I Will Follow Him...

 

I'm old enough that I should know better, but when my Facebook memories dredged up this gem today, I was amazed all over again at how aggressively stupid Richard Dawkins is.  It seems to me that Karl Marx still has more than a "few followers" today, and I suspect that Dawkins believed that, however few he has, they are still too many.  What's a follower, anyway? I suppose Yuval Noah Harari was his target here, but typically for the kind of thinker he is, Dawkins likes airy, sweeping dismissals of his real or imagined opponents.  The Marxist writers I'm aware of have read his work and study it, but they're not uncritical, not what I think of as followers.  I have read very little by Marx, so I don't have an overall sense of his ideas.  Besides, like many heavy thinkers, he changed positions over time, so: which Marx?  Dawkins makes it easy in this case: I suppose he means the Marx of Capital, the massive analysis of capitalism he didn't live to finish.  I haven't read it, and I wonder if Dawkins has.

I also don't think I understand what he intends by devoting time "to the Internet & human genome."  As I've noticed before, Dawkins has a tendency to write sloppily, especially on social media, and then to complain when he is, or thinks he is, misunderstood.  Did he mean that potential Marxists should instead seek employment in the tech industry or biotech, and if so, why?  Should they forget their reading of Capital and simply enjoy the rewards of working for Google, Meta, X, or the distinguished biblical scholar Peter Thiel?

This reminded me of the neuroscientist Robert M. Sapolsky, who once wrote (in The Trouble with Testosterone (pp. 107-8]:

We all do indeed have our dark sides. One evening, that great horned toad of an awkward intellectual, Karl Marx, came home from fulminating in the British Museum. "At any rate," he wrote to Engels that night, "I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles all the rest of their lives." As well they did. Few of us can ever hope for that level of retributive pissiness. We merely fantasize about returning someday to our childhood neighborhoods, encountering the ex-bullies or the catty girls who were in the in-group when we were not, and beating them into contused, bloodied contrition with our thick stack of diplomas.

Luckily, it wasn't Sapolsky but his DNA that wrote this weird, confused passage.  After I first read this, I found the letter by Marx his DNA quoted, to find out what had upset him so much, and wrote about it here.  Briefly, he was upset by the abuses of child labor in Britain in the mid-19th century, and by the efforts of manufacturers to block any legislation that might keep them from exploiting it. It's certainly fascinating, and symptomatic, that Sapolsky's DNA put that on the same level as being turned down for a date by "catty girls."  My DNA doesn't quite see the connection, but then I'm not a neuroscientist.  Sapolsky's DNA recently published a book called Determined: A Science of Life Without Free Will (Penguin, 2023), but I don't know if my DNA will be able to find the time to read it.  I'm sure it's every bit as deep as his reflections on Marx.

My DNA did read An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (Verso, 2011), edited by Robin Blackburn, which includes among other things, Marx's journalism for a radical New York newspaper during the American Civil War and his correspondence with Abraham Lincoln.  I was impressed by the clarity and intelligence of Marx's coverage of the conflict.  What made it most interesting to me was Marx's perspective as an outsider and a contemporary of the war: he couldn't know how it would turn out.  Dawkins might not care that Marx's followers today would pause their reading of Capital long enough to put together such a book, but he should at least be aware that they did.  Marxism is definitely pertinent to the connections between chattel slavery and "free labor" as it developed under capitalism, and I'm sure Dawkins would at least pay lip service to the idea that slavery should have been abolished; even that child labor isn't a good thing.  In the past it displeased him. At his age, there's probably little hope that he'll give up sharing his opinions on matters he's ill-informed about and hasn't given any serious thought, but the world would be a less entertaining place without his outbursts, and nowadays I need all the entertainment I can get.

Accentuate the Positive

Recently I began following the Facebook page of Bread and Roses, a non-profit organization " established in 2010 to help with the planning, coordination, and fundraising necessary to commemorate the 100th Anniversary of the Great Lawrence Strike of 1912, popularly referred to as the Bread & Roses Strike."  They post material about US labor history, some of it current, with arresting graphics, and from time to time I share their posts on my timeline, as a corrective to the nostalgia that many people my age indulge promote.  Some of my favorite items, like the one above, depict child labor, and I link to them with snarky comments about how these kids weren't spoiled with cell phones, game consoles, and other luxuries, unlike Kids Today.

Today, though, I held back.  I wondered if anyone thinks I'm being negative when I pass this stuff along. I don't intend to be.  Pictures and stories like these make me feel hopeful about all the people (too often forgotten) who resisted the powerful and worked for positive change. No, they weren't perfect. Sometimes they were closed-minded. (But does anyone nowadays really believe that they're free of prejudices and other opinions that will look embarrassing fifty or a hundred years from now? I certainly don't.) Worst of all, a lot of the changes that they gave time and sometimes their lives to bring about, are taken for granted now. We often forget that the good things we have now had to be worked for and fought for, against fierce resistance. Until we have to work and fight for them again -- but the example of people like these can give us hope that we can do it, just as they did.

I was pleased. by the way, that several friends responded favorably.  History is interesting, if it's presented the right way.