Marx As Vituperating Racist, Proto-Nazi

… A little complement on my (mostly, but not fully) anti-Marx essay:”Marx, for terror and tyranny all along…“ (part of Marx’s 200th birthday celebrations). After I published it some accused me publicly on the Internet to be “anti-left” when my position is the exact opposite: I am for real progress, liberty, equality, fraternity (in this order)… And I have paid my dues (including physical attacks from real right-wingers…)

Buried in my essay is the intellectual relationship of Marx with Adolf Hitler.

Hitler wrote, and said, that Nazism was “half Marxist dogma“.

Indeed, Marx’s strident racism and violent anti-Russian attitude were mental preparations for what fascist Germany did in 1914-1918 and then again under the Nazis. And, no, the usual excuse that everybody did it at the time, that everybody used to be racist, doesn’t fly. False: racism appears in the orders and writings of Pope Nicholas V (1455 CE, formally enabling the Portuguese plutocrats to enslave Africans), Kant, Marx…

Ninety Nine percent, 99% of the great thinkers of civilization were not racist, and the entire Greco-Roman empire was not racist at all (emperors came from Spain, Asia, Gaul, Arabia and Africa). Quite the opposite: the religion of the Late Greco-Roman empire, “Catholicism“, is Greek for “Universalism“.

Marxism is an ideology calling for dictatorship of something called the “proletariat”. The “proletarius” was well-known in Rome: it was the lowest part of the Plebs, the part whose only contribution to society was “proliferation”: from proles “offspring, progeny“. The proletariat had babies, and owned nothing, but those babies. Thus the proletariat was exempt from taxes and military service.

The idea that those without even an education should exert dictatorship flies in the face of common sense: in the Roman Republic, where the office of dictator was used occasionally, during emergencies, only the best and brightest, not the lowest and least educated, could pretend to it. In practice, in “Marxist” countries, an hereditary aristocracy of the dictatorship evolved, the “apparatchik”, those of the apparatus, who knew, from birth, how to use said system, the apparatus, blossomed. The apparatchik had exclusive stores, exclusive rights (as they were the ones dictating). Such heirs are fully visible in China or (North) Korea, where they are multibillionaires. Notice that the idea that those without an education should dictate can be viewed as “Political Correctness“. (As we will see below, it all has to do with Marx’s self-hatred: Marx condemned… was he was. Marx a stridently racist anti-Jewish Jew got into anti-“capitalist”economics when his family’s capital, vineyards, suffered from Prussian policies… Paradoxes, paradoxes…)

 

Russian Communist supporters holding portraits of Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin participate in a rally marking the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in downtown Moscow on November 7, 2017. Lenin instituted concentration camps, Stalin gloated that he killed more Russians than Hitler (personal conversation, Churchill said…). Marx wished for dictatorship… As Aristotle wished for monarchy. / AFP PHOTO / Kirill KUDRYAVTSEV. Funny how Marxists need gods.

The ideology was created by Karl Marx, borrowing the good bits from others, especially Proudhon. Marx—along with his collaborator and sponsor, the heir Friedrich Engels—wrote a pamphlet called “Manifesto of the Communist Party.”

In 1867, Marx wrote the first volume of “Das Kapital” from the British Library. The second and third volumes were published posthumously, edited by Engels. Neither Marx nor a fortiori Engels belong to the proletarius, by a very long shot: so why would they want dictatorship… when Marx spent lots of time screaming he was dictated upon?

Few people who call themselves Marxists have read “Das Kapital”, just as few people calling themselves Muslims have read unabridged version of the 83,000 words Qur’an. In both cases, the idea is apparently to make a show of believing in something absurd and offensive, to upset others, and use over them the dictatorship of insult to reason. If one did read Das Kapital, or Das Koran, one can see that people who call themselves Marxists, or Muslims, have little in common with those ideologies.

Marx and Engels were not always wrong. Those founders of so-called “scientific socialism”, which was neither, took positions on Islam most of the contemporary (pseudo-) left would reject as “Orientalist” and “Islamophobic”. Marx and Engels retrospectively supported the Franks of Charles Martel against the Arabs, and the defenders of Vienna against the Turks in 1529 and 1683. These Muslim empires threatened “European development”. It was necessary to save “European civilization”. In this context, Marx and Engels also approved of the medieval aristocracy who fought the invading Mongols at the battles of Legnica/Wahlstatt in 1241, and Klodzko,  in Poland, while draining the steppe invaders at the much larger Battle of Mohi in Hungary.

To contradict those who see Marx as their hero, here are a few historical tidbits they might find interesting. (One can read the 1979 book of Nathaniel Weyl, himself a former communist, “Karl Marx: Racist”.)

Marx and Engels had plenty of ideas, not just on dictatorship, but also on empire, race, war.

When the United States annexed California after the Mexican War, Marx sarcastically asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Engels explained: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.”

Marx’s was into self-hatred. This is clear in his attacks against his fellow socialist and Jew Ferdinand Lassalle (1824-64), a Breslau native who became the founder of German socialism, the SPD, as a mass movement. Lassalle’s achievements for socialism were much more considerable than Marx’s own. Lasalle secretly influenced Chancellor Bismarck, who installed the world’s first universal health care system Bismarck in 1878: …”[Lassalle] attracted me as an individual. He was one of the most intelligent and likable men I had ever come across”.

