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What Marx Got Right
People love to work
Few thinkers have had such profound impact on society as Karl Marx. Some see him has a red Satan, others adore him as a deity. It’s quite black and white with Marx. That’s a pity.
It is often said that his cure for society, communism, was quite a lot worse than the supposed disease, capitalism. Some even extend this line of argument to propose that he was the author of the many deaths caused by Stalinist Russia and Maoist China.
But these are signs of intellectual poverty. For Marx was not only an activist, a mobilizer, an instigator. He is perhaps one of the greatest observers of the human condition.
He saw that people were by nature fundamentally active. Occupation and work is not simply an ends to a mean, but an end in itself. But this is certainly not a view that is shared Marx in religious and intellectual history. To find an opposite view, let us start with Genesis.
Back To Paradise
The image of the Christian ideal condition for humankind is Paradise. In Paradise, Adam & Eve simply went around in leisure. They existed in harmony with no discomfort.
But then, Eve was tempted by the serpent to eat the fruit in the middle of the Garden of Paradise, which God had forbidden them to eat. When Eve ate the fruit of…
