The Comprehensive Claim of Marxism | Peter Kreeft | From Socrates Meets Marx: The Father of Philosophy Cross-Examines the Founder of Communism
Introduction
This book is one in a series of Socratic explorations of some of the Great Books. Books in this series are intended to be short, clear, and non-technical, thus fully understandable by beginners. They also introduce (or review) the basic questions in the fundamental divisions of philosophy (see the
chapter titles): metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, ethics, logic,
and method. They are designed both for classroom use and for educational
do-it-yourselfers. The "Socrates Meets . . ." books can be read and understood
completely on their own, but each is best appreciated after reading the
little classic it engages in dialogue.The setting – Socrates and the author of the Great Book meeting in the afterlife – need not deter readers who do not believe there is an afterlife. For although the two characters and their philosophies are historically real, their conversation, of course, is not and requires a "willing suspension of disbelief ". There is no reason the skeptic cannot extend this literary belief also to the setting.
This excerpt is Chapter 2 of Socrates Meets Marx.
SOCRATES: Perhaps it would be best for you to introduce your book first, to explain its context and its purpose, as if you were teaching it in a university classroom. I think you are much readier to lecture than to dialogue at this point, so perhaps this method would relieve that itch a bit.
MARX: Do you really expect me to respond to an insulting invitation like that?
SOCRATES: Yes.
MARX: Why?
SOCRATES: Because you are an egotist. And also because you have no choice: there is nothing else to do here.
MARX: Hmph! Well, I will take up your challenge.
The book we are about to explore is very short: a pamphlet of only 12,000 words. Yet it has changed the world, as I knew it would. It contains the essentials of Communism in these few pages. All the rest of my writing consists in additions or refinements to this.
I wrote it at age twenty-nine. Engels did not write a word of it. However, he supplied some of the ideas. The Manifesto corresponds to the first twenty-five questions in his Catechism. More importantly, he supplied most of the money to print it.
It is a Great Book because it finally solves the mystery of man and lays bare the most fundamental laws that have always governed human behavior. I did for man's history what Darwin did for the history of an- imal species and Newton did for the inorganic universe. It is the supreme achievement of human thought. I was the first to make history truly scientific.
All the philosophers, from Plato on, sought the "philosopher's stone", the world system, the formula. Each claimed to find it, but none did. Every time thought came to a halt before the timeless formula of some philosopher, the world moved on and refuted it.
Then came Hegel, who made change itself the formula. That was true, but not original: Heraclitus, even before your time, Socrates, had seen that "everything flows", like a river. He sought for the logos, the law or formula, for universal change; but it was not found until Hegel, who saw for the first time that logic itself moves with history, that truth itself changes according to the pattern of what he called the "dialectic": a thesis generates its own antithesis, and from this perpetual conflict emerges a synthesis, which then becomes a new thesis generating its own new antithesis, and so on until the final synthesis. Hegel, with unbelievable stupidity, identified this with "God", or "The Absolute" or "Spirit"--probably the three worst words in human speech and the three most harmful myths in human thought.
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