Babylonian Memory
In-between the Euphrates and the Tigris rivers, the city of Babylon rose from near obscurity to become a mighty multinational empire which then plunged into the dust. However, Babylon continues to live in competing strands of popular memory. For within the strands of popular memory, Hammurabi propagated his first codified law, Nebuchadnezzar grew his Hanging Gardens, the Tower of Babel fell, and its future Whore will reign anew in anticipation of the Second Coming. These twin strands of memory have endured and propagated the meaning of Babylon as a locus more than a city. The prime memory is a Judeo-Christian one where Babylon is a negative space: a place of captivity, degradation, and misery offset by a future redemption. On the second strand of memory, Babylon is a historical and impressive seat ruled by powerful and mighty kings and laws.
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During the 19th century, the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels commandeered the predominant position on the theories of socialism and communism.
In doing so, they invoked the twin strands of Babylonian memory, both the scriptural and the historical, to give assistance and shape to their analysis of political economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the collective memory of Babylon as employed by the radical and influential Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. It postulates that the memory of Babylon persisted in twin strands, one religious and one historical. All conceivable citations of the memory of Babylon will be analyzed in the two philosopher's writings and connections will be made to them and to the wider collective memory of
Babylon.
In the area of literary criticism, extemporaneous analyses have arrived on Karl Marx’s writings as a product of didactic and polemic German literature. Frank E. Manuel admits that it has been only relatively recently that a serious perspective has been taken on “the wealth of literary analogies that were an intrinsic part of the argument of Das Kapital.” Fresh attention has been given and new questions have arisen on Marx’s literary mechanisms to express economic theory such as Terrell Carver’s on why Marx should “included references to an amazing array of supernatural, paranormal, sacramental and occult phenomena to explain what he termed the ‘natural laws of capitalist production’?” A verdant field now stands in the application of memory studies toward a textual analysis of the works of Marx and Engels.
In 1837, the young Karl Marx was at the University of Berlin where he wrote several essays and poems during his time as a law student. The earliest citation of Babylon by Karl Marx begins in an incomplete and absurd satire Scorpion and Felix. In Scorpion and Felix, the memory of Babylon utilized is the Judeo-Christian type settled in the female figure of Grethe who is dreaming that she is the Great Whore of Babylon. However, here as the Whore of Babylon she is forced to have bearded stubble grow on her so as not to excite mankind with her beauty:
The goddess of fantasy seemed to have dreamed of a bearded beauty and to have lost herself in the enchanted fields of her vast countenance; when she awoke, behold, it was Grethe herself who had dreamed, fearful dreams that she was the great whore of Babylon, the Revelation of St. John and the wrath of God, and that on the finely furrowed skin He had caused a prickly stubble-field to sprout, so that her beauty should not excite to sin, and that her youth should be protected, as the rose by its thorns, that the world should to knowledge aspire and not for her take fire.
In quick accompaniment to this is Marx’s subsequent disregard for classical Babylon taken from his own notes on Ancient Greek philosophy. In his 1839 Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, Marx esteems the engine of Greek philosophy symbolized as the sole figure of a wise man. Whereas the symbolic whore was satirically modified in Scorpion and Felix, Marx here builds up his own symbolic figure contrasted with the historical fact of Babylon’s temptation:
“Greek philosophy begins with seven wise men, among whom is the Ionian philosopher of nature Thales, and it ends with the attempt to portray the wise man conceptually. The beginning and the end, but no less the centre, the middle, is one σοφός, namely Socrates. It is no more an accident that philosophy gravitates round these substantial individuals, than that the political downfall of Greece takes place at the time when Alexander loses his wisdom in Babylon.”
After the university, Karl Marx worked for the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper advocating radical ideas. It was based in Cologne where Marx served as editor for a time until he was forced to resign due to political pressure over a severe critique on the Russian Tsar. It was in 1843 that Marx published a piece in the Rheinische Zeitung concerning the recent election in Cologne for the Provincial Assembly. Marx maliciously attacked those election results in an imitation of Pslam 137’s lament against Babylon, mocking the lament of the electoral critics:
And now along come these fantastic materialists, for whom every steamship and even railway should have demonstrated ad oculos their utter lack sense, and talk hypocritically of “spiritual state” and “historical recollections”, and lament by the waters of Babylon over “the great city of Cologne, the holy city of Cologne, the witty city of Cologne” — and it is to be hoped that their tears will not dry up so soon!
