Requiem for Marx

~  5  ~ Classical Liberal Roots of the Marxist Doctrine of Classes

Ralph Raico

Few ideas are as closely associated with Marxism as the concepts of class and class conflict. It is, for instance, impossible to imagine what a Marxist philosophy of history or a Marxist revolutionary theory would be in their absence. Yet, as with much else in Marxism, these concepts remain ambiguous and contradictory.1 For instance, while Marxist doctrine supposedly grounds classes in the process of production, The Communist Manifesto asserts in its famous opening lines:

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another . . .2

On examination these opposed pairs turn out to be, either wholly or in part, not economic, but legal, categories.3

Neither Marx nor Engels ever resolved the contradictions and ambiguities in their theory in this area. The last chapter of the third and final volume of Capital, published posthumously in 1894, is titled, “Classes.”4 Here Marx states: “The first question to be answered is this: What constitutes a class?” “At first glance” it would seem to be “the identity of revenue and sources of revenue.” That, however, Marx finds inadequate, since “from this standpoint, physicians and officials, e.g., would also constitute two classes . . .” Distinct classes would also be yielded by

the infinite fragmentation of interest [sic] and rank into which the division of social labor splits laborers as well as capitalists and landlords—the latter, e.g., into owners of vineyards, farm owners, owners of forests, mine owners and owners of fisheries.

At this point, there is a note by Engels: “Here the manuscript breaks off.” This was not on account of Marx’s sudden demise, however. The chapter dates from a first draft composed by Marx between 1863 and 1867, that is, sixteen to twenty years before his death.5 Engels’s explanation is that “Marx used to leave such concluding summaries until the final editing, just before going to press, when the latest historical developments furnished him with unfailing regularity with proofs of the most laudable timeliness for his theoretical propositions.”6 This explanation would be more convincing if in the intervening years before his death Marx had elsewhere provided a clear definition of classes consistent with the other parts of his theory.

But whatever the defects of the Marxist concept of classes and of conflicts among them, it remains the case that Marxism is so closely identified with these ideas that an important fact is often lost sight of: not only was the notion of class conflict a commonplace for decades before Marx began to write, but a quite different theory of class conflict had been worked out which itself played a role in the genealogy of Marx’s ideas.

Marxism and the Classical Liberal Doctrine

Adolphe Blanqui was the protégé of Jean-Baptiste Say and succeeded him in the chair of political economy at the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers. In what is probably the first history of economic thought, published in 1837, Blanqui wrote:

In all the revolutions, there have always been but two parties opposing each other; that of the people who wish to live by their own labor, and that of those who would live by the labor of others. . .. Patricians and plebeians, slaves and freemen, guelphs and ghibellines, red roses and white roses, cavaliers and roundheads, liberals and serviles, are only varieties of the same species.7

Blanqui quickly makes clear what he understands to have been at issue in these social struggles:

So, in one country, it is through taxes that the fruit of the laborer’s toil is wrested from him, under pretense of the good of the state; in another, it is by privileges, declaring labor a royal concession, and making one pay dearly for the right to devote himself to it. The same abuse is reproduced under more indirect, but no less oppressive, forms, when, by means of custom-duties, the state shares with the privileged industries the benefits of the taxes imposed on all those who are not privileged.8

Blanqui was by no means the originator of this liberal analysis of the conflict of classes; rather, he drew on a perspective that was widespread in liberal circles in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Marx and Engels were aware of the existence of at least some forms of this earlier notion. In a letter written in 1852 to his follower, Joseph Weydemeyer, the first exponent of Marxism in the United States,9 Marx asserts:

no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of the classes.10

The two most prominent “bourgeois historians” whom he names are the Frenchmen, François Guizot and Augustin Thierry11; two years later, Marx referred to Thierry as “the father of the ‘class struggle’ in French historiography.”12

This “bourgeois” lineage of the Marxist theory was freely conceded by Marx’s immediate followers. Towards the end of his life, Engels suggested that so little did individuals count in history, as compared to the great underlying social forces, that even in the absence of Marx himself, “the materialist conception of history” would have been discovered by others; his evidence is that “Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, and all the English historians up to 1850” were striving towards it.13 Franz Mehring, Plekhanov, and and other scholars of Marxism in the period of the Second International emphasized the roots of the Marxist class conflict doctrine in the liberal historiography of the French Restoration.14 Lenin, too, credited “the bourgeoisie,” not Marx, with having originated the theory of the class struggle.15

Sources of Industrialisme

Of the French historians mentioned, only Augustin Thierry had delved deeply into the subject and had, in fact, participated in shaping a coherent, radical-liberal analysis of classes and class conflict. The purpose of this paper is to sketch the background and content of this original analysis and to discuss various points that arise in connection with it. The possibility that it might prove superior to Marxism as an instrument for interpreting social and political history will also be canvassed.

Liberal class conflict theory emerged in a polished form in France, in the period of the Bourbon Restoration, following the final defeat and exile of Napoleon. From 1817 to 1819, two young liberal intellectuals, Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer, edited the journal, Le Censeur Européen; beginning with the second volume (issue), Augustin Thierry collaborated closely with them. The Censeur Européen developed and disseminated a radical version of liberalism, one that continued to influence liberal thought up to the time of Herbert Spencer and beyond. It can be viewed as a core-constituent—and thus one of the historically defining elements—of authentic liberalism.16 In this sense, a consideration of the world-view of the Censeur Européen is of great importance in helping to give shape and content to the protean concept, ‘‘liberalism.” Moreover, through Henri de Saint-Simon and his followers and through other channels, it had an impact on socialist thought as well. Comte and Dunoyer called their doctrine Industrialisme, Industrialism.17

There were several major sources of Industrialism. One was Antoine Destutt de Tracy, the last and most famous of the Idéologue school of French liberals, whose friend, Thomas Jefferson, arranged for the translation and publication of his Treatise on Political Economy in the United States before it appeared in France.18 Tracy’s definition of society was crucial:

Society is purely and solely a continual series of exchanges. It is never anything else, in any epoch of its duration, from its commencement the most unformed, to its greatest perfection. And this is the greatest eulogy we can give to it, for exchange is an admirable transaction, in which the two contracting parties always both gain; consequently, society is an uninterrupted succession of advantages, unceasingly renewed for all its members.19

Tracy’s position was that “commerce is society itself. . . . It is an attribute of man. . . . It is the source of all human good . . .”20 For Tracy, in the words of a student of his thought, commerce was a “panacea,” “the world’s civilizing, rationalizing, and pacifying force.”21

Comte, Dunoyer, and Augustin Thierry and his brother Amédée were frequent guests at Tracy’s salon in the rue d’Anjou, a center of liberal social life in Paris. Here the young liberal intellectuals mingled with Stendhal, Benjamin Constant, Lafayette, and others.22

Constant’s work, De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation, which appeared in 1813, is another major source of Industrialist thought. Dunoyer credits Constant with being the first to distinguish sharply between modern and ancient civilization, thus opening up the question of the distinctive aim of modern civilization and the form of organization appropriate to that aim.23 From the reactionary author Montlosier was derived the view of the importance of conquest in the social predominance of the nobility over the commoners. The liberal reaction against the militarism and despotism of the Napoleonic period also played a part.24

The Role of Jean-Baptiste Say

There is little doubt, however, that the chief influence on Industrialism was Jean-Baptiste Say’s Traité de l’économie politique, the second edition of which appeared in 1814 and the third in 1817.25 Comte and Dunoyer probably became personally acquainted with Say during the Hundred Days, in the spring of 1815. Together with Thierry, they were participants at Say’s salon.26 (Comte later became Say’s son-in-law.) The third edition of Say’s Traité was accorded a two-part review of over 120 pages in the Censeur Européen27

Say held that wealth is comprised of what has value, and value is based on utility.

