恶人谷

上一期的纽约客上登了一篇关于最近出版的马克思传记的书评，我觉得特别好看，对我来说特别心有戚戚，细细看完一遍，过了几天忍不住又看一遍。强烈推荐一下。

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/ ... -and-today

网站版的题目很闷，在杂志里的题目特搞笑： "He's Back!" 里面有大把很逗的段落，为了避免侵犯纽约客的版权，我挑几段复制过来，原文里还有不少让人咕咕闷笑的地方。

KARL MARX, YESTERDAY AND TODAY
The nineteenth-century philosopher’s ideas may help us to understand the economic and political inequality of our time.
By Louis Menand
October 10, 2016 issue

Soon, in fact, there would be just two types of people in the world: the people who owned property and the people who sold their labor to them. As ideologies disappeared which had once made inequality appear natural and ordained, it was inevitable that workers everywhere would see the system for what it was, and would rise up and overthrow it. The writer who made this prediction was, of course, Karl Marx, and the pamphlet was “The Communist Manifesto.” He is not wrong yet.

Marx produced works that retained their intellectual firepower over time. Even today, “The Communist Manifesto” is like a bomb about to go off in your hands.

Marx is a warning about what can happen when people defy their parents and get a Ph.D. Marx’s father, a lawyer in the small city of Trier, in western Germany, had tried to steer him into the law, but Marx chose philosophy.

Engels’s father was a German industrialist in the textile business, an owner of factories in Barmen and Bremen and in Manchester, England, and although he disapproved of his son’s politics and the company he kept, he gave him a position at the Manchester factory. Engels hated the work, but he was good at it, as he was at most things. He went fox hunting with the gentry he despised, and made fun of Marx’s attempts to ride a horse. Engels eventually became a partner, and the income helped him keep Marx alive.

In private, [Marx] was modest and gracious. ... He was playful and affectionate. He loved Shakespeare, made up stories for his three daughters, and enjoyed cheap cigars and red wine. His wife and daughters adored him.

He became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, also from Trier, when he was eighteen and she was twenty-two. ... The relationship was mainly epistolary. (Sperber believes that they had premarital sex. I certainly hope so.) In her letters, Jenny calls Karl her “little wild boar.”

此处提起马克思的女佣 (bet you didn't know he had one) 生的私生子 Freddy。恩格斯把孩子给认下来，但是据说在他临死之前承认 Freddy 的父亲其实是马克思。

直到二十世纪三四十年代 。。。

People started to refer to Marxism as “scientific socialism,” a phrase that sums up what was most frightening about twentieth-century Communism: the idea that human beings can be reëngineered in accordance with a theory that presents itself as a law of history. The word the twentieth century coined for that was totalitarianism.

但是 Louis Menand 指出了马克思主义里很重要的内容，顺带解释了为什么马克思主义对于很多知识分子（包括 Bernie Sanders）那么有吸引力。

Marx was a humanist. He believed that we are beings who transform the world around us in order to produce objects for the benefit of all. That is our essence as a species. A system that transforms this activity into “labor” that is bought and used to aggrandize others is an obstacle to the full realization of our humanity.

Marx had very little to say about how the business of life would be conducted in a communist society, and this turned out to be a serious problem for regimes trying to put communism into practice. ... In theory, after the revolution, everything will be “up for grabs” 【各取所需】—which has been the great dream of leftist radicalism ever since.

Marx considered the division of labor one of the evils of modern life. (So did Hegel.) It makes workers cogs in a machine and deprives them of any connection with the product of their labor. “Man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him,” as Marx put it. In a communist society, he wrote, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes.” It will be possible “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman, or critic.”

This often quoted passage sounds fanciful, but it is at the heart of Marx’s thought. Human beings are naturally creative and sociable. A system that treats them as mechanical monads is inhumane.

工业社会对于个人的异化绝不是马克思一人的观点，但是他敏锐地在十九世纪中期就指出这个危险，直到二十世纪五十年代仍有西方作家与知识分子不停地重新发现这件事。

文章里还有很多精彩内容，我就不抄了，只抄最后特别有力又特别 relevant 的一段。当然少不了要引用一下小K的男神，二十一世纪资本论的作者 Thomas Piketty 的话。

Ryan, in his book on Marx, makes an observation that Marx himself might have made. “The modern republic,” he says, “attempts to impose political equality on an economic inequality it has no way of alleviating.” This is a relatively recent problem, because the rise of modern capitalism coincided with the rise of modern democracies, making wealth inequality inconsistent with political equality. But the unequal distribution of social resources is not new. One of the most striking points Piketty makes is that, as he puts it, “in all known societies in all times, the least wealthy half of the population has owned virtually nothing,” and the top ten per cent has owned “most of what there is to own.”

