Marxism: Criticism and/or Action

We have to go back to the witch doctors or the Shakespeare of Hamlet or Macbeth to reach a world in which spectres, abstract beings, names come to life, “objective powers” play so large a part as they do in that of Marx—from that “mysterious thing,” the commodity, which floats in the shadow of the physical products of modern industry, to those “personifications of economic relations,” the social classes, which, according to Capital, are the protagonists of the political-economic drama. Each of these entities, in one of Marx’s most characteristic phrases, “takes on an independent existence over against the individuals” and dominates human behavior. It is they who supply both the actors and the props for the stage of history; living men and women, magically bound to their service as Caliban by the wand of Prospero, act but to effect their ends. Even the hero, Marx takes pains to demonstrate, while imagining that he follows his own will, actually sustains in his thought and feeling the mode of life, the limits and half-conscious purposes of a collective person, the class which has chosen him; and he is lifted or cast down according to its c...