Requiem for Marx

~  3  ~ The Marx Nobody Knows

Gary North

Much of my immediate motivation to investigate the life and teachings of Marx came when I read a seminal essay on Marx by Louis J. Halle. I came across “Marx’s Religious Drama” shortly after it was published in October of 1965. Halle asked a very important question at the beginning of the essay: Why did Marx become so important? His answer: Marx’s religious vision.

What did this man have that made him, at last, such a powerful influence in history? As a revolutionary, organizing revolutionary action, he was no better than others of his day. He was to go in for economics later, basing his thought on the classical and rather naive labor theory of value, but it was not as an economist that he would achieve the topmost heights of distinction. As a political analyst he was surely not as good as his contemporary of lesser fame, Walter Bagehot; as a social philosopher he was inferior to Alexis de Tocqueville. His development of the sociological view that men’s concepts reflect the material circumstances of their productive lives—this certainly would entitle him to an important place in the history of human thought. But it is hardly commensurate with the magnitude of his influence.

Marx was extraordinary, I conclude, not as a man of action or as an academic thinker, but as one of the great visionaries of history. It was the Karl Marx who saw an immense and enthralling vision of human society, the Karl Marx who on the basis of that vision created a compelling myth of human society—this is the Marx who was extraordinary among his contemporaries. He had more of St. Paul in him than of the social scientist or the empirical scholar. His mission, too, began with a vision on the Road to Damascus.1

I asked myself: Is Halle correct? Concerning Marx’s intellectual attainments, he is generally correct: Marx was not a distinguished scholar. Concerning the influence of Marx’s religious vision, he is also correct, although I am unaware of any Damascus-type experience. He did lose his youthful commitment to liberal Christianity almost overnight, in between his graduation from the gymnasium and his early years as a college student. Shortly before his graduation from the gymnasium, Marx wrote an essay called “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession,” in which he exhibited such liberal and bourgeois sentiments as this one: “But the chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection.”2 How did the young man who could write these words in 1835 become the philosopher of class revolution a decade later? One thing is certain, as we shall see: his “conversion” to revolutionary communism was not the product of any grinding personal poverty.

His radically anti-Christian unpublished one-act play, “Oulanem,” is undated, but it was an early effort.3 Oulanem, writes Payne, is an anagram: oulanem = Manuelo = Immanuel = God. Immanuel is the New Testament word meaning “God with us” (Matt. 1:23).4 Marx’s 1841 poem, “The Player,” published in the Berlin literary magazine, Athenaeum, reveals the extent of his conversion to anti-Christianity. Payne reprints it.5

Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab
Unerringly within thy soul.
God neither knows nor honors art.
The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain.

Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See this sword—the Prince of Darkness sold it to me.
For he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

But what about Halle’s equating of Marx with St. Paul? That was what bothered me most in Halle’s essay. That Karl Marx offered mankind a religious drama is certain; that it had anything in common with the experience or theology of St. Paul is a misreading of Marx’s religion, for his was a modernized version of ancient paganism’s religion of revolution.6

The point I want to make in this brief biographical survey is that Marx from the beginning of his career was subsidized, and for the most part, subsidized well. He lived his entire life on the dole, though at least the various doles were private rather than public. The image of Marx the Promethean figure struggling against overwhelming odds continues to this day, but this legend is as mythical as Prometheus was. It was the product of Marx’s own skills as a self-promoter.

The Subsidies Begin

Karl Marx, the self-appointed philosopher, economist, and social theorist for the nineteenth-century industrial proletariat, was the bourgeois son of a bourgeois father. Born in Trier, in what is today Rhineland Germany, Marx found himself in a highly privileged position. In 1816, two years before his birth, his father had renounced his Jewish origins and had joined the official state Protestant church, enabling his family to enter the ranks of bourgeois society. It was only to be expected that Heinrich (Herschel) Marx, a relatively successful lawyer, would want his son to do well in the world of “affairs.” He provided for young Karl a thoroughly liberal humanistic education, first in the Trier gymnasium, then at the University of Bonn, and then at the University of Berlin.

He began at the University of Bonn, but his time had been spent more in drinking and dueling than in study, a situation which was typical for those young men who had aspirations of entering the state’s official bureaucracies upon graduation.7 Marx’s father therefore insisted that Marx transfer to the more academically rigorous University of Berlin; Marx did so at the beginning of his second year of college. Ludwig Feuerbach once remarked of the University of Berlin that “Other universities are positively Bacchanalian compared with this workhouse,”8 and Heinrich Marx could do no more than to send his son to such an institution. Nevertheless, his strategy failed.

We know relatively little about the life of Karl Marx over the succeeding five years. He piled up many bills, received continual financial support from his parents (his father died in 1838), and spent much of his time in the so-called Professors’ Club or Doctors’ Club, a group of about thirty youthful members which met in the Cafe Stehely. It was here and in his extracurricular reading, not in the classroom, that he received most of his education.9

As a student at the Universities of Bonn and then Berlin, he spent prodigious quantities of his father’s money. It was a habit he was never to break: spending other people’s money. It required the adoption of a lifetime strategy of begging. In late December, 1837, a few months before his death, his father wrote a long, despairing, and critical letter to him. It is obvious that the father knew his son only too well. He described in detail his son’s personal habits—habits that remained with him for a lifetime:

God’s grief!!! Disorderliness, musty excursions into all departments of knowledge, musty brooding under a gloomy oil-lamp; running wild in a scholar’s dressing-gown and with unkempt hair instead of running wild over a glass of beer; unsociable withdrawal with neglect of all decorum and even of all consideration for the father. . . . And is it here, in this workshop of senseless and inexpedient erudition, that the fruits are to ripen which will refresh you and your beloved [Jenny von Westphalen], and the harvest garnered which will serve to fulfil your sacred obligations!?10

The desperate dying man then resorted to sarcasm, only too well deserved, regarding his son’s capacity for spending money:

As if we were men of wealth, my Herr Son disposed in one year of almost 700 talers contrary to all agreement, contrary to all usage, whereas the richest spend less than 500. And why? I do him the justice of saying that he is no rake, no squanderer. But how can a man who every week or two discovers a new system and has to tear up old works laboriously arrived at, how can he, I ask, worry about trifles? How can he submit to the pettiness of order? Everyone dips a hand in his pocket, and everyone cheats him, so long as he doesn’t disturb him in his studies, and a new money order is soon written again, of course.11

Poor deceived Heinrich! He had read his son’s letters that described in detail the voluminous amount of reading that the young man had covered, unaware that the young man was spending endless nights drinking in the local pub with other “young Hegelians” in the “Doctors’ Club.” Recalling his experience in Bonn—a parental-enforced transfer—Karl had not written of these familiar collegiate uses of his father’s funds. And so, the old man concluded that “my hard-working talented Karl spends wretched nights awake, weakens his mind and his body by serious study, denies himself all pleasure, in order in fact to pursue lofty abstract studies, but what he builds today he destroys tomorrow, and in the end he has destroyed his own work and not assimilated the work of others.”12

What had “busy beaver” Karl actually accomplished in the winter term of 1837–38? Attendance at a single course, criminal legal procedure. (Too bad for him that he did not learn enough to keep him out of future trouble with the legal authorities of several nations, 1842–49.) The son had been running a year’s “confidence game” with his father’s money. He had taken only seven courses in his three terms at the University of Berlin. Over the next four years, he took only six more.13 He did not graduate from Berlin. He could never work up the courage to face his examinations. In 1841, Marx graduated from the University of Jena with a doctorate in philosophy (not in law, as his father had hoped). Due to the procedures of the German university system in Marx’s day, he had never actually attended Jena, although his doctoral dissertation entitled him to full honors.

His dissertation was titled, “Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” an appropriately narrow topic for a dissertation. It is even less interesting than its title indicates.14 The reader should note how far removed its subject matter was from anything Marx subsequently wrote. He later paid to have it printed as a book. The English-language version is 72 pages long. It has never played an important role in Marxism or anything else, but the final sentence of the foreword to the printed version is important, for it reveals Marx’s hatred of both God and authority: “Prometheus is the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophical calendar.” Immediately preceding this, he had quoted in Greek from Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound: “Be sure of this, I would not change my state of evil fortune for your servitude. Better to be the servant of this rock than to be faithful boy to Father Zeus.”15 Best of all, pretend to be the servant of the rock, and then get your father and friends to finance the illusion.

The Subsidies Continue

He took his first job with the newly established Rheinische Zeitung in 1842. He became a regular contributor in April of 1842, and within a few months the editorship was given to him. Charges had been leveled at the paper that it was communist in its orientation. On the day that he took over as editor (October 15, 1842), Marx wrote an editorial denying the charge. Not only was he against communism, he claimed, but he was equally opposed to the panacea of revolution, noting that for all Germany’s problems there was no single remedy, “no great deed that should absolve us from all these sins!”16 Communism, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, was not the goal of Karl Marx in 1842. As he put it: “The Rheinische Zeitung, which does not admit that communist ideas in their present form possess even theoretical reality, and therefore can still less desire their practical realization, or even consider it possible, will subject these ideas to thoroughgoing criticism.”17

Despite the denials, what happened to the Rheinische Zeitung would also happen to two other publishing ventures Marx was associated with in the next few years: it became so radical that the authorities shut it down.18 The history of this newspaper is illuminating. Originally, this Cologne paper had been started by the Prussian government, which had recently annexed the western German provinces in which Cologne was located. The government, fearing the possibility of a militant Catholicism that might succeed in agitating against Protestant control, had hoped to counter a successful Catholic newspaper in Cologne. The government venture, like so many governmental intellectual ventures, failed.

Several wealthy Cologne industrialists who had liberal sympathies were encouraged to take it over. One of those doing the encouraging was Moses Hess, a young man who was heir to a large fortune, and who was the first of the “young Hegelians” to be converted to communism. His associates were not yet aware of his radicalism, however, and even as his beliefs became more obvious his industrialist friends continued to accept at least some of his suggestions. One of his suggestions was to hire Karl Marx as editor of the paper. Isaiah Berlin, one of Marx’s biographers, describes what took place: “From a mildly liberal paper it rapidly became a vehemently radical one; more violently hostile to the Government than any other German newspaper. . . . The shareholders were, indeed, scarcely less surprised than the authorities. . . .”19

The authorities, while censoring the newspaper constantly, were at first afraid to close it, probably because they did not wish to alienate the prominent owners. It was only when Emperor Nicholas I of Russia happened to read one of Marx’s anti-Russian diatribes that the authorities acted. The Emperor complained to the Prussian government, and the government responded, unwilling to anger the Emperor and endanger the Russo-Prussian alliance which was in effect at the time.

Another opportunity to enter into the world of journalism presented itself shortly thereafter. Marx took his young bride, Jenny von Westphalen, to Paris, where he and his old “Young Hegelian” associate, Arnold Ruge, set out to edit Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbooks). The first edition was published in February of 1844; it was also to be the last edition. The two men quarrelled, and the breach was never healed. Many of the copies were confiscated by the Prussian government when issues were sent into Prussia. In the Yearbooks, two of Marx’s important early essays appeared: the “Introduction to a Critique of the Hegelian Philosophy of Law,” and his reply to Bruno Bauer, “On the Jewish Question,” so, from the historian’s viewpoint, the endeavor was not totally useless. But given the era in which he lived, Marx was not really the best man to have as an editor, as the radicals in Prussia and France were beginning to learn. Nevertheless, he continued to write for another radical publication, Vorwärts! (Forward!).20

The Indispensable Partner

In 1844, Marx and Engels began a long friendship which was to last as long as both were alive. Engels was the son of a wealthy German industrialist, and he himself did not break off relations with the business until late in his career. He was a man of expensive tastes who enjoyed an evening at the opera or the ballet. He was hardly the man one would expect to find as the collaborator of Karl Marx, the founder of Marxist revolutionary thought. Engels’s own work, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844, was to have a profound effect on Marx; from 1845 on, Marx was to have far more respect for economic research and investigation than he had ever imagined possible in his early “philosophical” days.

The greatest irony regarding the massive amount of published attention that is squandered on Karl Marx is this: Engels was the indispensable partner in the history of Communism, not Marx.21 Engels was ahead of Marx conceptually from the beginning, although he was two years younger. He became a communist a year before Marx did. He became interested in the economic conditions of industrial civilization before Marx did; his Condition of the Working Class in England was the book that in 1845 converted Marx to the theory of the economic foundations of the revolution. There is at least a reasonable suspicion that he and Marx together worked out the idea of the materialist conception of history, although Marx is usually given credit for the discovery.22 Joseph Schumpeter, after dutifully doffing his intellectual cap to Marx’s greater “depth of comprehension and analytic power,” then observes that “In those years Engels was certainly farther along, as an economist, than was Marx.”23 Engels co-authored The German Ideology (1845–46). He co-authored the Communist Manifesto (1848). He ghost wrote many of Marx’s journalism pieces to help earn him some extra money.24 He had a lively writing style and the ability to turn a phrase. He also knew how to make and keep money. Marx possessed neither skill. Alvin Gouldner has attempted to rehabilitate Engels’s reputation, but in my view, he did not go far enough.25

Engels thoroughly enjoyed the trappings of the wealth he possessed, while Marx spent many years of his life in hock to pawn brokers. He financed Marx throughout their long relationship.26 He outlived Marx by over a decade, corresponding with many revolutionaries throughout Europe, keeping the Marxist flame burning. He edited and published reprints of Marx’s books and his many unpublished manuscripts. The arguments in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific27 have had far more impact in bringing men to Communism than Das Kapital has ever had. He was not a pedant. He was not an anti-Semite, either, at least not in his writings; Marx was, and all the hedging and squirming of contemporary liberal and Marxist scholars regarding “the hidden underlying meaning” of Marx’s vicious essay, “On the Jewish Question” (1843), will not erase the fact.28

Engels was not a Ph.D-holding drudge. Those who are Ph.D-holding drudges have a distinct tendency to identify with Marx rather than Engels. They pretend to suffer with Marx, who was, like themselves, a heavily subsidized “victim” of the hated capitalist system. They share his alienation. Many of them also share his literary style, which is best described as Germanic verbal constipation coupled with a bad case of hemorrhoids. (The shouts! The groans! The outrage! The vows of revenge!)29 They write fat, unreadable books on Marxism, and they attribute to Marx rather than Engels almost everything of intellectual importance in Marxism. They attribute far greater importance to Marx’s academic drudgery than to Engels’s original insights. In one sense, however, this assessment may be valid, because Marxism has always been a movement that owes its success to its appeal to envy-driven intellectuals and academics who have revolutionary pretensions. This explanation of Marxism’s success is seldom discussed by Marxists and academic humanists. Marxism has not united the workers of the world, but it certainly has united tens of thousands of well-fed bourgeois academics, at least until the Marxist revolution actually comes and sweeps them into the Gulag or its regional equivalents.

Marx’s Aura of Authority

This academic emphasis on Marx over Engels is made much easier by the fact that Marx maintained an aura of authority and self-confidence (except when he was begging for money) regarding his position as the primary leader of the European revolutionary movement, and loyal historians have accepted Marx’s self-assessment at face value, unlike the pawn brokers who wisely discounted everything Marx brought to them. This view of Marx as the key figure is also a lasting testimony to Marx’s own machinations and maneuverings in the narrow, German-speaking circles of the European revolutionary movement. He took all the credit from Engels, in both senses. The pattern never changed: Engels gave; Marx spent.

Engels was a humble man. In his 1893 letter to Franz Mehring, he insisted that “you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself—in time—but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly.”30 He had lived in the shadow of Marx’s footnotes all his life, and his traditional Germanic awe of the academic drudge colored his own self-evaluation right up until his death. His own admission of a manufactured false front of self-confidence reveals a great deal about his own sense of inferiority: “Here in Paris I have come to adopt a very insolent manner, for bluster is all in the day’s work, and it works well with the female sex.”31 The latter concern was always high on his list of priorities.

Moses Hess: The Forgotten Co-Founder

When writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I became familiar with the major writings of these two intellectual founders of the most important secular religion of the modern world. By reading Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, I also stumbled onto the existence of the shadowy figure who converted Frederick Engels to communism in 1842, Moses Hess (1812–1875).32 He was the son of a successful Jewish businessman. As an adolescent, he had wanted to join his father in the family business, but his father insisted that the young man devote his life to the study of traditional Judaism’s holy books, the Babylonian Talmud, which young Moses hated. He fell into bad company, young Jews who were rebelling against their parents’ religion. Hess lost his faith in Judaism33 about a decade prior to Engels’s loss of faith in Christianity.34 By 1836, Hess was a communist, as reflected in his anonymously published book, Holy History of Mankind.35 Hess’s second book, The European Triarchy (1841), predicted that a fusion of French revolutionary socialist political theory, German revolutionary philosophy, and English social revolution would produce a new society.

Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it.36 He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.”37 Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along.38 For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels.39 Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.40

Marx had read essays by Engels in 1843, which the latter submitted to Marx as editor of the latter’s two short-lived radical newspapers. By 1844, Marx had also been converted to communism, though not the “scientific” Marxist version, which began to take shape only in 1845. It was in 1844 that the long collaboration between Marx and Engels began. Hess had been the catalyst.

In the widely read, notoriously pro-Marx biography by Franz Mehring, Hess’s influence is downplayed; Mehring even goes so far as to write: “Both Marx and Engels co-operated with Hess on numerous occasions during the Brussels period, and at one time it appeared as though Hess had completely adopted their ideas.”41 He makes it appear as though they were Hess’s teachers, when in fact it had been the other way around, at least in the early stages (1842–44). This Marxist rewriting of history is understandable, since Marx and Engels concentrated their fire on Hess’s ideas in the section on “True Socialism” in the Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the fact that Hess had adopted many of their views on political economy.42 This attack on a former friend and teacher was typical of Marx and Engels from the very beginning. His early associates had been warned. Biographer Fritz Raddatz writes: “One of the scenes of that Köln period, vividly pictured by Heinzen, is both revealing and sinister. The chief editor [of the Rheinische Zeitung] and his colleagues often sat over a glass of wine in the evenings, and if the row of empty glasses was becoming noticeably long, Marx would look round the company with the angry flashing eye of the aristocrat. One of his friends would be taken aback by a finger suddenly pointed at him, accompanied by the words ‘I will destroy you’”43 Hess was shortly to be repaid in full in traditional Marxist currency for his extravagant praise of Marx in 1841.44

Hess has remained a forgotten historical figure. He was ridiculed by Marx as the “Communist rabbi.”45 He was later to become the spiritual founder of Zionism. That one man served as the intellectual father of both of these important ideological movements is remarkable; even more remarkable is the fact that his name seldom appears in textbooks on modern European history. This was equally true a century ago. When the founder of political Zionism Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State, he had never heard of Hess. Shown a copy of Hess’s 1862 book, Rome and Jerusalem, over thirty years after its publication, he said that if he had known of it earlier, he would not have written The Jewish State, since Hess’s book had so thoroughly prefigured his own writing.46

One fact is generally de-emphasized by students of early Marxism: neither Marx nor Engels, and certainly not Hess, suffered from dire poverty as young men. All three were bourgeois intellectuals. All three came from comfortable, if not wealthy, backgrounds. Of the three, only Engels had any close contact with the industrial proletariat, and he was the son of the proletariat’s employer, working as an executive of the company almost all of his adult life. He hated it, but he refused to quit until he was middle aged.47

Marx’s Income: 1844–48

In March of 1843 Marx lost his job, yet got married in June—not to some proletarian, but to Jenny von Westphalen, his old sweetheart, the daughter of a high and respected Prussian official. Their long honeymoon was spent on a tour through Switzerland where, Jenny later related, they literally gave money away. Jenny’s mother had given the couple a small legacy for the trip. Marx spent the next few months reading and writing articles. (The journal for which he was writing went through one issue, and was immediately confiscated by the authorities, never to be revived.) At the end of the year he and his new bride went to Paris. These are hardly the activities of some starving proletarian philosopher.48

There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him,49 which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day.50 Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived.51 To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts,52 plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung.53 To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher.54 I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.”55 Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”56

Marx in Belgium

Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny.57 But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family.58 Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England.59 Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication,60 he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847.61 There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”62

We know that Marx received 6,000 francs from his father’s estate in March of 1848. His father had died in 1838; Marx could not persuade his mother and his Uncle Lion Philips to give him the money until 1848.63 Robert Payne claims, without offering any substantiating evidence, that Marx immediately spent 5,000 to fund the purchase of weapons for Belgian workmen.64 I have found no evidence of this, nor does any of the standard biographies of Marx refer to such a thing. If he did this, it was the least Marx-like act of his entire career. What we do know is that he was expelled from Belgium a few weeks later, after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and by then he apparently had no money. We may never know for certain what happened to this legacy from his father.

If we add up his income, 1844 to early 1848, it comes to over 15,000 francs, plus the 1,800 talers, plus whatever money Engels received for Condition of the Working Class. Not bad for a generally unemployed Ph.D!

Lifestyle

The obvious question arises: How much money was this in purchasing power? A lot. Statistical data from this period are not highly reliable, but we can make usable estimates. A survey made in February of 1848, as the revolution was breaking out, indicated that the average wage of a Parisian male worker was slightly under four francs per day,65 or around 1,250 francs per year, if he worked continually, six days a week, 52 weeks per year. Thus, during his brief stay of less than a year in Paris, Marx pulled in about 6,800 francs, plus 1,800 talers, or about six times the average Parisian worker’s salary (even if we do not count the 2,000 francs for the supposed sale of proof sets), and he was not required to work 52 weeks to earn it.

What did it cost to live in Paris? One survey in 1845 indicated that the minimum expenses for a childless family in Paris were in the range of 750 francs per year.66 Marx had only one child in 1844, so even if expenses were twice this, he could have survived. His income that year was ten or eleven times the Parisian family’s minimum expenditure. (I have not pursued the question of the cost of living in Brussels. It is unlikely to have been drastically different. There was an international gold standard at the time, free mobility of population, and growing business competition. All these factors would have tended to equalize the costs of living the major cities.)

Consider these ratios in terms of today’s income in the United States. First, recall that there were no income taxes in 1844. Taxes were quite low, way under double-digit levels. If today’s family of three reached the poverty level at about $8,500 per year in 1985,67 and if we assume that the average poor family spends all that it pulls in, then the Marx family was spending the equivalent of $85,000 after-tax 1985 dollars, or at least $125,000 of pre-tax income. This would put him at least in the upper two percent of U.S. income earners. This poverty-level figure does not include food stamps, free education, health care services, or other modern welfare benefits. If these are added to the base level income of $8,500, then the poverty line for American families in 1985 was considerably above $10,000 a year, meaning that Marx was pulling in the equivalent of over $100,000 a year after taxes.

Another way of looking at the figures is to assume that the average black family in the United States is at the lower end of the income level. The mean average after-tax income level of black families in 1985 was $16,000.68 At six times the average Parisian worker’s family, after taxes, the Marx family was doing well. Six times the average U.S. black family after taxes would have placed the Marx family’s income 1985 income at $96,000. The average married couple with two children pulled in $28,000 after taxes. If you compute six times this income, the Marx family pulled in $168,000.

Marx, in short, was no starving proletarian. By anyone’s standards in 1844, he was a rich man.

As far as I know, I seem to be the first investigator to search out even this minimal data on wage levels and the cost of living in Paris during the 1840s in order to compare Marx’s income with the average workers. I am surely not the only person bright enough to do this. What we are suffering from is a combination of laziness on the part of scholars of Marx’s life, plus an element of dignified silence: to discuss such matters would lead to the overthrow of the myth of Marx’s poverty. It throws serious doubt on Marx’s lifelong self-posturing as the Prometheus figure of the European proletariat. Only if someone finally turns up evidence that he really did donate 5,000 francs to the Belgian workers in early 1848 should we find reserves of compassion for poor Karl (unless, of course, the money was given to finance arms purchases so that they, rather than Marx, could get killed storming the barricades).

His years of serious financial hardship began in 1848, but by this time his philosophy of dialectical materialism and economic communism had already crystallized in his mind. In short, his philosophy of life had been developed in his years of remarkable prosperity. He became the self-appointed “voice of the proletarians” before he suffered the self-inflicted financial hardships of proletarianism. Unlike proletarians, he never held a steady job after 1844, and that job in Paris had lasted less than a year.

