Marx and "Effective Reality" (Gramsci) — Marx' Socialism: A Raging Impossibility

Image credit

I left this comment here:

Like Nick Johnson and Geoffrey Hodgson, I acknowledge that Marx made important contributions to the social sciences including economics. After all he discovered the phenomenon of "effective demand" before Keynes (and anyone else? Possibly). 

Marx advertised capitalism as a progressive force, a feature of Marxism largely and tragically underappreciated by its adepts. 

Bill Warren deals with this aspect in his "Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism." 

John Sender and Sheila Smith in their "The Development of Capitalism in Africa" demonstrate how paying attention to "effective reality" (Gramsci) requires a detailed and unprejudiced look at capitalist social relations as they actually unfold, in order to be able to correctly conceptualise and implement progressive policies rather than merely paying lip-service to politically sterile ideological stereotypes. 

Temperamentally, Marx was not equipped to take this approach. 

My first reaction on reading Hodgson above was of a somewhat skeptical nature. I did not like the destiny-argument. However, ultimately Hodgson is right: as substantial an analyst Marx may have been with regard to contemporary politics and social issues, his visions of socialism/communism were lacking any of that analytic rigour and sense of reality, being purely Utopian, mere products of fantasy and faith. 

It appears that a strong component of pure faith is indispensable for any movement to become radically totalitarian. Marx and Engels certainly provided that component. 

In contemplating the future, ever the idealistic Hegelian dreamer, Marx got carried away with his metaphysics of preordained history, when he should have remained down to earth and look for feasible improvements for the working class and the capitalist system.
Social democracy did this job for him. 

Marx was psychologically incapable of giving up his implacable hatred of capitalism and seek compromises in recognition of the insurmountable constraints and the huge positive potential presented by "effective reality". 

Marx was the source and the leader and the authentic saint of a socialist/communist movement based on Utopian faith and inexhaustible hatred for any form of reality that did not resemble Marx's figments of socialist/communist society. 

At the end of the day, Marx was not a materialist at all, but a religious type, preferring the lure and exhilaration of the total, the ultimate, the perfect to dealing with sober, pedestrian and messy "effective reality". 

Marx left socialism/communism without a home in reality—a raging impossibility. And rage it did.