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The Celestial Afterlife of Karl Marx
By KEVIN D. WILLIAMSON
August 6, 2020 11:24 AM
Why Marx continues to fascinate would-be revolutionaries
That Black Lives Matter should have tendrils connecting it directly to
the Marxist terrorist network of the 1960s and ’70s is entirely
unsurprising. It would be surprising if it were otherwise. That’s the
stuff of 2020.
BLM co-founder Patrisse Cullors describes herself as a “trained
Marxist,” with “trained” calling to mind that comical Marxist study
session in Hail, Caesar! She tells Democracy Now! that her entrée into
politics came under the guidance of Eric Mann, the Weather Underground
terrorist who was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder after
shooting up a Massachusetts police station. For radicals of that kind,
it is easy to see the appeal not of Marxism per se but of Karl Marx
himself and the Marxist style: Never mind the socialism, Marx offers up
radical anti-individualism, a totalitarian prefiguration of contemporary
identity politics, pathological anti-Semitism, the pretense to science,
and many other ingredients in the soup of radical politics du jour. And
in this meme-addled age, it is worth keeping in mind that Karl Marx,
with his big head of hair and Brooklyn beard, makes a pretty good mascot.
READ MOREMarxism, as National Review has reported elsewhere, is making a
little bit of a comeback among American progressives who have put out of
their minds the 100 million corpses produced by socialism in the 20th
century, along with the corBut the record of Marxism is clear enough.
What about Karl Marx himself?We do not know what Marx himself would have
done with real political power, because he never had any. Marx renounced
his Prussian citizenship in 1845, unsuccessfully tried to get it back in
1848, and was shortly thereafter expelled from Prussia and then France
before landing, at age 31, in the United Kingdom. So he was effectively
cut off from direct involvement in the mainstream of European affairs.
He had had only a marginal influence on practical politics during his
life on the Continent and had none at all thereafter. He was almost
exclusively a literary and journalistic figure, and though his
biographers have done him no favors in telling his story honestly (“a
tyrannical bigot,” Max Eastman called him), it is not his ugly and
abusive domestic life or his grimy grifting that should interest us but
his œuvre.
What should we make of Karl Marx the writer?
Marx began working as a journalist in 1842 and became the editor of the
radical newspaper Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher in 1843. He continued
writing for almost 40 years. His output was considerable and sustained
for decades, and so, as one might expect, it is uneven in quality and
style — wildly so, in fact.
As an economist, Marx was basically a caveman, building his analytic
framework atop a version of the labor theory of value that does not hold
up very well to scrutiny. His related claims about “surplus value” and
its inherently exploitative character reflect a primitive understanding
of how prices and exchange actually work. Marx was far from innumerate,
but he was at heart a moralist trying to work in a field that was
quickly becoming dominated by mathematics.
Marx purported to be practicing a “science” of history, but his analysis
is generally normative rather than genuinely descriptive. For example,
his insistence — he called it a “law” — that economic production is the
product of class antagonism is nonsensical and easily falsified. Marx,
for all of his scientistic fustian, led with his heart, deriving from
his own moralistic reactions to the conditions of his time (whether he
understood them or not) what he believed to be a historically necessary
progression toward a world that would — inevitably! — satisfy his own
spiritual and aesthetic longings.
As William Henry Chamberlin noted, “The truth is that there is nothing
remotely scientific about Marx’s socialism. He started with a set of
dogmatic a priori assumptions and then scratched around in the British
Museum for facts that would seem to bear out these assumptions.” Hence
Marx’s nearly endless series of risible predictions about the
development of both economic activity and political economy, a litany in
which Marx gets it wrong at practically every opportunity.
Those errors do not need to be rehearsed at length. But there were some
big misses: Capitalism has not produced an ever-smaller share of wealthy
exploiters and immiserated masses but has instead left the masses vastly
wealthier in real terms than the rich capitalists of Marx’s time; the
United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany were not primed for
socialist revolution but have instead built on the successes of
19th-century capitalism to create an even more liberal and egalitarian
form of capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries (Germany took a
horrific detour); the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in socialist
countries turned out to be dictatorship pure and simple, and socialism
did not bring about a “withering away” of the state but instead produced
a particularly comprehensive kind of statism that was not only
suffocating and vicious but often homicidal and genocidal as well. Much
of the rhetorical project of contemporary Marxism has been dominated by
defending socialism from history, a sustained cry of “No true Scotsman!”
that has reverberated from the Berlin Wall to the killing fields.