Marx returned to Cologne in 1848, and in June he began publication of still another paper, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The following February saw him brought to trial and subsequently acquitted of the charge of subversion. In May he published the inflammatory “red issue”—literally printed in red ink—since he was about to be expelled anyway. He left for France, but was expelled three months later (August 1849). From there he traveled to London, which, along with Switzerland, was the home of most nineteenth-century radicals after the revolutions of 1848–1850. He was to spend most of his remaining life in London, the city of exiles.

Self-imposed Poverty, 1848–1863

It was in the fifteen-year period from 1848 to 1863 that Marx gained his reputation for poverty, a reputation he earned by his unwillingness to go out and earn a living. He lost three of his children, lived in indescribable squalor, and struggled along on handouts from Engels and whatever income he could gain from the articles he wrote (or which Engels wrote under Marx’s name) for Horace Greeley’s New York Daily Tribune.

In 1861, things became desperate for Marx. The Civil War in the United States had begun to cause havoc in the English cotton market, for the South placed an embargo on its cotton exports to England in the hope (which proved illusionary) that such an act would force English industrialists and workers to pressure the English government into official recognition of Southern independence. What money Engels possessed came from his employment in his father’s mills, and Engels was employed in the Manchester branch of his father’s industrial holdings. His income dropped as a result of the depressed conditions, and he was, for three years, unable to aid Marx very much. Simultaneously, the Tribune canceled Marx’s column on European affairs in order to make more room for news concerning the war. Thus, Marx’s two chief sources of financial support were cut off. He went deeply into debt.

Things grew so bad in these years that Karl Marx was driven into the ultimate breaking point: he actually had to go out and look for a job! He applied for a post at a local railway office. His explanation to his Hanoverian correspondent, Dr. Kugelmann, was straightforward: “I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting.”69 Anyone who has ever seen Marx’s handwriting can sympathize with both the railway officials and Dr. Kugelmann.70 He never went looking again.

There is no denying that the Marx family lived in abject poverty in these years. But the textbooks seldom mention that the cause of this self-imposed poverty was that Marx never bothered to go out and get a job. “Nothing human is foreign to me,” he once wrote, citing the Roman Republic’s playwright Terence, thereby proclaiming his personal commitment to radical humanism. Nothing human was foreign to Marx, one is tempted to add, except steady employment. In 1864, he had squandered a fortune. The money had been advanced (given) to him by Engels, plus what he inherited from his mother’s estate, plus a huge inheritance from Wilhelm Wolff. In 1865, broke again, he was offered the opportunity to write a column each month on the movements of the money-market. He refused to accept the job, never bothering to so much as offer an explanation.71

Karl and Jenny Marx were simply not capable of handling money with any degree of success. Three things served to alleviate their economic hardship in this bleak period of their lives. First there was Helene (Lenchen) Demuth, the Marx’s housekeeper. She had grown up as a servant in the von Westphalen home, and Jenny’s mother sent her to be with the Marxes in 1846. She remained with the family until the death of Karl Marx in 1883. As Payne’s biography of Marx demonstrates, she was the keeper of the family purse, and she kept it as solvent as possible. She also bore Marx an illegitimate son in 1851—a son Marx was never willing to acknowledge for fear of embarrassment in London’s revolutionary circles—another hitherto ignored fact which Payne’s book brought to light.

The Inheritances

A second factor was the advance on his inheritance from his mother (who had not yet died) which he received in early 1861.

Karl’s mother paid off his old debts, and through the executor of her estate, her immensely successful industrialist brother-in-law Lion Philips.72 Marx received £160, part of which he spent on a whirlwind European tour.73

Finally, in 1863, Engels was able to scrape together £125, and possibly more—the record is unclear—for Marx’s relief.74 It was on this occasion that Engels criticized Marx openly, the only time he ever did so. In January, Engels’s “wife” died, and he wrote to Marx in despair. Marx replied with two brief sentences of regret and then launched into a description of his own financial woes. Engels was infuriated, told Marx so, and Marx apologized—possibly the only time in his adult life that he apologized to anyone outside his immediate family. So, Engels sent him the money, and the two partners were reconciled.

In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100.75 He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.”76 Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824.77 Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff.78 In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate).79 Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.

When I first began looking into Marx’s finances (prior to the publication of Payne’s revealing biography), I began to wonder just how much this money amounted to in terms of purchasing power. Not one biography prior to Payne’s asked this fundamental question. Professor Bowley has estimated that in 1860, the income of an agricultural laborer in the lowest ten percent of the British population was something like £30 annually. An average income for a worker would have been about £45 per year. For those in the upper ten percent of the population, a 70-pound figure would have been typical.80 The income of the Marx family in 1863 would have put them in the upper five percent of the British population! That was the sum sent by Engels to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” His income during the next year, 1864, would have been equivalent to the wages paid to over twenty “average” British proletarians.

Easy Come, Easy Go

Incredible as it may seem, in May of 1865 the Marx family was penniless again. On July 31 of that year he wrote to Engels for more money, claiming that he had been in hock to a pawnshop for two months.81 Dr. Kugelmann received a letter in October which contained these words: “My economic position has become so bad as a result of my long illness and the many expenses which it entailed, that I am faced with a financial crisis in the immediate future, a thing which, apart from the direct effects on me and my family, would also be disastrous for me politically, particularly here in London, where one must ‘keep up appearances.’”82

It would seem that either London’s radical society had been infected with a severe case of “bourgeois affectations,” or else Dr. Marx was now associating with those of very high class standings. Marx then went on to ask Kugelmann if he knew of anyone who would loan him money at a rate of five to six percent interest, since, as he announced, “I am now paying 20 to 30 percent interest for the small sums which I borrow, but even so I cannot put off my creditors much longer. . . .”83 Marx, the economist of the proletarian class, was hardly what we could call a sound financial administrator.

Where did the money go? Payne’s biography supplies a key clue. In a letter to his uncle Lion Philips, Marx announced (June 1864) that he had made £400 on the stock exchange. On July 4th, he wrote to Engels asking for the final settlement of the Wolff legacy: “If I had had the money during the last ten days, I would have been able to make a good deal on the stock exchange. The time has now come when my wit and very little money one can really make a killing in London.”84 Unfortunately, Marx forgot that when some people are making killings on the stock exchange, others frequently are getting killed. We cannot be certain, but Marx’s gambling instincts may have been the cause, at least in part, of his financial downfall.

Non-Proletarian Quarters

Expenditures, as we all know, tend to rise as income rises. With his mother’s small legacy in hand, Marx had moved his family into a new home in March of 1864, shortly before the news of the legacy from Wolff arrived. This represented a leap into the upper middle class. Payne’s description of Marx’s home (and the photograph of it in his book) is revealing: “No one arriving at the new house on Maitland Park Road would mistake it for a workman’s lodging. It was spacious and handsome, with cornices over the windows and elegant Corinthian columns at the head of the steps, with a small garden in front and a larger one at the back. Like nearly all the columned houses in London, this house gave an impression of subdued affluence. A doctor, a local magistrate, or a businessman who worked in the city would not have been out of place in it.”85

Karl Marx remained in this home until 1875, at which time he moved into one which was apparently close to being identical with the Maitland Park home (this final residence was destroyed during the World War II). Jenny, his wife, gave a fancy ball in October 1864, another drain on Marx’s finances, and she gave others as the years rolled on.86 No doubt they served the Marx family as reminders of their affluent youth. His housing preferences certainly confirms the observation of Logan Pearsal Smith: “All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.”87

The Pension from Engels

When Engels decided to sell his interest in the family firm in 1869, he wrote to Marx and asked him how much money it would take to clear up all of his debts. Marx replied by return mail that he was £210 in arrears, “of which about 75 are for pawnshop and interest.”88 In July 1869, Engels settled his accounts with the firm, and was able to pay off Marx’s debts, while putting him on an annual pension of £350. Yet Marx claimed that even this large sum was not enough for him to live comfortably. A year before, in a letter to Kugelmann, he had written this astounding message: “You may be sure that I have often discussed leaving London for Geneva, not only with myself and my family, but with Engels. Here I have to spend from 400 to £500 annually; in Geneva I could live on £200.” 89

Marx’s income, using Professor Bowley’s estimates, was some five times greater than the upper ten percent of the British laboring classes. Using the 1867 figures presented in that year by R. Dudley Baxter to the Statistical Society of London, we find that Marx’s income placed his family in the top 120,000 families in England and Wales. Some 5.1 million families lived below Marx’s “poverty line.” After 1869, Marx’s regular annual pension placed him in the upper two percent of the British population in terms of income.

Marx, in short, felt he was unable to live comfortably on an income greater than that enjoyed by ninety-eight percent of his countrymen—in a nation which, per capita, was the wealthiest in the world.90 Incredibly, one biography puts it this way: “But his anxieties only really ended in 1869, when Engels sold his share in the cotton mill and was able to make Marx a definite, if moderate, yearly allowance.”91 That is how history gets rewritten.

The Legend Lives On

We can now place the myth of Marx’s poverty in its proper perspective. He was poor during only fifteen years of his sixty-five-year career, in large part due to his unwillingness to use his doctorate and go out to get a job. His economic opinions had been formed, at least in their essentials, before this poverty set in, and the final culmination of his system, Das Kapital, published in 1867, was completed in the years of high income. His own life seems to stand as a testimony against the validity of his doctrine of economic determinism. The philosopher-economist of class revolution—the “Red Doctor of Soho” who spent only six years in that run-down neighborhood—was one of England’s wealthier citizens during the last two decades of his life. But he could not make ends meet.92

In one respect, at least, things have not changed very much since the middle years of the nineteenth century. You can still find far more self-proclaimed Marxists on the bourgeois college campus than you can find in the “proletarian” workshops of Detroit or Chicago. The well-fed bourgeois intellectuals have far more of an affinity for the ideas of Marx and Engels than today’s industrial proletariat does. Marx’s ideas were born in the university and its intellectual underground, nurtured during years of voluntary withdrawal from economic production, and flowered in declining years of luxury, far removed from the environment of the displaced proletariat.

The “tragedy” of Marx’s “poverty-stricken” life consisted only in the fact that if he had lived in the mid-twentieth century, he could have avoided those fifteen years of self-imposed trouble. There are today plenty of tax-exempt foundations that make a point of supporting such revolutionary conspirators in the high style which he experienced throughout most of his life.

Karl Marx set the pattern, both intellectually and financially, for the present generation of well-fed, well-subsidized, bourgeois intellectuals. An economist who could not economize, a revolutionary organizer whose organizations invariably fell apart, a secular prophet whose prophecies did not come true, a self-proclaimed autonomous man who spent his life on Engels’s dole and in hock to the pawnbrokers, the self-proclaimed spokesman of the working class who never did an hour’s manual labor in his life, the inventor of a theory of inevitable industrial revolutions that have in fact only occurred in backward rural societies, the man who predicted the withering away of the State whose ideas revived the ancient quest for world empire, Karl Marx’s life serves as testimony to the failure of bad ideas. The only people who still take his ideas seriously are bourgeois intellectuals, heretical middle-class pastors, and power-seekers who want to become tyrants for life—the kind of people Marx despised, that is, people very much like himself.

On the bourgeois dole for his entire life, he spent his days criticizing the very economic structure which permitted him his leisure time: capitalism. He attacked “Bourgeois Liberalism,” yet it was that system of liberal attitudes and broadmindedness which produced an atmosphere of intellectual freedom, without which he would have been imprisoned and his books burned as a lesson for others. Had bourgeois London not given him a place to hide and work—analogous to the Old Testament’s cities of refuge (Numbers 35:6–32)—we would never have heard of this third-rate materialist philosopher and fourth-rate classical economist. In short, Marx did his best to undercut the very foundations of his own existence. By 1998, in those nations that were officially Marxist, anti-Communist ideas had become the coin of the realm. Nothing remains of Marxism except its quest for power. Paraphrasing bourgeois intellectual Lincoln Steffans, the Communists have seen the future at close range, and it does not work.

Critically Critical Criticism

Fritz Raddatz correctly notes that Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus was a work of criticism. “Even in this very first work Marx showed himself as an ‘anti’ writer, an author who defined his own position as a result of polemic and criticism. His most important productions have as their title or subtitle the word ‘Critique’; his less important polemical writings are attempts to pick a quarrel or to counterattack.”93 Alvin Gouldner makes a similar observation.94 Look at the titles and subtitles of his essays and books: “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). As was the case in so many other aspects of the origin of Marxism, Engels was the originator of the tradition. He started this “critique” mania with his early titles, Schelling and Revelation: Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction Against the Free Philosophy (1841),95 and “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws” (1842).96

What Marx was, from beginning to end, was an uncompromising critic of others. He criticized everything and everyone except himself, especially those people who had befriended him earlier. Only Engels escaped his wrath, because Engels always offered public obeisance to him, and because he subsidized Marx handsomely, decade after decade. (In their only known dispute, Marx backed down—apparently the only time he ever backed down in any dispute.97) Karl Marx was the foremost hater and most incessant whiner in the history of Western Civilization. He was a spoiled, overeducated brat who never grew up; he just grew more shrill as he grew older. His lifelong hatred and whining have led to the deaths (so far) of perhaps a hundred million people, depending on how many people perished under Mao’s tyranny. We will probably never know.

Whiners, if given power, readily become tyrants. Marx was seen by his contemporaries as a potential tyrant. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), the Italian revolutionary, and a rival of Marx’s in the International Workingmen’s Association in the mid-1860s,98 once described Marx as “a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind . . . extraordinarily sly, shifty and taciturn. Marx is very jealous of his authority as leader of the Party; against his political rivals and opponents he is vindictive and implacable; he does not rest until he has beaten them down; his overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for power. Despite the communist egalitarianism which he preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party; admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition.”99 This is the essence of Marxism, despite Marx’s claims to the contrary: a system of bureaucratic control that attempts to overcome the leader’s lack of omniscience and omnipresence by means of top-down centralized power. It has been the characteristic feature of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and subsequent Communist dictators. It is inherent in the Communist system.

Bakunin’s Warning

Michael Bakunin, the revolutionary anarchist and rival of Marx in their battle for control over the International Working-men’s Association,100 accurately prophesied in 1869 what would be the legacy of Marx’s theory of Communism: statism.

The reasoning of Marx ends in absolute contradiction. Taking into account only the economic question, he insists that only the most advanced countries, those in which capitalist production has attained greatest development, are the most capable of making social revolution. These civilized countries, to the exclusion of all others, are the only ones destined to initiate and carry through this revolution. This revolution will expropriate either by peaceful, gradual, or by violent means, the present property owners and capitalists To appropriate all the landed property and capital, and to carry out its extensive economic and political programs, the revolutionary State will have to be very powerful and highly centralized. The State will administer and direct the cultivation of the land, by means of its salaried officials commanding armies of rural workers organized and disciplined for this purpose. At the same time, on the ruins of the existing banks, it will establish a single state bank which will finance all labor and national commerce.

It is readily apparent how such a seemingly simple plan of organization can excite the imagination of the workers, who are as eager for justice as they are for freedom; and who foolishly imagine that the one can exist without the other; as if, in order to conquer and consolidate justice and equality, one could depend on the efforts of others, particularly on governments, regardless of how they may be elected or controlled, to speak and act for the people! For the proletariat this will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks: a regime, where regimented workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to the beat of a drum; where the shrewd and educated will be granted government privileges; and where the mercenary-minded, attracted by the immensity of the international speculations of the state bank, will find a vast field for lucrative, underhanded dealings.101

Insufficiently Self-Critical

How critical is “critical?” In testing the truth or falsehood of any world-and-life view, we need to ask ourselves: “Does the theorist who is proposing this comprehensive explanation of cause and effect actually apply it to his own life and work?” Almost no modern social theorist is willing to do this. Allan Bloom has commented on this carefully ignored problem: “It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question ‘How is it possible to do what I am doing?’ He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who signs petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism.”102

Consider the theories of Marx and Engels. These men preached the gospel of inevitable proletarian revolution. But who were they? Two bourgeois writers who were converted to revolutionary socialism in their mid-twenties. Both were sons of successful bourgeois fathers, and Engels grew steadily richer over the years because of his skills in managing his father’s industrial textile mills. It never seemed to bother Lenin that he had no consistent Marxist explanation for the historical fact regarding the workers that he could not deny: the Social-Democratic consciousness of proletarians does not develop by itself. “This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness. . . . The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. The founders of modern scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.”103 The obvious question is: Why? It has no obvious Marxist answer.

Marx and Engels also predicted the initial successes of this proletarian revolution in nations that had adopted modern industrial capitalism. So, where have the only successful indigenous Communist revolutions taken place? In rural Third World nations and in nations that were only in the very early stages of industrialism (e.g., Russia). Who have their ideological recruits been? First and foremost, intellectuals in industrial countries who have themselves recruited no proletarian followers but who have strongly influenced a small army of other intellectuals who are basically favorable to Marxist humanism, or who are at least unfavorable to the efforts of the enemies of Marxist tyrannies.104 Second, highly educated bourgeois intellectual activists in rural nations who have succeeded in recruiting dedicated peasant followers. In short, nowhere have the theories of Marx and Engels been less applicable or their prophecies less accurate than in the history of Communism. This is seldom discussed by Communists. The critical attitude fostered by Marxism has not been sufficiently self-critical. Marxists apply Marxism’s comprehensive theories only to non-Marxist theories and societies. This has been true from the very beginning of Marxism.

Marx Short-Circuits at Age 49

Socialist economics eventually proved to be no solution to Marx’s intellectual problems. The fact that Marx refused to publish the second and third volumes of Capital and his “Theories of Surplus Value” is at least circumstantial evidence of the “dead end” character of his economic system, since he had plenty of money from Engels at this stage of his career; he could have afforded to get them published. If he was willing to publish his doctoral dissertation as a young man when he had much less money, why not his post-1867 magna opera? It was not what he wrote early in his career and did not bother to publish in uncompleted form that is most important, for he later submitted what he regarded as superior manuscripts to his publishers. The one major exception is The German Ideology [1845], which he and Engels tried unsuccessfully to get published, and which was never put into final form.105 What he labored on for a decade, 1857–67, and then refused to publish is what is most significant, for it reveals the breakdown of his system. This breakdown produced a kind of mental breakdown in Marx.

As I mentioned in Marx’s Religion in 1968, the fact that he got to the end of volume 3 of Capital without defining “class” is significant. He started to define that crucial term, but the manuscript ends two paragraphs later. The manuscript then sat on his shelves for well over a decade, gathering dust. Mises is correct: “Significantly the third volume breaks off after a few sentences in the chapter headed ‘The Classes.’ In treating the problem of class Marx got only as far as setting up a dogma without proof, and no further.”106

The dead ends of his system finally overwhelmed him. Marx’s economic analysis was visibly dead in 1867; Marx was smart enough to know that it was dead, so he wisely stopped writing economic analysis. The most accurate thing Marx ever wrote was his 1858 assessment of his notes for the manuscript that later became Das Kapital, notes which today are hailed as crucial in the development of Marx’s later thought, published as the Grundrisse. Marx called this material Scheisse.107 He saw clearly after 1867 that there is little use spending your “golden years” writing even more Scheisse.

What few scholars have admitted in print is that Marx short-circuited after age 49. It is rarely mentioned that after the publication of what later became known as volume 1 of Capital, Marx never had another full-length book published during his lifetime. Instead, he confined his intellectual activities to working frantically on a wide, unstructured range of unpublished projects, plus writing the usual refutations of his enemies. These tirades lacked both the venom and volume of the enormous pile of tirades published earlier in his career. It was as if he was going through the motions out of habit more than anything else, like an old dog who still chases an occasional car for a hundred feet instead of three blocks down the street. A few barks, and then he trots back to his rug on the front porch. Except for citations from The Civil War in France (1871) and an occasional reference to the Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), you will hardly see anything written by Marx referred to in anyone’s book on Marx. Almost everything of significance to the Communist movement after 1867 was written by Engels. The Moscow-published, three-volume Selected Works of Marx and Engels has more Engels in it than Marx, and after The Civil War in France (the middle of volume 2), almost all of the set is written by Engels.

Frantic Reading

Raddatz has summarized Marx’s later years quite well:

As it subsequently proved, however, for the last fifteen years of his life following publication of Volume I Marx hardly, if at all, worked on Capital. The information given by Engels in his prefaces to Volumes 2 and 3 was almost sensational: the manuscripts he found among Marx’s papers had clearly been written between 1864 and 1867, in other words before Volume I had been published. Moreover, Marx had not been prevented from completing his book by illness or debility. . . .Letters show that Marx actually ran away from this book, that he definitely looked for excuses. . . . He delved into such problems as the chemistry of nitrogen fertilizers, agriculture, physics, and mathematics. His book of excerpts of 1878 is full of tables and sketches, on atmospheric temperature for instance, or drawings of sea shells and fossils; whole pages are covered with chemical formulae; on page after page whole lines are carefully erased with a ruler. Methodical labor for no good purpose. This time-wasting in senseless and extreme precision was a method of evasion; even in the early days Engels had warned him: “As long as you have some book you think important lying in front of you unread, you will never get down to writing.”108 And there were always sufficient books lying unread to satisfy the appetite of this gargantuan devourer of paper—studies on differential calculus, a Danish theory of the state, or Russian grammar. Marx immediately wrote a treatise on differential calculus and various other mathematical manuscripts; he learned Danish; he learned Russian. Among his papers Engels, who knew only too well the defenses behind which Marx barricaded himself, found “over two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone.”109 The word ‘excuse’ appears even in a letter from Marx himself to the Russian translator of Capital; in it he counts himself lucky that publication in Germany is prevented by anti-socialist legislation and that fortunately fresh material from Russia and the United States provides him with the excuse he is looking for to continue with his research instead of finishing the book and publishing it.110

Raddatz then reveals that even this excuse was a lame one; the Prussian censors regarded Marx’s books as social-democratic or non-revolutionary communism (which boggles the imagination), and so there was no legal excuse for prohibiting their importation.111 What I argue is that this was not Marx’s mid-life crisis; this was his inconsistent-system crisis.

There is true irony here. In constructing his critique of capitalism, Marx explicitly adopted the classical economists’ erroneous intellectual legacy, the labor theory of value. The classical economists argued that the source of all economic value is human labor. One error that results from the labor theory of value is the idea that activity is a meaningful economic substitute for production. The obvious nature of the error should have warned economists that something was fundamentally wrong with the labor theory of value. Yet Marx lived out the labor theory of value during the final sixteen years of his life. He substituted frantic intellectual activity for meaningful intellectual production.

Raddatz has recognized the fragmented nature of Marx’s legacy: “The fact that Marx’s life’s work remained fragmentary, therefore, cannot be laid at the door of external circumstances. Since, apart from his great polemics or works of criticism and shorter inflammatory writings, everything remained uncompleted, the question arises whether this was due to some fundamental tendency.”111 Marx was endlessly rewriting pieces that were more than a month old. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue records that Marx could not bear to publish anything that was less than perfect. Yet he left behind a mountain of notebooks and jumbled papers.112 And out of this jumble many academic reputations have been constructed!

Youthful Habits Revisited

His biographer (or more accurately, his hagiographer) Franz Mehring recognized Marx’s life-long problem with getting anything written in final form, from his doctoral dissertation onward. “It was characteristic of Marx, and it remained so until the end of his days, that his insatiable urge to knowledge permitted him to master difficult problems quickly, whilst his merciless self-criticism prevented him from having done with them equally quickly.”113 Merciless self-criticism was never one of Marx’s visible personality traits, but his overwhelming desire to avoid making a mistake in print was increasingly a problem for Engels as Marx grew older. He could not get Marx to finish anything.

Arnold Ruge, one of Marx’s early radical associates, had lived at the same address in Paris during one of Marx’s numerous exiles.114 Ruge had recommended in 1842 that Marx be made co-editor of the short-lived Rheinische Zeitung, and who within two years became an early target of his invective, once described Marx as follows: “He is a strange character with a pronounced bent towards scholarship and authorship but totally incompetent as a journalist. He reads a great deal; he works at extraordinary pressure and has a talent for criticism which sometimes develops into presumptuous and discourteous dialectics; he never completes anything, is always breaking off and plunging back again into an endless welter of books.”115 It could be said of Marx that he was the perpetual sophomore, learning new material rapidly and superficially, but inevitably becoming bogged down with details of analysis when they proved to be inconvenient with his presuppositions and initial hypotheses, as they invariably proved to be.

