Karl Barth’s Karl Marx: On the University Protests and Globalism

Economic materialism, more commonly known as Marxism is, of course, the philosophy/ideology that Karl Marx constructed; that is, to the world’s demise. It’s doubtful that Marxism is actually at play in what we are currently seeing take place at America’s Universities; that is, in regard to the recent and ongoing protests. There are clearly ideologues behind the scenes who are pulling strings in a way that might be somewhat Marxist in orientation, but I’d say that really it is just straight anarchic action with the goal of creating some type of internationalist revolution (which of course is pretty Marxist, eh). The talking points of a Marxism are certainly present, but if anything, those are being touted in order to give the useful idiots something to hang onto.

I want to drill down a little further on what Marxism entails from Karl Barth’s reading of this phenomenon. I think he offers a valuable insight, and even critique towards Marxism that many of his followers might benefit from reading. So Barth:

This is where what is called “historical materialism” comes in. For it, what we have hitherto spoken of under the name of materialism is only a necessary weapon and an indispensable apologetic and polemical ally. The doctrine of Karl Marx, which is identical with this historical materialism, is undoubtedly materialism in the sense in which we have used the term, and in practice it stands or falls with the fact that it is so. Yet is so only per accidens and not per essentiam. It is certainly one of the historical limits of Marxism that it has bound itself so closely with the dogma of ostensibly scientific materialism. But we quite misunderstand it if we take it to be grounded on this, or adopt the view of older theological polemics that it is one of its evil moral fruits. The very opposite is the case, namely, that ostensibly scientific materialism, at any rate in the 19^th century, acquired weight only as it was discovered, appropriated and employed by historical materialism. Over against it, historical materialism is a construction with its own origin.

In face of the modern development of community, historical materialism is 1. the affirmation in which the child at last acquires a name, namely, that the whole history of mankind at its core is the history of human economy or economic history, and that everything else, the achievement of civilisation, science, art, the state, morality and religion, are only phenomenal accompaniments of this one reality, expressions of the current relations of economic forces, attempts to disguise, beautify, justify, and defend them, occasionally perhaps even expressions of its discontent, instruments of its criticism, means of its alteration, but at all events secondary forms or ideologies form which economics is differentiated as true historical reality. The figure of man which arose in the 19^th century seemed unambiguously to prove this. At any rate, this is how it was interpreted and understood by Karl Marx.

Historical materialism is 2. a critique of the previous course of human history interpreted in this way. As economic history, it is the history of a struggle between the ruling and ruled strata or classes of the community, i.e., between the economically strong and the economically weak, between the invariable possessors of the earth and all the other means of production and the others who invariably do the work which is economically productive in the true sense. In this struggle, the latter, the workers, have always been the losers, and, under the characteristic modern dominance of anonymous capital striving only for its own increase, they are the losers with an accentuated necessity—the expropriated and exploited. Those ideologies have in fact shown themselves to be only accompanying phenomena which can neither render impossible nor stop the class war which is waged with such unequal weapons, but in different ways can only confirm and further it. How very differently does Karl Marx view what the Idealists only a few decades before had celebrated as the victory of the spirit over nature?

Historical materialism is 3. a prediction concerning the future course of the history of mankind. The dominance of the possessors, which has to-day become the dominance of anonymous capital, will necessarily lead to continually new crises of production and consumption, to warlike developments and revolutionary catastrophes. Thus with an inner necessity, it moves towards a final upheaval. The proletarianisation of the masses becomes sharper and sharper, and encroaches upon greater and greater levels even of the modern middle class. The class of the oppressed, thus increasing, will gradually be automatically compelled to unify itself, and to recognise and seize the power which really lies in its hands, in order to finally and conclusively to make political, and if need be forceful, use of it, and to set up its own dictatorship in place of that of the anonymous tyrants. It expropriates those who have so far expropriated. It erects the economic and welfare social state in which there are no more exploiters and therefore no more exploited, in which all other social sicknesses vanish with their common cause, and in which morality, which in the present class-state is possible only in the form of hypocrisy, can become a genuine reality. Again, it will not be ideologies that will lead mankind to this end, but only economic material development as this is rightly understood and therefore directed at the right moment by the right intervention. This was the hope, the eschatology, which Karl Marx gave to his followers as the supreme good and as the appropriate driving motive for socialist action on the way to it.[1]

It isn’t hard to see how some people have seen in Marxism a type of a Christian heresy. The difference, of course, between Marxism and Christianity, is that the former immanentizes what classically was understood as God into the brute economic and thus materialist forces at play in an absolutely horizontal and pure nature (purus natura). A Marxist materialism presents the closed material world in an apotheosis wherein the centraldogma of all reality is a crass mechanized world wherein Utopia obtains in an abstract and atheistic way. Economic inequity, and thus classism, or sin in the Marxist lexicon, is finally vanquished by the indomitable economic spirit of production over matter. Within this production economic equity is brought into a totalized equilibrium wherein the people might experience the leisure and rest that such material production ostensibly produces.

I think some of these themes are being deployed currently on the younger minds of the world in an attempt not to bring a utopia of Marxist delight, but to simply elevate the elite few to the heights of mammonic ejaculation. Things, as I see it, are indeed that nihilistic. It turns out, after all, that people, post-Enlightened or not, are simply slaves to their base affections to the point that they will seek those first, and their own righteousness, even as that leads them into the abyss of their final dissolution; that is into the non-being their base affections are formed by.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §46 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 180–81.