While Marx argued (from the labor theory of value and “surplus value”)
that income beyond the production costs not immediately returned to
workers is exploitation, it is precisely the diversion of profits into
capital investments that has led to higher real standards of living for
workers. Brad DeLong, who gives Marx a great deal of credit as both an
economist and an economic historian (“among the very first to get the
industrial revolution right”), argues: “Marx believed that capital is
not a complement to but a substitute for labor. Thus technological
progress and capital accumulation that raise average labor productivity
also lower the working-class wage. Hence the market system simply could
not deliver a good or half-good society but only a combination of
obscene luxury and mass poverty. This is an empirical question.” Marx’s
answer was the wrong one.
Even most self-proclaimed socialists in the United States implicitly
reject Marx’s analysis; the national systems they purport to admire in
such places as Denmark, Sweden, and Norway were created not by the
proletariat’s violent overthrow of the capitalist order but instead by
capitalism and liberal democracy. Whatever Marx’s continuing allure is,
it is not to be found in the substance of his economic and political
thought.
What they are attracted to is the Marxist style.
Our contemporary Marxists are not as embarrassed by Marx’s racism and
anti-Semitism as they should be — or, indeed, even as embarrassed as
some of Marx’s contemporaries were. In an 1890 letter, Friedrich Engels
chastised his collaborator for his obsessive Jew-hatred, reminding him
that “anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture, which is why it is
found only in Prussia and Austria, and in Russia too. Anyone dabbling in
anti-Semitism, either in England or in America, would simply be ridiculed.”
Marx was not unique in being an anti-Semite of Jewish origin or in
leaning on ethnic stereotypes (e.g., he spoke of “lazy Mexicans” who
would benefit by being politically dominated by the United States). He
can be found abusing his rivals with ethnic slurs, sometimes practically
rococo in their ornamentation. (His letter to Engels denouncing “Der
jüdische N*****” Ferdinand Lassalle, which includes spiteful racial
speculations about the man’s ancestry, is the most infamous example.)
But Judaism was hardly an afterthought to the father of socialism. It is
notable that one of Marx’s first high-profile contributions to
intellectual life was “On the Jewish Question,” which is full of
anti-Jewish invective: “What is the worldly cult of the Jew?
Huckstering. . . . The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew.” It
traffics in familiar anti-Semitic canards, including the claim that the
Jews who were being persecuted in Europe in Marx’s time were secretly
dominating public affairs through their financial power: “The
contradiction which exists between the effective political power of the
Jew and his political rights is the contradiction between politics and
the power of money,” Marx writes.
(Engels again offers a corrective, writing to Marx: “In North America
not a single Jew is to be found among the millionaires.”)
But there is more in “On the Jewish Question” than anti-Semitism,
because the hatred of Judaism and the Jewish identity is only a
subcategory of Marx’s rejection of all sources of connection and
community outside the political sphere. It is here, and not in The
Communist Manifesto or Capital, that the totalitarian foundation of
Marxism is made most comprehensible:
Where the political state has attained to its full development, man
leads, not only in thought, in consciousness, but in reality, in life, a
double existence — celestial and terrestrial. He lives in the political
community, where he regards himself as a communal being, and in civil
society where he acts simply as a private individual, treats other men
as means, degrades himself to the role of a mere means, and becomes the
plaything of alien powers.
Marx’s rejection of “the Jew” is in part his rejection of “the
individual, as the professor of a particular religion,” an affiliation
that prevents his being wholly assimilated into the “celestial” unity of
the political community — we may as well call it “the Communion of
Saints,” which is in effect what Marx imagines. (A great deal of
intellectual life in the modern era has consisted of trying to repurpose
Christian forms and concepts.) Of course, the political state, with its
“sophistry” and contradictions, must in Marx’s view also eventually give
way to the “final form of human emancipation,” which will involve, among
other things, “abolishing religion.” Marx goes in for some
consciousness-raising:
As soon as Jew and Christian come to see in their respective
religions nothing more than stages in the development of the human mind
— snake skins which have been cast off by history, and man as the snake
who clothed himself in them — they will no longer find themselves in
religious opposition, but in a purely critical, scientific and human
relationship. Science will then constitute their unity.
Anticipating the most obvious objection to this fantasy, Marx offers:
“Scientific oppositions are resolved by science itself.”
