The Creative Concord

Had Karl Marx been born after Karl Popper, his greatness would be incomparable.
Successfully, Marx identified the bourgeois, the proletariat, and ‘the material dialectic’, but he
failed to identify the artifex, meaning ‘creator class’, which is made up of entrepreneurs,
inventors, and artists. An artifexian, which is a term first introduced in this paper, is anyone who
creates or recreates a means of production and/or a thing to be produced. If anything, Marx
conflated creators with the bourgeois or lost sight of them amongst the general proletariat.
Consequently, his material dialectic only halfway addresses the nature of socioeconomic change
through history. The full dialectic by which society ‘marches’ can be expressed as follows:

                                                     ‘The Creative Concord’

                                           ‘The material dialectic’ | creativity
                                                                  or
                                             (owner(s) | worker(s)) | creator(s)
                                                                 or
                                           (Bourgeois | Proletariat) | Artifex

Marx argued, through the material dialectic, that Capitalism was inherently contradictory,
for it inevitably undergoes, of one kind or another, ‘creative destruction’ (Schumpeter): the
businesses it creates destroys others, the resources it consumes leaves many lacking, etc…In
other words, at the center of Capitalism is self-destructive paradox. Though the material dialectic
properly delineates how socioeconomic orders change within a given creative epoch, it does
not describe how such orders change through them. To allude to Popper, history changes not
in line with any kind of dialectic, but in concordance with unpredictable inventions, ‘eurekas’,
and ‘creative acts’ (see Nikolai Berdyaev). Marx, coming before Popper, missed this, and so
created a theory and system that works in a given epoch, but not through them. Aware of Popper,
so brilliant, surely he would have recognized ‘the creative concord’ and artifex himself. Failing
to identify the creator class, Marx missed that Capitalism expands itself while carrying out
creative destruction within itself. The proper dialectic isn’t just composed of creative destruction,
but creative destruction along with creativity.

Marx claims that ‘alienation’ drives the working class, or proletariat, to revolt against
those who own the means of production, or bourgeois. This is true, making revolution eminent.
The question is how the revolution is to occur. For the proletariat to seize the means of
production and become like the bourgeois they rebelled against is just as alienating and ironic as
being forced to work on something that one doesn’t own. Both kinds of alienation manifest in
apathy, violence, or a desire to be ‘amused to death’ (Postman). A forceful and violent
revolution, as Marx ‘pointed to’ and Lenin advanced, plays into the alienation which stimulated
it, rather than works over it. Marxists and Leninists, through history, have revolted in the wrong
way. They’ve chosen a ‘French Revolution’ rather than a ‘Glorious’ one.
To create is to revolt. The man who starts a business is claiming that he has a competitive
advantage over other businesses. He seizes the means of production by creating new means of
production. Through creativity, he claims that he can be a part of the bourgeois without their

permission. In creating what he owns and what he works, he chooses how he needs others by
choosing which enterprise to create that requires demand, and so escapes both the enslavement
of the bourgeois’ need for the proletariat and the proletariat’s need for the bourgeois. He
becomes both – the artifex – he becomes free. In this regard, the woman who pickets Big Oil
doesn’t launch a revolution as effective as the woman who invents the alternative energy that
Entrepreneurship is peaceful revolution.
Creativity is nonviolent resistance.

For the rest of ‘The Creative Concord’, please visit:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BzkJKz21gbfkR09tOHpxM1VuNkE/edit?usp=sharing

O.G. Rose lives in Charlottesville Virginia. Rose graduated from UVa and is working to publish a short story collection called 3 and a novel called Digression(s). For more from O.G. Rose, visit his Flickr and SoundCloud.