TRADITION AND THE MODERN AGE
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identical with the realm of ideas where the philosopher moves, or
that philosophy, which has always been only "for the few," will one
day be the common-sense reality for everybody.
These three statements are framed in traditional terms which
they, however, explode; they arc formulated as paradoxes and meant
to shock us. They are in fa ct even more paradoxical and led Marx
into greater perplexities than he himself had anticipated. Each con–
tains one fundamental contradiction which remained insoluble in his
own terms.
If
labor is the most human and most productive of man's
activities, what will happen when after the revolution " labor is
abolished" in "the realm of freedom," when man has succeeded in
emancipating himself from it? What productive and what essentially
human activity will be left?
If
violence is the midwife of history and
violent action therefore the most dignified of all forms of human
action, what will happen when, after the conclusion of class struggle
and the disappearance of the state, no violence will even be possible?
How will man be able to act at all in a meaningful authentic way?
Finally, when philosophy has been both realized and abolished in
the futu re society, what kind of thought will be left?
Marx's inconsistencies are well known and noted by almost all
Marx scholars. They usually are summarized as discrepancies "be–
tween the scientific point of view of the historian and the moral
point of view of the prophet" (Edmund Wilson), between the his–
torian seeing in the accumulation of capital "a material means for the
increase of productive forces" (Marx) and the moralist who de–
nounced those who performed "the historical task" (Marx) as ex–
ploiters and dehumanizers of man. This and similar inconsistencies are
minor when compared with the fundamental contradiction between
the glorification of labor and action as against contemplation and
thought
and
of a state-less, that is, action-less and (almost) labor–
less society. For this can neither be blamed on the natural difference
between a revolutionary young Marx and the more scientific insights
of the older historian and economist, nor resolved through the as–
sumption of a dialectical movement which needs the negative or eviI
to produce the positive or the good.
Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in
second-rate writers, in whom they can be discounted. In the work of
great authors they lead into the very center of their work and are