‘On the Jewish Question” is in the main plodding and doctrinaire, and of
very little use — it is salon material, of limited practical benefit to
the would-be revolutionary. But then much of Marx is. Both the
forward-looking Marx and the backward-looking Marx suffer from crippling
deficiencies of insight and understanding. Yet if there is relatively
little of real enduring interest in Marx the historian and Marx the
theorist (by which I mean little of real enduring interest for
nonspecialists in the works on their own terms; the horrifying
totalitarian political movement they midwifed will remain of urgent
interest), Marx the journalist, writing neither prospectively nor
retrospectively but putting into moral and political context the events
of his own time, remains a bracing and sometimes thrilling read. The
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, described by its translator (and
Stalin biographer) Robert Tucker as a “stylistic masterpiece,” is lively
and curious where so much of Marx is flat and dogmatic, grappling with
real events and people rather than getting sidetracked into endless
conceptual refinement and duck-row formation. It is also the source of
Marx’s much-quoted and misquoted lines: “Hegel remarks somewhere that
all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were,
twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as
farce.” That observation is the organizing principle of the essay, which
presents the 1851 coup d’état of Louis Bonaparte as the diminished echo
of his uncle Napoleon’s rise to power.
Louis Bonaparte forces Marx to step away from the romanticized and
theoretical proletariat of his ideological harangues and take a good
hard look at the masses as they are. Bonaparte, he writes, represents
the “most numerous class of French society.” Marx’s mid-19th-century
analysis perfectly presages the laments of 20th- and 21st-century
leftists who preach the virtues of the masses and mass democracy while
bewailing the way those very masses use mass democracy to “vote against
their own interests.” See if this sounds at all familiar:
The Bonaparte dynasty represents not the revolutionary, but the
conservative peasant; not the peasant that strikes out beyond the
condition of his social existence, the small holding, but rather the
peasant who wants to consolidate it; not the country folk who want to
overthrow the old order through their own energies linked up with the
towns, but on the contrary those who, in stupefied bondage to this old
order, want to see themselves and their small holdings saved and
favoured by the ghost of the empire. It represents not the
enlightenment, but the superstition of the peasant; not his judgment,
but his prejudice; not his future, but his past.
This is, of course, just a “clinging” and a “deplorable” away from the
contemporary analysis by the American Left (by which I mean here
center-left Democrats as well as far-left radicals) of the
nationalist-populist eruption of 2016 and thereafter. (And it is not
entirely wrong.) Marx sneers at the “faith of the French peasants in the
miracle that a man named Napoleon would bring all the glory back to
them.” (As Donald Trump told Emmanuel Macron: “Make France Great
Again!”) Marx understands the leaders of the Bonaparte coup as rapists —
and asks why the victim was wearing such a short skirt:
It is not enough to say, as the French do, that their nation has
been taken by surprise. A nation and a woman are not forgiven the
unguarded hour in which the first adventurer that came along could
violate them. . . . It remains to be explained how a nation of
thirty-six millions can be surprised and delivered unresisting into
captivity by three high-class swindlers.
At the same time, Marx finds potential radical allies mired in
accommodation, turned aside into a movement that “throws itself into
doctrinaire experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations, hence
into a movement in which it renounces the revolutionizing of the old
world by means of its own great, combined resources, and seeks, rather,
to achieve its salvation behind society’s back, in private fashion.”
That is a kind of prologue to the contemporary American Left’s contempt
for philanthropy, in which a kind of salvation (if a purely material
one) is worked out “in private fashion,” voluntarily, rather than in the
“celestial” realm of political community through the revolution called
for by such professing socialists as Senator Bernie Sanders. Marx had
touched on this in “The Tactics of Social Democracy,” with its warnings
about the substitution of “vulgar democracy” for real (and permanent)
revolution, and he would emphasize and revisit this theme in his writing
about the Commune in “The Civil War in France,” lamenting that “no
sooner do the working men anywhere take the subject into their own hands
with a will, than uprises at once all the apologetic phraseology of the
mouthpieces of present society with its two poles of Capital and
Wages-Slavery.”
36
It is that posture of uncompromising radicalism that gives Karl Marx the
power to continue fascinating would-be revolutionaries all these many
years later, and after all the hundreds of millions of murders and other
crimes produced by the partisans of his philosophy. And it was little
more than a posture, however sincere he may have felt himself to be in
his safe (if unnecessarily poor) life, sheltering under the sturdy roof
of British capitalism. For V. I. Lenin, that uncompromising radicalism
was more than a posture. The question for us in 2020 is whether the
blackshirts in Portland and elsewhere are playacting Marxes or
bloody-minded Lenins. It may be that Karl Marx is being used mainly as a
mascot.
A mascot for what?
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