(Marx later got even with Ruge, as he did with all his former colleagues except Engels, who never stopped sending him money. He became a paid informant for the Austrian police, spying on his revolutionary associates. Ruge was one of them. He was paid the equivalent of $25 for each bit of information he turned up. This is not one of the biographical details heralded in the dozens of conventional histories of Marx, although the story has been known since 1960.)116

Perhaps it really was self-criticism that at last destroyed him. He had criticized everything mercilessly all his life. Perhaps he did criticize himself into partial intellectual paralysis after 1867. If so, this was a fitting end to a life of endless rebuttals, detailed nit-picking of others, and continual self-justification. What I suspect, however, was that he was too arrogant to admit publicly that the economic analysis found in volume 1 of Capital was self-contradictory, and he was also too arrogant to admit publicly, by failing to publish volume 1, that more than a decade of struggling with economics had been a major malinvestment of his life’s resources. He therefore allowed volume 1 to be published, but then refused to finish the other explanatory manuscripts for publication, knowing full well that their appearance in print would only visibly compound his problem, as indeed they did.

Endless Excommunications

Another feature of Marx’s personality was his inability to co-operate with his fellow revolutionaries. Throughout his career, he found himself bickering with former associates and present workers who were, in Marx’s mind, rivals. With Engels alone he remained on friendly terms, and Engels was careful always to give Marx the two things which he required: unfailing subservience and money. Otto Rühle, by no means an unfavorable biographer, has not exaggerated when he writes that “Marx was one of those persons who are overpowered by a perpetual urge towards the highest, the purest, the most ideal. It was not merely his ambition to be the most famous among those who have studied socialist literature, and the most learned of all the critics of economic science; he also wanted to be the most efficient revolutionist, and pre-eminent among the advocates of revolution. He wanted to expound the purest theory, to establish the most complete system of communism. As a preliminary to the demonstration of this superiority, he must prove that the socialist theories of all his predecessors were worthless, false, contemptible, or ludicrous. He had to show that the socialism of the utopists was a crazy-quilt of outworn and questionable ideas. That Proudhon was a suspect intruder into the realm of socialist thought. That Lassalle, Bakunin, and [Johann] Schweitzer were tainted with bourgeois ideology, and had probably sold themselves to the enemy. He, Marx alone, was in possession of the true doctrine. His was the crystal-clear knowledge; his was the philosopher’s stone; his the immaculate conception of socialism; his the divine truth. With contemptuous wrath, with bitter mockery and profound hostility, he rejected all other opinions, fought against all other convictions, than his own, persecuted all ideas that had not originated in his own brain. For him, there was no wisdom except his own, no socialism other than the socialism he proclaimed, no true gospel outside the limits of his own doctrine. His work was the essence of intellectual purity and scientific integrity. His system was Allah, and he was its prophet.”117

Marx’s unwillingness to tolerate anything which he regarded as insubordination was the cause of numerous splits within the ranks of the proletarian revolutionary movement in Europe, some of which were avoidable. Even Franz Mehring, the author of the semi-official biography of Marx, has to admit that during the dispute with Lassalle, the founder of the Marxist German Social Democratic Party, Marx was excessively bitter. “In his letters to Engels Marx condemns Lassalle’s activities with a severity which occasionally develops into bitter injustice.”118 Marx’s references to him as “a little kike” or as a “Jewish nigger” are certainly not in the best spirit of his own self-proclaimed neutrality.119

Marx’s Anti-Semitism

This brings up the whole question of Marx’s supposed anti-Semitism. The question is extremely difficult to deal with, if for no other reason than the fact that it involves a post-mortem psycho-analysis, a questionable academic endeavor at best. How can we know what he thought in an area where his writings are so ambiguous? Those who claim that he was an anti-Semite invariably point to the letters that he wrote to Engels which contained nasty statements about Lassalle. Why would he use the word “Jew” as the ultimate form of contempt? In his essay published in 1844, “On the Jewish Question,” what was he attacking, his critics ask, if not the Jewish faith and culture? The answer, at least in part, is that he was attacking bourgeois life in general, using the famous stereotype of the European Jewish financier as his representative type of the bourgeois man. He saw the Jewish community as an infected, diseased culture—totally bourgeois, and always seeking after money. But the critic’s question still remains: why did he single out the Jews?120 Sidney Hook has tried to defend Marx on this point: “Although Marx was free of anti-Semitic prejudice, he unfortunately was not over-sensitive to using the term ‘Jew,’ often with unsavory adjectives, as an epithet of abuse.”121 But the fact remains that “Jew” was the word which Marx chose.

Marx: Graduate Student for Life

Writing a negative critical book is a good post-Ph.D exercise for a newly certified scholar, but it is a sign of immaturity when a scholar spends his whole life criticizing the ideas of others, never putting together a positive alternative. It is evidence that he has no positive alternative. What I have just described is the intellectual career of Karl Marx. Marx never stopped writing long-winded critical refutations of his opponents. His books’ targets were almost always the writings of his socialist rivals, and usually very obscure rivals at that, not Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, or other important advocates of classical economics. Marx never provided any blueprints regarding the operation of the communist society to come. He offered no program for building a new society after the revolution, except for the famous ten points of the Communist Manifesto (1848). He never again brought up the subject of the transition from capitalist to socialist to Communist society. Ten points in a pamphlet do not a civilization build. Almost three decades later, he wrote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”122 This is a slogan, not a program. Lenin played the same game when he wrote that a Communist society is simply one which combines political power and electricity,123 one which gives equal pay to all workers and can be run by simple bookkeepers,124 one in which gold will be used for public lavatories.125 Marx and Lenin could produce slogans but no blueprints. They could tear down; they could not build up.

The Lenin Factor

My view regarding the importance of Karl Marx’s thought in intellectual history is tied closely to my view of the political importance of Lenin. Had Lenin not successfully pulled off the October Revolution in 1917, the name Karl Marx would be known only to specialists in the history of sociology,126 to a handful of specialists in late-nineteenth-century trade union history and Russian intellectual history, and to an even smaller group of specialists in the history of mid-nineteenth-century materialist Hegelian philosophy. Wilhelm Windelband, for example, devoted only two brief bibliographical entries and part of one paragraph to Marx and Engels in his 1901 History of Philosophy.127 The fact is, Marx had very little influence prior to 1917, especially in the United States.128 Had it not been for Lenin, references to Marx would be limited to a series of obscure footnotes, rather than a library of books.

But Lenin and his colleagues did pull off the Russian Revolution, much to the surprise of Europe. I am reminded of the comment by Herr Schober, the petty police official who later became Chancellor of Austria. Ludwig von Mises records this about him: “Toward the end of 1915 he reported to his superiors that he doubted the possibility of a Russian revolution. ‘Who, then, could make this revolution? Surely not this Mr. Trotsky, who used to read newspapers in Café Central.’”129

Modern intellectuals, always respectful of those who win major wars and also respectful of any radical group that conducts a bloody revolution against traditional, religion-supported authority, have resurrected Marx’s intellectual reputation posthumously. In short, had it not been for Lenin, you would never had heard about Marx. The library shelves devoted to Marxism would be devoted to some other topic. (If the Germans had won World War II, rest assured that many of these shelves would today be filled with books praising the creative humanist vision and the rational economic planning of the Nazis. The fascination that Nazism had for Western scholars and politicians during the 1930s, including John Maynard Keynes,130 not to mention U.S. businessmen who traded extensively with the Nazi State,131 is a story not found in today’s textbooks. Why not? Because Hitler lost.)

Conclusion

How can we hope to summarize the life and thought of a man whose words posthumously transformed the world? How can we hope to understand what motivated him? Historian Donald Treadgold has raised the question, has admitted that there is no simple answer, but then pointed to a forgotten primary source document that he believes throws light on Marx’s view of his life.132 In 1865, two years before the publication of Das Kapital, Marx entered these words into the guest book of some relatives:

Your idea of happiness: “to fight”
Your idea of misery: “to submit”
Your chief characteristic: “singleness of purpose”

Does this tell us what Marx was? Only insofar as it reveals life-long self-deception. Did he fight? He did indeed fight all his life, rarely against specific leading intellectual defenders of capitalism, but instead against unknown (then and now) and undistinguished German intellectual enemies, socialists and atheists all. Proudhon was one of his few competent victims.

Did he submit? He submitted all his life to Engels’s benevolent charity. Economically, he was Engels’s “kept man,” who fathered an illegitimate son by his wife’s kept woman, their lifetime family housekeeper Helene Demuth, and who then refused to acknowledge his fatherhood or even allow the mother to keep the baby in his home, for fear of the scandal within the then-publicly prim socialist community, and also for fear of his wife’s jealousy.133 He forced the mother to give the baby to poverty-stricken foster parents.134 (Staunch Prometheus!) From 1883, at Marx’s death, until her own death in 1890, Helene Demuth became Engels’s housekeeper, and it was widely assumed that Engels had been the father of her son.135

Did he retain his singleness of purpose? After age 49, he never again wrote a book, but instead buried himself in a self-imposed program of frantic undirected and voluminous reading—a return to the pattern of his youth, when he read day and night (in between all-night sessions at the local pub),136 but could never bring himself to face the rigors (the “final judgment”) of a doctoral examination at the University of Berlin. In short, in his arrogance he was utterly self-deceived. He also succeeded in deceiving the vast majority of his bourgeois academic commentators. They have taken his verbal strutting at face value.

His chosen public mask was the image of Prometheus, the fire-bringer. He hated the “authoritarian” religion of Christianity. He was self-consciously in revolt against the god of bourgeois civilization, all in the name of proletarian man and the eschatology of the imminent and immanent Communist millennial paradise. Like Prometheus, he brought fire to the society of man—or as Billington has put it, Marx and his revolutionary colleagues brought fire to the minds of men.137 That fire still rages.

Marx is important for the religion he preached, not the footnotes he assembled. He is important because he provided what appeared to be scientific proof for demonic revolution. By capturing the minds of several generations of bloody revolutionaries and ideological gangsters, Marx and Engels changed the history of the world. It was Marx’s vision of an eschatological apocalypse, not his turgid scholarship, that won the day. He provided generations of intellectuals with what they have sought above all: attachment to political victors, either vicariously or directly in their service. It has also been emotionally convenient for them that Marx was a member of their own social class rather than a proletarian. Karl Marx, like Lenin, served as an inspired prophet, not of proletarian victory, which never took place, but of bourgeois victory cleverly masquerading as a proletarian victory. He served as a sort of nineteenth-century intellectual rag peddler, selling proletarian designer jeans for the costume parties of the alienated middle class. To add authenticity before they are shipped to fashion-conscious buyers, Marx-Engels designer jeans are bleached. So are the bones of a hundred million of their victims.

Father Knew Best

In the last analysis, it was Marx’s father who best described his son’s life, yet he did so in 1837, when his son was only 19 years old. He did not live to see his prophetic speculations come true; he died in 1838. The opening paragraph of the letter should be reprinted in every biography of Karl Marx; I have never seen it reprinted in any.

It is remarkable that I, who am by nature a lazy writer, become quite inexhaustible when I have to write to you. I will not and cannot conceal my weakness for you. At times my heart delights in thinking of you and your future. And yet at times I cannot rid myself of ideas which arouse in me sad forebodings and fear when I am struck as if by lightning by the thought: is your heart in accord with your head, your talents? Has it room for the earthly but gentler sentiments which in this vale of sorrow are so essentially consoling for a man of feeling? And since that heart is obviously animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever—and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart—will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness? Will—and this doubt has no less tortured me recently since I have come to love a certain person like my own child [Jenny von Westphalen]—will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you?138

Eleven years later, Karl published The Manifesto of the Community Party. Thirty years later, he published Das Kapital. By then it was clear that his demon was not heavenly. His father had suspected as much. Karl Marx’s true personal model—as distinguished from his ideological model—was not Prometheus, the fire-bringer, but Faust, the maker of the incomparably bad bargain.

 

_________________

139Louis J. Halle, “Marx’s Religious Drama,” Encounter 25 (October, 1965): 29.

140Marx, “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession” (August 1835) in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 1, p. 8.

141This poem was made available in English in Robert Payne’s 1971 collection, The Unknown Karl Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1971), p. 63.

142“Oulanem” appears in volume 1 of Collected Works, pp. 588–607. Contrast this with his 1835 schoolboy essay, “The Union of Believers with Christ,” pp. 636–39.

143Payne, The Unknown Karl Marx, p. 59. It is this poem and the seemingly overnight loss of Marx’s faith that led Pastor Richard Wurmbrand, a victim of much torture in Communist prisons, to conclude that Marx made some sort of pact with the devil: Marx and Satan (Westchester, Ill.: Crossway, 1985), chap. 2. Wurmbrand cites Albert Camus, The Rebel, who claimed that some 30 volumes of Marx materials are as yet unpublished by Moscow. Wurmbrand wrote to the Marx Institute, and received a reply from M. Mtchedlov, who insisted that Camus was lying, and then went on to explain that over 85 volumes are still unpublished, due to the effects of World War II. He wrote this in 1980, 35 years after the War ended. Wurmbrand speculates that there may be evidence of Marx’s satanism in these unpublished volumes. Marx and Satan, pp. 31–32.

144Gary North, Marx’s Religion of Revolution (Nutley, N.J.: Craig Press, 1968). Reprinted in 1988 with additional material by the Institute for Christian Economics in Tyler, Texas.

145Cf. Max Weber, “National Character and the Junkers” (1917), in H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), chap. 15.

146Cited in Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, Edward Fitzgerald, trans. (1933; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 9.

147This, however, is generally the case when very bright young men enter college. Textbooks bore them. Classroom lectures bore them. European lectures are notoriously boring, and nineteenth-century German university lectures may have established the modern international world record in the production of student boredom. Oxford’s lectures were boring, Adam Smith insisted. But at least they were not in German.

148Herschel Marx to Karl Marx, 9 December 1837; Marx and Engels, Collected Works 1, p. 688.

149Ibid. 1, p. 690.

150Idem.

151The courses are listed in ibid., 1, pp. 703–4.

152For a mercifully brief summary of Marx’s insufferably dull dissertation, see Henry F. Mins, “Marx’s Doctoral Dissertation,” Science and Society 12 (1948): 157–69.

153Collected Works, 1, p. 31 n.

154Marx, “Communism and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung” (16 October 1842); ibid., 1, p. 219.

155Ibid., 1, p. 220.

156The two other papers were Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher (1844) and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848).

157Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 74.

158On Marx’s early journalism, See Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 32–87.

159I had not come to this conclusion in 1968, when my book on Marx first appeared, although I fully recognized that Engels had been the more effective literary stylist.

160There is no evidence in his published and unpublished manuscripts prior to The German Ideology (1845) that Marx had devised any such conception of history. Engels was the co-author of The German Ideology. See Oscar J. Hammen, The Red ‘48ers: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), pp. 116–17.

161Joseph A. Schumpeter, “The Communist Manifesto in Sociology and Economics,” Journal of Political Economy 57 (1949): 200.

162The most notable examples were the articles Engels wrote on the revolution of 1848 in Germany for the New York Daily Tribune (1851–52) which were later assembled into a book, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, or Germany in 1848.I own a version published by Charles H. Kerr & Company, no publication date, with Marx’s name on it. Presumably, it was published around the turn of the century.

The Kerr edition of volume 1 of Capital was published in 1906. The book contains an 1896 “Note by the Editor,” Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx-Aveling, who says that Marx was paid one British pound per article (p. 9). She did not admit what she must have known, that Engels had written them. In volume 11 of the Collected Works, the essays are reproduced under Engels’s name. The editors discretely fail to mention that for at least half a century, Marx had been given credit for having written them.

In 1848, Charles A. Dana (1819–97), visited Europe for the Tribune to meet with various revolutionaries, where he met Karl Marx. Dana later became the Tribune’s managing editor. He was later to serve as Assistant Secretary of War in Lincoln’s administration when Horace Greeley fired him from the newspaper in 1861: William Harlan Hale, Horace Greeley: Voice of the People (1950; New York: Collier, 1961), p. 261. Dana in 1840 had been a founder and financier of Brook Farm, an early writers’ colony farm (Ibid., p. 110). He and Greeley were followers of Charles Fourier, and were also members of a secret society known as the Columbians (founded in New York City in 1795): David Tame, “Secret Societies in the Life of Karl Marx,” Critique 25 (1987): 95. They built the Tribune into a highly successful newspaper. The paper ceased publishing Marx’s essays in 1861. The association had lasted a decade.

163Alvin Gouldner, The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), chap. 9. He believes that there are two Marxisms, critical Marxism and scientific Marxism.

164Edgar Longuet, Marx’s grandson through his daughter Jenny, remarked in 1949: “There is no doubt that without Engels Marx and his family would have starved.” Edgar Longuet, “Some Aspects of Karl Marx’s Family Life,” in Marx and Engels Through the Eyes of Their Contemporaries (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), p. 172.

165An extract from the less readable Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science (1878).

166Nethaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979). Cf. Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Fritz J. Raddatz, who is typical of modern Marx scholars in this regard, explains away the essay’s clear language: The context, however, shows that Marx was using the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaism’ in a ‘quasi-non-Jewish’ sense.” Raddatz, Karl Marx: A Political Biography, Richard Barry, trans. (1975; Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 41. Anti-Semitic language is not normally tolerated by intellectuals in the West, but Marx was a Jew and even more important, he was a Communist, so his anti-Semitism is treated as if it were something else.

167A modern expositor of Marxism who is similarly afflicted is George Lichtheim, whose ponderous Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (1961) is matched by his Origins of Socialism (1969), which has been highly recommended by Steven Marcus, “in spite of the fact that he buries about half of what he has to say in footnotes of unendurable length. . . .” Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 88 n.

168Engels to Mehring, 14 July 1893, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846–1895, Dona Torr, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p. 510.

169Engels to Marx, 15 January 1847; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 38, p. 108.

170Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (1950; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), chap. 6.

171Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1985), pp. 10–11.

172Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, chap. 3.

173Avineri, Moses Hess, p. 13.

174Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, p. 87.

175Cited by David McLellan, Friedrich Engels (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 21. This statement was made the following summer (19 June 1843), cited in Hammen, Red ‘48ers, p. 39.

176Terrell Carver, Engels (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 20.

177Sidney Hook, Revolution, Reform, and Social Justice: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Marxism (1975; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 58.

178Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 186.

179Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 112.

180Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 186. For details of Engels’s attack on Hess at the October 23, 1847 meeting of the executive committee of Paris Communist League’s District Authority, see Hammen, Red ‘48ers, pp. 163–64.

181Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 35.

182Hess had written: “Here is a phenomenon who has made an enormous impression on me although I work in the same field. In short prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only genuine philosopher now living who will soon have the eyes of all Germany upon him wherever he may appear in public, whether in print or on the rostrum. Dr. Marx, as my idol is called, is still quite a young man (aged about 24 at most) and it is he who will give medieval religion and politics their coup de grace; he combines a biting wit with deeply serious philosophical thinking. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel combined into one person—and I say combined, not blended—and there you have Dr. Marx.” Cited by Raddatz, Karl Marx, pp. 25–26; also cited by Robert Payne, Marx (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 82; and by Avineri, Moses Hess, pp. 14–15.

183Hammen, Red ’48ers, p. 39.

184Avineri, Moses Hess, pp. 243–44.

185Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Marx’s daughter, described the situation: “For twenty years Engels was doomed to the forced labor of business life. . . . But I was with Engels when he reached the end of this forced labor and I saw what he must have gone through all those years. I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed: For the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to the office for the last time. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy. I was then too young to understand all that and when I think of it now the tears come to my eyes.” Marx and Engels Through the Eyes of Their Contemporaries, p. 163. How touching!

Eleanor committed suicide in 1898. (Her sister Laura died the same way in 1911.) It is notable that Eleanor’s estate was valued at £1,909, which was a small fortune in 1898. She had inherited Marx’s estate, mainly his books’ royalties. Her bankrupt communist husband then inherited everything. Payne, Marx, p. 530. Not a bad windfall for a bigamist who had secretly and illegally married the year before to another woman, a 22-year-old actress, to whom he immediately returned (Ibid., pp. 525, 530–31).

The Revolution consumes its own. But not soon enough.

186Payne, Marx, p. 92.

187Hal Draper, The Marx-Engels Chronicle: A Day-by-Day Chronology of Marx & Engels’ Life & Activity (New York: Schocken, 1985), p. 29. This is an exhaustive and indispensable volume.

188According to an estimate—perhaps exaggerated—by Wilhelm Wolff in 1844. Less than one taler a day was a net working wage for a weaver in Silesia in 1844. See the extract from his 1844 essay in Frank Eyck, ed., The Revolutions of 1848–49 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), p. 22. Wolff complained that retired high army officers received pensions of 1,000 talers a year. Wolff was Marx’s benefactor who left him a small fortune in 1864: See below.

189Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 46.

190Ibid.,p. 283, 20 n.

191Ibid., p. 61.

192For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone paying this much for proof copies of a journal that survived only one issue.

193Ibid., p. 58.

194Cited in ibid., p. 47.

195Ibid., p. 61.

196Draper, Chronicle, p. 16.

197Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 61. I may be double counting here: Raddatz and Draper do not mention each other’s data on Marx’s book income. Maybe they are referring to the same payment.

198“Contract,” February 1,1845, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 4, p. 675.

199Draper, Chronicle, p. 28.

200Marx to Engels, 15 May 1847, Collected Works, 38, p. 116.

201Hammen, Red ’48ers, p. 190.

202Payne, Marx, p. 176.

203Donald Cope McKay, The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. xv.

204Ibid., p. xvi.

205Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1988 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1988), p. 406.

206Ibid., table 695.

207Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, in Letters To Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 24. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 41, p. 436.

208Samples can be found in Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 283, and Payne, Marx, pp. 35, 153, 405.

209Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 342–43. This took place in 1865, the year following Marx’s massive inheritance.

210Lion Philips, Marx’s uncle by marriage, became the founder of one of Europe’s most powerful companies, the Philips Electrical Company, of which the North American Philips Company (Norelco) is a subsidiary. See Payne, Marx, p. 330.

211Ibid., p. 330.

212Ibid., pp. 339–40. The Nicolaievsky biography reports that Engels actually paid Marx £350 in 1863, although I am inclined to doubt this figure. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), p. 253.

213Ibid., p. 346.

214Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, p. 253.

215Payne, Marx, p. 354.

216Berlin, Karl Marx, pp. 247–48.

217Payne, Marx, p. 354.

218A. L. Bowley, Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 46.

219Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 341.

220Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866 in Letters to Kugelmann, p. 42.

221Idem.

222Payne, Marx, p. 354. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 41, p. 546.

223Ibid., p. 377.

224Ibid.,p. 355.

225The Portable Curmudgeon, Jon Winokur, ed. (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 232.

226Quoted by Otto Rühle, Karl Marx: His Life and Work (New York: New Home Library, 1942), p. 360.

227Marx to Kugelmann, 17 March 1868, in Letters to Kugelmann, p. 65.

228Baxter’s figures appear in Economic History Review 21 (April 1968): 21.

229Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, p. 254.

230At his death, Marx’s estate was valued at about £250, consisting primarily of his books and furniture. Payne, Marx, p. 500. Payne’s comment is only too accurate: “In spite of Engels’ generosity he was continually in debt. Although he spent most of his waking hours thinking about money, he had very little understanding of the risk attached to borrowing. He would sign bills of exchange at high interest and wonder how he had brought himself to such a pass when the bills fell due. He was improvident and oddly childlike in financial matters. He had no gift for making money and none for spending it” (p. 342).

231Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 28.

232Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, p. 11

233Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1, pp. 192–240.

234Ibid., 1, pp. 304–11.

235It took place when Engel’s mistress Mary Burns died in January of 1863. Engels wrote to Marx, telling of his loss on January 7. The next day—the letter went from Manchester to London in one day!—Marx wrote two sentences of condolences and then begged for more money in two long paragraphs. On January 13, Engels replied, indicating that he was displeased with Marx’s “frosty reaction.” On January 24, Marx sent a letter apologizing for his behavior. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence, 1844–1877, Fritz J. Raddatz, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 104–6.

