[It has long been my ambition to profile some of the great bloggers avant la lettre, now deceased. But I was uncertain how I might get hold of any of them. Never underestimate the power of the internet. Two weeks ago, and by one of those major coincidences that make life so intriguing, I received an email from Karl Marx asking politely if he might try his hand at the normblog profile. Naturally, I sent him the questionnaire by return. A few days later, through the post and in his own hand, his answers arrived. Marx's handwriting is not always clearly legible, so I have backed up my efforts to decipher it with reference links to his writings. In only a small number of cases have I had to rely solely on my own ability to make it out. The overall authenticity of the document is, however, beyond question. It has been independently attested by three reputable graphologists. - NG]
Karl Marx was born in Trier in 1818. In the early 1840s he formed what was to be a lifelong friendship and intellectual and political collaboration with Frederick Engels, who also helped him out financially. Marx wrote many well-known and influential works. He died in London in 1883 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.
Why do you blog? > To lay bare the economic law of motion of modern society. (1)
What has been your best blogging experience? > Have just finished correcting the last sheet (49th) of the book [Volume I of Capital]... So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone [Engels] that it was possible! Without your self-sacrifice for me I could not possibly have managed the immense labour demanded by the 3 volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks! (2)
What has been your worst blogging experience? > Constant labour of one uniform kind disturbs the intensity and flow of a man's animal spirits, which find recreation and delight in mere change of activity. (3)
What would be your main blogging advice to a novice blogger? > De omnibus dubitandum [Doubt everything]. (4)
What are your favourite blogs? > A Spectre Is Haunting Europe. (5)
Who are your intellectual heroes? > Just as I was working at the first volume of Capital, it was the good pleasure of the peevish, arrogant, mediocre Epigonoi... who now talk large in cultured Germany, to treat Hegel in the same way as the brave Moses Mendelssohn in Lessing's time treated Spinoza, i.e., as a 'dead dog'. I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even here and there, in the chapter on the theory of value, coquetted with the modes of expression peculiar to him. The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel's hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. (6)
What are you reading at the moment? > For recreation in the evenings I have been reading Appian's Civil Wars of Rome in the original Greek. A most valuable book. And: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air. (7; 8)
Who are your cultural heroes? > Aeschylus, Shakespeare, Dante, Goethe. (9)
What is the best novel you've ever read? > Balzac, who is generally remarkable for his profound grasp of reality, aptly describes in his last novel, Les Paysans, how a petty peasant performs many small tasks gratuitously for his usurer, whose goodwill he is eager to retain, and how he fancies that he does not give the latter something for nothing because his own labour does not cost him any cash outlay. (10)
What is your favourite poem? > It's a haiku: 'Workers of the world / Unite, hey. You have nothing / To lose but your chains!' (11).
What is your favourite movie? > May I have two? A Touch of Class and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. I also quite enjoyed Working Girl. (12; 13)
What is your favourite song? > 'Common People'. (14)
What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to disseminate? > Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. (15)
Can you name a work of non-fiction which has had a major and lasting influence on how you think about the world? > [a] The outstanding achievement of Hegel's Phenomenology and of its final outcome, the dialectic of negativity as the moving and generating principle, is thus, first, that Hegel conceives the self-creation of man as a process, conceives objectification as loss of the object, as alienation and as transcendence of this alienation; that he thus grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man - true, because real man - as the outcome of man's own labour. [b] Darwin's work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, 'teleology' in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained. (16; 17)Who are your political heroes? > Spartacus. (18)
What is your favourite piece of political wisdom? > The categoric imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable being. (19)
If you could effect one major policy change in the governing of your country, what would it be? > The reabsorption of the State power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it. (20)
If you could choose anyone, from any walk of life, to be Prime Minister, who would you choose? > Dear Fred. (21)
What would you do with the UN? > The point is to change it. (22)
Do you think the world (human civilization) has already passed its best point, or is that yet to come? > In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly - only then then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs! (23)
What would be your most important piece of advice about life? > Determinatio est Negatio. (24)
Do you think you could ever be married to, or in a long-term relationship with, someone with radically different political views from your own? > No. (25)
What do you consider the most important personal quality? > Simplicity. (26)
What personal fault do you most dislike? > Servility. (27)
In what circumstances would you be willing to lie? > To my regret I am unable to give you a succinct answer. (28 - Marx letter of 8 March 1881)
Do you have any prejudices you're willing to acknowledge? > Mill... On the level plain, simple mounds look like hills; and the imbecile flatness of the present bourgeoisie is to be measured by the altitude of its great intellects. (29)
What is your favourite proverb? > Nihil humani a me alienum puto [Nothing human is alien to me]. (30)
What commonly enjoyed activities do you regard as a waste of time? > Monopoly produces competition. (31)
What, if anything, do you worry about? > My state [of health] is such that I really should give up working and thinking entirely for some time; but that would be hard for me, even if I had the means to loaf. (32)
If you were to relive your life to this point, is there anything you'd do differently? > If there should ever be the time for such work again, I would greatly like to make accessible to the ordinary human intelligence, in two or three printer's sheets, what is rational in the method which Hegel discovered but at the same time enveloped in mysticism. (33)
What would you call your autobiography? > 'Sixty-Five Moor Years' (34)
Who would play you in the movie about your life? > He could have been a contender. (35)
Where would you most like to live (other than where you do)? > Revolutionary Road. (36 - scroll to the end)
What would your ideal holiday be? > There is no chance of coming to Manchester. (37)
What do you like doing in your spare time? > Bookworming. (38)
What is your most treasured possession? > Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it - when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., - in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital. In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. (39)
Who is your favourite comedian or humorist? > He understands absolutely nothing about the social revolution. (40)
Which English Premiership football team do you support? > United, of course. (See the text to note 11 above)
If you could have one (more or less realistic) wish come true, what would you wish for? > I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles. (41)
How, if at all, would you change your life were you suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money? > Do not I, who thanks to money am capable of all that the human heart longs for, possess all human capacities? Does not my money, therefore, transform all my incapacities into their contrary? (42)
What animal would you most like to be? > (a) If one wanted to be an ox, one could, of course, turn one's back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one's own hide. But I should really have thought myself unpractical if I had pegged out without finally completing my book, at least in manuscript. (b) The animal is immediately one with its life activity. It is not distinct from that activity; it is that activity. Man makes his life activity itself an object of his will and consciousness. He has conscious life activity. It is not a determination with which he directly merges. (43; 44)
If you could have any three guests, past or present, to dinner who would they be? > Johannes Kepler, Philip Roth and Merle Haggard. (45; 46)
[The normblog profile is a weekly Friday morning feature. A list of all the profiles to date, and the links to them, can be found here.]