Dear Elizabeth:
Obviously my views on Marx probably go too far in denigrating his impact (most likely because I detest what was done in his name by Communists and not only in Russia but in Cuba, China and elsewhere as well). However, to the contrary I ran across an edition of The Communist Manifesto (Penguin Classics 2002) with an Introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones which does a good job in placing Marx in context in a post-Soviet, post-industrialized and globalized world and certainly supports your view of his importance in many respects.
I also find it interesting how both Marx and Freud attempted to use a "scientific" analysis of their respective areas of interest. In many ways I find it characteristic of a 19th Century faith in the then rapid development of the scientific method, a manifestation of the displacement of religious faith by secularism. Darwinism culminating in the elimination of the conception that man was created in God's image replaced by humanity being buffeted by immutable economic forces and primal urges in the face of which it stands helpless. I simply rebel against this deterministic view of life, devoid of compassion, kindness, beauty and hope. I'm getting old.
Dear Petr, I am also getting old, *sigh*. That's the way of things. And as I get older I get considerably more tolerant. When I was a college student I couldn't stand the emphasis on social history that was the tendency among American historians of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. I really rebelled against it. I remember in one class somebody gave a report in which he mentioned that tens of thousands of Soviet citizens thronged the streets of Moscow during Stalin's funeral, trying to see the dictator in the flesh one last time. I remarked (off the cuff as usual) "They wanted to make sure he was dead." My professor turned around and looked at me. She smiled. So you see, even the strictest Sovietologists were not without a sense of humor, or a sense of perspective.
In this forum I have often argued strenuously against Marxism, following my own instincts on the one hand and historians like Martin Malia on the other. And I was also extremely anti-Freud, for all the reasons you cite, and then some, when I was younger. But now that I'm advancing in years, I am beginning to see the contributions to humanity of these great minds. I mean, okay, let's face it -- Freud was an artist of genius. You're absolutely right, not a scientist for all his claims, not by a long stretch. But an artist almost on par with someone like Dostoevsky, in the breadth and depth of his imagination. So as much as I deplore many of his statements and much of his influence, I nevertheless believe that ultimately, he influenced our culture for the better...
About Marx, I am not so confident, because I do not see him as an artist so much and of course, you're right, like Freud he did aspire to be a scientist, and he was completely wrong about so many things. You are no doubt correct, too, about the growth of progressive social and political movements long before Marx ever hit the scene. And you do right to remind me that I find Marx's replacement of absolute values with conditional ones (based on changing circumstances, such as history, class, etc.) highly disturbing. So, as I said before, I don't have any answers. I just think that both Freud and Marx offer, at their best, a new way of examining and learning about things. At their worst, of course, they encouraged and still encourage the dogmatic and the fanatic to tighten their hold on humanity "in the name of science," and always of course "for our own good," with often lethal results.