236”Record of Marx’s Speech on Mazzini’s Attitude to the International Working Men’s Association” (1866), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 20, p. 401.

237Cited by Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 66.

238Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 249–340.

239Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, Sam Dolgoff, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 283–84.

240Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 203–4.

241Vladimir I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902; New York: International Publishers, 1943), pp. 32–33.

242Jean Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984).

243“Preface,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 5, pp. xv, xxv.

244Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 328 n.

245Marx to Engels, 2 April 1858 in Marx and Engels, Correspondence, 1846–1895, p. 105.

246Engels to Marx, 3 April 1851, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 38, p. 330.

247Engels to Friederich Adolph Sorge, 29 June 1883.

248Marx to Nicolai F. Danielson, 10 April 1879. All cited in Raddatz, Karl Marx, pp. 236–37.

249Idem.

250Idem.

251Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 25.

252Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 43.

253Cited by Raddatz, ibid., p. 43.

254The German Newspaper Reichshruf (January 9,1960) reported that Chancellor Raabe of Austria gave Nikita Khrushchev an original letter from Marx that had been found accidentally in the Austrian archives. The letter gave details on this unique financial arrangement. Premier Khrushchev was not amused. Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, p. 33.

255Otto Rühle, Karl Marx, pp. 38–83; cf. 101, 238.

256Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 308.

257For a list of these vitriolic references, see Leopold Schwartzschild, Karl Marx: The Red Prussian (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), p. 251.

258Jewish conservatives are especially fond of pointing out these apparently anti-Semetic statements. Cf. Max Geltman, “A Little Known Chapter in American History,” National Review (October 5, 1965), pp. 865–67.

259Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 278 n. Hook’s defense is of a mild sort; he challenged L. Rudas for defending Marx’s practice in using the word “Jew.” But what is Hook’s rationale for saying that Marx was free of anti-Semitic prejudice?

260Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 3, p. 19.

261“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” V. I. Lenin, “Communism and Electrification,” (1920), in The Lenin Anthology, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 494.

262“Accounting and control—these are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of the first phase of Communist society. All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of one national state ‘syndicate.’ All that is required is that they should work equally, should regularly do their share of work, and should receive equal pay. The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.” Lenin, State and Revolution (1918; New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 83–84.

263“When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.” Lenin, “The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism” (1921), in The Lenin Anthology, p. 515.

264Bottomore and Rubel, “The Influence of Marx’s Sociological Thought,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, eds. (1956; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).

265Wilhelm Windelband, History of Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 2, pp. 632, 655.

266Solomon Bloom writes: “Specifically, it was the Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, that brought the United States rather suddenly face to face with Marxism. . . .” Bloom, “Man of His Century: A Reconsideration of the Historical Significance of Karl Marx,” Journal of Political Economy 51 (December, 1943); reprinted in Shepard B. Clough, Peter Gay, and Charles K Warner eds., The European Past (New York: Macmillan, 1964), vol. 2, p. 143.

267Ludwig von Mises, Notes and Recollections (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1978), p. 5. (Libertarian Press is now located in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania.)

268Keynes wrote these words in the Foreword to the 1936 German-language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.” Translated with the German original by James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints (Boulder, Colo.: Ralph Myles Press, 1971), pp. 203, 205. The citation also appears in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), p. xxvi.

269Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933–1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983); Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Suffolk, England: Bloomfield, 1976), originally published by ’76 Press, Seal Beach, California. On George Bush’s father’s work for the Harrimans in this regard, see Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), chap. 2.

270Donald W. Treadgold, Introduction to Sergei Bulgakov, Karl Marx as A Relgious Type: His Relation to the Religion of Anthropotheism of L. Feuerbach (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland [1907] 1979), p. 14.

271Payne, Marx, pp. 265–66, 532–38.

272Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 134.

273Ibid., p. 135.

274He continued his “pub crawls” with friends and even enemies during his years in London. After one of these, at 2 a.m., Marx and his friends started smashing street lamps with stones, outrunning the local police: Payne, Marx, p. 282.

275James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980).

276Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 2 March 1837, in Collected Works, 1, p. 670.