[The different ways of producing] all consist in taking a product in one state and putting it into another in which it has more utility and value . . . in one way or another, from the moment that one creates or augments the utility of things, one augments their value, one is exercising an industry, one is producing wealth.28

All those members of society who contribute to the creation of values are deemed productive, but Say awards pride of place to the entrepreneur. Say was one of the first to realize the boundless possibilities of a free economy, led by creative entrepreneurs. As one commentator summarizes his message:

The productive power of industry is limited only by ignorance and by the bad administration of states. Spread enlightenment and improve governments, or, rather, prevent them from doing harm; there will be no limit that can be assigned to the multiplication of wealth.29

There exist, however, categories of persons who merely consume wealth rather than produce it. These unproductive classes include the army, the government, and the state-supported clergy30—what could be called the “reactionary” classes, associated by and large with the Old Regime.

However, Say was quite aware that anti-productive and anti-social activity was also possible, indeed, altogether common, when otherwise productive elements employed state power to capture privileges:

But personal interest is no longer a safe criterion, if individual interests are not left to counteract and control each other. If one individual, or one class, can call in the aid of authority to ward off the effects of competition, it ac-quires a privilege and at the cost of the whole community; it can then make sure of profits not altogether due to the productive services rendered, but composed in part of an actual tax upon consumers for its private profit; which taxit commonly shares with the authority that thus unjustly lends its support. The legislative body has great difficulty in resisting the importunate demands for this kind of privileges; the applicants are the producers that are to benefit thereby, who can represent, with much plausibility, that their own gains are a gain to the industrious classes, and to the nation at large, their workmen and themselves being members of the industrious classes, and of the nation.31

Thus, while there was a harmony of interest among producers (between employers and workers, for instance), a natural conflict of interests obtained between producers and non-producers, as well as between those members of the producing classes when they choose to exploit others through government-granted privilege. As one scholar has put it, the cry of Say—and of his disciples—could be, “Producers of the world, unite!”32

Social Philosophy of the Censeur Européen

The essential achievement of Comte, Dunoyer, and Thierry in the Censeur Européen was to have taken the ideas of Say and other earlier liberals and forged them into a fighting creed.33

Industrialism purports to be a general theory of society. Taking as its starting point man, who acts in order to satisfy his needs and desires, it posits that the purpose of society is the creation of “utility” in the widest sense: the goods and services useful to man in the satisfaction of his needs and desires. In striving to meet his needs, man has three alternative means available: he may take advantage of what nature offers spontaneously (this is pertinent only in rather primitive circumstances); he may plunder the wealth that others have produced; or he may labor to produce wealth himself.34

In any given society, a sharp distinction may be drawn between those who live by plunder and those who live by production. The first are characterized in several ways by Comte and Dunoyer; they are “the idle,” “the devouring,” and “the hornets.” The second, are termed, among other things, “the industrious” and “the bees.”35 Tb attempt to live without producing is to live “as savages.” The producers are “the civilized men.”36

Cultural evolution has been such that whole societies may be designated as primarily plundering and idle, or as productive and industrious. Industrialism is thus not only an analysis of social dynamics, but also a theory of historical development. Indeed, much of Industrialist theory is embedded in its account of historical evolution.

The “Industrialist Manifesto”

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles between the plundering and the producing classes. Following Constant, plunder through warfare is said to have been the method favored by the ancient Greeks and Romans. With the decline of the Roman Empire in the West, Germanic barbarians established themselves, through conquest, as the lords of the land: feudalism developed—especially in France, after the Frankish invasion and in England after the Norman conquest. It was essentially a system for the spoliation of domestic peasants by the warrior elite of “noblemen.”37 Under feudalism, there was

a kind of subordination that subjected the laboring men to the idle and devouring men, and which gave to the latter the means of existing without producing anything, or of living nobly.38

Throughout the Middle Ages, the nobility exploited not only its own peasants, but especially the merchants who passed through their territories. The nobles’ castles were nothing but thieves’ dens.39 With the rise of the towns in the eleventh century, one may even speak of “two nations” sharing the soil of France: the plundering feudal elite and the productive commoners of the towns.

To the rapacious nobility there eventually succeeded the equally rapacious kings, whose “thefts with violence, alterations of the coinage, bankruptcies, confiscations, hindrances to industry,” are the common stuff of the history of France.40 “When the lords were the stronger, they viewed as belonging to them everything they could lay hold of. As soon as the kings were on top, they thought and acted in the same way.”41 With the growth of the wealth produced by the commoners, or Third Estate, additional riches became available for expropriation by the parasitic classes. Comte is particularly severe on royal manipulation of money and legal tender laws, and quotes a seventeenth century writer on how “discountings [les escomptes] enriched the men of money and finance at the expense of the public.”42

In modern times, the main types of the idle classes have been the professional soldiers, monks, the nobles, bourgeois who were ennobled, and governments.43

“Peace and Freedom”

A pro-peace position was central to the Industrialist point of view—indeed, the motto on the title page of each issue of the Censeur Européen was: paix et liberté—“peace and freedom.”

The Industrialist attack on militarism and standing armies was savage and relentless. In a typical passage, for instance, Dunoyer states that the “production” of the standing armies of Europe has consisted in

massacres, rapes, pillagings, conflagrations, vices and crimes, the depravation, ruin, and enslavement of the peoples; they have been the shame and scourge of civilization.44

Particularly anathematized were wars engendered by mercantilism, or “the spirit of monopoly . . . the pretension of each to be industrious to the exclusion of all others, exclusively to provision the others with the products of its industry.”45 In the course of a jeremiad against the imperialist foreign policy of the English, Dunoyer states, significantly:

The result of this pretension was that the spirit of industry became a principle more hostile, more ‘of an enemy to civilization, than the spirit of rapine itself.46

Monasticism, in the Industrialist view, encouraged idleness and apathy.47 In the modern period, the nobles, no longer able to live by directly robbing the industrious, began to fill government positions, and lived by a new form of tribute, “under the name of taxes.”48 Members of the bourgeoisie who achieved noble status no longer tended to their own businesses and, in the end, had no means of subsistence but the public treasury. Finally, governments, while burdening the producers with taxes, “have very rarely furnished society with the equivalent of the values they received from it for governing.”49

The Industrialist writers anticipated that with the greater perfectioning of society would come the ultimate triumph of their cause. Comte looked forward to “the extinction of the idle and devouring class” and to the emergence of a social order in which “the fortune of each would be nearly in direct ratio to his merit, that is, to his utility, and almost without exception, none would be destitute except the vicious and useless.”50

State Functionaries as Exploiters

The class of contemporary exploiters that the Industrialist writers investigated more than any other was the government bureaucrats. As Comte put it:

What must never be lost sight of is that a public functionary, in his capacity as functionary, produces absolutely nothing; that, on the contrary, he exists only on the products of the industrious class; and that he can consume nothing that has not been taken from the producers.51

