Is Marx Assumption Correct That Economic Forces Base All Facets of Life?*

It seems as though we are more than just creatures of commodity. Marx admits that his theory is entirely rooted in the premise of class struggle, a notion that there is always an oppressing class and an oppressed class. These classes are identified primarily by material possessions and control of material production. They are formed by the economic forces that motivate one's desire of possessions and one's ability to produce those possessions. As embodied creatures, we need certain amounts of material goods in order to survive. We need food, water, occasionally shelter from the material elements. We also need interpersonal interaction with other humans which is a material necessity of a kind. However, beyond these material necessities, I am not convinced that material goods can bear the burden of Marx's theory. In order for Marx to be correct, a super-majority of human persons must locate their identify in the quantity and quality of their possessions to such a high degree that it literally defines the epochs of human history.

There is room, especially within the capitalist and materialist elements of society, to find sympathy for Marx's thinking. After all, class envy plays a powerful role in modern politics and one does not have to look very hard to find the individual who identifies himself/herself by the value of his/her car, the size of his/her house, or the fashionable nature of his/her attire. However, equally prominent in our society are individuals who are contented with their commodities, people who aspire to live a comfortable, middle-class life driving a nice (but not luxurious) car, living in a nice house, and raising a family. The fact that we readily relate and identify the idea of a "middle class" is damning to Marx's theory; what would he do with these men and women who are not poor, not rich, but live a life in the middle, suspended between his extreme and ever warring poles, that seem to be just right. Even more damning to Marx's theory is two millennia of Christendom. Many modern Christians who hold loosely on to material possessions could not hold a candle to their brothers and sisters of earlier eras who seemed to care little for the material world. For an extreme example of this, one needs only to look at Christian martyrs whose only struggle was not only against the rich, but also against the poor insomuch as each of these needs to the love and saving knowledge of Christ.

Marx rightly recognizes a tension in life, but he misidentifies it as a tension of class struggle. In reality, is a tension of good versus evil. It is true that the devil can work through material commodities; we are damned when we buy in to Satan's deceptive perversion of desires for material commodities. However, I often wonder who loves material possessions more: the rich or the poor? In the end, I am not convinced that each is not tempted equally in his or her own way by a desire for the material. However, Satan also tempts us with non-material elements, such as hatred, which seems to lead to just as much if not more of the conflict which we see in the world around us. Ever hated someone for the ideas which they espouse? Ever hate them for their ethnicity? For their religion? Examples of struggles based on non-material things are in the news constantly especially in the middle east.

Marx's project is to educate us to believe in a material world filled with struggles over the merely material. If he were correct, he would succeed in locating the "problem of sin" (though we cannot call it that) and the hope of man in a solution which rights the wrongs of the material distribution. However, such a world does not make sense for many reasons not the least of which includes everything from the poetry of Emerson to the struggles of St. Francis. True, the problem of sin is located in poverty, in the absence or the abuse of material commodities, but the problem of sin is also located in racism which, in and of itself, has nothing to do with material commodities. I am therefore compelled to believe that Marx's material box does not hold all of the contents relating to human struggle throughout time.

(*Note: This essay was written as a response to a question posed at the end of a session in the Torrey Honors Institute which focused on a reading of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels)