‘The Final Law of Being’

In August 1880 Karl Marx received a visitor in Ramsgate, the English seaside resort where Marx and his family spent their summer vacation: John Swinton, a reporter for the New York based journal The Sun. Surprisingly, in the article where Swinton presents his account of the meeting he has little to say about political issues. Perhaps he was all too overawed and humbled by his meeting with the famous revolutionary. Instead, Swinton reports impressions from Marx's family life in the form of a domestic tale. A key moment in this narrative is his depiction of a family picnic on the beach and of the events that followed. As the evening dawned, the male members of the Marx family went on a promenade walk with their visitor. After an hour of chatting Swinton worked up the courage to pose a question which, he thought, could only be answered by a ‘sage’ like Marx – a question regarding the very ground of being:

This, of course, is an entirely apocryphal Marx. We do not know with certainty whether Marx, on this summer evening in 1880, responded to the inquiry regarding the ground of being with the word ‘Struggle!’. Nonetheless, the Swinton text is remarkable. It draws its importance from indicating to us the shape of a Marxian ontology, that is a Marxist theory of being-as-being (rather than the conventional Marxist anthropology of being-aslabour).