The contribution of Industrialism to the prehistory of the theory of Public Choice has received little attention.52 True to the Industrialist concentration on the “economic factor,” Dunoyer surveyed “the influence exercised on the government by the salaries attached to the the exercise of public functions.”53 In the United States—always the model Industrialist country—official salaries, even for the president, are low. Typically, American officials receive an “indemnity” for their work, but nothing that could be called a “salary.”54 In France, on the other hand, public opinion is shocked not by the exercise of power being made into “a lucrative profession,” but by its being monopolized by a single social class.55

Public expenditures, however, bear almost an inverse relationship to the proper functioning of government: in the United States, for instance, where government costs some 40 million francs a year, property is more secure than in England, where it costs more than 3 billion.56 The characteristics of public employment are the reverse of those in private business. For example:

ambition, so fertile in happy results in ordinary labor, is here a principle of ruin; and the more a public functionary wishes to progress in the profession he has taken up, the more he tends, as is natural, to raise and increase his profits, the more he becomes a burden to the society that pays him.57

As increasing numbers of individuals aspire to government jobs, two tendencies emerge: government power expands, and the burden of government expenditures and taxation grows. In order to satisfy the new hordes of office-seekers, the government extends its scope in all directions; it begins to concern itself with the people’s education, health, intellectual life, and morals, sees to the adequacy of the food supply, and regulates industry, until “soon there will be no means of escape from its action for any activity, any thought, any portion” of the people’s existence.58 Functionaries have become “a class that is the enemy of the well-being of all the others.”59

Since the enjoyment of government jobs has ceased to be the private preserve of the aristocracy, it has become the object of everyone in society.60 In France there are perhaps “ten times as many aspirants to power than the most gigantic administration could possible accommodate. . .. Here one would easily find the personnel to govern twenty kingdoms.”61

Similarities with Marxism

The emphasis by the Censeur Européen liberals on the ravenous exploitation of the productive classes by the growing class of state functionaries opens another point of contact with Marxism. As has been sometimes noted,62 Marxism contains two rather different views of the state: most conspicuously, it views the state as the instrument of domination by exploiting classes that are defined by their position within the process of social production, e.g., the capitalists. Some-times, however, Marx characterized the state itself as the independently exploiting agent. Thus, Marx, in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, writes, quite in the Industrialist spirit:

This executive power, with its enormous bureaucratic and military organization, with its ingenious state machinery, embracing wide strata, with a host of officials numbering half a million, besides an army of another half million, with appalling parasitic body, which enmeshes the body of French society like a net and chokes all its pores, sprang up in the days of the absolute monarchy . . .63

All regimes assisted in the growth of this parasite, according to Marx. He adds:

Every common interest was straightway severed from society, counterposed to it as a higher, general, interest, snatched from the activity of society’s members themselves and made an object of government activity, from a bridge, a schoolhouse, and the communal property of a village community, to the railways, the national wealth, and the national university of France. . .. All revolutions perfected this machine instead of smashing it. The parties that contended in turn for domination regarded the possession of this huge state edifice as the principal spoils of the victor.64

In a later work, The Civil War in France, Marx writes of “the State parasite feeding upon, and clogging, the free movement of society.”65

Thus, the conception of the “parasite-state” is clearly enunciated by Marx. By now it should be clear, however, how incorrect it is to assert, as does Richard N. Hunt, that Marx originated this conception.66 Several decades before Marx wrote, the Censeur Européen group had already singled out the parasitic state as the major example in modern society of the plundering and “devouring” spirit.

Interestingly, another similarity between Industrialism and Marxism is in the notion of ideology.67 According to the Industrialist view, there are ideas and values that serve the interests of the productive and of the exploiting classes, respectively. Comte mentions, for instance, the typically feudal judgment, that those who sweat for their wealth are ignoble while those who “gain it by shedding the blood of their fellows” are glorious; such an essentially barbaric idea, he asserts, had to be hidden and veiled by placing it in the context of classical antiquity.68

Comte even indicates the existence of what could be called “false consciousness,” that is, the harboring by members of one class of ideas contrary to their own interests and useful to the interests of an opposing class. He states:

The war waged by the slaves against their masters has something base to our eyes. These are men who fight so that the product of their industry should not be the spoils of those who enslaved them; it is an ignoble war. The war waged by Pompey against Caesar charms us; its object is to discover who will be the party who will tyrannize the world; it takes place between men equally incapable of subsisting by their own efforts; it is a noble war. If we trace our opinions to their source, we will find that the majority have been produced by our enemies.69

The Early Thierry and Industrialism70

In the period of his association with the Censeur Européen, Augustin Thierry shared the Industrialist philosophy of Comte and Dunoyer, with perhaps even more radical emphases. His review-essay on Tracy’s Commentaire sur l’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu is particularly important in this connection.71 Thierry seconds Tracy’s firm adherence to laissez-faire.

Government should be good for the liberty of the governed, and that is when it governs to the least possible degree. It should be good for the wealth of the nation, and that is when it acts as little as possible upon the labor that produces it and when it consumes as little as possible. It should be good for the public security, and that is when it protects as much as possible, provided that the protection does not cost more than it brings in. . . . It is in losing their powers of action that governments improve. Each time that the governed gain space, there is progress.72

As against Montesquieu, Thierry sides with Tracy: “commerce consists in exchange; it is society itself; and “Taxation is always an evil.”73

The functions of government are to ensure security, “whether there is a danger from outside or whether the mad and the idle threaten to disturb the order and peace necessary for labor.” In a simile freighted with meaning in the rhetoric of Industrialism, Thierry asserts that any government that exceeds these limits ceases to be a government properly speaking:

its action can be classed with the action exerted upon the inhabitants of a land when it is invaded by soldiers; it degenerates into domination, and that occurs regardless of the number of men involved, of the arrangement in which they order themselves, or what titles they take . . .74

Sharing the horror of militarism of the other Industrialist authors, Thierry quotes Tracy with approval on “the absurd and ruinous wars which have been too often waged to maintain the empire and exclusive monopoly over some faraway colonies.” This is not true commerce, he declares, but “the mania for domination.”75

Thierry goes on to sketch a radical-liberal program of very great scope indeed. First of all, the spirit of the free communes of the Middle Ages, which battled the plundering nobility, must be revived; that spirit will inspire men “to oppose the league of civilization to the league of the dominators and the idle.” The intellectual movement will be allied to a great social movement:

An invisible and ever-active power, labor spurred on by industry, will precipitate at the same time all of the population of Europe into this general movement. The productive force of the nations will break all its fetters . . . Industry will disarm power, by causing the desertion of its satellites, who will find more profit in free and honest labor than in the profession of slaves guarding slaves. Industry will deprive power of its pretexts and excuses, by recalling those the police keep in check to the enjoyments and virtues of labor. Industry will deprive power of its income, by offering at less cost the services which power makes people pay for [qu’il se fait payer]. To the degree that power will lose its actual force and apparent utility, liberty will gain, and free men will draw closer together.76

Appropriately enough, in view of the remarkable sentence in the above passage for which emphasis has been supplied, Thierry unequivocally enunciates the cosmopolitanism of a liberalism tending towards sheer anarchism. States are merely “incoherent agglomerations that divide the European population . . . dominions formed and increased by conquests or by diplomatic donations.” Eventually, the bonds linking men to states will be shed. Then

the passage from one society to another will scarcely be felt. Federations will replace states; the loose but indissoluble chains of interest will replace the despotism of men and of laws; the tendency towards government, the first passion of the human race, will cede to the free community. The era of empire is over, the era of association begins.77

Thierry stresses the role of historical writing in aiding in the great struggle. “We are the sons of these serfs, of these tributaries, of these bourgeois that the conquerors devoured at will; we owe them all that we are.” History, which should have transmitted memories of this tradition to us, “has been in the pay of the enemies of our fathers . . . Slaves emancipated only yesterday, our memory has for a long time recalled to us only the families and the acts of our masters.” 78 As if presaging his own work on the chartered towns of the Middle Ages, he adds:

If a skillful and liberal pen were finally to undertake our history, that is, the history of towns and associations . . . all of us would see in it the meaning of a social order, what gives it birth and what destroys it.79

Critique of Industrialism

As far as criticism of the Industrialist viewpoint is concerned, only three problems can be indicated here, and a more comprehensive discussion of its shortcomings must be postponed to another occasion.