• 1For more on the comprehensive system see Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Mikhail Agursky, et al., From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1974); Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Leftism: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Marcuse (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House: 1974; 2nd edition, Regnery, 1990); Paul Hollander, The Many Faces of Socialism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1983); David Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of His Theories (New York: Viking Penguin, 1987).
• 2Paul Craig Roberts, in the Wall Street Journal, June 28,1989.
• 3See Martin Malia, “From Under the Rubble, What?”, in Problems of Communism, January-April 1992; Peter Rutland, The Myth of the Plan (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1985).
• 4A striking example of Western infatuation with Soviet socialism is Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936).
• 5Gary Becker, “The President’s Address,” The Mont Pelerin Society Newsletter, vol. 46, no. 1, February 1993.
• 6Austrian contributions to this debate include: Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1949; Philadelphia, Penn.: Orion Editions, 1984); Peter J. Boettke, “The Austrian Critique and the Demise of Socialism: The Soviet Case,” in Richard M. Ebeling, ed. Austrian Economics: Perspectives on the Past and Prospects for the Future (Hillsdale, Mich.: Hillsdale College Press, 1991); F. A. Hayek, New Studies in Philosophy, Politics, Economics, and the History of Ideas (University of Chicago Press, 1978); Trygve J. B. Hoff, Economic Calculation in a Socialist Society (Indianapolis, Ind.: LibertyPress, 1981); Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “De-Socialization in a United Germany,” Review of Austrian Economics 5, no. 2 (1991): 77–106 and A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism (Boston, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1989); Israel M. Kirzner, “The Economic Calculation Debate: Lessons for Austrians,” Review of Austrian Economics 2 (1988): 1–18; Don Lavoie, Rivalry and Central Planning: The Socialist Calculation Debate Reconsidered (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Murray N. Rothbard, “The End of Socialism and the Calculation Debate Revisited,” Review of Austrian Economics 5, no.2 (1991): 51–70), “Lange, Mises and Praxeology: The Retreat from Marxism,” Toward Liberty, vol. 2 (Menlo Park, Calif.: Institute for Humane Studies, 1971), pp. 307–21, and “Ludwig von Mises and Economic Calculation Under Socialism,” The Economics of Ludwig von Mises (Kansas City: Sheed and Ward, 1976), pp. 67–78; Ludwig von Mises, “Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism,” Two Essays by Ludwig von Mises (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1991), Socialism (Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Press/Liberty Classics, 1981), “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” F. A. Hayek, ed., Collective Economic Planning (Clifton, N.J.: Kelley Publishing Company, 1975), pp. 87–130, and (Auburn, Ala.: The Ludwig von Mises Institute), and “One Hundred Years of Marxian Socialism,” Money, Method, and the Market Process, Richard M. Ebeling, ed. (Boston, Mass.: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990), pp. 215–32.
• 7On the failure of the Soviet model, see: Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Macmillan, 1989); Sven Rydenfelt, A Pattern for Failure: Socialist Economies in Crisis (San Diego: Harcourt, Brace, Jonvanovich, 1984); Nick Eberstadt, The Poverty of Communism (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1988).
• 8Martin Malia, “From Under the Rubble, What?”, in Problems of Communism, January-April 1992, p. 96.
• 9Stolitsa No. 37, 1992, p. 4.
• 10Peter J. Boettke, The Political Economy of Soviet Socialism: The Formative Years 1918–1928 (Boston: Kluwer, 1990).
• 11One historical account of such activity is Joseph Finder, Red Carpet (New York: Holt, Rinehart, Winston, 1983).
• 12For a refutation of neo-Marxist attempts to save the system from itself, see David Gordon, Resurrecting Marx: The Analytical Marxists on Freedom, Exploitation, and Justice (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1990).
• 13All socialist propaganda to the contrary notwithstanding, the falsehood of the Marxist description of capitalists and laborers as antagonistic classes also comes to bear in certain empirical observations: Logically speaking, people can be grouped into classes in infinitely different ways. According to orthodox positivist methodology (which I consider false but am willing to accept here for the sake of argument), that classification system is better which helps us predict better. Yet the classification of people as capitalists or laborers (or as representatives of varying degrees of capitalist- or laborer-ness) is practically useless in predicting what stand a person will take on fundamental political, social and economic issues. Contrary to this, the correct classification of people as tax producers and the regulated vs. tax consumers and the regulators (or as representatives of varying degrees of tax producer- or consumer-ness) is indeed also a powerful predictor. Sociologists have largely overlooked this because of almost universally shared Marxist preconceptions. But everyday experience overwhelmingly corroborates my thesis: Find out whether or not somebody is a public employee (and his rank and salary), and whether or not and to what extent the income and wealth of a person outside of the public sector is determined by public sector purchases and/or regulatory actions—people will systematically differ in their response to fundamental political issues depending on whether they are classified as direct or indirect tax consumers, or as tax producers!
• 14Oppenheimer, System der Soziologie, vol. 2, pp. 322–23, presents the matter thus: “The basic norm of the state is power. That is, seen from the side of its origin: violence transformed into might. Violence is one of the most powerful forces shaping society, but is not itself a form of social interaction. It must become law in the positive sense of this term, that is, sociologically speaking, it must permit the development of a system of ‘subjective reciprocity’: and this is only possible through a system of self-imposed restrictions on the use of violence and the assumption of certain obligations in exchange for its arrogated rights. In this way violence is turned into might, and a relationship of domination emerges which is accepted not only by the rulers, but under not too severely oppressive circumstances by their subjects as well, as expressing a ‘just reciprocity’ Out of this basic norm secondary and tertiary norms now emerge as implied in it: norms of private law, of inheritance, criminal, obligational and constitutional law, which all bear the mark of the basic norm of power and domination, and which are all designed to influence the structure of the state in such a way as to increase economic exploitation to the maximum level which is compatible with the continuation of legally regulated domination.” The insight is fundamental that “law grows out of two essentially different roots . . .: on the one hand, out of the law of the association of equals, which can be called a ‘natural’ right, even if it is no ‘natural right,’ and on the other hand, out of the law of violence transformed into regulated might, the law of unequals.”
• 15See James M. Buchanan and Gordon Tullock, The Calculus of Consent (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965), p. 19.
• 16See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Eigentum, Anarchie und Staat (Opladen: West-deutscher Verlag, 1987); idem, Theory of Socialism and Capitalism.
• 17See Hans-Hermann Hoppe, “Banking, Nation States and International Politics,” Review of Austrian Economics 4 (1989); Rothbard, The Mystery of Banking, chaps. 15–16.
• 18See on this in particular Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State, chap. 10, esp. the section “The Problem of One Big Cartel”; also Mises, Socialism, chaps. 22–26.
• 19See on this Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of Conservatism (Chicago: Free Press, 1967); James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the Liberal State (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); Ronald Radosh and Murray N. Rothbard, eds., A New History of Leviathan (New York: Dutton, 1972); Leonard P. Liggio and James J. Martin, eds., Watershed of Empire (Colorado Springs, Colo.: Ralph Myles, 1976).
• 20On the relationship between state and war see Ekkehart Krippendorff, Staat und Krieg (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985); Charles Tilly, “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans, et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); also Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
• 21On a further elaborated version of this theory of military and monetary imperialism see H. H. Hoppe, “Banking, Nation States and International Politics.”
• 22See on this in particular Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History (Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1985), esp. part 2.
• 23It may be noted here that Marx and Engels, foremost in their Communist Manifesto, championed the historically progressive character of capitalism and were full of praise for its unprecedented accomplishments. Indeed, reviewing the relevant passages of the Manifesto concludes Joseph A. Schumpeter, “Never, I repeat, and in particular by no modern defender of the bourgeois civilization has anything like this been penned, never has a brief been composed on behalf of the business class from so profound and so wide a comprehension of what its achievement is and what it means to humanity.” “The Communist Manifesto in Sociology and Economics,” in Richard Clemence, Essays of J. A. Schumpeter (Port Washington, N. Y.: Kennikat Press, 1951), p. 293. Given this view of capitalism, Marx went so far as to defend the British conquest of India, for example, as a historically progressive development. See Marx’s contributions to the New York Daily Tribune (June 25, 1853; July 11, 1853; August 8, 1853 in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke vol. 9 (East Berlin: Dietz, 1960). As a contemporary Marxist taking a similar stand on imperialism see Bill Warren, Imperialism: Pioneer of Capitalism (London: New Left Books, 1981).
• 24See on the theory of revolution in particular Charles Tilly, From Mobilization to Revolution (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1978); idem, As Sociology Meets History (New York: Academic Press, 1981).
• 25For a neo-Marxist assessment of the present era of “late capitalism” as characterized by “a new ideological disorientation” born out of permanent economic stagnation and the exhaustion of the legitimatory powers of conservatism and social-democratism (i.e., “liberalism” in American terminology) see Jürgen Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1985); also idem, Legitimation Crisis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1975); Claus Offe, Strukturprobleme des kapitalistischen Staates (Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1972).
• 26For an Austrian-libertarian assessment of the crisis-character of late capitalism and on the prospects for the rise of a revolutionary libertarian class consciousness see Murray Rothbard, “Left and Right”; idem, For a New Liberty, chap. 15; idem. Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1982), part 5.
• 27On the internal inconsistencies of the Marxist theory of the state see also Hans Kelsen, Sozialismus und Staat (Vienna: Verlag der Wiener Volksbuchhandlung, 1965).
• 28Nethaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1979). Cf. Julius Carlebach, Karl Marx and the Radical Critique of Judaism (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978). Fritz J. Raddatz, who is typical of modern Marx scholars in this regard, explains away the essay’s clear language: The context, however, shows that Marx was using the words ‘Jew’ and ‘Judaism’ in a ‘quasi-non-Jewish’ sense.” Raddatz, Karl Marx: A Political Biography, Richard Barry, trans. (1975; Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), p. 41. Anti-Semitic language is not normally tolerated by intellectuals in the West, but Marx was a Jew and even more important, he was a Communist, so his anti-Semitism is treated as if it were something else.
• 29A modern expositor of Marxism who is similarly afflicted is George Lichtheim, whose ponderous Marxism: An Historical and Critical Study (1961) is matched by his Origins of Socialism (1969), which has been highly recommended by Steven Marcus, “in spite of the fact that he buries about half of what he has to say in footnotes of unendurable length. . . .” Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 88 n.
• 30Engels to Mehring, 14 July 1893, in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846–1895, Dona Torr, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p. 510.
• 31Engels to Marx, 15 January 1847; Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 38, p. 108.
• 32Sidney Hook, From Hegel to Marx: Studies in the Intellectual Development of Karl Marx (1950; Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), chap. 6.
• 33Shlomo Avineri, Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (New York: New York University Press, 1985), pp. 10–11.
• 34Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, chap. 3.
• 35Avineri, Moses Hess, p. 13.
• 36Marcus, Engels, Manchester, and the Working Class, p. 87.
• 37Cited by David McLellan, Friedrich Engels (New York: Viking, 1977), p. 21. This statement was made the following summer (19 June 1843), cited in Hammen, Red ‘48ers, p. 39.
• 38Terrell Carver, Engels (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), p. 20.
• 39Sidney Hook, Revolution, Reform, and Social Justice: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Marxism (1975; Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1976), p. 58.
• 40Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 186.
• 41Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 112.
• 42Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 186. For details of Engels’s attack on Hess at the October 23, 1847 meeting of the executive committee of Paris Communist League’s District Authority, see Hammen, Red ‘48ers, pp. 163–64.
• 43Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 35.
• 44Hess had written: “Here is a phenomenon who has made an enormous impression on me although I work in the same field. In short prepare to meet the greatest, perhaps the only genuine philosopher now living who will soon have the eyes of all Germany upon him wherever he may appear in public, whether in print or on the rostrum. Dr. Marx, as my idol is called, is still quite a young man (aged about 24 at most) and it is he who will give medieval religion and politics their coup de grace; he combines a biting wit with deeply serious philosophical thinking. Imagine Rousseau, Voltaire, Holbach, Lessing, Heine and Hegel combined into one person—and I say combined, not blended—and there you have Dr. Marx.” Cited by Raddatz, Karl Marx, pp. 25–26; also cited by Robert Payne, Marx (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968), p. 82; and by Avineri, Moses Hess, pp. 14–15.
• 45Hammen, Red ’48ers, p. 39.
• 46Avineri, Moses Hess, pp. 243–44.
• 47Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Marx’s daughter, described the situation: “For twenty years Engels was doomed to the forced labor of business life. . . . But I was with Engels when he reached the end of this forced labor and I saw what he must have gone through all those years. I shall never forget the triumph with which he exclaimed: For the last time!’ as he put on his boots in the morning to go to the office for the last time. A few hours later we were standing at the gate waiting for him. We saw him coming over the little field opposite the house where he lived. He was swinging his stick in the air and singing, his face beaming. Then we set the table for a celebration and drank champagne and were happy. I was then too young to understand all that and when I think of it now the tears come to my eyes.” Marx and Engels Through the Eyes of Their Contemporaries, p. 163. How touching!
• 48Payne, Marx, p. 92.
• 49Hal Draper, The Marx-Engels Chronicle: A Day-by-Day Chronology of Marx & Engels’ Life & Activity (New York: Schocken, 1985), p. 29. This is an exhaustive and indispensable volume.
• 50According to an estimate—perhaps exaggerated—by Wilhelm Wolff in 1844. Less than one taler a day was a net working wage for a weaver in Silesia in 1844. See the extract from his 1844 essay in Frank Eyck, ed., The Revolutions of 1848–49 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1972), p. 22. Wolff complained that retired high army officers received pensions of 1,000 talers a year. Wolff was Marx’s benefactor who left him a small fortune in 1864: See below.
• 51Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 46.
• 52Ibid.,p. 283, 20 n.
• 53Ibid., p. 61.
• 54For the life of me, I cannot imagine anyone paying this much for proof copies of a journal that survived only one issue.
• 55Ibid., p. 58.
• 56Cited in ibid., p. 47.
• 57Ibid., p. 61.
• 58Draper, Chronicle, p. 16.
• 59Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 61. I may be double counting here: Raddatz and Draper do not mention each other’s data on Marx’s book income. Maybe they are referring to the same payment.
• 60“Contract,” February 1,1845, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 4, p. 675.
• 61Draper, Chronicle, p. 28.
• 62Marx to Engels, 15 May 1847, Collected Works, 38, p. 116.
• 63Hammen, Red ’48ers, p. 190.
• 64Payne, Marx, p. 176.
• 65Donald Cope McKay, The National Workshops: A Study in the French Revolution of 1848 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1933), p. xv.
• 66Ibid., p. xvi.
• 67Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1988 (Washington, D.C.: Department of Commerce, 1988), p. 406.
• 68Ibid., table 695.
• 69Marx to Kugelmann, 28 December 1862, in Letters To Kugelmann (New York: International Publishers, 1934), p. 24. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 41, p. 436.
• 70Samples can be found in Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 283, and Payne, Marx, pp. 35, 153, 405.
• 71Mehring, Karl Marx, pp. 342–43. This took place in 1865, the year following Marx’s massive inheritance.
• 72Lion Philips, Marx’s uncle by marriage, became the founder of one of Europe’s most powerful companies, the Philips Electrical Company, of which the North American Philips Company (Norelco) is a subsidiary. See Payne, Marx, p. 330.
• 73Ibid., p. 330.
• 74Ibid., pp. 339–40. The Nicolaievsky biography reports that Engels actually paid Marx £350 in 1863, although I am inclined to doubt this figure. Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx: Man and Fighter (London: Methuen, 1936), p. 253.
• 75Ibid., p. 346.
• 76Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, p. 253.
• 77Payne, Marx, p. 354.
• 78Berlin, Karl Marx, pp. 247–48.
• 79Payne, Marx, p. 354.
• 80A. L. Bowley, Wages and Income in the United Kingdom Since 1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1937), p. 46.
• 81Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 341.
• 82Marx to Kugelmann, 13 October 1866 in Letters to Kugelmann, p. 42.
• 83Idem.
• 84Payne, Marx, p. 354. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 41, p. 546.
• 85Ibid., p. 377.
• 86Ibid.,p. 355.
• 87The Portable Curmudgeon, Jon Winokur, ed. (New York: New American Library, 1987), p. 232.
• 88Quoted by Otto Rühle, Karl Marx: His Life and Work (New York: New Home Library, 1942), p. 360.
• 89Marx to Kugelmann, 17 March 1868, in Letters to Kugelmann, p. 65.
• 90Baxter’s figures appear in Economic History Review 21 (April 1968): 21.
• 91Nicolaievsky and Maenchen-Helfen, Karl Marx, p. 254.
• 92At his death, Marx’s estate was valued at about £250, consisting primarily of his books and furniture. Payne, Marx, p. 500. Payne’s comment is only too accurate: “In spite of Engels’ generosity he was continually in debt. Although he spent most of his waking hours thinking about money, he had very little understanding of the risk attached to borrowing. He would sign bills of exchange at high interest and wonder how he had brought himself to such a pass when the bills fell due. He was improvident and oddly childlike in financial matters. He had no gift for making money and none for spending it” (p. 342).
• 93Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 28.
• 94Gouldner, The Two Marxisms, p. 11
• 95Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 1, pp. 192–240.
• 96Ibid., 1, pp. 304–11.
• 97It took place when Engel’s mistress Mary Burns died in January of 1863. Engels wrote to Marx, telling of his loss on January 7. The next day—the letter went from Manchester to London in one day!—Marx wrote two sentences of condolences and then begged for more money in two long paragraphs. On January 13, Engels replied, indicating that he was displeased with Marx’s “frosty reaction.” On January 24, Marx sent a letter apologizing for his behavior. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Letters: The Personal Correspondence, 1844–1877, Fritz J. Raddatz, ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), pp. 104–6.
• 98”Record of Marx’s Speech on Mazzini’s Attitude to the International Working Men’s Association” (1866), in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 20, p. 401.
• 99Cited by Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 66.
• 100Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 249–340.
• 101Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-Founder of World Anarchism, Sam Dolgoff, ed. (New York: Knopf, 1972), pp. 283–84.
• 102Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), pp. 203–4.
• 103Vladimir I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902; New York: International Publishers, 1943), pp. 32–33.
• 104Jean Francois Revel, How Democracies Perish (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1984).
• 105“Preface,” in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 5, pp. xv, xxv.
• 106Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (1922; New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1951), p. 328 n.
• 107Marx to Engels, 2 April 1858 in Marx and Engels, Correspondence, 1846–1895, p. 105.
• 108Engels to Marx, 3 April 1851, in Marx and Engels, Collected Works, 38, p. 330.
• 109Engels to Friederich Adolph Sorge, 29 June 1883.
• 110Marx to Nicolai F. Danielson, 10 April 1879. All cited in Raddatz, Karl Marx, pp. 236–37.
• 111Idem.
• 112Idem.
• 113Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 25.
• 114Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 43.
• 115Cited by Raddatz, ibid., p. 43.
• 116The German Newspaper Reichshruf (January 9,1960) reported that Chancellor Raabe of Austria gave Nikita Khrushchev an original letter from Marx that had been found accidentally in the Austrian archives. The letter gave details on this unique financial arrangement. Premier Khrushchev was not amused. Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan, p. 33.
• 117Otto Rühle, Karl Marx, pp. 38–83; cf. 101, 238.
• 118Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 308.
• 119For a list of these vitriolic references, see Leopold Schwartzschild, Karl Marx: The Red Prussian (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), p. 251.
• 120Jewish conservatives are especially fond of pointing out these apparently anti-Semetic statements. Cf. Max Geltman, “A Little Known Chapter in American History,” National Review (October 5, 1965), pp. 865–67.
• 121Hook, From Hegel to Marx, p. 278 n. Hook’s defense is of a mild sort; he challenged L. Rudas for defending Marx’s practice in using the word “Jew.” But what is Hook’s rationale for saying that Marx was free of anti-Semitic prejudice?
• 122Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (1875), in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, 3 vols. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1969), 3, p. 19.
• 123“Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” V. I. Lenin, “Communism and Electrification,” (1920), in The Lenin Anthology, Robert C. Tucker, ed. (New York: Norton, 1975), p. 494.
• 124“Accounting and control—these are the chief things necessary for the organizing and correct functioning of the first phase of Communist society. All citizens are here transformed into hired employees of the state, which is made up of the armed workers. All citizens become employees and workers of one national state ‘syndicate.’ All that is required is that they should work equally, should regularly do their share of work, and should receive equal pay. The accounting and control necessary for this have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.” Lenin, State and Revolution (1918; New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 83–84.
• 125“When we are victorious on a world scale I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities in the world.” Lenin, “The Importance of Gold Now and After the Complete Victory of Socialism” (1921), in The Lenin Anthology, p. 515.
• 126Bottomore and Rubel, “The Influence of Marx’s Sociological Thought,” in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, eds. (1956; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964).
• 127Wilhelm Windelband, History of Philosophy, 2 vols. (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 2, pp. 632, 655.
• 128Solomon Bloom writes: “Specifically, it was the Bolshevik Revolution of November, 1917, that brought the United States rather suddenly face to face with Marxism. . . .” Bloom, “Man of His Century: A Reconsideration of the Historical Significance of Karl Marx,” Journal of Political Economy 51 (December, 1943); reprinted in Shepard B. Clough, Peter Gay, and Charles K Warner eds., The European Past (New York: Macmillan, 1964), vol. 2, p. 143.
• 129Ludwig von Mises, Notes and Recollections (South Holland, Ill.: Libertarian Press, 1978), p. 5. (Libertarian Press is now located in Spring Mills, Pennsylvania.)
• 130Keynes wrote these words in the Foreword to the 1936 German-language edition of his General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory.” Translated with the German original by James J. Martin, Revisionist Viewpoints (Boulder, Colo.: Ralph Myles Press, 1971), pp. 203, 205. The citation also appears in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, vol. 7 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1973), p. xxvi.
• 131Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Expose of the Nazi-American Money Plot, 1933–1949 (New York: Delacorte, 1983); Antony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler (Suffolk, England: Bloomfield, 1976), originally published by ’76 Press, Seal Beach, California. On George Bush’s father’s work for the Harrimans in this regard, see Webster Griffin Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography (Washington, D.C.: Executive Intelligence Review, 1992), chap. 2.
• 132Donald W. Treadgold, Introduction to Sergei Bulgakov, Karl Marx as A Relgious Type: His Relation to the Religion of Anthropotheism of L. Feuerbach (Belmont, Mass.: Nordland [1907] 1979), p. 14.
• 133Payne, Marx, pp. 265–66, 532–38.
• 134Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 134.
• 135Ibid., p. 135.
• 136He continued his “pub crawls” with friends and even enemies during his years in London. After one of these, at 2 a.m., Marx and his friends started smashing street lamps with stones, outrunning the local police: Payne, Marx, p. 282.
• 137James Billington, Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith (New York: Basic Books, 1980).
• 138Heinrich Marx to Karl Marx, 2 March 1837, in Collected Works, 1, p. 670.
• 139In the Soviet Union, Marxism was not thought to be just an economic theory. It pretended to be the universal explanation of nature, life, and society. It was also a deadly weapon to be wielded against personal enemies. As in the case of Sergei Vavilov who was starved to death for violating Marxism because he adhered to the science of genetics, “a false science invented by the Catholic monk Mendel.” In the name of Marxism, the death toll reached 100 million, the rivers of blood flowed from Russia to Kampuchea, from China to Czechoslovakia.
• 140The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. “We should all be thankful to the Soviets,” says Paul Craig Roberts, “because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn’t work. No one can say they didn’t have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn’t go far enough.”
• 141In contrast to the West, where Marxist tenets were doctrines of a counter religion, few in the Soviet Union truly believed in the official ideology: not the state managers, not the professors, not the journalists. It was not necessary that they do so, for Marxism was a means of political rent seeking and of coercive control, not a body of ideas held to by honest men.
• 142The Soviet Union is now gone, as are the huge statues of Marx and Lenin that littered the East, and the good reputation of their systems of thought. This collection of articles is the Requiem for Marx and the social and economic systems created in his name. As with any funeral service, we look back on the life of Marxian ideas. But unlike the ordinary funeral, we are not looking back fondly, for Marxism is as good an example of the maxim that “ideas have consequences” as can be found. It does not speak well of the intellectual class that no body of ideas attracted a greater following in this century.
• 143It is beyond the capacity of economic analysis to calculate the opportunity costs of the socialist experiment in Russia. But the human toll from Stalin’s collectivization, purges, and Gulags is estimated by Russian historian Roy Medvedev at forty-one million people. A popular Russian aphorism says: “The only lesson of history is that it does not teach us anything.” “Despite the recent collapse of socialism and communism in Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe, socialism is alive and growing,” Gary Becker has said. It presents a mortal danger to economic freedom and the quality of life and will for generations to come.
• 144The scholars contributing to this volume write in the economic and historical tradition of the Austrian school, founded by Carl Menger with his book Principles of Economics (1875). The tradition emphasizes a deductive method, role of choice and uncertainty in economic affairs, the power of market prices to coordinate economic activity, and the essential nature of private property for forming the basis of rational calculation. The Austrian school is also the historical bete’ noire of the Marxian school. Long before any other school came around to understanding the deep flaws in the Marxian approach, the Austrians had devoted an enormous amount of intellectual power to exposing its fallacies and dangers. Carl Menger refuted the labor theory of value, his student Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk demolished Marx’s views of capital, F. A. Hayek showed the incompatibility between socialism and political freedom, and Ludwig von Mises attacked the core of socialist economic theory.
• 145From my life and study in Moscow, I can attest to the truth of this prediction. In an economy, nearly every consumption good requires several stages of production. The more natural resources used and the more complex the technology involved, the more stages of production are required. Yet lacking an ability to see a production process through to ends that consumers desire, Soviet socialism gave only military hardware, useless goods, goods to make other goods, while consumers were deprived of bare essentials.
• 146In the late 1980s, when glasnost at last permitted Soviet economists to speak out, they confirmed the death sentence that Mises pronounced. As Martin Malia put it, “through the voices of Nikolay Shmelev, Gavriil Popov, Vasiliy Selyunin, Grigory Khanin, Larisa Piyasheva, Mikhail Berger, and subsequently Grigoriy Yavlinksy and Yegor Gaydar, they offered us a portrait of the Soviet that was in full accord with the evaluations of . . . Ludwig von Mises, whose book contains hardly a single figure and not a word about GNP.” This powerful confirmation, Malia points out, led to “methodological smuta” (in Russian) in Western economics.
• 147Larisa Piyasheva—the only visible economist close to the Austrian school in present day Russia—believes that total privatization alone will not solve all the problems, but without it, there is no hope. She was fired by Yeltsin’s government due to “budget cuts.”
• 148If the present looks bleak, the recent history of the Soviet Union remains widely misunderstood. No one figure represents the confusion better than Mikhail Gorbachev. In the West, he was and is considered the great reformer—witness the title of Princeton Professor Stephen Cohen’s New York Times op-ed, “Gorbachev the Great.” If Gorbachev was a reformer, he was hardly the first Soviet politician to use so-called reforms to maintain power. Lenin was a reformer too, and he resorted to extraordinary means to save communism. As a result of Lenin’s efforts to impose real utopian socialism—not the bureaucratized model that existed until recently—the entire population was dying out. Had he continued on that course, he would not have had any subjects to rule. That’s when he initiated the New Economic Policy, which allowed markets and private property.
• 149President George Bush played no small part in keeping Gorbachev in power longer than he should have been, sticking by him, and doing everything politically possible to support him. Bush lent his support to the only major world leader without a democratic mandate, a man despised by his subjects, who imposed a system antithetical to Western values. Is it an American tradition that the U.S. president should support the head of Soviet communism in time of need? Similarly, Herbert Hoover bailed out Lenin, Franklin Roosevelt bailed out Stalin, and George Bush rescued Gorbachev.
• 150The sad legacy of Marxism is the mind set of certain people, both in the East and West, who believe that the state can cure all economic ills and bring about social justice. Yet a return to central management under whatever label is not the solution, but neither is the status quo. What is needed in the former Soviet Union and Soviet-client states is a wholesale repudiation of the legacy of Marx. In the United States, too, Marx’s ideas influenced a generation of reformers during the Progressive Era (out of which came modern central banking and the progressive income tax), the New Deal, the Great Society, and continues to infect departments of literature and sociology in major universities. Remarkably, even after the fall of Soviet and East European social regimes, Marxism has not lost all its academic cache. “I think it’s an exciting time to be a Marxist,” Steve Cullenberg of the University of California at Riverside told the Associated Press. He was among the 2,000 academics that attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst conference in November 1992 entitled “Marxism in the New World Order: Crises and Possibilities.” The mass media, moreover, pays tribute to Marx’s honor every time it uses the terms “progressive” and “reactionary,” demonstrating an unwitting acceptance of Marx’s version of the historical inevitability of socialism.
• 151The gradual abolishment of feudal and absolutist rule and the rise of increasingly capitalist societies in Western Europe and the United States, and along with this unheard of economic growth and rising population numbers was the result of an increasing class consciousness among the exploited, who were ideologically molded together through the doctrines of natural rights and liberalism. In this Austrians and Marxists agree. They disagree, however, on the next assessment: The reversal of this liberalization process and steadily increased levels of exploitation in these societies since the last third of the nineteenth century, and particularly pronounced since World War I, are the result of a loss in class consciousness. In fact, in the Austrian view Marxism must accept much of the blame for this development by misdirecting attention from the correct exploitation model of the homesteader-producer-saver-contractor vs. the non-homesteader-producer-saver-contractor to the fallacious model of the wage earner vs. the capitalist, thus muddling things up.
• 152The establishment of a ruling class over an exploited one many times its size by coercion and the manipulation of public opinion, i.e., a low degree of class consciousness among the exploited, finds its most basic institutional expression in the creation of a system of public law superimposed on private law. The ruling class sets itself apart and protects its position as a ruling class by adopting a constitution for their firm’s operations. On the one hand, by formalizing the internal operations within the state apparatus as well as its relations vis-à-vis the exploited population, a constitution creates some degree of legal stability. The more familiar and popular private law notions are incorporated into constitutional and public law, the more conducive this will be to the creation of favorable public opinion. On the other hand, any constitution and public law also formalizes the exemptory status of the ruling class as regards the homesteading principle. It formalizes the right of the state’s representatives to engage in non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions and the ultimate subordination of private to public law. Class justice, i.e., a dualism of one set of laws for the rulers and another for the ruled, comes to bear in this dualism of public and private law and in the domination and infiltration of public law over and into private law. It is not because private property rights are recognized by law, as Marxists think, that class justice is established. Rather, class justice comes into being precisely whenever a legal distinction exists between a class of persons acting under and being protected by public law and another class acting under and being protected instead by some subordinate private law. More specifically then, the basic proposition of the Marxist theory of the state in particular is false. The state is not exploitative because it protects the capitalists’ property rights, but because it itself is exempt from the restriction of having to acquire property productively and contractually.
