It's when the people refuse to freely cooperate that Marx gets angry. At one point in the play, Marx growls that "we should praise the capitalist system for its amazing means of production -- and then TAKE IT OVER." Zinn here gives voice to the same problem that confronted Lenin: it's really hard to be patient and wait for the revolution to spontaneously happen, as Marx predicted, when it's so easy to prod it along at the barrel of a gun. Like Marx being resurrected from the dead, Marxists believe that politics can resurrect a man who seems to have been absent through all recorded human history. Marx seems to have taken a cue from Rousseau, who believed that in his natural state, man was peaceful and unselfish. This is an untestable and impossible-to-prove thesis. It's not a matter of empirical evidence-capitalism must degrade man, because communism is the prehistorical, proper way for man to live. And he knows this on faith. |
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