First, it is likely that by sidestepping the issue of rights—property, Comte claims, is better called “a fact,” or even a “thing,” than a right80—the Industrialist writers set the stage for difficulties arising latter on in their theory.

Second, by concentrating on production rather than on exchange of rightful property, they create false targets of attack. Thus, “monks”—they really mean the religious altogether—are deemed “idlers,” placed in the same category as feudal lords and brigands, and, quite deliberately, no distinction is made among paupers between those who live on voluntary charity and those who live from state aid.81 (It would seem that the Industrialists did not totally understand the implications of positing the existence of “immaterial” as well as “material” values.)

Finally, in regard to the State: again, by speaking blithely of production rather than voluntary exchange, the Industrialists appear to be trying to avoid the tricky issue of the “production” of a good—security—that is forced upon the “consumer.” 82

Guizot and Mignet

Although Franois Guizot has often been placed in the same category as Thierry as a historian of class conflict, especially by Marxists, his views were substantially different. Guizot had no connection with the Censeur Européen group, being a supporter instead of the juste milieu views of the Doctrinaire, Royer-Collard. As a leader of the Doctrinaires (of whom it has been said that no school of thought ever deserved the name less), Guizot lacked any guiding theory, such as Industrialism, to apply in his historical works. Always an eclectic, he wrote for a while in the 1820s in the then popular idiom of class conflict. But he never held that one of the competing classes would or should triumph. On the contrary, the struggle, according to Guizot, was already in his own day eventuating in a grand synthesis, whereby aristocracy and Third Estate would combine in the “French Nation.”83 Shirley M. Gruner aptly summarizes Guizot’s standpoint:

[He] liked to be popular and therefore liked to be considered up-to-date in his ideas. Nor does he wish to appear “unscientific.” Therefore he never denies anything outright but seeks to modify a little here and there so that finally nothing is left of it. There is no head-on opposition . . . This is in fact the whole problem of Guizot—his indecisive decisiveness so that not only in history but in politics the basically constitutional conservative appears at time [sic] to long for the trappings of a radical liberal. And it has also been in the interest of certain groups, for instance the Communists of 1848, to suggest that there was not much difference between Guizot and the other “bourgeois” liberals.84

As a thinker (and, of course, in his political role), Guizot was essentially oriented towards the state. A major purpose of his account of French history was to show that “the bourgeoisie and the power of the Crown were not only allies but forces pressing towards each other.”85 He thoroughly endorsed the historical collaboration of the Crown and the Third Estate, which reached a kind of apotheosis in the July Monarchy, particularly under Guizot’s own ministry. Over the years, Guizot’s influence on Thierry grew, and it was all in the direction of emphasizing the historical contributions of all “classes” to the creation of la grande Nation, especially the assistance accorded to the Third Estate by the Monarchy in its rise to recognition and preeminence. This tendency in Thierry’s work culminates in his Essai sur l’Histoire de la Formation et des Progrès du Tiers État, which appeared as the introduction to a collection of documents whose publication was inspired by Guizot.86

François Mignet, a friend of Thierry and fellow historian, is often mentioned as another of the liberal precursors of Marxist class conflict theory. But although Mignet did, of course, write of the struggles of the aristocracy and the Third Estate during the Revolution, an immense gulf separated him from the original class conflict analysis of the Industrialists. A sort of reductio ad absurdum of the glorification of the bourgeoisie in and of itself, irrespective of any connection with production, was reached by Mignet when in 1836 he wrote of the French Revolutionary armies:

All the old aristocratic armies of Europe had succumbed to these bourgeois, at first disdained and then feared, who, forced to take up the sword and having made use of it as before of the word, as previously of thought, had become heroic soldiers, great captains, and had added to the formidable power of their ideas the prestige of military glory and the authority of their conquests.87

Mignet also chided Charles Comte for his deprecation of the “Great Men” of history. Comte’s views here were part of the “transvaluation of all values” attempted by the Industrialists, whereby, for instance, a small manufacturer or a shepherd was to be more highly valued than destructive conquerors like Caesar or Pompey. But Mignet was of a more Hegelian, not to say pedestrian, turn of mind. According to him, Comte

forgot that the greatest advances of humanity have had as their representatives and defenders the greatest captains . . . that Napoleon’s sword had, for fifteen years, led to the principle of modern equality penetrating all of Europe. He likewise disputed the difficult art of governing the peoples . . .88

Friend and collaborator of Adolphe Thiers (virtually the personification of the corrupt bourgeois state in nineteenth century France), and, like Thiers, a glorifier of Napoleon, Mignet simply inhabited a different intellectual world from Say, Comte, Dunoyer, and the young Thierry.

Thierry’s Defection

This is not the place to attempt a detailed account and explanation of how Thierry exchanged his relatively sophisticated Industrialist analysis of class conflict for a considerably coarser one. At some point, Thierry seems to have come to believe that a rigorous Industrialist interpretation “falsified” history by subjecting it to too rigid a theoretical scheme.89 After his first essays on English history, in the Censeur Européen, he had begun to feel, he added, the need to leave to each epoch its originality: “I changed style and manner; my former rigidity became more supple . . .”90

The type of general and purely political considerations to which I had confined myself up until then seemed to me for the first time too arid and limited. I felt a strong inclination to descend from the abstract to the concrete, to envisage the national life in all its facets and to take my point of departure in solving the problem of the antagonism of the different classes of men in the bosom of the same society the study of the primitive races in their original diversity.91

The “tinge of politics was effaced,” Thierry explains, as he devoted himself more to “science.”92 In fact, he did not cease to write as the historian of the oppressed and downtrodden, as the chronicler, first, of the sufferings of defeated “races” like the Saxons at the time of the Norman Conquest, then of the rise to power and pride of the Third Estate in France.

But Thierry’s treatment of class conflict in his more famous works is defective and, ultimately, fatally flawed: the conceptual apparatus he employs is too blunt an instrument for purposes of social dissection. When he deals with the history of France in the medieval and early modern period, for instance, the industrious, creative element of society is identified tout court with the “Third Estate,” the exploiting idlers and parasites with the feudal nobility and its descendants alone. Thus, crucial distinctions existing within the Third Estate, or bourgeoisie, of the sort that Say had already exposed and drawn attention to, are omitted. The earlier analytical dividing line between those who act on the market, through exchange, and those who use force, above all through the State, disappears. Thierry thus sinned against his own methodological principle: “The great precept that must be given to historians is to distinguish instead of confounding. “93

The Final Stage

In Thierry’s last major work, Essay on the History of the Formation and Progress of the Third Estate, virtually nothing is left of the original Industrialist doctrine. Instead, we are presented with what amounts to a case-study in complacent and self-satisfied Whiggish historiography. It turns out that the events and figures of some 700 years of French history have all conspired to bring about the triumph of what is now Thierry’s ideal, the modern, centralized French State, based on equality before the law, to be sure, but rich in power and historical glory, as well. Over and over again, the French kings are praised for having worked to elevate the Third Estate, largely by providing jobs for its members, and, in the traditional manner, for having “created” France. Richelieu is eulogized both for his foreign and domestic policies, equally admirable, and for “multiplying for the commons, besides offices, places of honor in the State.”94 Colbert, the architect of French mercantilism, is glorified as a commoner who planned “the industrial regeneration of France,” and is applauded for his distribution of largesse to writers, scholars, and “all classes of men.”95 One could go on.