• 153In spite of this fundamental misconception, however, Marxism, because it correctly interprets the state as exploitative (contrary, for instance to the public choice school, which sees it as a normal firm among others), is on to some important insights regarding the logic of state operations. For one thing, it recognizes the strategic function of redistributionist state policies. As an exploitative firm, the state must at all times be interested in a low degree of class consciousness among the ruled. The redistribution of property and income—a policy of divide et impera—is the state’s means with which it can create divisiveness among the public and destroy the formation of a unifying class consciousness of the exploited. Furthermore, the redistribution of state power itself through democratizing the state constitution and opening up every ruling position to everyone and granting everyone the right to participate in the determination of state personnel and policy is a means for reducing the resistance against exploitation as such. Secondly, the state is indeed, as Marxists see it, the great center of ideological propaganda and mystification: Exploitation is really freedom; taxes are really voluntary contributions; non-contractual relations are really “conceptually” contractual ones; no one is ruled by anyone but we all rule ourselves; without the state neither law nor security would exist; and the poor would perish, etc. All of this is part of the ideological superstructure designed to legitimize an underlying basis of economic exploitation. And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state and business, especially the banking elite—even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit on top of its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelized banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nervous centers of civil society—not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites and the state.
• 154In spite of this fundamental misconception, however, Marxism, because it correctly interprets the state as exploitative (contrary, for instance to the public choice school, which sees it as a normal firm among others), is on to some important insights regarding the logic of state operations. For one thing, it recognizes the strategic function of redistributionist state policies. As an exploitative firm, the state must at all times be interested in a low degree of class consciousness among the ruled. The redistribution of property and income—a policy of divide et impera—is the state’s means with which it can create divisiveness among the public and destroy the formation of a unifying class consciousness of the exploited. Furthermore, the redistribution of state power itself through democratizing the state constitution and opening up every ruling position to everyone and granting everyone the right to participate in the determination of state personnel and policy is a means for reducing the resistance against exploitation as such. Secondly, the state is indeed, as Marxists see it, the great center of ideological propaganda and mystification: Exploitation is really freedom; taxes are really voluntary contributions; non-contractual relations are really “conceptually” contractual ones; no one is ruled by anyone but we all rule ourselves; without the state neither law nor security would exist; and the poor would perish, etc. All of this is part of the ideological superstructure designed to legitimize an underlying basis of economic exploitation. And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state and business, especially the banking elite—even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit on top of its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelized banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nervous centers of civil society—not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites and the state.
• 155In spite of this fundamental misconception, however, Marxism, because it correctly interprets the state as exploitative (contrary, for instance to the public choice school, which sees it as a normal firm among others), is on to some important insights regarding the logic of state operations. For one thing, it recognizes the strategic function of redistributionist state policies. As an exploitative firm, the state must at all times be interested in a low degree of class consciousness among the ruled. The redistribution of property and income—a policy of divide et impera—is the state’s means with which it can create divisiveness among the public and destroy the formation of a unifying class consciousness of the exploited. Furthermore, the redistribution of state power itself through democratizing the state constitution and opening up every ruling position to everyone and granting everyone the right to participate in the determination of state personnel and policy is a means for reducing the resistance against exploitation as such. Secondly, the state is indeed, as Marxists see it, the great center of ideological propaganda and mystification: Exploitation is really freedom; taxes are really voluntary contributions; non-contractual relations are really “conceptually” contractual ones; no one is ruled by anyone but we all rule ourselves; without the state neither law nor security would exist; and the poor would perish, etc. All of this is part of the ideological superstructure designed to legitimize an underlying basis of economic exploitation. And finally, Marxists are also correct in noticing the close association between the state and business, especially the banking elite—even though their explanation for it is faulty. The reason is not that the bourgeois establishment sees and supports the state as the guarantor of private property rights and contractualism. On the contrary, the establishment correctly perceives the state as the very antithesis to private property that it is and takes a close interest in it for this reason. The more successful a business, the larger the potential danger of governmental exploitation, but the larger also the potential gains that can be achieved if it can come under government’s special protection and is exempt from the full weight of capitalist competition. This is why the business establishment is interested in the state and its infiltration. The ruling elite in turn is interested in close cooperation with the business establishment because of its financial powers. In particular, the banking elite is of interest because as an exploitative firm the state naturally wishes to possess complete autonomy for counterfeiting. By offering to cut the banking elite in on its own counterfeiting machinations and allowing them to counterfeit on top of its own counterfeited notes under a regime of fractional reserve banking, the state can easily reach this goal and establish a system of state monopolized money and cartelized banking controlled by the central bank. And through this direct counterfeiting connection with the banking system and by extension the banks’ major clients, the ruling class in fact extends far beyond the state apparatus to the very nervous centers of civil society—not that much different, at least in appearance, from the picture that Marxists like to paint of the cooperation between banking, business elites and the state.
• 156Competition within the ruling class and among different ruling classes brings about a tendency toward increasing concentration. Marxism is right in this. However, its faulty theory of exploitation again leads it to locate the cause for this tendency in the wrong place. Marxism sees such a tendency as inherent in capitalist competition. Yet it is precisely so long as people are engaged in a clean capitalism that competition is not a form of zero-sum interaction. The homesteader, the producer, saver and contractor do not gain at another’s expense. Their gains either leave another’s physical possessions completely unaffected or they actually imply mutual gains (as in the case of all contractual exchanges). Capitalism thus can account for increases in absolute wealth. But under its regime no systematic tendency toward relative concentration can be said to exist. Instead, zero-sum interactions characterize not only the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, but also between competing rulers. Exploitation defined as non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions is only possible as long as there is anything that can be appropriated. Yet if there were free competition in the business of exploitation, there would obviously be nothing left to expropriate. Thus, exploitation requires monopoly over some given territory and population; and the competition between exploiters is by its very nature eliminative and must bring about a tendency toward relative concentration of exploitative firms as well as a tendency toward centralization within each exploitative firm. The development of states rather than capitalist firms provides the foremost illustration of this tendency: There are now a significantly smaller number of states with exploitative control over much larger territories than in previous centuries. And within each state apparatus there has in fact been a constant tendency toward increasing the powers of the central government at the expense of its regional and local subdivisions. Yet outside the state apparatus a tendency toward relative concentration has also become apparent for the same reason. Not, as should be clear by now, because of any trait inherent in capitalism, but because the ruling class has expanded its rule into the midst of civil society through the creation of a state-banking-business alliance and in particular the establishment of a system of central banking. If a concentration and centralization of state power then takes place, it is only natural that this be accompanied by a parallel process of relative concentration and cartelization of banking and industry. Along with increased state powers, the associated banking and business establishment’s powers of eliminating or putting economic competitors at a disadvantage by means of non-productive and/or non-contractual expropriations increase. Business concentration is the reflection of a “state-ization” of economic life.
• 157Competition within the ruling class and among different ruling classes brings about a tendency toward increasing concentration. Marxism is right in this. However, its faulty theory of exploitation again leads it to locate the cause for this tendency in the wrong place. Marxism sees such a tendency as inherent in capitalist competition. Yet it is precisely so long as people are engaged in a clean capitalism that competition is not a form of zero-sum interaction. The homesteader, the producer, saver and contractor do not gain at another’s expense. Their gains either leave another’s physical possessions completely unaffected or they actually imply mutual gains (as in the case of all contractual exchanges). Capitalism thus can account for increases in absolute wealth. But under its regime no systematic tendency toward relative concentration can be said to exist. Instead, zero-sum interactions characterize not only the relationship between the ruler and the ruled, but also between competing rulers. Exploitation defined as non-productive and non-contractual property acquisitions is only possible as long as there is anything that can be appropriated. Yet if there were free competition in the business of exploitation, there would obviously be nothing left to expropriate. Thus, exploitation requires monopoly over some given territory and population; and the competition between exploiters is by its very nature eliminative and must bring about a tendency toward relative concentration of exploitative firms as well as a tendency toward centralization within each exploitative firm. The development of states rather than capitalist firms provides the foremost illustration of this tendency: There are now a significantly smaller number of states with exploitative control over much larger territories than in previous centuries. And within each state apparatus there has in fact been a constant tendency toward increasing the powers of the central government at the expense of its regional and local subdivisions. Yet outside the state apparatus a tendency toward relative concentration has also become apparent for the same reason. Not, as should be clear by now, because of any trait inherent in capitalism, but because the ruling class has expanded its rule into the midst of civil society through the creation of a state-banking-business alliance and in particular the establishment of a system of central banking. If a concentration and centralization of state power then takes place, it is only natural that this be accompanied by a parallel process of relative concentration and cartelization of banking and industry. Along with increased state powers, the associated banking and business establishment’s powers of eliminating or putting economic competitors at a disadvantage by means of non-productive and/or non-contractual expropriations increase. Business concentration is the reflection of a “state-ization” of economic life.
• 158The primary means for the expansion of state power and the elimination of rival exploitation centers is war and military domination. Interstate competition implies a tendency toward war and imperialism. As centers of exploitation their interests are by nature antagonistic. Moreover, with each of them—internally—in command of the instrument of taxation and absolute counterfeiting powers, it is possible for the ruling classes to let others pay for their wars. Naturally, if one does not have to pay for one’s risky ventures oneself, but can force others to do so, one tends to be a greater risk taker and more trigger happy than one would otherwise be. Marxism, contrary to much of the so-called bourgeois social sciences, gets the facts right: there is indeed a tendency toward imperialism operative in history; and the foremost imperialist powers are indeed the most advanced capitalist nations. Yet the explanation is once again faulty. It is the state as an institution exempt from the capitalist rules of property acquisitions that is by nature aggressive. And the historical evidence of a close correlation between capitalism and imperialism only seemingly contradicts this. It finds its explanation, easily enough, in the fact that in order to come out successfully from interstate wars, a state must be in command of sufficient (in relative terms) economic resources. Ceteris paribus, the state with more ample resources will win the war. As an exploitative firm, a state is by nature destructive of wealth and capital accumulation. Wealth is produced exclusively by civil society; and the weaker the state’s exploitative powers, the more wealth and capital society accumulates. Thus, paradoxical as it may sound at first, the weaker or the more liberal a state is internally, the further developed capitalism is; a developed capitalist economy to extract from makes the state richer; and a richer state then makes for more and more successful expansionist wars.
• 159And a similarly straightforward yet once again entirely non-Marxist explanation exists for the observation always pointed out by Marxists, that the banking and business establishment is usually among the most ardent supporters of military strength and imperial expansionism. It is not because the expansion of capitalist markets requires exploitation, but because the expansion of state protected and privileged business requires that such protection be extended also to foreign countries and that foreign competitors be hampered through non-contractual and non-productive property acquisitions in the same way or more so than internal competition. Specifically, it supports imperialism if this promises to lead to a position of military domination of one’s own allied state over another. For then, from a position of military strength, it becomes possible to establish a system of—as one may call it—monetary imperialism. The dominating state will use its superior power to enforce a policy of internationally coordinated inflation. Its own central bank sets the pace in the process of counterfeiting, and the central banks of the dominated states are ordered to use its currency as their own reserves and inflate on top of them. This way, along with the dominating state and as the earliest receivers of the counterfeit reserve currency its associated banking and business establishment can engage in an almost costless expropriation of foreign property owners and income producers. A double layer of exploitation of a foreign state and a foreign elite on top of a national state and elite is imposed on the exploited class in the dominated territories, causing prolonged economic dependency and relative economic stagnation vis-à-vis the dominant nation. It is this—very uncapitalist—situation that characterizes the status of the United States and the United States dollar and that gives rise to the—correct—charge of United States economic exploitation and dollar imperialism.
• 160Contrary to Marxist claims, this is not the result of any historical laws, however. In fact, no such things as inexorable historical laws as Marxists conceive of them exist. Nor is it the result of a tendency for the rate of profit to fall with an increased organic composition of capital (an increase in the proportion of constant to variable capital, that is), as Marx thinks. Just as the labor theory of value is false beyond repair, so is the law of the tendential fall of the profit rate, which is based on it. The source of value, interest and profit is not exclusively the expenditure of labor, but much more general: acting, i.e., the employment of scarce means in the pursuit of goals by agents who are constrained by time preference and uncertainty (imperfect knowledge). There is no reason to suppose, then, that changes in the organic composition of capital should have any systematic relation to changes in interest and profit.
• 161Instead, the likelihood of crises which stimulate the development of a higher degree of class consciousness (i.e., the subjective conditions for the overthrow of the ruling class) increases because—to use one of Marx’s favorite terms—of the “dialectics” of exploitation which I have already touched on earlier: Exploitation is destructive of wealth formation. Hence, in the competition of exploitative firms, i.e., of states, less exploitative or more liberal ones tend to outcompete more exploitative ones because they are in command of more ample resources. The process of imperialism initially has a relatively liberating effect on societies coming under its control. A relatively more capitalist social model is exported to relatively less capitalist (more exploitative) societies. The development of productive forces is stimulated, economic integration is furthered, division of labor extended, and a genuine world market established. Population figures go up in response, and expectations as regards the economic future rise to unprecedented heights. With exploitative domination taking hold, and interstate competition reduced or even eliminated in a process of imperialist expansionism, however, the external constraints on the dominating state’s power of internal exploitation and expropriation gradually disappear. Internal exploitation, taxation and regulation begin to increase the closer the ruling class comes to its ultimate goal of world domination. Economic stagnation sets in and the—worldwide—higher expectations become frustrated. And this—high expectations and an economic reality increasingly falling behind these expectations—is the classical situation for the emergence of a revolutionary potential. A desperate need for ideological solutions to the emerging crises arises, along with a more wide-spread recognition of the fact that state rule, taxation and regulation—far from offering such a solution—actually constitute the very problem that must be overcome. If in this situation of economic stagnation, crises, and ideological disillusion a positive solution is offered in the form of a systematic and comprehensive libertarian philosophy coupled with its economic counterpart: Austrian economics, and if this ideology is propagated by an activist movement, then the prospects of igniting the revolutionary potential to activism become over-whelmingly positive and promising. Anti-statist pressures will mount and bring about an irresistible tendency toward dismantling the power of the ruling class and the state as its instrument of exploitation.
• 162Instead, the likelihood of crises which stimulate the development of a higher degree of class consciousness (i.e., the subjective conditions for the overthrow of the ruling class) increases because—to use one of Marx’s favorite terms—of the “dialectics” of exploitation which I have already touched on earlier: Exploitation is destructive of wealth formation. Hence, in the competition of exploitative firms, i.e., of states, less exploitative or more liberal ones tend to outcompete more exploitative ones because they are in command of more ample resources. The process of imperialism initially has a relatively liberating effect on societies coming under its control. A relatively more capitalist social model is exported to relatively less capitalist (more exploitative) societies. The development of productive forces is stimulated, economic integration is furthered, division of labor extended, and a genuine world market established. Population figures go up in response, and expectations as regards the economic future rise to unprecedented heights. With exploitative domination taking hold, and interstate competition reduced or even eliminated in a process of imperialist expansionism, however, the external constraints on the dominating state’s power of internal exploitation and expropriation gradually disappear. Internal exploitation, taxation and regulation begin to increase the closer the ruling class comes to its ultimate goal of world domination. Economic stagnation sets in and the—worldwide—higher expectations become frustrated. And this—high expectations and an economic reality increasingly falling behind these expectations—is the classical situation for the emergence of a revolutionary potential. A desperate need for ideological solutions to the emerging crises arises, along with a more wide-spread recognition of the fact that state rule, taxation and regulation—far from offering such a solution—actually constitute the very problem that must be overcome. If in this situation of economic stagnation, crises, and ideological disillusion a positive solution is offered in the form of a systematic and comprehensive libertarian philosophy coupled with its economic counterpart: Austrian economics, and if this ideology is propagated by an activist movement, then the prospects of igniting the revolutionary potential to activism become over-whelmingly positive and promising. Anti-statist pressures will mount and bring about an irresistible tendency toward dismantling the power of the ruling class and the state as its instrument of exploitation.
• 163Instead, the likelihood of crises which stimulate the development of a higher degree of class consciousness (i.e., the subjective conditions for the overthrow of the ruling class) increases because—to use one of Marx’s favorite terms—of the “dialectics” of exploitation which I have already touched on earlier: Exploitation is destructive of wealth formation. Hence, in the competition of exploitative firms, i.e., of states, less exploitative or more liberal ones tend to outcompete more exploitative ones because they are in command of more ample resources. The process of imperialism initially has a relatively liberating effect on societies coming under its control. A relatively more capitalist social model is exported to relatively less capitalist (more exploitative) societies. The development of productive forces is stimulated, economic integration is furthered, division of labor extended, and a genuine world market established. Population figures go up in response, and expectations as regards the economic future rise to unprecedented heights. With exploitative domination taking hold, and interstate competition reduced or even eliminated in a process of imperialist expansionism, however, the external constraints on the dominating state’s power of internal exploitation and expropriation gradually disappear. Internal exploitation, taxation and regulation begin to increase the closer the ruling class comes to its ultimate goal of world domination. Economic stagnation sets in and the—worldwide—higher expectations become frustrated. And this—high expectations and an economic reality increasingly falling behind these expectations—is the classical situation for the emergence of a revolutionary potential. A desperate need for ideological solutions to the emerging crises arises, along with a more wide-spread recognition of the fact that state rule, taxation and regulation—far from offering such a solution—actually constitute the very problem that must be overcome. If in this situation of economic stagnation, crises, and ideological disillusion a positive solution is offered in the form of a systematic and comprehensive libertarian philosophy coupled with its economic counterpart: Austrian economics, and if this ideology is propagated by an activist movement, then the prospects of igniting the revolutionary potential to activism become over-whelmingly positive and promising. Anti-statist pressures will mount and bring about an irresistible tendency toward dismantling the power of the ruling class and the state as its instrument of exploitation.
• 164Instead, the likelihood of crises which stimulate the development of a higher degree of class consciousness (i.e., the subjective conditions for the overthrow of the ruling class) increases because—to use one of Marx’s favorite terms—of the “dialectics” of exploitation which I have already touched on earlier: Exploitation is destructive of wealth formation. Hence, in the competition of exploitative firms, i.e., of states, less exploitative or more liberal ones tend to outcompete more exploitative ones because they are in command of more ample resources. The process of imperialism initially has a relatively liberating effect on societies coming under its control. A relatively more capitalist social model is exported to relatively less capitalist (more exploitative) societies. The development of productive forces is stimulated, economic integration is furthered, division of labor extended, and a genuine world market established. Population figures go up in response, and expectations as regards the economic future rise to unprecedented heights. With exploitative domination taking hold, and interstate competition reduced or even eliminated in a process of imperialist expansionism, however, the external constraints on the dominating state’s power of internal exploitation and expropriation gradually disappear. Internal exploitation, taxation and regulation begin to increase the closer the ruling class comes to its ultimate goal of world domination. Economic stagnation sets in and the—worldwide—higher expectations become frustrated. And this—high expectations and an economic reality increasingly falling behind these expectations—is the classical situation for the emergence of a revolutionary potential. A desperate need for ideological solutions to the emerging crises arises, along with a more wide-spread recognition of the fact that state rule, taxation and regulation—far from offering such a solution—actually constitute the very problem that must be overcome. If in this situation of economic stagnation, crises, and ideological disillusion a positive solution is offered in the form of a systematic and comprehensive libertarian philosophy coupled with its economic counterpart: Austrian economics, and if this ideology is propagated by an activist movement, then the prospects of igniting the revolutionary potential to activism become over-whelmingly positive and promising. Anti-statist pressures will mount and bring about an irresistible tendency toward dismantling the power of the ruling class and the state as its instrument of exploitation.
• 165If and insofar as this occurs, however, this will not mean—contrary to the Marxist model—social ownership of means of production. In fact, social ownership is not only economically inefficient as has already been explained; moreover, it is incompatible with the idea that the state is “withering away.” For if means of production are owned collectively, and if it is realistically assumed that not everyone’s ideas as to how to employ these means of production happen to coincide (as if by miracle), then it is precisely socially owned factors of production which require continued state actions, i.e., an institution coercively imposing one person’s will on another disagreeing one’s. Instead, the withering away of the state, and with this the end of exploitation and the beginning of liberty and unheard of economic prosperity, means the establishment of a pure private property society regulated by nothing but private law.
• 166Engels thoroughly enjoyed the trappings of the wealth he possessed, while Marx spent many years of his life in hock to pawn brokers. He financed Marx throughout their long relationship. He outlived Marx by over a decade, corresponding with many revolutionaries throughout Europe, keeping the Marxist flame burning. He edited and published reprints of Marx’s books and his many unpublished manuscripts. The arguments in his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific have had far more impact in bringing men to Communism than Das Kapital has ever had. He was not a pedant. He was not an anti-Semite, either, at least not in his writings; Marx was, and all the hedging and squirming of contemporary liberal and Marxist scholars regarding “the hidden underlying meaning” of Marx’s vicious essay, “On the Jewish Question” (1843), will not erase the fact.
• 167Engels was not a Ph.D-holding drudge. Those who are Ph.D-holding drudges have a distinct tendency to identify with Marx rather than Engels. They pretend to suffer with Marx, who was, like themselves, a heavily subsidized “victim” of the hated capitalist system. They share his alienation. Many of them also share his literary style, which is best described as Germanic verbal constipation coupled with a bad case of hemorrhoids. (The shouts! The groans! The outrage! The vows of revenge!) They write fat, unreadable books on Marxism, and they attribute to Marx rather than Engels almost everything of intellectual importance in Marxism. They attribute far greater importance to Marx’s academic drudgery than to Engels’s original insights. In one sense, however, this assessment may be valid, because Marxism has always been a movement that owes its success to its appeal to envy-driven intellectuals and academics who have revolutionary pretensions. This explanation of Marxism’s success is seldom discussed by Marxists and academic humanists. Marxism has not united the workers of the world, but it certainly has united tens of thousands of well-fed bourgeois academics, at least until the Marxist revolution actually comes and sweeps them into the Gulag or its regional equivalents.
• 168Engels was a humble man. In his 1893 letter to Franz Mehring, he insisted that “you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself—in time—but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly.” He had lived in the shadow of Marx’s footnotes all his life, and his traditional Germanic awe of the academic drudge colored his own self-evaluation right up until his death. His own admission of a manufactured false front of self-confidence reveals a great deal about his own sense of inferiority: “Here in Paris I have come to adopt a very insolent manner, for bluster is all in the day’s work, and it works well with the female sex.” The latter concern was always high on his list of priorities.
• 169Engels was a humble man. In his 1893 letter to Franz Mehring, he insisted that “you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself—in time—but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly.” He had lived in the shadow of Marx’s footnotes all his life, and his traditional Germanic awe of the academic drudge colored his own self-evaluation right up until his death. His own admission of a manufactured false front of self-confidence reveals a great deal about his own sense of inferiority: “Here in Paris I have come to adopt a very insolent manner, for bluster is all in the day’s work, and it works well with the female sex.” The latter concern was always high on his list of priorities.
• 170When writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I became familiar with the major writings of these two intellectual founders of the most important secular religion of the modern world. By reading Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, I also stumbled onto the existence of the shadowy figure who converted Frederick Engels to communism in 1842, Moses Hess (1812–1875). He was the son of a successful Jewish businessman. As an adolescent, he had wanted to join his father in the family business, but his father insisted that the young man devote his life to the study of traditional Judaism’s holy books, the Babylonian Talmud, which young Moses hated. He fell into bad company, young Jews who were rebelling against their parents’ religion. Hess lost his faith in Judaism about a decade prior to Engels’s loss of faith in Christianity. By 1836, Hess was a communist, as reflected in his anonymously published book, Holy History of Mankind. Hess’s second book, The European Triarchy (1841), predicted that a fusion of French revolutionary socialist political theory, German revolutionary philosophy, and English social revolution would produce a new society.
• 171When writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I became familiar with the major writings of these two intellectual founders of the most important secular religion of the modern world. By reading Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, I also stumbled onto the existence of the shadowy figure who converted Frederick Engels to communism in 1842, Moses Hess (1812–1875). He was the son of a successful Jewish businessman. As an adolescent, he had wanted to join his father in the family business, but his father insisted that the young man devote his life to the study of traditional Judaism’s holy books, the Babylonian Talmud, which young Moses hated. He fell into bad company, young Jews who were rebelling against their parents’ religion. Hess lost his faith in Judaism about a decade prior to Engels’s loss of faith in Christianity. By 1836, Hess was a communist, as reflected in his anonymously published book, Holy History of Mankind. Hess’s second book, The European Triarchy (1841), predicted that a fusion of French revolutionary socialist political theory, German revolutionary philosophy, and English social revolution would produce a new society.
• 172When writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I became familiar with the major writings of these two intellectual founders of the most important secular religion of the modern world. By reading Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, I also stumbled onto the existence of the shadowy figure who converted Frederick Engels to communism in 1842, Moses Hess (1812–1875). He was the son of a successful Jewish businessman. As an adolescent, he had wanted to join his father in the family business, but his father insisted that the young man devote his life to the study of traditional Judaism’s holy books, the Babylonian Talmud, which young Moses hated. He fell into bad company, young Jews who were rebelling against their parents’ religion. Hess lost his faith in Judaism about a decade prior to Engels’s loss of faith in Christianity. By 1836, Hess was a communist, as reflected in his anonymously published book, Holy History of Mankind. Hess’s second book, The European Triarchy (1841), predicted that a fusion of French revolutionary socialist political theory, German revolutionary philosophy, and English social revolution would produce a new society.
• 173When writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I became familiar with the major writings of these two intellectual founders of the most important secular religion of the modern world. By reading Sidney Hook’s From Hegel to Marx, I also stumbled onto the existence of the shadowy figure who converted Frederick Engels to communism in 1842, Moses Hess (1812–1875). He was the son of a successful Jewish businessman. As an adolescent, he had wanted to join his father in the family business, but his father insisted that the young man devote his life to the study of traditional Judaism’s holy books, the Babylonian Talmud, which young Moses hated. He fell into bad company, young Jews who were rebelling against their parents’ religion. Hess lost his faith in Judaism about a decade prior to Engels’s loss of faith in Christianity. By 1836, Hess was a communist, as reflected in his anonymously published book, Holy History of Mankind. Hess’s second book, The European Triarchy (1841), predicted that a fusion of French revolutionary socialist political theory, German revolutionary philosophy, and English social revolution would produce a new society.
• 174Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it. He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.” Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along. For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels. Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.
• 175Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it. He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.” Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along. For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels. Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.
• 176Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it. He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.” Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along. For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels. Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.
• 177Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it. He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.” Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along. For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels. Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.
• 178Engels read the second book and was greatly influenced by it. He met with Hess in late 1842. Seven months later, Hess described this meeting with Engels: “We talked of questions of the day. Engels, who was revolutionary to the core when he met me, left as a passionate Communist.” Engels also met Marx briefly at this time, but the two did not get along. For one thing, Marx was not yet a Marxist. Sidney Hook dates Marx’s first appearance as a Marxist—an expositor of historical materialism—with The German Ideology (1845), an unpublished manuscript co-authored with Engels. Part of this manuscript actually appears in Hess’s handwriting.
