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.
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。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.”
直到二十世纪三四十年代 。。。
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。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.
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.
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。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.
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。
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。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.”
，好在有机器人和免费社区服务，所以没有domestic drudgery。
