Surfing through Youtube, I there came across a video of ex U.S. President Bill Clinton at a birthday celebration in 2006 for the President of the state of Israel. It was a video in which an Israeli singer, Liel Kolet, was performing and she spontaneously asked Clinton to join her on stage for a rendition of John Lennon’s “Imagine.” I have to admit that as I saw a former Western ruler and a Middle Eastern teenage girl performing there with “forty Jewish children and forty Arabic children”, I got chills at the thought of the world ever really coming together despite political, economic, or religious reasons. Karl Marx was a German philosopher who, before John lennon, Bill Clinton, or Liel Kolet, imagined a world in which humanity could coexist and everyone’s needs were met. Unfortunately, the world and the human race do not work that way. Applying Marxist ideals to the real world have never worked the way that they are intended to, and will likely never work, because of the simple fact that people will never be happy with being average and having just the basics.
One of the first things that people ask when meeting someone new is “So what do you do?” which is many times followed by “So how did you get involved that field?” But what are people truly looking for when they ask that question? If someone asks “What do you do?” would it be appropriate to respond, “Well, in the morning I wake up, jump in the shower, get dressed, and go to work. Then I…”? That response would leave the other person confused and would make the rest of the meeting very awkward. The reason for that is that the average person understands that being asked about what one does is supposed to be met with an explanation of one’s profession which then gives the other person an idea of where to place him or her in the social order. Karl Marx says in “The German Ideology” that people “begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organization. By producing their means of subsistence [people] are indirectly producing their actual material life.” (653). This type of question, when met by an appropriate response, serves as some sort of validation, for the person being questioned, about their stance in society. The person being interviewed is able to prove that he or she is producing enough work to sustain him or herself and is then also able to show it off through material possessions. However, if people are placed in a society in which everyone is the same, their jobs are the same as everyone else’s, and everyone has the same materials, people would eventually get tired of being just like everyone else and not standing out, as is the case in Communist Cuba where people would rather risk death in the ocean in an attempt to escape than stay in a country and system of government which was supposed to be for their benefit.
There is much propaganda floating around with Marxist ideology; messages about a better world where people can live together in harmony and social, economic, and political equality. Those messages may sometimes help to keep people like myself looking ahead to a brighter future. However, the real chances of such a Eutopia ever existing are slim to none because of the real human need to stand out in their means of providing for themselves and their need to accumulate material wealth to prove their ability to provide.
Works Cited
Marx, Karl. “The German Ideology.” Literary Theory: An Anthology. Ed. Rivkin, Julie. Ryan, Michael. Malden: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 653. Print.