• 179In the widely read, notoriously pro-Marx biography by Franz Mehring, Hess’s influence is downplayed; Mehring even goes so far as to write: “Both Marx and Engels co-operated with Hess on numerous occasions during the Brussels period, and at one time it appeared as though Hess had completely adopted their ideas.” He makes it appear as though they were Hess’s teachers, when in fact it had been the other way around, at least in the early stages (1842–44). This Marxist rewriting of history is understandable, since Marx and Engels concentrated their fire on Hess’s ideas in the section on “True Socialism” in the Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the fact that Hess had adopted many of their views on political economy. This attack on a former friend and teacher was typical of Marx and Engels from the very beginning. His early associates had been warned. Biographer Fritz Raddatz writes: “One of the scenes of that Köln period, vividly pictured by Heinzen, is both revealing and sinister. The chief editor [of the Rheinische Zeitung] and his colleagues often sat over a glass of wine in the evenings, and if the row of empty glasses was becoming noticeably long, Marx would look round the company with the angry flashing eye of the aristocrat. One of his friends would be taken aback by a finger suddenly pointed at him, accompanied by the words ‘I will destroy you’” Hess was shortly to be repaid in full in traditional Marxist currency for his extravagant praise of Marx in 1841.
• 180In the widely read, notoriously pro-Marx biography by Franz Mehring, Hess’s influence is downplayed; Mehring even goes so far as to write: “Both Marx and Engels co-operated with Hess on numerous occasions during the Brussels period, and at one time it appeared as though Hess had completely adopted their ideas.” He makes it appear as though they were Hess’s teachers, when in fact it had been the other way around, at least in the early stages (1842–44). This Marxist rewriting of history is understandable, since Marx and Engels concentrated their fire on Hess’s ideas in the section on “True Socialism” in the Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the fact that Hess had adopted many of their views on political economy. This attack on a former friend and teacher was typical of Marx and Engels from the very beginning. His early associates had been warned. Biographer Fritz Raddatz writes: “One of the scenes of that Köln period, vividly pictured by Heinzen, is both revealing and sinister. The chief editor [of the Rheinische Zeitung] and his colleagues often sat over a glass of wine in the evenings, and if the row of empty glasses was becoming noticeably long, Marx would look round the company with the angry flashing eye of the aristocrat. One of his friends would be taken aback by a finger suddenly pointed at him, accompanied by the words ‘I will destroy you’” Hess was shortly to be repaid in full in traditional Marxist currency for his extravagant praise of Marx in 1841.
• 181In the widely read, notoriously pro-Marx biography by Franz Mehring, Hess’s influence is downplayed; Mehring even goes so far as to write: “Both Marx and Engels co-operated with Hess on numerous occasions during the Brussels period, and at one time it appeared as though Hess had completely adopted their ideas.” He makes it appear as though they were Hess’s teachers, when in fact it had been the other way around, at least in the early stages (1842–44). This Marxist rewriting of history is understandable, since Marx and Engels concentrated their fire on Hess’s ideas in the section on “True Socialism” in the Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the fact that Hess had adopted many of their views on political economy. This attack on a former friend and teacher was typical of Marx and Engels from the very beginning. His early associates had been warned. Biographer Fritz Raddatz writes: “One of the scenes of that Köln period, vividly pictured by Heinzen, is both revealing and sinister. The chief editor [of the Rheinische Zeitung] and his colleagues often sat over a glass of wine in the evenings, and if the row of empty glasses was becoming noticeably long, Marx would look round the company with the angry flashing eye of the aristocrat. One of his friends would be taken aback by a finger suddenly pointed at him, accompanied by the words ‘I will destroy you’” Hess was shortly to be repaid in full in traditional Marxist currency for his extravagant praise of Marx in 1841.
• 182In the widely read, notoriously pro-Marx biography by Franz Mehring, Hess’s influence is downplayed; Mehring even goes so far as to write: “Both Marx and Engels co-operated with Hess on numerous occasions during the Brussels period, and at one time it appeared as though Hess had completely adopted their ideas.” He makes it appear as though they were Hess’s teachers, when in fact it had been the other way around, at least in the early stages (1842–44). This Marxist rewriting of history is understandable, since Marx and Engels concentrated their fire on Hess’s ideas in the section on “True Socialism” in the Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the fact that Hess had adopted many of their views on political economy. This attack on a former friend and teacher was typical of Marx and Engels from the very beginning. His early associates had been warned. Biographer Fritz Raddatz writes: “One of the scenes of that Köln period, vividly pictured by Heinzen, is both revealing and sinister. The chief editor [of the Rheinische Zeitung] and his colleagues often sat over a glass of wine in the evenings, and if the row of empty glasses was becoming noticeably long, Marx would look round the company with the angry flashing eye of the aristocrat. One of his friends would be taken aback by a finger suddenly pointed at him, accompanied by the words ‘I will destroy you’” Hess was shortly to be repaid in full in traditional Marxist currency for his extravagant praise of Marx in 1841.
• 183Hess has remained a forgotten historical figure. He was ridiculed by Marx as the “Communist rabbi.” He was later to become the spiritual founder of Zionism. That one man served as the intellectual father of both of these important ideological movements is remarkable; even more remarkable is the fact that his name seldom appears in textbooks on modern European history. This was equally true a century ago. When the founder of political Zionism Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State, he had never heard of Hess. Shown a copy of Hess’s 1862 book, Rome and Jerusalem, over thirty years after its publication, he said that if he had known of it earlier, he would not have written The Jewish State, since Hess’s book had so thoroughly prefigured his own writing.
• 184Hess has remained a forgotten historical figure. He was ridiculed by Marx as the “Communist rabbi.” He was later to become the spiritual founder of Zionism. That one man served as the intellectual father of both of these important ideological movements is remarkable; even more remarkable is the fact that his name seldom appears in textbooks on modern European history. This was equally true a century ago. When the founder of political Zionism Theodore Herzl wrote The Jewish State, he had never heard of Hess. Shown a copy of Hess’s 1862 book, Rome and Jerusalem, over thirty years after its publication, he said that if he had known of it earlier, he would not have written The Jewish State, since Hess’s book had so thoroughly prefigured his own writing.
• 185One fact is generally de-emphasized by students of early Marxism: neither Marx nor Engels, and certainly not Hess, suffered from dire poverty as young men. All three were bourgeois intellectuals. All three came from comfortable, if not wealthy, backgrounds. Of the three, only Engels had any close contact with the industrial proletariat, and he was the son of the proletariat’s employer, working as an executive of the company almost all of his adult life. He hated it, but he refused to quit until he was middle aged.
• 186In March of 1843 Marx lost his job, yet got married in June—not to some proletarian, but to Jenny von Westphalen, his old sweetheart, the daughter of a high and respected Prussian official. Their long honeymoon was spent on a tour through Switzerland where, Jenny later related, they literally gave money away. Jenny’s mother had given the couple a small legacy for the trip. Marx spent the next few months reading and writing articles. (The journal for which he was writing went through one issue, and was immediately confiscated by the authorities, never to be revived.) At the end of the year he and his new bride went to Paris. These are hardly the activities of some starving proletarian philosopher.
• 187There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 188There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 189There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 190There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 191There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 192There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 193There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 194There are a handful of accounts of Marx’s financial status during the years 1844–48. All of them point to the same fact: he lived high on the hog. I have pieced together the fragmentary and sometimes conflicting data as best I can. In March of 1844, while he was living in Paris for about fourteen months, Marx’s friends in Germany had collected 1,000 talers for him, which was the equivalent of three years’ income for a Silesian weaver working 14 to 16 hours a day. Shortly thereafter, Raddatz says, another 800 talers arrived. To this was added the money he earned from his 1,800 franc annual salary from Vorwärts, plus the 4,000 francs he had received from the “Köln Circle” of liberals who had funded the short-lived newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung. To this, Raddatz says, should be added another 2,000 francs that Marx received for the sale of proof sets of the Deutsche-Französische Jahrbücher. I have not found any confirmation of this additional 2,000 francs, however, so I do not count it. In any case, his total income, as Raddatz correctly observes, “should have been enough for several years.” Arnold Ruge had sarcastically remarked in a letter of 1844: “His wife gave him for his birthday a riding switch costing 100 francs and the poor devil cannot ride nor has he a horse. Everything he sees he wants to ‘have’—a carriage, smart clothes, a flower garden, new furniture from the Exhibition, in fact the moon.”
• 195Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny. But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication, he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847. There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”
• 196The Holy Family.
• 197Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny. But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication, he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847. There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”
• 198Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny. But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication, he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847. There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”
• 199Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny. But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication, he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847. There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”
• 200Marx was expelled from Paris in early 1845. He fled to Belgium. He was begging for money within a few months. Predictably, during the next three years in Brussels, he did not earn a penny. But the money still rolled in. In December of 1844, he received 1,000 francs for the publication of The Holy Family. Engels also gave him the advance he had received in May for The Condition of the Working Class in England. Köln sent him another 750 francs. He also took advance payment of 1,500 francs for a book he never got around to writing. The publisher made a serious financially fatal mistake. After signing an initial contract with Marx that promised a payment of 1,500 francs upon completion of the manuscript, and another 1,500 at the time of publication, he relented for some reason and sent Marx the initial 1,500 a few months later. He would spend the next few years demanding the manuscript or the return of his money, all to no avail. (As a publisher who has also been sucked in on several occasions by the pleas and promises of initially enthusiastic, boldly self-confident, perpetually indebted, and “ideologically pure” authors, I can sympathize with him. The surest way to bury any book publishing project is to pay the prospective author in advance.) He also borrowed 150 francs from his brother-in-law in November of 1847. There is no record of any repayment. In an 1847 letter to Engels, Marx brings up the life-long theme of themes in his correspondence with Engels: “money.”
• 201We know that Marx received 6,000 francs from his father’s estate in March of 1848. His father had died in 1838; Marx could not persuade his mother and his Uncle Lion Philips to give him the money until 1848. Robert Payne claims, without offering any substantiating evidence, that Marx immediately spent 5,000 to fund the purchase of weapons for Belgian workmen. I have found no evidence of this, nor does any of the standard biographies of Marx refer to such a thing. If he did this, it was the least Marx-like act of his entire career. What we do know is that he was expelled from Belgium a few weeks later, after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and by then he apparently had no money. We may never know for certain what happened to this legacy from his father.
• 202We know that Marx received 6,000 francs from his father’s estate in March of 1848. His father had died in 1838; Marx could not persuade his mother and his Uncle Lion Philips to give him the money until 1848. Robert Payne claims, without offering any substantiating evidence, that Marx immediately spent 5,000 to fund the purchase of weapons for Belgian workmen. I have found no evidence of this, nor does any of the standard biographies of Marx refer to such a thing. If he did this, it was the least Marx-like act of his entire career. What we do know is that he was expelled from Belgium a few weeks later, after the publication of the Communist Manifesto, and by then he apparently had no money. We may never know for certain what happened to this legacy from his father.
• 203The obvious question arises: How much money was this in purchasing power? A lot. Statistical data from this period are not highly reliable, but we can make usable estimates. A survey made in February of 1848, as the revolution was breaking out, indicated that the average wage of a Parisian male worker was slightly under four francs per day, or around 1,250 francs per year, if he worked continually, six days a week, 52 weeks per year. Thus, during his brief stay of less than a year in Paris, Marx pulled in about 6,800 francs, plus 1,800 talers, or about six times the average Parisian worker’s salary (even if we do not count the 2,000 francs for the supposed sale of proof sets), and he was not required to work 52 weeks to earn it.
• 204What did it cost to live in Paris? One survey in 1845 indicated that the minimum expenses for a childless family in Paris were in the range of 750 francs per year. Marx had only one child in 1844, so even if expenses were twice this, he could have survived. His income that year was ten or eleven times the Parisian family’s minimum expenditure. (I have not pursued the question of the cost of living in Brussels. It is unlikely to have been drastically different. There was an international gold standard at the time, free mobility of population, and growing business competition. All these factors would have tended to equalize the costs of living the major cities.)
• 205Consider these ratios in terms of today’s income in the United States. First, recall that there were no income taxes in 1844. Taxes were quite low, way under double-digit levels. If today’s family of three reached the poverty level at about $8,500 per year in 1985, and if we assume that the average poor family spends all that it pulls in, then the Marx family was spending the equivalent of $85,000 after-tax 1985 dollars, or at least $125,000 of pre-tax income. This would put him at least in the upper two percent of U.S. income earners. This poverty-level figure does not include food stamps, free education, health care services, or other modern welfare benefits. If these are added to the base level income of $8,500, then the poverty line for American families in 1985 was considerably above $10,000 a year, meaning that Marx was pulling in the equivalent of over $100,000 a year after taxes.
• 206Another way of looking at the figures is to assume that the average black family in the United States is at the lower end of the income level. The mean average after-tax income level of black families in 1985 was $16,000. At six times the average Parisian worker’s family, after taxes, the Marx family was doing well. Six times the average U.S. black family after taxes would have placed the Marx family’s income 1985 income at $96,000. The average married couple with two children pulled in $28,000 after taxes. If you compute six times this income, the Marx family pulled in $168,000.
• 207Things grew so bad in these years that Karl Marx was driven into the ultimate breaking point: he actually had to go out and look for a job! He applied for a post at a local railway office. His explanation to his Hanoverian correspondent, Dr. Kugelmann, was straightforward: “I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting.” Anyone who has ever seen Marx’s handwriting can sympathize with both the railway officials and Dr. Kugelmann. He never went looking again.
• 208Things grew so bad in these years that Karl Marx was driven into the ultimate breaking point: he actually had to go out and look for a job! He applied for a post at a local railway office. His explanation to his Hanoverian correspondent, Dr. Kugelmann, was straightforward: “I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting.” Anyone who has ever seen Marx’s handwriting can sympathize with both the railway officials and Dr. Kugelmann. He never went looking again.
• 209There is no denying that the Marx family lived in abject poverty in these years. But the textbooks seldom mention that the cause of this self-imposed poverty was that Marx never bothered to go out and get a job. “Nothing human is foreign to me,” he once wrote, citing the Roman Republic’s playwright Terence, thereby proclaiming his personal commitment to radical humanism. Nothing human was foreign to Marx, one is tempted to add, except steady employment. In 1864, he had squandered a fortune. The money had been advanced (given) to him by Engels, plus what he inherited from his mother’s estate, plus a huge inheritance from Wilhelm Wolff. In 1865, broke again, he was offered the opportunity to write a column each month on the movements of the money-market. He refused to accept the job, never bothering to so much as offer an explanation.
• 210Karl’s mother paid off his old debts, and through the executor of her estate, her immensely successful industrialist brother-in-law Lion Philips. Marx received £160, part of which he spent on a whirlwind European tour.
• 211Karl’s mother paid off his old debts, and through the executor of her estate, her immensely successful industrialist brother-in-law Lion Philips. Marx received £160, part of which he spent on a whirlwind European tour.
• 212Finally, in 1863, Engels was able to scrape together £125, and possibly more—the record is unclear—for Marx’s relief. It was on this occasion that Engels criticized Marx openly, the only time he ever did so. In January, Engels’s “wife” died, and he wrote to Marx in despair. Marx replied with two brief sentences of regret and then launched into a description of his own financial woes. Engels was infuriated, told Marx so, and Marx apologized—possibly the only time in his adult life that he apologized to anyone outside his immediate family. So, Engels sent him the money, and the two partners were reconciled.
• 213In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100. He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824. Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff. In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate). Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.
• 214In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100. He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824. Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff. In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate). Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.
• 215In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100. He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824. Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff. In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate). Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.
• 216In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100. He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824. Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff. In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate). Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.
• 217In late 1863, Marx’s mother died. His share of the inheritance, minus the advance, came to something less than £100. He collected this early in 1864. It was enough, as one biography puts it, to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” Then came the deluge. An obscure German follower, Wilhelm Wolff, one of the original eighteen conspirators of the 1846 League of the Just, died and left Marx the staggering (by 1864 standards) sum of £824. Marx later dedicated Das Kapital to Wolff. In September, Engels was made a full partner in his father’s firm, and may have been less resentful than usual when Marx demanded an additional £40, which he insisted was owed to him by Engels (who was executor of Wolff’s estate). Thus, in one year Marx was the recipient of almost £1000.
• 218When I first began looking into Marx’s finances (prior to the publication of Payne’s revealing biography), I began to wonder just how much this money amounted to in terms of purchasing power. Not one biography prior to Payne’s asked this fundamental question. Professor Bowley has estimated that in 1860, the income of an agricultural laborer in the lowest ten percent of the British population was something like £30 annually. An average income for a worker would have been about £45 per year. For those in the upper ten percent of the population, a 70-pound figure would have been typical. The income of the Marx family in 1863 would have put them in the upper five percent of the British population! That was the sum sent by Engels to mitigate “at least the worst of Marx’s distress.” His income during the next year, 1864, would have been equivalent to the wages paid to over twenty “average” British proletarians.
• 219Incredible as it may seem, in May of 1865 the Marx family was penniless again. On July 31 of that year he wrote to Engels for more money, claiming that he had been in hock to a pawnshop for two months. Dr. Kugelmann received a letter in October which contained these words: “My economic position has become so bad as a result of my long illness and the many expenses which it entailed, that I am faced with a financial crisis in the immediate future, a thing which, apart from the direct effects on me and my family, would also be disastrous for me politically, particularly here in London, where one must ‘keep up appearances.’”
• 220Incredible as it may seem, in May of 1865 the Marx family was penniless again. On July 31 of that year he wrote to Engels for more money, claiming that he had been in hock to a pawnshop for two months. Dr. Kugelmann received a letter in October which contained these words: “My economic position has become so bad as a result of my long illness and the many expenses which it entailed, that I am faced with a financial crisis in the immediate future, a thing which, apart from the direct effects on me and my family, would also be disastrous for me politically, particularly here in London, where one must ‘keep up appearances.’”
• 221It would seem that either London’s radical society had been infected with a severe case of “bourgeois affectations,” or else Dr. Marx was now associating with those of very high class standings. Marx then went on to ask Kugelmann if he knew of anyone who would loan him money at a rate of five to six percent interest, since, as he announced, “I am now paying 20 to 30 percent interest for the small sums which I borrow, but even so I cannot put off my creditors much longer. . . .” Marx, the economist of the proletarian class, was hardly what we could call a sound financial administrator.
• 222Where did the money go? Payne’s biography supplies a key clue. In a letter to his uncle Lion Philips, Marx announced (June 1864) that he had made £400 on the stock exchange. On July 4th, he wrote to Engels asking for the final settlement of the Wolff legacy: “If I had had the money during the last ten days, I would have been able to make a good deal on the stock exchange. The time has now come when my wit and very little money one can really make a killing in London.” Unfortunately, Marx forgot that when some people are making killings on the stock exchange, others frequently are getting killed. We cannot be certain, but Marx’s gambling instincts may have been the cause, at least in part, of his financial downfall.
• 223Expenditures, as we all know, tend to rise as income rises. With his mother’s small legacy in hand, Marx had moved his family into a new home in March of 1864, shortly before the news of the legacy from Wolff arrived. This represented a leap into the upper middle class. Payne’s description of Marx’s home (and the photograph of it in his book) is revealing: “No one arriving at the new house on Maitland Park Road would mistake it for a workman’s lodging. It was spacious and handsome, with cornices over the windows and elegant Corinthian columns at the head of the steps, with a small garden in front and a larger one at the back. Like nearly all the columned houses in London, this house gave an impression of subdued affluence. A doctor, a local magistrate, or a businessman who worked in the city would not have been out of place in it.”
• 224Karl Marx remained in this home until 1875, at which time he moved into one which was apparently close to being identical with the Maitland Park home (this final residence was destroyed during the World War II). Jenny, his wife, gave a fancy ball in October 1864, another drain on Marx’s finances, and she gave others as the years rolled on. No doubt they served the Marx family as reminders of their affluent youth. His housing preferences certainly confirms the observation of Logan Pearsal Smith: “All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.”
• 225Karl Marx remained in this home until 1875, at which time he moved into one which was apparently close to being identical with the Maitland Park home (this final residence was destroyed during the World War II). Jenny, his wife, gave a fancy ball in October 1864, another drain on Marx’s finances, and she gave others as the years rolled on. No doubt they served the Marx family as reminders of their affluent youth. His housing preferences certainly confirms the observation of Logan Pearsal Smith: “All reformers, however strict their social conscience, live in houses just as big as they can pay for.”
• 226When Engels decided to sell his interest in the family firm in 1869, he wrote to Marx and asked him how much money it would take to clear up all of his debts. Marx replied by return mail that he was £210 in arrears, “of which about 75 are for pawnshop and interest.” In July 1869, Engels settled his accounts with the firm, and was able to pay off Marx’s debts, while putting him on an annual pension of £350. Yet Marx claimed that even this large sum was not enough for him to live comfortably. A year before, in a letter to Kugelmann, he had written this astounding message: “You may be sure that I have often discussed leaving London for Geneva, not only with myself and my family, but with Engels. Here I have to spend from 400 to £500 annually; in Geneva I could live on £200.”
• 227When Engels decided to sell his interest in the family firm in 1869, he wrote to Marx and asked him how much money it would take to clear up all of his debts. Marx replied by return mail that he was £210 in arrears, “of which about 75 are for pawnshop and interest.” In July 1869, Engels settled his accounts with the firm, and was able to pay off Marx’s debts, while putting him on an annual pension of £350. Yet Marx claimed that even this large sum was not enough for him to live comfortably. A year before, in a letter to Kugelmann, he had written this astounding message: “You may be sure that I have often discussed leaving London for Geneva, not only with myself and my family, but with Engels. Here I have to spend from 400 to £500 annually; in Geneva I could live on £200.”
• 228Marx, in short, felt he was unable to live comfortably on an income greater than that enjoyed by ninety-eight percent of his countrymen—in a nation which, per capita, was the wealthiest in the world. Incredibly, one biography puts it this way: “But his anxieties only really ended in 1869, when Engels sold his share in the cotton mill and was able to make Marx a definite, if moderate, yearly allowance.” That is how history gets rewritten.
• 229Marx, in short, felt he was unable to live comfortably on an income greater than that enjoyed by ninety-eight percent of his countrymen—in a nation which, per capita, was the wealthiest in the world. Incredibly, one biography puts it this way: “But his anxieties only really ended in 1869, when Engels sold his share in the cotton mill and was able to make Marx a definite, if moderate, yearly allowance.” That is how history gets rewritten.
• 230We can now place the myth of Marx’s poverty in its proper perspective. He was poor during only fifteen years of his sixty-five-year career, in large part due to his unwillingness to use his doctorate and go out to get a job. His economic opinions had been formed, at least in their essentials, before this poverty set in, and the final culmination of his system, Das Kapital, published in 1867, was completed in the years of high income. His own life seems to stand as a testimony against the validity of his doctrine of economic determinism. The philosopher-economist of class revolution—the “Red Doctor of Soho” who spent only six years in that run-down neighborhood—was one of England’s wealthier citizens during the last two decades of his life. But he could not make ends meet.
• 231Fritz Raddatz correctly notes that Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus was a work of criticism. “Even in this very first work Marx showed himself as an ‘anti’ writer, an author who defined his own position as a result of polemic and criticism. His most important productions have as their title or subtitle the word ‘Critique’; his less important polemical writings are attempts to pick a quarrel or to counterattack.” Alvin Gouldner makes a similar observation. Look at the titles and subtitles of his essays and books: “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). As was the case in so many other aspects of the origin of Marxism, Engels was the originator of the tradition. He started this “critique” mania with his early titles, Schelling and Revelation: Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction Against the Free Philosophy (1841), and “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws” (1842).
• 232Fritz Raddatz correctly notes that Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus was a work of criticism. “Even in this very first work Marx showed himself as an ‘anti’ writer, an author who defined his own position as a result of polemic and criticism. His most important productions have as their title or subtitle the word ‘Critique’; his less important polemical writings are attempts to pick a quarrel or to counterattack.” Alvin Gouldner makes a similar observation. Look at the titles and subtitles of his essays and books: “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). As was the case in so many other aspects of the origin of Marxism, Engels was the originator of the tradition. He started this “critique” mania with his early titles, Schelling and Revelation: Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction Against the Free Philosophy (1841), and “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws” (1842).
• 233Fritz Raddatz correctly notes that Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus was a work of criticism. “Even in this very first work Marx showed himself as an ‘anti’ writer, an author who defined his own position as a result of polemic and criticism. His most important productions have as their title or subtitle the word ‘Critique’; his less important polemical writings are attempts to pick a quarrel or to counterattack.” Alvin Gouldner makes a similar observation. Look at the titles and subtitles of his essays and books: “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). As was the case in so many other aspects of the origin of Marxism, Engels was the originator of the tradition. He started this “critique” mania with his early titles, Schelling and Revelation: Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction Against the Free Philosophy (1841), and “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws” (1842).
• 234Fritz Raddatz correctly notes that Marx’s doctoral dissertation on Epicurus and Democritus was a work of criticism. “Even in this very first work Marx showed himself as an ‘anti’ writer, an author who defined his own position as a result of polemic and criticism. His most important productions have as their title or subtitle the word ‘Critique’; his less important polemical writings are attempts to pick a quarrel or to counterattack.” Alvin Gouldner makes a similar observation. Look at the titles and subtitles of his essays and books: “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” (1843), The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (1867); Critique of the Gotha Program (1875). As was the case in so many other aspects of the origin of Marxism, Engels was the originator of the tradition. He started this “critique” mania with his early titles, Schelling and Revelation: Critique of the Latest Attempt of Reaction Against the Free Philosophy (1841), and “On the Critique of the Prussian Press Laws” (1842).
• 235What Marx was, from beginning to end, was an uncompromising critic of others. He criticized everything and everyone except himself, especially those people who had befriended him earlier. Only Engels escaped his wrath, because Engels always offered public obeisance to him, and because he subsidized Marx handsomely, decade after decade. (In their only known dispute, Marx backed down—apparently the only time he ever backed down in any dispute.) Karl Marx was the foremost hater and most incessant whiner in the history of Western Civilization. He was a spoiled, overeducated brat who never grew up; he just grew more shrill as he grew older. His lifelong hatred and whining have led to the deaths (so far) of perhaps a hundred million people, depending on how many people perished under Mao’s tyranny. We will probably never know.
• 236Whiners, if given power, readily become tyrants. Marx was seen by his contemporaries as a potential tyrant. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), the Italian revolutionary, and a rival of Marx’s in the International Workingmen’s Association in the mid-1860s, once described Marx as “a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind . . . extraordinarily sly, shifty and taciturn. Marx is very jealous of his authority as leader of the Party; against his political rivals and opponents he is vindictive and implacable; he does not rest until he has beaten them down; his overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for power. Despite the communist egalitarianism which he preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party; admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition.” This is the essence of Marxism, despite Marx’s claims to the contrary: a system of bureaucratic control that attempts to overcome the leader’s lack of omniscience and omnipresence by means of top-down centralized power. It has been the characteristic feature of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and subsequent Communist dictators. It is inherent in the Communist system.
• 237Whiners, if given power, readily become tyrants. Marx was seen by his contemporaries as a potential tyrant. Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–72), the Italian revolutionary, and a rival of Marx’s in the International Workingmen’s Association in the mid-1860s, once described Marx as “a destructive spirit whose heart was filled with hatred rather than love of mankind . . . extraordinarily sly, shifty and taciturn. Marx is very jealous of his authority as leader of the Party; against his political rivals and opponents he is vindictive and implacable; he does not rest until he has beaten them down; his overriding characteristic is boundless ambition and thirst for power. Despite the communist egalitarianism which he preaches he is the absolute ruler of his party; admittedly he does everything himself but he is also the only one to give orders and he tolerates no opposition.” This is the essence of Marxism, despite Marx’s claims to the contrary: a system of bureaucratic control that attempts to overcome the leader’s lack of omniscience and omnipresence by means of top-down centralized power. It has been the characteristic feature of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and subsequent Communist dictators. It is inherent in the Communist system.
• 238Michael Bakunin, the revolutionary anarchist and rival of Marx in their battle for control over the International Working-men’s Association, accurately prophesied in 1869 what would be the legacy of Marx’s theory of Communism: statism.
• 239It is readily apparent how such a seemingly simple plan of organization can excite the imagination of the workers, who are as eager for justice as they are for freedom; and who foolishly imagine that the one can exist without the other; as if, in order to conquer and consolidate justice and equality, one could depend on the efforts of others, particularly on governments, regardless of how they may be elected or controlled, to speak and act for the people! For the proletariat this will, in reality, be nothing but a barracks: a regime, where regimented workingmen and women will sleep, wake, work, and live to the beat of a drum; where the shrewd and educated will be granted government privileges; and where the mercenary-minded, attracted by the immensity of the international speculations of the state bank, will find a vast field for lucrative, underhanded dealings.
