I introduced the concept of the nasty genius—someone who fundamentally changes the way we think about the world but whose ideas assume something dire about human nature or human possibilities. Today’s nasty genius: Karl Marx.
Why a Genius: I am a Marxist, and virtually everyone who thinks about culture and society is a Marxist, too. Marx gave us the insight that the forms of culture and society reflect the economic conditions of the time. A chivalric romance of the Middle Ages reflects the feudal organization of society in which the nobles control agricultural land and appropriate its products for their own uses. A nineteenth century novel reflects the rising middle class of a capitalist society.
Previously, we used to think about cultural forms in terms of models. The Bible and the great works of classical antiquity set the patterns within which later writers had to work. Enlightenment thinkers noticed that this worship of formalism and tradition imposed absurd conditions on those who wanted to write about the world honestly. They used reason to free us from those constraints. Reason could give modern writers an authority of their own in contrast to the now irrelevant examples from the past.
Yes, observed Marx, but don’t fool yourself into thinking that “reason” is entirely disinterested, that it is valid in itself. We unconsciously absorb the values of the society that surrounds us. They determine what seems “reasonable” to us. These values are imposed by those who own the means of production. One way or another, works of culture flatter the self-image of the powerful.
The complication is that in the modern world, society changes rapidly. One set of values always comes under assault by a new set of values just as a new set of owners continually displaces the old set.
Since Marx, no one can write about culture without paying some attention to the values of the wealthy and powerful. Furthermore, we cannot write about culture without honestly confronting how we ourselves are implicated in those values and the society they create.
You don’t have to be a communist to analyze culture in a Marxist way. I’m in favor of capitalism myself. But Marx’s way of thinking remains the most powerful tool for deriving insight about society and culture. Anyone who believes they have some innate entitlement to wealth, power, and privilege gets swept off the stage in gales of Marxist laughter.
Why Nasty: Marx thought he knew where everything was headed. The workers of industrial society would eventually band together and take over the means of production from the bourgeoisie. Looking backward, Marx could see how economics determined history, how old and new interests battle until the new triumphs, how one period inevitably has to follow another. History obeys a kind of natural law, Marx determined. It wasn’t any kind of leap, then, to project history forward just one step from today’s capitalism to tomorrow’s communism.
And why not help history along? If the bourgeoisie are certain losers, why wait? Why not get rid of them today? Most of the butchery of the 20th century traces back to Marx’s sense of the inevitability of history. Josef Stalin wanted to modernize agriculture in the Soviet Union in the 1930s by converting private land ownership into large collective farms in Ukraine. 10 million people died. Mao Zedong did the same thing in China during Great Leap Forward of the 1950s. Add in his work in the Cultural Revolution and other campaigns, and the death toll reaches 40 million. Mao’s example inspired Pol Pot to launch a similar campaign in Cambodia in the 1970s though only 2 million people perished there. Marx’s sense of history influenced even the triumphalism of Adolph Hitler’s National Socialism.
After such hubris, a little humility refreshes. “Man came here by an intolerable way,” said Charles Olson. “When man is reduced to so much fat for soap, superphosphate for soil, fillings and shoes for sale, he has to begin again….”¹ I admire most those who choose the humble occupation of poet.
¹ Olson, Charles, “The Resistance,” Human Universe and Other Essays, ed. Donald Allen (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1967), p. 47.
The Future of Reading 