Whosever Sows Desire...

Marx (Prologue)

“Marx has completely changed my vision of the world,” declared the younger Pallieres who normally never speaks to me. Antoine Pallieres was the sole heir of an old industrial family and son of one of my eight employers. The final belch of a grand merchant family, the sort that is produced only from the most discreet hiccups, he went on with his narrative automatically. A doorpost would have done as well for audience. He didn’t think I heard (let alone understood) anything of what he was saying. What, after all, could the masses, the labour class, understand of the oeuvre of Marx? Its arduous work reading it, the language is high-flown; the prose, very subtle; and his hypotheses are of the greatest complexity.

And then I almost betrayed myself.

“You shoud read The German Ideology”, I told that cretin in a fur duffle coat.

To understand Marx and to understand why he is wrong , one must read The German Ideology. It’s anthropology is the pedestal that Marx used to make all his exhortations of a new world and the foundation on which his masterful certainty is built: men, who no longer desire, shall be better able to live fulfilled lives. In a world where the hubris of desire is muzzled, a new social order can be born - washed of selfish individual goals, oppression and noxious hierarchies.

“He that sows desire, reaps oppression,” I said sotto-voce, thinking only my cat would hear.

But Antoine Pallieres, whose repugnant and embroyonic moustache has nothing on the elegant whiskers of my feline companion, looked at me strangely, uncertain of what he had heard. As always, it was the inability of human beings to step outside their normal mental habits that saved me. A caretaker does not read The German Ideology and therefore is incapable of citing the 11th Thesis on Feuerbach. In addition, a caretaker who reads Marx teeters dangerously at the edge of subversion, has already sold herself to the devil named CGT. That she can read for amusement or elevation of the spirit seems too bizarre and never strikes one of the members of the upper classes.

While closing the door quickly in his face I murmered in the same tone “Wish your mother a good day,” hoping that one normal statement would be sufficient to glue his preconceptions back in place.