But Marx did not believe in the existence of any such organism as “the economy.” What he postulated, and what made him different from any previous theorist of materialism whether historical or dialectical, was a sharp distinction between the forces and the relations of production. Within the integument of one system of exploitation, in other words, was contained a systemic conflict that, if not resolved, would lead to stagnation and decline but, if properly confronted, might lead to a higher synthesis of abundance and equality. (War between competitive capitalist states, for example, would be an instance of the negative. Seizure of power by an educated working class that understood and could transcend the logic of private ownership would be an example of human progress. Shall we just say for now that modern history furnishes more illustrations of the former than of the latter?) At all events, those who use the simplistic term the economy are, according to Marx, themselves “stupid.”

In my opinion, therefore, the most powerful Marxist book of the past four decades was Rudolf Bahro’s The Alternative, which showed how and why the East German state and economy were certain to implode. Communism, said Bahro—one of its former functionaries—was compelled to educate and train people up to a certain level. But beyond that level, it forbade them to think, or to inquire, or to use their initiative. Thus, while it created a vast amount of “surplus consciousness,” it could find no way of employing this energy except by squandering and dissipating and ultimately repressing it. The conflict between the forces and relations of production in the eastern part of the homeland of Karl Marx thus became a locus classicus of the sort of contradiction he had originally identified. (Incidentally, and as Václav Havel, following Heidegger, once pointed out in an address to a joint session of Congress, this makes a strong case for “consciousness” having a say in the determination of “social being.”)

Marx was a keen admirer of that other great Victorian Charles Darwin, and according to Engels he wanted to do for the economic system what the author of The Origin of Species had done for the natural order: lay bare its objective laws of motion and thus make it possible at last to dispense with subjective and idealist interpretations. The term exploitation, for example, should be not a moralizing one but a cold measure of the difference between use value and exchange value, or between the wages earned at the coal face and the real worth of that labor to the mine owner. Sometimes, making use of the statistical “Blue Books” furnished by the admirable Engels, Marx did manage to illuminate the ways in which the industrial system really functioned. But very often he allowed sheer outrage to guide his pen, and betrayed a dislike for money and business in themselves. In the first volume of Capital (the only one to be published in his lifetime; the succeeding ones were works of Talmudic exegesis by his disciples), he has capitalism speaking in the words of Shylock; includes an extract from Timon of Athens wherein money is described as the “common whore of mankind”; and offers still another denunciation of the cash nexus, from the Antigone of Sophocles. One of the most famous phrases of Marx’s vast correspondence during the writing of the book expresses his hatred for having to work on “the economic shit,” and one recalls Lenin’s revealing opinion about gold—that it was fit only to supply the flooring for public lavatories. One pleasure in the rereading of Marx is to savor the trenchancy and aptness of his literary allusions. It was actually Engels who said that a Balzac was worth many Zolas, but Marx who—not always with rigorous consistency—tried to enforce the difference between novelist and pamphleteer.