我遗憾地发现，脑力和记忆力都处于顶峰的青少年时期，被迫浪费了多少时间上学考试！还以为很了解马克思，其实都是垃圾，学了不仅无益而且有害。

直到今天马克思的资本主义经济危机理论还在课堂上讲。

让我觉得特别有趣的是，马克思自己是不喜欢劳动的。他工作很努力，但是他只做自己想做的工作，写自己想写的文章，他的理想是把大家都从社会强加给他们的劳动生产中解放出来，随心所欲地想干什么就干什么。

但是，马克思自己的随心所欲的工作，是靠恩格斯这个资本家支撑的。如果没有恩格斯在工厂当经理，当合伙人，当资本家，做他自己其实也不喜欢的管理工作，马克思也不能成天只写资本论，不给资本家打工。

另一个很有趣的地方是，马克思所关心的主题是 the nature of social relations. 换言之是人和人之间的关系，而不是单独个人的存在和意义。但是他想象出来的共产主义日常生活，其实跟老子想象的自给自足“鸡犬相闻”，“老死不相往来”的乌托邦，其实颇有相似之处。在结构复杂、必须合作的大型社会里，人和人之间到底怎样 relate to each other？马克思和老子的想象里，个体是非常独立的，不是互相压迫互相利用互相屠杀等等丑恶的关系，但是只要人和人有关系就不可能都是花好月圆相亲相爱，想要没有难看讨厌的关系，只能没关系而独立存在。

这是一个没有答案的问题。

Jun wrote:让我觉得特别有趣的是，马克思自己是不喜欢劳动的。他工作很努力，但是他只做自己想做的工作，写自己想写的文章，他的理想是把大家都从社会强加给他们的劳动生产中解放出来，随心所欲地想干什么就干什么。

Jun wrote:但是他想象出来的共产主义日常生活，其实跟老子想象的自给自足“鸡犬相闻”，“老死不相往来”的乌托邦，其实颇有相似之处。在结构复杂、必须合作的大型社会里，人和人之间到底怎样 relate to each other？

我也很好奇到底马克思的共产主义社会是什么样子的。

刚刚看了Arthur C. Clarke的Childhood's End，里面的乌托邦是这样的：

The abolition of armed forces had at once almost doubled the world's effective wealth and increased production had done the rest... Everything was so cheap that the necessities of life were free, provided as a public service...A man could travel anywhere he pleased, eat whatever food he fancied - without handing over any money, he had earned the right to do this by being a productive member of community... The number number of people sufficiently strong-willed to indulge in a life of complete idleness is much smaller than is generally supposed. Supporting such parasites was considerably less of a burden than providing the armies of ticket-collectors, shop assistants, bank clerks, stockbrokers....

Nearly a quarter of the human race's total activity... was now expended on sports of various kinds...Next to sport, entertainment, in all its branches, was the greatest single industry... Among all the distractions and diversions of a planet which now seemed well on the way to becoming one vast playground....

人类社会彻底消灭了阶级、国家和宗教(only a pure form of Buddhism)，消灭了种族歧视。人们在学校里会呆很长时间，按兴趣学习，只干自己想干的工作。婚姻也不是必须的，想结婚也可以签合同，带年限。

当然这个乌托邦是有条件的。首先，外星高级生物guardian angel把重要的规矩都定好了，该惩罚的都惩罚了。其次，机器人把繁重的、无聊的工作都做了。外星人倒没有奖励谁，让人类自己无为而治。有趣的是，孩子还得要女人来生 ，好在有机器人和免费社区服务，所以没有domestic drudgery。

乌托邦也有问题：

Humanity has lost its ancient gods; now it was old enough to have no need for new ones. Though few realised it as yet, the fall of religion had been paralleled by a decline in science.

The end of strife and conflicts of all kinds had also meant the virtual end of creative art.

很有趣的猜想。而且，乌托邦本身并没有给出人类的终极哲学问题的答案

即使是最聪明的人想象出来的天堂/乌托邦/共产主义都限于不必工作，无所事事，至于那时候人们都在干啥，却提不出来。

换言之，已经衣食不愁的有钱人，在现实中可以不必工作，无所事事，他们又在干啥呢？很多仍然在努力忙这忙那，或许是为了后代挣来永远花不完的资源？他们的天堂又在哪里啊在哪里？（硅谷大亨说：永生不死，或者上火星。）

我认识一个搞医学研究的，他的终极梦想就是发明人造器官，这件事如果成了，他说，我就好好地退休去了。I doubt it.

我总算抽时间看了这篇文章。把马克思放回十九世纪背景看很有意思，最聪明博览的人，想象力仍然受到时代限制。那个时代工人一周干八十四小时的体力活换取生计，马克思的理想社会就是各取所需各尽所能。他不会想到今天饱食终日的福利社会仍然不能满足所有人。
政治平等和经济不平等的说法很有意思。政治平等在一定程度上可以阻止延缓经济分化。经济不平等发展到一定阶段，有优势的阶级会把手伸到政治平等上，政治平等也维持不下去。