Mors Immortalis
It seems likely that the entirety of Marx’s practical materialism arises out of one line from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura: “when mortal life has been taken away by immortal death.” Lucretius had 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) Marx would deploy the same mors immortalis as a means of dispelling the fixed and eternal claims of political economy. iIn his book The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847 (and that is responding to Proudhon’s The Philosophy of Poverty, lol) Marx says: “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 political economies, philosophies and all the gods. The law of death is the impermanence of all things, meaning included. For Marx this is an incitement to make our own social relations.
Death and the Gravedigger, (1900) Carlos Schwabe