Thierry had experienced the socialist agitation of 1848 and the June Days; the specter of social revolution haunted him to the end of his life. He was anxious that the socialist troublemakers should not be able to draw sustenance from his work on the role of classes in French history. In the Preface to the Essay, Thierry implies that now, in 1853, there is no further need for the concept of classes: “the national mass” is “today one and homogeneous.” Only “the prejudices spread by systems that tend to divide” the homogeneous nation into “mutually hostile classes” could suggest otherwise.96 The present-day antagonism between bourgeoisie and workers, which some wish to trace back for centuries, is “destructive of all public order.”97 Thus, ironically, one of thinkers who was a major inspiration for the socialist idea of class conflict ended by categorically denying any class conflict in the modern world, and he did so in part out of fear of the dangers the idea posed now that it had been reshaped by the socialists.98

Liberals and the July Monarchy

The July Monarchy of Louis Philippe, which came to power in 1830, was notorious for its corruption on behalf of the bourgeoisie, especially in the form of massive and blatant jobbery.99 This was the regime of which Tocqueville wrote:

[The middle class] entrenched itself in every vacant government job, prodigiously augmented the number of such jobs, and accustomed itself to live almost as much upon the Treasury as upon its own industry.100

Many of the liberals were major beneficiaries of the new regime, rewarded for the support they had given, and continued to give, to Louis Philippe. Dunoyer was made prefect in Moulins, and Stendhal consul at Trieste, while Daunou was reappointed as director of the National Archives.101 Other historians of the liberal party under the Restoration did as well, or better. Guizot, of course, was one of the chief figures of the new order. With Mignet, Thiers, Villemain, he “divided up the premier offices of the State, the most brilliant favors of the regime.”102 Thierry himself, however, now blind, had to make do with occasional grants and was reduced to pleading for a steady job as research historian. At one point, a plan to eliminate literary pensions, which would have included his own, distressed him in the extreme.103 Thus, any analysis of the reasons behind the conservative drift of many French liberals after 1830—and of their abandonment of the dangerous idea of the conflict of classes—would have to take account not only of the growing threat of socialism, but also of the new links to power and wealth that the “liberal” regime of Louis Philippe afforded them.

Back in 1817, in the heyday of the Industrialist movement, Dunoyer had lamented the fact that “the idle and devouring class has constantly been recruited from among the industrious men.. .” “The destiny of civilization,” he declared, “seems to have been to raise up the men of the laboring classes only to see them betray her cause and pass to the ranks of her enemies.”104 There is perhaps a sense in which these words were prophetic of the fate of some of the Restoration liberals, including the Industrialist thinkers themselves.

Other Liberal Class-Conflict Theories

The Industrialist doctrine of class conflict was by no means the first or only treatment of this question in the history of liberal theory.105 In the United States, some Jeffersonians and Jacksonians also grappled with the question of class, in the politically relevant sense, and came to conclusions reminiscent of the Industrialist school. John Taylor of Caroline, William Leggett, and John C. Calhoun were keen observers and critics of the social groups whom they believed were utilizing political power in order to exploit the rest of society, the producers.

John Taylor was outraged by what he saw as the betrayal of the principles of the American Revolution by a new aristocracy based on “separate legal interests,” the bankers privileged to issue paper money as legal tender and the beneficiaries of “public improvements” and protective tariffs. American society has been divided into the privileged and the unprivileged by this “substantial revival of the feudal system.”106

Two decades later, in the 1830s, the northern radical, William Leggett, denounced the same exploiting classes. A thoroughgoing Jeffersonian and disciple of Adam Smith and J.-B. Say, Leggett held that the principles of political economy are the same as those of the American Republic: Laissez-faire, Do not govern too much. This system of equal rights was being overthrown by a new aristocracy, among whom Leggett particularly singled out the state-connected bankers for attack.

Have we not, too, our privileged orders? our scrip nobility? aristocrats, clothed with special immunities, who control, indirectly, but certainly, the power of the state, monopolize the most copious source of pecuniary profit, and wring the very crust from the hand of toil? Have we not, in short, like the wretched serfs of Europe, our lordly master . . . ? If any man doubts how these questions should be answered, let him walk through Wall-street.107

The American aristocracy naturally favored a strong government, including control of the banking system. Leggett, in contrast, demanded “the absolute separation of government from the banking and credit system.”108

John C. Calhoun, in his Disquisition on Government, focused attention on the taxing powers of the state, “the necessary result” of which

is to divide the community into two great classes: one consisting of those who, in reality, pay the taxes and, of course, bear exclusively the burthen of supporting the government; and the other, of those who are the recipients of their proceeds through disbursements, and who are, in fact, supported by the government; or, in fewer words, to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers. But the effect of this is to place them in antagonistic relations in reference to the fiscal action of the government and the entire course of policy therewith connected.109

Liberal class conflict rhetoric was often applied throughout the nineteenth century; in England, it is a recurrent theme in the agitation for repeal of the corn laws, used by Cobden, Bright, and others. It underlies the attack by William Graham Sumner on the “plutocrats,” capitalists who use the state rather than the market to enrich themselves.110

Bringing the State Back In

Today a revival appears to be under way of the concept of the state as creator of classes and class conflict. For instance, a group of scholars including Theda Skocpol, has produced an anthology with the significant title, Bringing the State Back In.111 In an introductory chapter,112 Skocpol speaks of “an intellectual sea change” taking place, by which the “society-centered ways of explaining politics and governmental activities” popular in the 1950s and 60s are being reversed, and government itself is looked upon as “an independent actor.”

We must recognize, she asserts, the capacity of the state to act independently of the various groupings of “civil society” more systematically than is allowed by the Marxist notion of “relative autonomy.” In particular, in regard to relations with other states, a state may often act in ways that cannot be explained by its concern for private interests, even for collective private interests. Skocpol notes that while state actions are often justified by reference to their appropriateness for the long-run interests of society or the benefits that accrue from them to various social groups (which would tend to shift the center of attention once more to society), “autonomous state actions will regularly take forms that attempt to reinforce the authority, political longevity, and social control of the state organizations whose incumbents generated the relevant policies or policy ideas.” Citing Suzanne Berger, Skocpol stresses that the view that social “interests” determine politics is one-sided and shallow, if for no other reason then because

“the timing and characteristics of state intervention” affect “not only organizational tactics and strategies,” but “the content and definition of interest itself” . . . Some scholars have directly stressed that state initiatives create corporatist forms . . . the formation, let alone the political capacities, of such purely socioeconomic phenomena as interest groups and classes depends in significant measure on the structures and activities of the very states the social actors, in turn, seek to influence.113

Class Conflict in Marxist Regimes

From a scientific point of view, the liberal theory—which locates the source of class conflict in the exercise of state power—would seem to have at least one pronounced advantage over the conventional Marxist analysis: liberal theory is able to shed light on the structure and functioning of Marxist societies themselves. “The theory of the Communists,” Marx wrote, “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”114 Yet Communist societies, which have essentially abolished private property, do not appear to be on the road to the abolition of classes. This has led to some deep soul-searching and confused analysis among Marxist theoreticians and justified complaints regarding the inadequacy of a purely “economic” analysis of class conflict to account for the empirical reality of the socialist countries.115 Yet the liberal theory of class conflict is ideally suited to deal with such problems in a context where access to wealth, prestige, and influence is determined by control of the state apparatus.