What about the other half of the infamous duo? By 1842, the Englishman Friedrich Engels was already notorious as a member of the Young Hegelians group and an ardent admirer
During the 19th century, the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels commandeered the predominant position on the theories of socialism and communism.
In doing so, they invoked the twin strands of Babylonian memory, both the scriptural and the historical, to give assistance and shape to their analysis of political economy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the collective memory of Babylon as employed by the radical and influential Karl Marx and Frederich Engels. It postulates that the memory of Babylon persisted in twin strands, one religious and one historical. All conceivable citations of the memory of Babylon will be analyzed in the two philosopher's writings and connections will be made to them and to the wider collective memory of
Babylon.
In the area of literary criticism, extemporaneous analyses have arrived on Karl Marx’s writings as a product of didactic and polemic German literature. Frank E. Manuel admits that it has been only relatively recently that a serious perspective has been taken on “the wealth of literary analogies that were an intrinsic part of the argument of Das Kapital.” Fresh attention has been given and new questions have arisen on Marx’s literary mechanisms to express economic theory such as Terrell Carver’s on why Marx should “included references to an amazing array of supernatural, paranormal, sacramental and occult phenomena to explain what he termed the ‘natural laws of capitalist production’?” A verdant field now stands in the application of memory studies toward a textual analysis of the works of Marx and Engels.
In 1837, the young Karl Marx was at the University of Berlin where he wrote several essays and poems during his time as a law student. The earliest citation of Babylon by Karl Marx begins in an incomplete and absurd satire Scorpion and Felix. In Scorpion and Felix, the memory of Babylon utilized is the Judeo-Christian type settled in the female figure of Grethe who is dreaming that she is the Great Whore of Babylon. However, here as the Whore of Babylon she is forced to have bearded stubble grow on her so as not to excite mankind with her beauty:
The goddess of fantasy seemed to have dreamed of a bearded beauty and to have lost herself in the enchanted fields of her vast countenance; when she awoke, behold, it was Grethe herself who had dreamed, fearful dreams that she was the great whore of Babylon, the Revelation of St. John and the wrath of God, and that on the finely furrowed skin He had caused a prickly stubble-field to sprout, so that her beauty should not excite to sin, and that her youth should be protected, as the rose by its thorns, that the world should to knowledge aspire and not for her take fire.
In quick accompaniment to this is Marx’s subsequent disregard for classical Babylon taken from his own notes on Ancient Greek philosophy. In his 1839 Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, Marx esteems the engine of Greek philosophy symbolized as the sole figure of a wise man. Whereas the symbolic whore was satirically modified in Scorpion and Felix, Marx here builds up his own symbolic figure contrasted with the historical fact of Babylon’s temptation:
“Greek philosophy begins with seven wise men, among whom is the Ionian philosopher of nature Thales, and it ends with the attempt to portray the wise man conceptually. The beginning and the end, but no less the centre, the middle, is one σοφός, namely Socrates. It is no more an accident that philosophy gravitates round these substantial individuals, than that the political downfall of Greece takes place at the time when Alexander loses his wisdom in Babylon.”
After the university, Karl Marx worked for the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper advocating radical ideas. It was based in Cologne where Marx served as editor for a time until he was forced to resign due to political pressure over a severe critique on the Russian Tsar. It was in 1843 that Marx published a piece in the Rheinische Zeitung concerning the recent election in Cologne for the Provincial Assembly. Marx maliciously attacked those election results in an imitation of Pslam 137’s lament against Babylon, mocking the lament of the electoral critics:
And now along come these fantastic materialists, for whom every steamship and even railway should have demonstrated ad oculos their utter lack sense, and talk hypocritically of “spiritual state” and “historical recollections”, and lament by the waters of Babylon over “the great city of Cologne, the holy city of Cologne, the witty city of Cologne” — and it is to be hoped that their tears will not dry up so soon!
What about the other half of the infamous duo? By 1842, the Englishman Friedrich Engels was already notorious as a member of the Young Hegelians group and an ardent admirer