• 240How critical is “critical?” In testing the truth or falsehood of any world-and-life view, we need to ask ourselves: “Does the theorist who is proposing this comprehensive explanation of cause and effect actually apply it to his own life and work?” Almost no modern social theorist is willing to do this. Allan Bloom has commented on this carefully ignored problem: “It is Nietzsche’s merit that he was aware that to philosophize is radically problematic in the cultural, historicist dispensation. He recognized the terrible intellectual and moral risks involved. At the center of his every thought was the question ‘How is it possible to do what I am doing?’ He tried to apply to his own thought the teachings of cultural relativism. This practically nobody else does. For example, Freud says that men are motivated by desire for sex and power, but he did not apply those motives to explain his own science or his own scientific activity. But if he can be a true scientist, i.e., motivated by love of the truth, so can other men, and his description of their motives is thus mortally flawed. Or if he is motivated by sex or power, he is not a scientist, and his science is only one means among many possible to attain those ends. This contradiction runs throughout the natural and social sciences. They give an account of things that cannot possibly explain the conduct of their practitioners. The highly ethical economist who speaks only about gain, the public-spirited political scientist who sees only group interest, the physicist who signs petitions in favor of freedom while recognizing only unfreedom—mathematical law governing moved matter—in the universe are symptomatic of the difficulty of providing a self-explanation for science and a ground for the theoretical life, which has dogged the life of the mind since early modernity but has become particularly acute with cultural relativism.”
• 241Consider the theories of Marx and Engels. These men preached the gospel of inevitable proletarian revolution. But who were they? Two bourgeois writers who were converted to revolutionary socialism in their mid-twenties. Both were sons of successful bourgeois fathers, and Engels grew steadily richer over the years because of his skills in managing his father’s industrial textile mills. It never seemed to bother Lenin that he had no consistent Marxist explanation for the historical fact regarding the workers that he could not deny: the Social-Democratic consciousness of proletarians does not develop by itself. “This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness. . . . The theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals. The founders of modern scientific Socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.” The obvious question is: Why? It has no obvious Marxist answer.
• 242Marx and Engels also predicted the initial successes of this proletarian revolution in nations that had adopted modern industrial capitalism. So, where have the only successful indigenous Communist revolutions taken place? In rural Third World nations and in nations that were only in the very early stages of industrialism (e.g., Russia). Who have their ideological recruits been? First and foremost, intellectuals in industrial countries who have themselves recruited no proletarian followers but who have strongly influenced a small army of other intellectuals who are basically favorable to Marxist humanism, or who are at least unfavorable to the efforts of the enemies of Marxist tyrannies. Second, highly educated bourgeois intellectual activists in rural nations who have succeeded in recruiting dedicated peasant followers. In short, nowhere have the theories of Marx and Engels been less applicable or their prophecies less accurate than in the history of Communism. This is seldom discussed by Communists. The critical attitude fostered by Marxism has not been sufficiently self-critical. Marxists apply Marxism’s comprehensive theories only to non-Marxist theories and societies. This has been true from the very beginning of Marxism.
• 243Socialist economics eventually proved to be no solution to Marx’s intellectual problems. The fact that Marx refused to publish the second and third volumes of Capital and his “Theories of Surplus Value” is at least circumstantial evidence of the “dead end” character of his economic system, since he had plenty of money from Engels at this stage of his career; he could have afforded to get them published. If he was willing to publish his doctoral dissertation as a young man when he had much less money, why not his post-1867 magna opera? It was not what he wrote early in his career and did not bother to publish in uncompleted form that is most important, for he later submitted what he regarded as superior manuscripts to his publishers. The one major exception is The German Ideology [1845], which he and Engels tried unsuccessfully to get published, and which was never put into final form. What he labored on for a decade, 1857–67, and then refused to publish is what is most significant, for it reveals the breakdown of his system. This breakdown produced a kind of mental breakdown in Marx.
• 244As I mentioned in Marx’s Religion in 1968, the fact that he got to the end of volume 3 of Capital without defining “class” is significant. He started to define that crucial term, but the manuscript ends two paragraphs later. The manuscript then sat on his shelves for well over a decade, gathering dust. Mises is correct: “Significantly the third volume breaks off after a few sentences in the chapter headed ‘The Classes.’ In treating the problem of class Marx got only as far as setting up a dogma without proof, and no further.”
• 245The dead ends of his system finally overwhelmed him. Marx’s economic analysis was visibly dead in 1867; Marx was smart enough to know that it was dead, so he wisely stopped writing economic analysis. The most accurate thing Marx ever wrote was his 1858 assessment of his notes for the manuscript that later became Das Kapital, notes which today are hailed as crucial in the development of Marx’s later thought, published as the Grundrisse. Marx called this material Scheisse. He saw clearly after 1867 that there is little use spending your “golden years” writing even more Scheisse.
• 246As it subsequently proved, however, for the last fifteen years of his life following publication of Volume I Marx hardly, if at all, worked on Capital. The information given by Engels in his prefaces to Volumes 2 and 3 was almost sensational: the manuscripts he found among Marx’s papers had clearly been written between 1864 and 1867, in other words before Volume I had been published. Moreover, Marx had not been prevented from completing his book by illness or debility. . . .Letters show that Marx actually ran away from this book, that he definitely looked for excuses. . . . He delved into such problems as the chemistry of nitrogen fertilizers, agriculture, physics, and mathematics. His book of excerpts of 1878 is full of tables and sketches, on atmospheric temperature for instance, or drawings of sea shells and fossils; whole pages are covered with chemical formulae; on page after page whole lines are carefully erased with a ruler. Methodical labor for no good purpose. This time-wasting in senseless and extreme precision was a method of evasion; even in the early days Engels had warned him: “As long as you have some book you think important lying in front of you unread, you will never get down to writing.” And there were always sufficient books lying unread to satisfy the appetite of this gargantuan devourer of paper—studies on differential calculus, a Danish theory of the state, or Russian grammar. Marx immediately wrote a treatise on differential calculus and various other mathematical manuscripts; he learned Danish; he learned Russian. Among his papers Engels, who knew only too well the defenses behind which Marx barricaded himself, found “over two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone.” The word ‘excuse’ appears even in a letter from Marx himself to the Russian translator of Capital; in it he counts himself lucky that publication in Germany is prevented by anti-socialist legislation and that fortunately fresh material from Russia and the United States provides him with the excuse he is looking for to continue with his research instead of finishing the book and publishing it.
• 247As it subsequently proved, however, for the last fifteen years of his life following publication of Volume I Marx hardly, if at all, worked on Capital. The information given by Engels in his prefaces to Volumes 2 and 3 was almost sensational: the manuscripts he found among Marx’s papers had clearly been written between 1864 and 1867, in other words before Volume I had been published. Moreover, Marx had not been prevented from completing his book by illness or debility. . . .Letters show that Marx actually ran away from this book, that he definitely looked for excuses. . . . He delved into such problems as the chemistry of nitrogen fertilizers, agriculture, physics, and mathematics. His book of excerpts of 1878 is full of tables and sketches, on atmospheric temperature for instance, or drawings of sea shells and fossils; whole pages are covered with chemical formulae; on page after page whole lines are carefully erased with a ruler. Methodical labor for no good purpose. This time-wasting in senseless and extreme precision was a method of evasion; even in the early days Engels had warned him: “As long as you have some book you think important lying in front of you unread, you will never get down to writing.” And there were always sufficient books lying unread to satisfy the appetite of this gargantuan devourer of paper—studies on differential calculus, a Danish theory of the state, or Russian grammar. Marx immediately wrote a treatise on differential calculus and various other mathematical manuscripts; he learned Danish; he learned Russian. Among his papers Engels, who knew only too well the defenses behind which Marx barricaded himself, found “over two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone.” The word ‘excuse’ appears even in a letter from Marx himself to the Russian translator of Capital; in it he counts himself lucky that publication in Germany is prevented by anti-socialist legislation and that fortunately fresh material from Russia and the United States provides him with the excuse he is looking for to continue with his research instead of finishing the book and publishing it.
• 248As it subsequently proved, however, for the last fifteen years of his life following publication of Volume I Marx hardly, if at all, worked on Capital. The information given by Engels in his prefaces to Volumes 2 and 3 was almost sensational: the manuscripts he found among Marx’s papers had clearly been written between 1864 and 1867, in other words before Volume I had been published. Moreover, Marx had not been prevented from completing his book by illness or debility. . . .Letters show that Marx actually ran away from this book, that he definitely looked for excuses. . . . He delved into such problems as the chemistry of nitrogen fertilizers, agriculture, physics, and mathematics. His book of excerpts of 1878 is full of tables and sketches, on atmospheric temperature for instance, or drawings of sea shells and fossils; whole pages are covered with chemical formulae; on page after page whole lines are carefully erased with a ruler. Methodical labor for no good purpose. This time-wasting in senseless and extreme precision was a method of evasion; even in the early days Engels had warned him: “As long as you have some book you think important lying in front of you unread, you will never get down to writing.” And there were always sufficient books lying unread to satisfy the appetite of this gargantuan devourer of paper—studies on differential calculus, a Danish theory of the state, or Russian grammar. Marx immediately wrote a treatise on differential calculus and various other mathematical manuscripts; he learned Danish; he learned Russian. Among his papers Engels, who knew only too well the defenses behind which Marx barricaded himself, found “over two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone.” The word ‘excuse’ appears even in a letter from Marx himself to the Russian translator of Capital; in it he counts himself lucky that publication in Germany is prevented by anti-socialist legislation and that fortunately fresh material from Russia and the United States provides him with the excuse he is looking for to continue with his research instead of finishing the book and publishing it.
• 249Raddatz has recognized the fragmented nature of Marx’s legacy: “The fact that Marx’s life’s work remained fragmentary, therefore, cannot be laid at the door of external circumstances. Since, apart from his great polemics or works of criticism and shorter inflammatory writings, everything remained uncompleted, the question arises whether this was due to some fundamental tendency.” Marx was endlessly rewriting pieces that were more than a month old. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue records that Marx could not bear to publish anything that was less than perfect. Yet he left behind a mountain of notebooks and jumbled papers. And out of this jumble many academic reputations have been constructed!
• 250Raddatz has recognized the fragmented nature of Marx’s legacy: “The fact that Marx’s life’s work remained fragmentary, therefore, cannot be laid at the door of external circumstances. Since, apart from his great polemics or works of criticism and shorter inflammatory writings, everything remained uncompleted, the question arises whether this was due to some fundamental tendency.” Marx was endlessly rewriting pieces that were more than a month old. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue records that Marx could not bear to publish anything that was less than perfect. Yet he left behind a mountain of notebooks and jumbled papers. And out of this jumble many academic reputations have been constructed!
• 251His biographer (or more accurately, his hagiographer) Franz Mehring recognized Marx’s life-long problem with getting anything written in final form, from his doctoral dissertation onward. “It was characteristic of Marx, and it remained so until the end of his days, that his insatiable urge to knowledge permitted him to master difficult problems quickly, whilst his merciless self-criticism prevented him from having done with them equally quickly.” Merciless self-criticism was never one of Marx’s visible personality traits, but his overwhelming desire to avoid making a mistake in print was increasingly a problem for Engels as Marx grew older. He could not get Marx to finish anything.
• 252Arnold Ruge, one of Marx’s early radical associates, had lived at the same address in Paris during one of Marx’s numerous exiles. Ruge had recommended in 1842 that Marx be made co-editor of the short-lived Rheinische Zeitung, and who within two years became an early target of his invective, once described Marx as follows: “He is a strange character with a pronounced bent towards scholarship and authorship but totally incompetent as a journalist. He reads a great deal; he works at extraordinary pressure and has a talent for criticism which sometimes develops into presumptuous and discourteous dialectics; he never completes anything, is always breaking off and plunging back again into an endless welter of books.” It could be said of Marx that he was the perpetual sophomore, learning new material rapidly and superficially, but inevitably becoming bogged down with details of analysis when they proved to be inconvenient with his presuppositions and initial hypotheses, as they invariably proved to be.
• 253Arnold Ruge, one of Marx’s early radical associates, had lived at the same address in Paris during one of Marx’s numerous exiles. Ruge had recommended in 1842 that Marx be made co-editor of the short-lived Rheinische Zeitung, and who within two years became an early target of his invective, once described Marx as follows: “He is a strange character with a pronounced bent towards scholarship and authorship but totally incompetent as a journalist. He reads a great deal; he works at extraordinary pressure and has a talent for criticism which sometimes develops into presumptuous and discourteous dialectics; he never completes anything, is always breaking off and plunging back again into an endless welter of books.” It could be said of Marx that he was the perpetual sophomore, learning new material rapidly and superficially, but inevitably becoming bogged down with details of analysis when they proved to be inconvenient with his presuppositions and initial hypotheses, as they invariably proved to be.
• 254(Marx later got even with Ruge, as he did with all his former colleagues except Engels, who never stopped sending him money. He became a paid informant for the Austrian police, spying on his revolutionary associates. Ruge was one of them. He was paid the equivalent of $25 for each bit of information he turned up. This is not one of the biographical details heralded in the dozens of conventional histories of Marx, although the story has been known since 1960.)
• 255Another feature of Marx’s personality was his inability to co-operate with his fellow revolutionaries. Throughout his career, he found himself bickering with former associates and present workers who were, in Marx’s mind, rivals. With Engels alone he remained on friendly terms, and Engels was careful always to give Marx the two things which he required: unfailing subservience and money. Otto Rühle, by no means an unfavorable biographer, has not exaggerated when he writes that “Marx was one of those persons who are overpowered by a perpetual urge towards the highest, the purest, the most ideal. It was not merely his ambition to be the most famous among those who have studied socialist literature, and the most learned of all the critics of economic science; he also wanted to be the most efficient revolutionist, and pre-eminent among the advocates of revolution. He wanted to expound the purest theory, to establish the most complete system of communism. As a preliminary to the demonstration of this superiority, he must prove that the socialist theories of all his predecessors were worthless, false, contemptible, or ludicrous. He had to show that the socialism of the utopists was a crazy-quilt of outworn and questionable ideas. That Proudhon was a suspect intruder into the realm of socialist thought. That Lassalle, Bakunin, and [Johann] Schweitzer were tainted with bourgeois ideology, and had probably sold themselves to the enemy. He, Marx alone, was in possession of the true doctrine. His was the crystal-clear knowledge; his was the philosopher’s stone; his the immaculate conception of socialism; his the divine truth. With contemptuous wrath, with bitter mockery and profound hostility, he rejected all other opinions, fought against all other convictions, than his own, persecuted all ideas that had not originated in his own brain. For him, there was no wisdom except his own, no socialism other than the socialism he proclaimed, no true gospel outside the limits of his own doctrine. His work was the essence of intellectual purity and scientific integrity. His system was Allah, and he was its prophet.”
• 256Marx’s unwillingness to tolerate anything which he regarded as insubordination was the cause of numerous splits within the ranks of the proletarian revolutionary movement in Europe, some of which were avoidable. Even Franz Mehring, the author of the semi-official biography of Marx, has to admit that during the dispute with Lassalle, the founder of the Marxist German Social Democratic Party, Marx was excessively bitter. “In his letters to Engels Marx condemns Lassalle’s activities with a severity which occasionally develops into bitter injustice.” Marx’s references to him as “a little kike” or as a “Jewish nigger” are certainly not in the best spirit of his own self-proclaimed neutrality.
• 257Marx’s unwillingness to tolerate anything which he regarded as insubordination was the cause of numerous splits within the ranks of the proletarian revolutionary movement in Europe, some of which were avoidable. Even Franz Mehring, the author of the semi-official biography of Marx, has to admit that during the dispute with Lassalle, the founder of the Marxist German Social Democratic Party, Marx was excessively bitter. “In his letters to Engels Marx condemns Lassalle’s activities with a severity which occasionally develops into bitter injustice.” Marx’s references to him as “a little kike” or as a “Jewish nigger” are certainly not in the best spirit of his own self-proclaimed neutrality.
• 258This brings up the whole question of Marx’s supposed anti-Semitism. The question is extremely difficult to deal with, if for no other reason than the fact that it involves a post-mortem psycho-analysis, a questionable academic endeavor at best. How can we know what he thought in an area where his writings are so ambiguous? Those who claim that he was an anti-Semite invariably point to the letters that he wrote to Engels which contained nasty statements about Lassalle. Why would he use the word “Jew” as the ultimate form of contempt? In his essay published in 1844, “On the Jewish Question,” what was he attacking, his critics ask, if not the Jewish faith and culture? The answer, at least in part, is that he was attacking bourgeois life in general, using the famous stereotype of the European Jewish financier as his representative type of the bourgeois man. He saw the Jewish community as an infected, diseased culture—totally bourgeois, and always seeking after money. But the critic’s question still remains: why did he single out the Jews? Sidney Hook has tried to defend Marx on this point: “Although Marx was free of anti-Semitic prejudice, he unfortunately was not over-sensitive to using the term ‘Jew,’ often with unsavory adjectives, as an epithet of abuse.” But the fact remains that “Jew” was the word which Marx chose.
• 259This brings up the whole question of Marx’s supposed anti-Semitism. The question is extremely difficult to deal with, if for no other reason than the fact that it involves a post-mortem psycho-analysis, a questionable academic endeavor at best. How can we know what he thought in an area where his writings are so ambiguous? Those who claim that he was an anti-Semite invariably point to the letters that he wrote to Engels which contained nasty statements about Lassalle. Why would he use the word “Jew” as the ultimate form of contempt? In his essay published in 1844, “On the Jewish Question,” what was he attacking, his critics ask, if not the Jewish faith and culture? The answer, at least in part, is that he was attacking bourgeois life in general, using the famous stereotype of the European Jewish financier as his representative type of the bourgeois man. He saw the Jewish community as an infected, diseased culture—totally bourgeois, and always seeking after money. But the critic’s question still remains: why did he single out the Jews? Sidney Hook has tried to defend Marx on this point: “Although Marx was free of anti-Semitic prejudice, he unfortunately was not over-sensitive to using the term ‘Jew,’ often with unsavory adjectives, as an epithet of abuse.” But the fact remains that “Jew” was the word which Marx chose.
• 260Writing a negative critical book is a good post-Ph.D exercise for a newly certified scholar, but it is a sign of immaturity when a scholar spends his whole life criticizing the ideas of others, never putting together a positive alternative. It is evidence that he has no positive alternative. What I have just described is the intellectual career of Karl Marx. Marx never stopped writing long-winded critical refutations of his opponents. His books’ targets were almost always the writings of his socialist rivals, and usually very obscure rivals at that, not Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, or other important advocates of classical economics. Marx never provided any blueprints regarding the operation of the communist society to come. He offered no program for building a new society after the revolution, except for the famous ten points of the Communist Manifesto (1848). He never again brought up the subject of the transition from capitalist to socialist to Communist society. Ten points in a pamphlet do not a civilization build. Almost three decades later, he wrote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This is a slogan, not a program. Lenin played the same game when he wrote that a Communist society is simply one which combines political power and electricity, one which gives equal pay to all workers and can be run by simple bookkeepers, one in which gold will be used for public lavatories. Marx and Lenin could produce slogans but no blueprints. They could tear down; they could not build up.
• 261Writing a negative critical book is a good post-Ph.D exercise for a newly certified scholar, but it is a sign of immaturity when a scholar spends his whole life criticizing the ideas of others, never putting together a positive alternative. It is evidence that he has no positive alternative. What I have just described is the intellectual career of Karl Marx. Marx never stopped writing long-winded critical refutations of his opponents. His books’ targets were almost always the writings of his socialist rivals, and usually very obscure rivals at that, not Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, or other important advocates of classical economics. Marx never provided any blueprints regarding the operation of the communist society to come. He offered no program for building a new society after the revolution, except for the famous ten points of the Communist Manifesto (1848). He never again brought up the subject of the transition from capitalist to socialist to Communist society. Ten points in a pamphlet do not a civilization build. Almost three decades later, he wrote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This is a slogan, not a program. Lenin played the same game when he wrote that a Communist society is simply one which combines political power and electricity, one which gives equal pay to all workers and can be run by simple bookkeepers, one in which gold will be used for public lavatories. Marx and Lenin could produce slogans but no blueprints. They could tear down; they could not build up.
• 262Writing a negative critical book is a good post-Ph.D exercise for a newly certified scholar, but it is a sign of immaturity when a scholar spends his whole life criticizing the ideas of others, never putting together a positive alternative. It is evidence that he has no positive alternative. What I have just described is the intellectual career of Karl Marx. Marx never stopped writing long-winded critical refutations of his opponents. His books’ targets were almost always the writings of his socialist rivals, and usually very obscure rivals at that, not Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, or other important advocates of classical economics. Marx never provided any blueprints regarding the operation of the communist society to come. He offered no program for building a new society after the revolution, except for the famous ten points of the Communist Manifesto (1848). He never again brought up the subject of the transition from capitalist to socialist to Communist society. Ten points in a pamphlet do not a civilization build. Almost three decades later, he wrote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This is a slogan, not a program. Lenin played the same game when he wrote that a Communist society is simply one which combines political power and electricity, one which gives equal pay to all workers and can be run by simple bookkeepers, one in which gold will be used for public lavatories. Marx and Lenin could produce slogans but no blueprints. They could tear down; they could not build up.
• 263Writing a negative critical book is a good post-Ph.D exercise for a newly certified scholar, but it is a sign of immaturity when a scholar spends his whole life criticizing the ideas of others, never putting together a positive alternative. It is evidence that he has no positive alternative. What I have just described is the intellectual career of Karl Marx. Marx never stopped writing long-winded critical refutations of his opponents. His books’ targets were almost always the writings of his socialist rivals, and usually very obscure rivals at that, not Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, or other important advocates of classical economics. Marx never provided any blueprints regarding the operation of the communist society to come. He offered no program for building a new society after the revolution, except for the famous ten points of the Communist Manifesto (1848). He never again brought up the subject of the transition from capitalist to socialist to Communist society. Ten points in a pamphlet do not a civilization build. Almost three decades later, he wrote: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” This is a slogan, not a program. Lenin played the same game when he wrote that a Communist society is simply one which combines political power and electricity, one which gives equal pay to all workers and can be run by simple bookkeepers, one in which gold will be used for public lavatories. Marx and Lenin could produce slogans but no blueprints. They could tear down; they could not build up.
• 264My view regarding the importance of Karl Marx’s thought in intellectual history is tied closely to my view of the political importance of Lenin. Had Lenin not successfully pulled off the October Revolution in 1917, the name Karl Marx would be known only to specialists in the history of sociology, to a handful of specialists in late-nineteenth-century trade union history and Russian intellectual history, and to an even smaller group of specialists in the history of mid-nineteenth-century materialist Hegelian philosophy. Wilhelm Windelband, for example, devoted only two brief bibliographical entries and part of one paragraph to Marx and Engels in his 1901 History of Philosophy. The fact is, Marx had very little influence prior to 1917, especially in the United States. Had it not been for Lenin, references to Marx would be limited to a series of obscure footnotes, rather than a library of books.
• 265My view regarding the importance of Karl Marx’s thought in intellectual history is tied closely to my view of the political importance of Lenin. Had Lenin not successfully pulled off the October Revolution in 1917, the name Karl Marx would be known only to specialists in the history of sociology, to a handful of specialists in late-nineteenth-century trade union history and Russian intellectual history, and to an even smaller group of specialists in the history of mid-nineteenth-century materialist Hegelian philosophy. Wilhelm Windelband, for example, devoted only two brief bibliographical entries and part of one paragraph to Marx and Engels in his 1901 History of Philosophy. The fact is, Marx had very little influence prior to 1917, especially in the United States. Had it not been for Lenin, references to Marx would be limited to a series of obscure footnotes, rather than a library of books.
• 266My view regarding the importance of Karl Marx’s thought in intellectual history is tied closely to my view of the political importance of Lenin. Had Lenin not successfully pulled off the October Revolution in 1917, the name Karl Marx would be known only to specialists in the history of sociology, to a handful of specialists in late-nineteenth-century trade union history and Russian intellectual history, and to an even smaller group of specialists in the history of mid-nineteenth-century materialist Hegelian philosophy. Wilhelm Windelband, for example, devoted only two brief bibliographical entries and part of one paragraph to Marx and Engels in his 1901 History of Philosophy. The fact is, Marx had very little influence prior to 1917, especially in the United States. Had it not been for Lenin, references to Marx would be limited to a series of obscure footnotes, rather than a library of books.
• 267But Lenin and his colleagues did pull off the Russian Revolution, much to the surprise of Europe. I am reminded of the comment by Herr Schober, the petty police official who later became Chancellor of Austria. Ludwig von Mises records this about him: “Toward the end of 1915 he reported to his superiors that he doubted the possibility of a Russian revolution. ‘Who, then, could make this revolution? Surely not this Mr. Trotsky, who used to read newspapers in Café Central.’”
• 268Modern intellectuals, always respectful of those who win major wars and also respectful of any radical group that conducts a bloody revolution against traditional, religion-supported authority, have resurrected Marx’s intellectual reputation posthumously. In short, had it not been for Lenin, you would never had heard about Marx. The library shelves devoted to Marxism would be devoted to some other topic. (If the Germans had won World War II, rest assured that many of these shelves would today be filled with books praising the creative humanist vision and the rational economic planning of the Nazis. The fascination that Nazism had for Western scholars and politicians during the 1930s, including John Maynard Keynes, not to mention U.S. businessmen who traded extensively with the Nazi State, is a story not found in today’s textbooks. Why not? Because Hitler lost.)
• 269Modern intellectuals, always respectful of those who win major wars and also respectful of any radical group that conducts a bloody revolution against traditional, religion-supported authority, have resurrected Marx’s intellectual reputation posthumously. In short, had it not been for Lenin, you would never had heard about Marx. The library shelves devoted to Marxism would be devoted to some other topic. (If the Germans had won World War II, rest assured that many of these shelves would today be filled with books praising the creative humanist vision and the rational economic planning of the Nazis. The fascination that Nazism had for Western scholars and politicians during the 1930s, including John Maynard Keynes, not to mention U.S. businessmen who traded extensively with the Nazi State, is a story not found in today’s textbooks. Why not? Because Hitler lost.)
• 270How can we hope to summarize the life and thought of a man whose words posthumously transformed the world? How can we hope to understand what motivated him? Historian Donald Treadgold has raised the question, has admitted that there is no simple answer, but then pointed to a forgotten primary source document that he believes throws light on Marx’s view of his life. In 1865, two years before the publication of Das Kapital, Marx entered these words into the guest book of some relatives:
• 271Did he submit? He submitted all his life to Engels’s benevolent charity. Economically, he was Engels’s “kept man,” who fathered an illegitimate son by his wife’s kept woman, their lifetime family housekeeper Helene Demuth, and who then refused to acknowledge his fatherhood or even allow the mother to keep the baby in his home, for fear of the scandal within the then-publicly prim socialist community, and also for fear of his wife’s jealousy. He forced the mother to give the baby to poverty-stricken foster parents. (Staunch Prometheus!) From 1883, at Marx’s death, until her own death in 1890, Helene Demuth became Engels’s housekeeper, and it was widely assumed that Engels had been the father of her son.
• 272Did he submit? He submitted all his life to Engels’s benevolent charity. Economically, he was Engels’s “kept man,” who fathered an illegitimate son by his wife’s kept woman, their lifetime family housekeeper Helene Demuth, and who then refused to acknowledge his fatherhood or even allow the mother to keep the baby in his home, for fear of the scandal within the then-publicly prim socialist community, and also for fear of his wife’s jealousy. He forced the mother to give the baby to poverty-stricken foster parents. (Staunch Prometheus!) From 1883, at Marx’s death, until her own death in 1890, Helene Demuth became Engels’s housekeeper, and it was widely assumed that Engels had been the father of her son.
• 273Did he submit? He submitted all his life to Engels’s benevolent charity. Economically, he was Engels’s “kept man,” who fathered an illegitimate son by his wife’s kept woman, their lifetime family housekeeper Helene Demuth, and who then refused to acknowledge his fatherhood or even allow the mother to keep the baby in his home, for fear of the scandal within the then-publicly prim socialist community, and also for fear of his wife’s jealousy. He forced the mother to give the baby to poverty-stricken foster parents. (Staunch Prometheus!) From 1883, at Marx’s death, until her own death in 1890, Helene Demuth became Engels’s housekeeper, and it was widely assumed that Engels had been the father of her son.
• 274Did he retain his singleness of purpose? After age 49, he never again wrote a book, but instead buried himself in a self-imposed program of frantic undirected and voluminous reading—a return to the pattern of his youth, when he read day and night (in between all-night sessions at the local pub), but could never bring himself to face the rigors (the “final judgment”) of a doctoral examination at the University of Berlin. In short, in his arrogance he was utterly self-deceived. He also succeeded in deceiving the vast majority of his bourgeois academic commentators. They have taken his verbal strutting at face value.
• 275His chosen public mask was the image of Prometheus, the fire-bringer. He hated the “authoritarian” religion of Christianity. He was self-consciously in revolt against the god of bourgeois civilization, all in the name of proletarian man and the eschatology of the imminent and immanent Communist millennial paradise. Like Prometheus, he brought fire to the society of man—or as Billington has put it, Marx and his revolutionary colleagues brought fire to the minds of men. That fire still rages.
• 276It is remarkable that I, who am by nature a lazy writer, become quite inexhaustible when I have to write to you. I will not and cannot conceal my weakness for you. At times my heart delights in thinking of you and your future. And yet at times I cannot rid myself of ideas which arouse in me sad forebodings and fear when I am struck as if by lightning by the thought: is your heart in accord with your head, your talents? Has it room for the earthly but gentler sentiments which in this vale of sorrow are so essentially consoling for a man of feeling? And since that heart is obviously animated and governed by a demon not granted to all men, is that demon heavenly or Faustian? Will you ever—and that is not the least painful doubt of my heart—will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness? Will—and this doubt has no less tortured me recently since I have come to love a certain person like my own child [Jenny von Westphalen]—will you ever be capable of imparting happiness to those immediately around you?