 

_____________

116The concept of class has a central importance in Marxist theory, though neither Marx nor Engels ever expounded it in a systematic form.” Tom Bottomore, “Class,” in idem, ed., A Dictionary of Marxist Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), p. 74; cf. another contemporary Marxist theoretician, Charles Bettelheim, “Reflections on Concepts of Class and Class Struggle in Marx’s Work,” trans. Carole Biewener, in Stephen Resnick and Richard Wolff, eds., Rethinking Marxism: Struggles in Marxist Theory. Essays for Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy (Brooklyn, N.Y: Autonomedia, 1985), p. 22: Marx “did not arrive at a unique and coherent conception of classes and of class struggles.”

117Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works in Three Volumes (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1983), I, pp. 108–9.

118Cf. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 113: “Marx obfuscated the problem by confusing the notions of caste and class.”

119Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, III, The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, Friedrich Engels, ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1967), pp. 885–86.

120Ibid., Friedrich Engels, “Preface,” p. 3.

121Ibid., p. 7.

122Jérôme-Adolphe Blanqui, Histoire de l’Économie Politique en Europe depuis les anciens jusqu’à nos jours (Paris: Guillaumin, 1837), p. x. (Italics in original.) Ernst Nolte, Marxismus und Industrielle Revolution (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983), p. 599, 79n, notes that Engels attacked Blanqui’s “miserable history of economics” in a newspaper article shortly before he composed the Principles of Communism, which Marx drew upon in composing the Manifesto. The Principles, however, contains nothing similar to the opening lines of the first section of the Manifesto; cf. The Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, D. Ryazanoff, ed. (1930; repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), pp. 319–40.

123Blanqui, Histoire, pp. x–xi.

124Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5, 1852, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Correspondence (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1965), pp. 67–70.

125Ibid., p. 69. Marx here states that his own contributions are limited to having shown that classes are not a permanent feature of human society, and that the class struggle will lead to the dictatorship of the proletariat and thence to a classless society. Charles Bettelheim, “Reflections on Concepts of Class,” p. 16, agrees with Marx on this point: “Lacking these elements [“polarization, historical tendency, final result”] we are faced with a conception already long defended by numerous historians who recognize the existence of class struggles and their action upon the course of history.”

126The third is the much less significant English writer, John Wade. Later in the letter, Marx refers to the economists, Richardo, Malthus, Mill, Say, et al., who have revealed how the “economic bases of the different classes are bound to give rise to a necessary and ever-growing antagonism among them.” Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 69. It is worth noting that in the same letter, Marx ridicules the view of “the fatuous [Karl] Heinzen,” that “the existence of classes [is connected with] the existence of political privileges and monopolies . . .” Ibid., emphasis in original.

127Marx to Engels, July 27,1854, Selected Correspondence, p. 87.

128Engels to H. Starkenburg, January 25, 1894, Selected Correspondence, p. 468.

129In his classic biography of Marx, Franz Mehring traces this conception to Marx’s period in Paris in 1843–44: “The study of the French Revolution led him on to the historical literature of the Third Estate,’ a literature which originated under the Bourbon restoration and was developed by men of great historical talent who followed the historical existence of their class back into the eleventh century and presented French history as an uninterrupted series of class struggles. Marx owed his knowledge of the historical nature of classes and their struggles to these historians . . . Marx always denied having originated the theory of the class struggle.” Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of His Life, (1918) Edward Fitzgerald, trans. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962), p. 75. David McLellan telescopes the process described by Mehring when he states, in Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 95: “It was his [Marx’s] reading of the history of the French Revolution in the summer of 1843 that showed him the role of class struggle in social development.” Neither Guizot nor Thierry concentrated on the Revolution in their works; in any case, it is their emphasis on class struggle as a constant spanning centuries of medieval and modern history that is reflected in the Marxian account.

130V. I. Lenin, State and Revolution (1917) (New York: International Publishers, 1943), p. 30: ‘The theory of the class struggle was not created by Marx, but by the bourgeoisie before Marx and is, generally speaking, acceptable to the bourgeoisie.” (Italics in original.) The last part of Lenin’s statement, however, is problematical.

131See Ralph Raico, “Review Essay: The Rise and Decline of Western Liberalism,” Reason Papers 14 (Spring 1989): 163–64.

132Leonard P. Liggio has had the merit of recognizing the significance of the Industrialist writers and pioneering the study of their thought in recent years; see his highly important article, “Charles Dunoyer and French Classical Liberalism,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 153–78 (the scope of which is considerably wider than is suggested by the title) and the relevant works cited in the endnotes, as well as, idem, “The Concept of Liberty in 18th and 19th Century France,” Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines 1, no. 1 (Spring, 1990), and idem, Charles Dunoyer and the Censeur: A Study in French Liberalism (forthcoming); also, Charles Dunoyer, “Notice Historique sur l’Industrialisme,” Oeuvres de Charles Dunoyer 3, Notices de l’Économie Sociale (Paris: Guillaumin, 1880), pp. 173–199; Ephraïm Harpaz, “‘Le Censeur Européen’: Histoire d’un Journal Industrialiste,” Revue d’Histoire Économique et Sociale 37, no. 2 (1959): 185–218, and 37, no. 3 (1959): 328–357; Élie Halévy, “The Economic Doctrine of Saint-Simon,” (1907), in The Era of Tyrannies: Essays on Socialism and War, R. K. Webb, trans. (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1965), pp. 21–60; Edgard Allix, “J.-B. Say et les origines d’industrialisme,” Revue d’Économie Politique 24 (1910): 304–13, 341–62.

133What appealed to Jefferson was Tracy’s condemnation of government squandering of social wealth through public debt, taxation, banking monopolies, and spending, which paralleled his own anti-Hamiltonian views. Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution: Destutt de Tracy and the Origins of “Ideology,” (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978), p. 228.

134Antoine Destutt de Tracy, A Treatise on Political Economy, Thomas Jefferson, ed. (1817; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), p. 6.

135Emmet Kennedy, A Philosophe in the Age of Revolution, p. 180. This leads Kennedy to refer mistakenly to Tracy’s position as a form of “economic determinism.”

136Ibid., p. 183.

137Ibid., pp. 270–72. At a later point, Kennedy refers to Augustin Thierry and Dunoyer as among Destutt de Tracy’s “old friends”; ibid., p. 290. See also Cheryl B. Welch, Liberty and Utility: The French Ideologues and the Transformation of Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp. 157–158. Augustin Thierry, in his review of Tracy’s Commentaire sur L’Esprit des Lois de Montesquieu, states: “the principles of the Commentaire are also ours.” Censeur Européen 7 (1818): 220.

