Mors Immortalis
We will propose (following John Bellamy Foster) that the entirety of Marx’s practical materialism arises out of one line from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura: ”mortalem vitam mors cum immortalis ademit”—”when mortal life has been taken away by immortal death.” Lucretius has thrown down the deathless gods and replaced them with the deathless facticity of death. Nearly two thousand years later (separated by the long Christian dream of immortal life—1000 years of stasis) Marx would deploy the same mors immortalis as a means of destroying the fixed and eternal claims of political economy (in particular, in his book The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847—and that is responding to M. Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty, lol): “thus the ideas, these economic categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. There is a continual movement of growth in productive forces, of destruction in social relations, of formation in ideas; the only immutable thing is the abstraction of movement—mors immortalis.” In short: not only are humans condemned to die, but so must all political economy, philosophy, theology; in short: the law of death is the impermanence of all things, meaning included. Most cannot admit this, refuse to even think of it.
Death and the Gravedigger, (1900) Carlos Schwabe
