He nodded. “And immensely rich. Not a penny must go to waste. That’s why I have to concentrate on my accounts.”
“Why bother?”
Sophie waved and walked on. But she had not gone many yards before she noticed a little girl sitting quite alone under one of the tall trees. She was dressed in rags, and looked pale and ill. As Sophie walked by, she thrust her hand into a little bag and pulled out a box of matches.
“Will you buy some matches?” she asked, holding them out to Sophie. Sophie felt in her pockets to see if she had any money with her. Yes—she found a crown.
“How much are they?”
“One crown.”
Sophie gave the girl the coin and stood there, with the box of matches in her hand.
“You are the first person to buy anything from me for over a hundred years. Sometimes I starve to death, and other times the frost does away with me.”
Sophie thought it was perhaps not surprising if the sale of matches was not especially brisk here in the woods. But then she came to think of the businessman she had just passed. There was no reason for the little match girl to die of starvation when he was so wealthy.
“Come here,” said Sophie.
She took the girl’s hand and walked with her back to the rich man.
“You must see to it that this girl gets a better life,” she said.
The man glanced up from his paperwork and said: “That kind of thing costs money, and I said not so much as a penny must go to waste.”
“But it’s not fair that you’re so rich when this girl is so poor,” insisted Sophie. “It’s unjust!”
“Bah! Humbug! Justice only exists between equals.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I had to work my way up, and it has paid off. Progress, they call it.”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll die,” said the poor girl.
The businessman looked up again from his ledgers. Then he threw his quill pen onto the table impatiently.
“You don’t figure in my accounts! So—be off with you—to the poorhouse!”
“If you don’t help me, I’ll set fire to the woods,” the girl persisted.
That brought the man to his feet, but the girl had already struck one of her matches. She held it to a tuft of dry grass which flared up instantly.
The man threw up his arms. “God help me!” he shouted. “The red cock has crowed!”
The girl looked up at him with a playful smile.
“You didn’t know I was a communist, did you?”
The next minute, the girl, the businessman, and the desk had disappeared. Sophie was once again standing alone while the flames consumed the dry grass ever more hungrily. It took her a while to put out the fire by stamping on it.
Thank goodness! Sophie glanced down at the blackened grass. She was holding a box of matches in her hand.
She couldn’t have started the fire herself, could she?
When she met Alberto outside the cabin she told him what had happened.
“Scrooge was the miserly capitalist in A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens. You probably remember the little match girl from the tale by Hans Christian Andersen.”
“I didn’t expect to meet them here in the woods.”
“Why not? These are no ordinary woods, and now we are going to talk about Karl Marx. It is most appropriate that you have witnessed an example of the tremendous class struggles of the mid-nineteenth century. But let’s go inside. We are a little more protected from the major’s interference there.”
Once again they sat at the little table by the window facing the lake. Sophie could still feel all over her body how she had experienced the little lake after having drunk from the blue bottle.
Today, both bottles were standing on the mantelpiece. There was a miniature model of a Greek temple on the table.
“What’s that?” asked Sophie.
“All in good time, my dear.”
Alberto began to talk: “When Kierkegaard went to Berlin in 1841, he might have sat next to Karl Marx at Schel-ling’s lectures. Kierkegaard had written a master of arts thesis on Socrates. About the same time, Marx had written a doctoral thesis on Democritus and Epicurus—in other words, on the materialism of antiquity. Thus they had both staked out the course of their own philosophies.”
“Because Kierkegaard became an existentialist and Marx became a materialist?”
“Marx became what is known as a historical materialist. But we’ll come back to that.”
“Go on.”
“Each in his own way, both Kierkegaard and Marx took Hegel’s philosophy as their point of departure. Both were influenced by Hegel’s mode of thought, but both rejected his ‘world spirit,’ or his idealism.”
“It was probably too high-flown for them.”
“Definitely. In general, we usually say that the era of the great philosophical systems ended with Hegel. After him, philosophy took a new direction. Instead of great speculative systems, we had what we call an existential philosophy or a philosophy of action. This was what Marx meant when he observed that until now, ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’ These words mark a significant turning point in the history of philosophy.”
“After meeting Scrooge and the little match girl, I have no problem understanding what Marx meant.”
“Marx’s thinking had a practical—or political—objective. He was not only a philosopher; he was a historian, a sociologist, and an economist.”
“And he was a forerunner in all these areas?”
“Certainly no other philosopher had greater significance for practical politics. On the other hand, we must be wary of identifying everything that calls itself Marxism with Marx’s own thinking. It is said of Marx that he only became a Marxist in the mid-1840s, but even after that he could at times feel it necessary to assert that he was not a Marxist.”
“Was Jesus a Christian?”
“That, too, of course, is debatable.”
“Carry on.”
“Right from the start, his friend and colleague Friedrich Engels contributed to what was subsequently known as Marxism. In our own century, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and many others also made their contribution to Marxism, or Marxism-Leninism.”
“I suggest we try to stick to Marx himself. You said he was a historical materialist?”
“He was not a philosophical materialist like the atomists of antiquity nor did he advocate the mechanical materialism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But he thought that, to a great extent, it was the material factors in society which determined the way we think. Material factors of that nature have certainly been decisive for historical development.”
“That was quite different from Hegel’s world spirit.”
“Hegel had pointed out that historical development is driven by the tension between opposites—which is then resolved by a sudden change. Marx developed this idea further. But according to Marx, Hegel was standing on his head.”
“Not all the time, I hope.”
“Hegel called the force that drives history forward world spirit or world reason. This, Marx claimed, is upside down. He wished to show that material changes are the ones that affect history. ‘Spiritual relations’ do not create material change, it is the other way about. Material change creates new spiritual relations. Marx particularly emphasized that it was the economic forces in society that created change and thus drove history forward.”
“Do you have an example?”
“Antiquity’s philosophy and science were purely theoretical in purpose. Nobody was particularly interested in
