Diary of a Walking Butterfly
So, I really despise these pictures of Marx floating around with the words “I told you so” on them. Its both fucked up and against the spirit of Marx’s ideas. Some of the images are professional political cartoons, so I suspect this whole phenomena originated with some bourgeois paper. But others have reproduced the images as well. And many people who should know better are reposting it, seemingly with glee. Of course there are images with an older women smiling and holding up a sign with that on it, which I suppose is somewhat cute. But that doesn’t purge the phrase of its problems.
I can’t imagine Marx ever saying something like this. For example, in a letter to Arnold Ruge, he wrote:
“This does not mean that we shall confront the world with new doctrinaire principles and proclaim: Here is the truth, on your knees before it! It means that we shall develop for the world new principles from the existing principles of the world. We shall not say: Abandon your struggles, they are mere folly; let us provide you with true campaign-slogans. Instead, we shall simply show the world why it is struggling, and consciousness of this is a thing it must acquire whether it wishes or not.”
The whole letter is worth a read (its short and brilliant). It gives not only a response to this, but it also does something much more important generally: it addresses the question of how socialists relate to non-socialists, non-radicals, etc. It pointedly brings to light what should be an obvious fact: that the dreams of the Left are the dreams of all humanity. “The world has long been dreaming of something that it could actualise if only it becomes conscious of it.”
I hope comrades will consider reflecting for the matter. For the sake of all. This attitude isn’t limited to this image. And it isn’t a helpful attitude at all.
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One Response to Marx: ‘I Told You So’? Yeah, no…
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The real “I told you so” was aimed at the working class (not this “Marx for the bourgeoisie/capitalists”), and goes like this:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/09/politics-resolution.htm
“Considering, that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;
That this constitution of the working class into a political party is indispensable in order to ensure the triumph of the social revolution and its ultimate end — the abolition of classes…”
And that the structure of said “political party” is much, much closer to pre-WWI German Social Democracy than to today’s electoral machines or the vulgar “party in the broad sense” that’s used as cover for council fetishes.