Sidney Hook Chats with Karl Marx

VISITS TO OTHER WORLDS have often been thought of as difficult, even traumatic experiences. Through the fantasy of spatial travel, the visitor would try to confront elements within his thought or feeling he had previously hesitated to acknowledge. But, apparently, the stress need not always be a critical one, for Sidney Hook recently paid a visit to the other world which left him completely cheerful and reassured. So much so that he promptly wrote it up for The New Leader of May 2, 1955.

Most of his visit seems to have been spent in conversation with Karl Marx. Hook asked him a series of questions concerning the relationship between Marxism and Stalinism, which Marx— very patiently, we thought—proceeded to answer. (Marx made it clear that he didn’t approve of Stalinism.) The answers were somewhat on the rudimentary side, but then the questions weren’t so sharp either. In any case, it appears that since his death Marx has become a quite reasonable fellow who, on all the important questions of our day, agrees entirely with Sidney Hook. “Capitalism and socialism as they were traditionally conceived,” Hook happily reports Marx as telling him, “are today irrelevant abstractions in understandi...