Fishing, the Root Cellar, and Karl Marx

Rising early, I found Jonah already waiting for me down by the stream. I was surprised not to have seen him at St. Godric's Thursday evening and feared he might have had to leave the valley before we were able to fish together. But there he was - some worn khakis hanging over a good pair of hiking boots, a long sleeve plaid shirt over a white T, and an expensive pair of polariods peering out from beneath a floppy hat. Into the hat were carefully laced an assortment of standard flies and a few terrestrials. He had an old St. Croix fly rod, but it was a nice one. Obviously this was not someone I was going to have to teach anything.

We fished away the morning together. (It was a little drizzly, but there were good clear hatches and lots of fish - kept two nice ones for a late breakfast and two I will attempt to preserve tomorrow morning.) Then he graciously stayed to help me with the root cellar. I found a reasonable enough hill to dig into about 150 feet from the back of the cottage - which is a little further than I would like to have to go to get a jar of beets in the middle of winter, but not so bad.

Here's what the cellar is supposed to look like when it's finished, though I'm going to push it back a little more into the hill and build a small 'hallway.' (I'm a little concerned about the depth of the frost in the winter.)



I had borrowed some tools from the monastery shed when I was there - a couple of shovels and a pickaxe just in case; but what we needed and didn't have was a wheelbarrow. We had to make a litter to carry the dirt, and that was not ideal, but we got quite a good start on carving out the cellar. We worked on it from 10:30 to Noon, broke for lunch, and then put in another four hours. It's certainly hard work, but it's good work.

And it's good work, really, because it's not for wages and when I'm done with it I am free to enjoy the fruits of my own labor and the unforced labor of my comrades, who will also be welcome to the benefits.

And in a nutshell, that's the heart of Marx's 'communism' proper. The wholesale Entfremdung (estrangement) and Entaüsserung (alienation) of capitalism, the separation of men from the product of their labor, from the beauty and dignity of labor itself, and even from their own humanity, is the principle object of his critique.

I share that critique. Men and women should find satisfaction in their labor. They should work for all. We should be 'comrades' rather than fierce competitors and rabid consumers (which are two sides of the same coin).

As I thought more about that this evening, I realized that whatever stirring in my soul led me out here, it was partly an urge escape everything that Marx also hated. But I came to escape Marx's hatred of everything, as well. The power play that he foresaw and approved, the totalitarian purges that Stalin, Lenin, Mao and others carried out, the forced leveling and 'crude communism' that Marx had naively hoped was only a necessary and vulgar but temporary and intermediate stage to some utopian future, simply cannot be accepted as a means to anything better. Though we may need to disassemble to recreate, we cannot destroy. And Marx's glorious future, a future of which I also dream, was to him only accessible by a path of destruction.

If only there we could find another way.

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Karl Marx, "The Alienation of Labor"