My Borges' vision of Marx

The Circular Ruins is one of my favorite short stories by Borges. I don’t have an academic degree in literature, so what I’m about to say might have already been said before, but if that’s the case, I’m unaware of it.

I think that The Circular Ruins is a metaphor of Marxism. It came to my mind the first time I read it years ago, and it happened to me again this time. Of its own story Borges said that “everything is unreal” (Fictions, prologue, 1941). He might have been frank with this three-word introduction, but I think there is much more of it.

The argument of the story is that the wise man, or magician, that comes to live in the circular ruins wants to “dream a man: he wanted to dream him with thorough integrity and impose him on reality.” He even says that “the purpose that guided him was not impossible, though supernatural.” The rest of the story is the struggle of this wise man to create inside his dreams a perfect human being. In order to achieve it, he practices various strategies that do not work so well at the beginning, and ends up asking the help of supernatural beings, or gods. At first it seems to be a completely fantastic story, with the usual references to enigmatic problems and descriptions common in Borges writings. But going back to the argument of conceiving a perfect man in order to impose it on reality, I cannot avoid thinking that the wise man is Karl Marx.

Now, Marx was too careful to fall into utopianism, and he thoroughly hated it. The gigantic effort he did to device his immense sociological system of dialectical materialism was an impressive rhetorical narrative to disguise what really is a utopia with the mask of scientific reality, which we can trace as early as his The German Ideology (1846). He knew that the man he was calling for was inexistent during his lifetime, but the vast majority of his thinking consists in proving that the true human condition has the potential to one day become that man, by changing the world in which he lives, hence changing him. This is what fallows logically from dialectical materialism, inherited from Hegel’s dialectic. And this is precisely one of Marx’s major mistakes: he thought that he was conceiving the true material human being, whereas what he was doing was making out of a logical deduction an empirical claim; an obvious fallacy.

To go back to The Circular Ruins, the first device developed by the wise man is to dream an amphitheater full of students to whom he is imparting a lecture. He was “looking a soul that deserved to participate in the universe,” that is someone who legitimately can be imposed on reality, according to the first argument. The purpose was to find out who of those students was the true man he was looking for, by digging in their intellectual abilities. Soon he finds out that they are a crown of uncreative, unintelligent repeaters of his doctrine. The wise man is an eminent professor, a thinker, a philosopher, like Marx. But his doctrine only produces ideologues, like most Marxists. The wise man is disappointed by his followers (like Marx in his late years) and wakes up very distressed.

At this point the story suffers a break in which the wise man must depart temporarily from his mission in order to rest and think it through from the beginning. He realizes how arduous, time consuming and difficult it is to conceive such a man. He takes longer and longer, paying attention to every detail of his body, as detailed and as long as Das Kapital (1867). But when he finishes it, the man won’t wake up. The creation is so unreal that the creature remains unconscious of his potential for living. Just as the 19^th and 20^th centuries saw failed revolutions, because Lenin’s new man wouldn’t be born to start the final revolution of all; the revolution that would impose the new man on reality, making capitalism obsolete and the entrance to the final stage of history, communism, possible.

The wise man gives up and asks the gods for help. He realized that his intellectual quest is supernatural. This is where Marxism reaches its delusional peak, because claiming the ultimate social scientific truth, what they are looking for cannot be naturally reached. So, how can it be scientifically true? It can’t. Marxism must yield to the fact that it has all been a dream, an arbitrary act of imagination, a violent will to make reality the way it wants it to be, and not the way that it simply is. Marxism turns totalitarian. In Arendtian sense, it uses violence to force upon men and reality the form that it wants them to have. This is the horrible true material conclusion of Marxism, and it has the name of Stalin, the truest of all Marxists. However, Marxism today wants to naively reject this claim (for good reasons though).

In the last part of the story, the wise man manages to wake his imaginary man into reality by the help of the god of fire (godly fire is the metaphor for totalitarian violence). His son travels somewhere to other ruins to teach the new doctrine (to disturb other countries politics). One day some travelers tell the wise man that his son has proved to be invulnerable to fire. Of course, he is nothing but a product of imagination, a ghost, an unreal man. The wise man is afraid that his son might realize that truth, hence undermining his life experience and existence. But suddenly a fire breaks around the circular ruins, burning them. When the wise man tries to escape he realizes that fire cannot hurt him. He is also a product of someone else’s imagination. He cannot experience true human suffering. He cannot understand the true human condition. If he would have, he wouldn’t have tried to conceive the perfect man in the first place. Fire, the technology of totalitarianism to create the perfect man, ends up destroying the ruins themselves, and demonstrating the wise man that he has been living a fictitious life. This is the tragic outcome of all the mythical heroes of Marxism, from Trotsky to Che Guevara and beyond.

If Borges didn't mean to make a metaphor of Marxism, at least I find it strikingly similar.