138Charles Dunoyer, “Notice Historique,” pp. 175–76; Ephraim Harpaz, “‘Le Censeur Européen’”: 197.

139Allix, “J-B. Say et les origines de l’industrialisme”: 305.

140Ibid. Michael James, “Pierre-Louis Roederer, Jean-Baptiste Say, and the Concept of industry,” History of Political Economy 9, no. 4 (Winter 1977): 455–75, argues for Say’s indebtedness to the Idéologue Roederer for some important concepts, but grants that it was Say who directly and powerfully influenced the Censeur Européen group.

141Harpaz, “‘Le Censeur Europen’”: 204–05.

142Censeur Européen 1 (1817): 159–227; 2 (1817): 169–221.

143Jean-Baptiste Say, Cathéchisme d’Économie Politique, ou Instruction Familière (Paris: Crapelet, 1815), p. 14.

144Allix, “J.-B. Say et les origines de l’industrialisme,”: 309. Cf. Harpaz, “‘Le Censeur Européen’”: 356: “The immense progress of modern material civilization is sketched, or at the very least suggested, in the twelve volumes of the Censeur Européen.”

145Allix, “J.-B. Say et les origines de l’industrialisme”: 341–44.

146Jean-Baptiste Say, A Treatise on Political Economy, or the Production, Distribution, and Consumption of Wealth, C. R. Prinsep, trans, from 4th ed. (1880; New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964), pp. 146–47 (emphasis supplied). It has been persuasively argued that Say was an important source for the modern theory of “rent-seeking”; Patricia J. Euzent and Thomas L. Martin, “Classical Roots of the Emerging Theory of Rent Seeking: the Contribution of Jean-Baptiste Say,” History of Political Economy 16, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 255–62. As Euzent and Martin point out, Say was familiar with why “those engaged in any particular branch of trade are so anxious to have themselves made the subject of regulation . . .” Treatise, pp. 176–77.

147Allix, “J.-B. Say et les origines de l’industrialisme”: 312.

148As Dunoyer, “Notice historique,” p. 179, put it: If it is doubtful that these writers had perceived the political consequences of their observations relative to industry, these observations cast a new light upon politics that was singularly favorable to its progress. Their writings fell into the hands of several men who were making this science their special study, and effected a revolution in their ideas. Such was notably the effect that these writings produced in the authors of the Censeur.”

149Charles Comte, “Considérations sur l’état moral de la nation française, et sur les causes de l’instabilité de ses institutions,” Censeur Européen 1: 1–2, 9. The similarity to Franz Oppenheimer’s analysis is obvious. See his The State, John Gitterman, trans., and C. Hamilton, intro. (New York: Free Life, 1975).

150Charles Comte, “Considérations sur l’état moral,” Censeur Européen 1:11.

151Ibid.: 19.

152Ibid.,p. 9.

153Charles Comte, “De l’organisation sociale considérée dans ses rapports avec les moyens de subsistence des peuples,” Censeur Européen 2 (1817): 22.

154Charles Comte, “Considerations sur l’état moral,” Censeur Européen 1: 14. Thierry’s work on the Norman conquest is already foreshadowed in this early essay of Comte’s, in his attack on William the Conqueror. Ibid.: 19–20.

155Ibid., pp. 20–21.

156Ibid., p. 21.

157Ibid.

158Charles Dunoyer, “Du systéme de l’équilibre des puissances européenes,” Censeur Européen 1 (1817): 119–26.

159Ibid., p. 120.

160Ibid., p. 131.

161Ibid., p. 132.

162Ibid., p. 120.

163Charles Comte, “De l’organisation sociale,” Censeur Européen 2: 33.

164Charles Dunoyer, “Du système de l’équilibre,” Censeur Européen 1: 124. Dunoyer goes on to state (124): “If, in precisely rendering this service [protection of liberty and property] to them [the members of society], it makes them pay more than it is worth, more than the price at which they could obtain it for themselves, then everything it takes in addition is something truly subtracted from them, and, in this respect, it acts according to the spirit of rapine.” It will be noted that Dunoyer is faced with a problem here, in so far as he assents to monopoly government with taxing powers. The same is true regarding his assertion (125) that the government, in providing security, “should not have obliged them [the citizens] to pay more than it should naturally cost [ce qu’il devrait naturellement coûter].”

165“Considérations sur l’état moral,” Censeur Européen, vol. 1: 88–89.

166“De l’organisation sociale,” Censeur Européen, vol. 2: 29–30.

167See, however, the article by Patricia J. Euzent and Thomas L. Martin, in note 31 above.

168“De l’influence qu’exercent sur le gouvernement les salaires attachés à l’exercice des functions publiques,” Censeur Européen, vol. 11 (1819): 75–118.

169Ibid., p. 77.

170Ibid., p. 78.

171Ibid., p. 80.

172Ibid., pp. 81–82.

173Ibid.,p. 86.

174Ibid., p. 88.

175Ibid., p. 89.

176Ibid., p. 103.

177Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels: I Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818–1850 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), pp. 124–31; David Conway, A Farewell to Marx: An Outline and Appraisal of his Theories (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 162–64; Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory: A Comment on Professor Liggio’s Paper,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 1, no. 3 (1977): 179–83.

178In Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. 1, p. 477.

179Ibid. See also p. 432.

180Ibid., vol. 2, p. 222.

181Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, p. 124.

182I am using the term here in the Marxist, not the Idéologue, sense.

183”Considérations sur l’état moral,” Censeur Européen, 1: 29–30.

184Ibid., pp. 36–37n.

185On Thierry, see A. Augustin-Thierry, Augustin Thierry (1795–1856), d’après sa correspondance et ses papiers de famille (Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1922); Kieran Joseph Carroll, Some Aspects of the Historical Thought of Augustin Thierry (1795–1856) (Washington, D. C: Catholic University of America Press, 1951); Rulon Nephi Smithson, Augustin Thierry. Social and Political Consciousness in the Evolution of Historical Method (Geneva: Droz, 1973); and Lionel Grossman, Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography, Theory and History, Beiheft 15 (Wesleyan University Press, 1976).

186Censeur Européen, 7: 191–260. An English version of this essay, somewhat rearranged, was translated by Mark Weinberg and published under the title, Theory of Classical Liberal “Industrielisme,” Preface by Leonard P. Liggio, by the Center for Libertarian Studies (New York, 1978).

187Censeur Européen, 7: 228 and 230.

188Ibid.: 206 and 205.

189Ibid.: 244.

190Ibid.: 218.

191Ibid.: 256–57. Emphasis added.

192Ibid.: 257–58.

193Ibid.: 251–52.

194Ibid.: 255.

195“Considerations sur l’état moral,” Censeur Européen, 1: 6.

196Charles Comte, “De la multiplication des pauvres, des gens à places, et des gens à pensions,” Censeur Européen, 7: 1n.

197See also note 49, above.

198Cf. Shirley M. Gruner, Economie Materialism and Social Moralism (The Hague/Paris: Mouton, 1973), pp. 108–10.

199Ibid., p. 110.

200Dietrich Gerhard, “Guizot, Augustin Thierry, und die Rolle des Tiers État in der französischen Geschichte,” Historische Zeitschrift, 190, no. 2 (1960): 305.

201Ibid.: 307.

202François Mignet, “Le comte Sieyès: Notice,” Notices et portraits historiques et littéraires, vol. 1 (Paris: Charpentier, 1854), p. 88 (emphasis supplied).

