Theatre of the Absurd

King Karl and His Acolytes

Marxists are notorious reductionists.  Everything must be reduced to money (capital) and how to get it.  There is usually a sub-stratum to the ideology: the pot of money is fixed or finite.  Getting money or capital, therefore, necessitates removing it from someone else.  Socialists are a peculiar class of people who are always concerned with who is getting how much, coupled with strategies about how to get more. Resentment, envy, bitterness, and conspiracies are always swirling in its poisoned atmosphere.

This reductionist fixation which sees all of life somehow tied up with money and getting more of it is not merely tawdry.  Like all reduction-isms it results in gross oversimplifications.  It is a dumb idea.  It produces a steel-trap mind where more is kept out than let in.
 

Jonah Goldberg rings the changes on this particular nonsense:

In his myopic arrogance [Marx] insisted on imposing a single mode of analysis on humanity.  It would be like dividing the entire world into those who are left-handed and right-handed.  Yes, you would learn and highlight some interesting things about the differences and interactions of southpaws and decent humans (I don't trust left-handed people!) but that would hardly unlock the mysteries to every realm of life.

Like the proverbial Martian visitor who would rationally deduce that humans were slaves to dogs because we pick up their faeces, Marx's obsession with defining everyone as homo economicus caused him to ignore many of the most important facts of life.  It is a lesson that not only Marxist economists would do well to learn.  To look upon the interactions of the priest and the confessor, mother and child, doctor and patient, soldiers and their comrades, musicians and their audiences as exclusively, or even primarily, economic transactions is to cram the square pegs of your ideology into the round holes of reality.    [Jonah Goldberg, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (New York: Sentinel/Penguin, 2012), p.197.]

To commence each conversation or train of thought with, "How much money does he/she/it have in comparison to us?" and, then, "Therefore, what ought we to think about he/she/it?" is just a tad silly.  Nevertheless we award prestigious academic qualifications for, bestow social honours and celebrations upon, and unduly respect, such nonsense. 

Thus our idolatries are weighed and found, not just wanting, but stupid.  The dismal fact that socialism has indeed captured the heart of our culture is not a corroboration of its truth.  It rather confirms the folly of the Western mind: it resembles the closed jaws of a gin trap. Not much gets in, or out.