203François Miget, “Charles Comte: Notice,” ibid., vol. 2, p. 102.

204”After much time and labor lost in thus obtaining artificial results, I perceived that I was falsifying history by imposing identical formulas on totally different periods.” Augustin Thierry, Dix Ans d’Études Historiques (1834; Paris: Furne, 1851), p. 3. Of his earlier radical liberal political views, he says: “I aspired enthusiastically towards a future of which I had no very clear idea . . . [vers un avenir, je ne savais trop lequel].” Ibid., p. 7.

205Ibid., pp. 6–7.

206Ibid., p. 8.

207Ibid., p. 12.

208Cited in Peter Stadler, “Politik und Geschichtsschreibung in der französischen Restauration 1814–1830,” Historische Zeitschrift 180, no. 2 (1955): 283.

209Augustin Thierry, Essai sur l’Histoire de la Formation et des Progrès du Tiers État (1853), new rev. ed. (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1894), pp. 172–73.

210Ibid., pp. 189 and 195.

211Ibid., pp. 1–2.

212Ibid., p. 2.

213Marx discusses Thierry’s Essai in the letter to Engels cited in tnote 12, above. Interestingly, he commends Thierry for describing “well, if not as a connected whole: (1) How from the first, or at least after the rise of the towns, the French bourgeoisie gains too much influence by constituting itself the Parliament, the bureaucracy, etc., and not as in England through commerce and industry. This is certainly still characteristic even of present-day France.” Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, p. 88.

214See, for instance, the popular pamphlet by “Timon” (Louis-Marie Cormenin de la Haye), Ordre du Jour sur la Corruption Électorate, 7th ed. (Paris: Pagnerre, 1846).

215Recollections, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (New York: Meridian, 1959), pp. 2–3.

216Allix, “J.-B. Say et les origines d’industrialisme”: 318–19.

217A. Augustin-Thierry, Augustin Thierry, p. 114.

218Ibid., p. 131.

219“Sur l’état présent,” Censeur Européen, 2: 97.

220See Ralph Raico, “Classical Liberal Exploitation Theory”: 179–83.

221Eugene Tenbroeck Mudge, The Social Philosophy of John Taylor of Caroline: A Study in Jeffersonian Democracy (1939; New York: AMS Press, 1968), pp. 151–204 and passim.

222William Leggett, Democratick Editorials: Essays in Jacksonian Political Economy, Lawrence H. White, ed. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1984), pp. 250–51. See also Lawrence H. White, “William Leggett: Jacksonian Editorialist as Classical Liberal Political Economist,” History of Political Economy 18, no. 2 (Summer 1986): 307–24.

223William Leggett, Democratick Editorials, p. 142.

224John C. Calhoun, A Disquisition on Government and Selections from the Discourse, C. Gordon Post, ed. (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1953), pp. 17–18.

225See, e.g., Harris E. Starr, William Graham Sumner, (New York: Henry Holt, 1925), pp. 241 and 458.

226Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The title derives from an earlier essay by Skocpol.

227Ibid., pp. 3–37.

228A scholar who stressed the role of the state in creating corporatist forms and hence “class interest” (although he preferred the sociologically more accurate term “caste” to “class”) was Ludwig von Mises; see his Theory and History, pp. 113–15. Mises, who examined this topic thirty years ago, is not mentioned by Skocpol. See also Murray N. Rothbard, Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970): pp. 12–13, where Rothbard states: “It has become fashionable to assert that ‘Conservatives’ like John C. Calhoun ‘anticipated’ the Marxian doctrine of class exploitation. But the Marxian doctrine holds, erroneously, that there are ‘classes’ on the free market whose interests clash and conflict. Calhoun’s insight was almost the reverse. Calhoun saw that it was the intervention of the State that in itself created the ‘classes’ and the conflict.” Rothbard also prefers the term “caste”: “castes are State-made groups, each with its own set of established privileges and tasks.” Ibid., p. 198, 5n.

229“Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Selected Works, I, p. 120.

230George Konrad and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power, Andrew Arato and Richard E. Allen, trans. (New York/London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979), pp. xiv-xvi, 39–44, and passim.

• 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.
• 111Theda Skocpol, Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1985). The title derives from an earlier essay by Skocpol.
• 112Idem.
• 113Idem.
• 114Mehring, Karl Marx, p. 25.
• 115Raddatz, Karl Marx, p. 43.
• 116In 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.
• 117The 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.”
• 118In 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.
• 119The 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.
• 120It 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.
• 121The 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.
• 122From 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.
• 123In 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.
• 124Larisa 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.”
• 125If 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.
• 126President 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.
• 127The 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.
• 128The 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.
• 129The 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.
• 130In 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.
• 131In 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.
• 132In 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.
• 133Competition 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.
• 134Competition 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.
• 135The 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.
• 136And 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.
• 137Contrary 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.
• 138Instead, 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.
• 139Instead, 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.
• 140Instead, 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.
• 141Instead, 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.
• 142If 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.
• 143Engels 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.
• 144Engels 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.
• 145Engels 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.
• 146Engels 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.
• 147When 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.
• 148When 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.
• 149When 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.
• 150When 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.
• 151Engels 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.
• 152Engels 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.
• 153Engels 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.
• 154Engels 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.
• 155Engels 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.
• 156In 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.
• 157In 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.
• 158In 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.
• 159In 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.
• 160Hess 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.
• 161Hess 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.
• 162One 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.
• 163In 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.
• 164There 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.”
• 165There 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.”
• 166There 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.”
• 167There 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.”
• 168There 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.”
• 169There 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.”
• 170There 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.”
• 171There 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.”
• 172Marx 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.”
• 173The Holy Family.
• 174Marx 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.”
• 175Marx 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.”
• 176Marx 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.”
• 177Marx 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.”
• 178We 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.
• 179We 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.
• 180The 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.
• 181What 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.)
• 182Consider 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.
• 183Another 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.
• 184Things 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.
• 185Things 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.
• 186There 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.
• 187Karl’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.
• 188Karl’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.
• 189Finally, 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.
• 190In 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.
• 191In 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.
• 192In 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.
• 193In 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.
• 194In 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.
• 195When 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.
• 196Incredible 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.’”
• 197Incredible 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.’”
• 198It 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.
• 199Where 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.
• 200Expenditures, 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.”
• 201Karl 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.”
• 202Karl 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.”
• 203When 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.”
• 204When 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.”
• 205Marx, 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.
• 206Marx, 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.
• 207We 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.
• 208Fritz 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).
• 209Fritz 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).
• 210Fritz 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).
• 211Fritz 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).
• 212What 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.
• 213Whiners, 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.
• 214Whiners, 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.
• 215Michael 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.
• 216It 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.
• 217How 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.”
• 218Consider 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.
• 219Marx 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.
• 220Socialist 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.
• 221As 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.”
• 222The 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.
• 223As 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.
• 224As 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.
• 225As 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.
• 226Today a revival appears to be under way of the concept of the state as creator of classes and class conflict. For instance, a group of scholars including Theda Skocpol, has produced an anthology with the significant title, Bringing the State Back In. In an introductory chapter, Skocpol speaks of “an intellectual sea change” taking place, by which the “society-centered ways of explaining politics and governmental activities” popular in the 1950s and 60s are being reversed, and government itself is looked upon as “an independent actor.”
• 227Raddatz 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!
• 228Raddatz 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!
• 229His 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.
• 230Arnold 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.