Marx’s vituperations stand in sharp contrast. Marx called Lassalle the ‘Jewish Nigger‘. Marx used the word “Neger” (although the word, meaning black was not, nor should be, pejorative…) Marx saw his fellow socialist as a Polish Jew and ‘The Jews of Poland are the dirtiest of all races.‘

Engels wrote to Marx, March 1856: “[Lassalle] is a real Jew from the Slav frontier and he has always been willing to exploit party affairs for private purposes. It is revolting to see how he is always trying to push his way into the aristocratic world. He is a greasy Jew disguised under brilliantine and flashy jewels.”  In attacking Lassalle’s Jewishness, and sneering at his syphilis, Marx expressed age-old anti-Judaism, virulent in Germany since the eleventh century.

Thus Marx wrote to Engels, 10 May 1861: ‘A propos Lasalle-Lazarus. Lepsius in his great work on Egypt has proved that the exodus of the Jews from Egypt was nothing but the history which Mantheto narrates of the expulsion of the “leprous people” from Egypt. At the head of these lepers was an Egyptian priest, Moses. Lazarus, the leper, is therefore the archetype of the Jew, and Lassalle is the typical Leper.‘ Or again, 30 July 1862: ‘It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from Negroes who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger). This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.‘

Lassalle doesn’t look subsaharan African at all… It is reality itself which was taken for a ride, in Marx’s addled brain…

Ferdinand Lassalle in 1860, Schriftsteller, Politiker, Begründer des Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeitervereins. Er war zeitlebens Vertreter des philosophischen Idealismus Hegelscher Prägung.
geb: 11.4.1825 in Breslau,
gest: 31.8.1864 in Genf (Geneva, Switzerland, where died three days after being hit in the abdomen in a duel he called for, as his beloved went back to the Prince she had been engaged with…)
Does that gentleman, founder of the socialist SPD, look like coming from Subsaharan Africa? To Karl Marx, he did!

Engels shared Marx’s delirious racism. In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Lafargue had “one-eighth or one-twelfth nigger blood.” Here notice the idea that US racists and Nazi racist pushed, the “one drop” rule. By contrast, in France, several famous individuals were up to 100% subsaharan Africans, and that was not noticed (one became a most famous general, his son, the famous writer Alexandre Dumas).

In a letter to Lafargue’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

He was not joking…

Marx’s father, Heinrich, was the first in nearly a century to not become a rabbi and receive a secular education. Heinrich became a lawyer and lived a wealthy middle-class life, with his family owning Moselle vineyards. Although a descendant of rabbis on both sides of his lineage, Marx anti-Judaism was no passing vituperation. In his essay titled “On the Jewish Question”, published in 1844. Marx asked:

“What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money. … Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. … The bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange. … The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of money in general.”

All too many otherwise good people got too drunk on that one… Hatred is great, yet, it is time to sober up.

***

Search the Diamonds in the Mud:

When his son asked Roman emperor Vespasian why he taxed urine, the latter famously replied:”Money doesn’t have a smell”. Well, ideas don’t have a smell either. So ideas can be grabbed wherever, and whoever they come from. What has a smell are systems of thoughts, and moods, mentalities.

Marxism, as a system of thoughts, stinks to high heavens. But that doesn’t mean Marx never had a good idea (though many of those he grabbed from others…)

For example, calling attention to Marx’s extravagant, quasi-criminogenic anti-Judaism is not to say Judaism shouldn’t be criticized. Far from it: on the face of it, Judaism is tribalism made divine (I will not tweet that one, at least not today…) Spinoza, a Jew, showed how a critique of Judaism reached radical and fruitful conclusions about the world. The French Enlightenment, while promoting Jews as individuals, struck hard against Judaism, Christianism, Islamism… And so do I (yet that doesn’t make me anti-Israel, as Israel has a good, multidimensional historical justification…)

Marx and Engels regarded capitalism and liberal democracy as historically progressive steps, compared to feudalism and royal absolutism. Only capitalism could create centralized nation-states with modern, industrial economies and hence lay the material basis for socialism, the next step in human history. For this reason, Marx and Engels supported “bourgeois” and democratic movements (such as the revolutions of 1848). However, as I pointed out “Marxist” style revolutions had happened before (especially the one which launched the coup of Octavian/Augustus… the dictator of Rome, a very much milder version of Stalin).

This is not all completely false. However, it suffers from a myopic vision of civilization. Civilization comes and goes, ebbs and flows, according to the vagaries of wars, invasions, ecology and plutocracy. It doesn’t go all one way. When the feudal system crystallized, in the Eleventh century, it did it the way it did from the Carolingian collapse which had followed the Carolingian renaissance which followed the Islamist invasions, which collapsed the Merovingian renaissance outlawing slavery, itself blossoming after vanquishing the non-Frankish savages, and mind killing terrorizing Catholicism.

In the end, by the year 1066 CE, civilization stood higher than Rome in some ways  (no slavery, more technology, more machines, more wind and water and tidal mills, better beans, better horses, hydraulic hammers…) and less well in others (constant wars of potentates against each others… As it was not clear who was the boss; and the European subcontinent was still blockaded and under siege from the Muslims).

Marx is so much on the right, or even Nazi, in so many ways that one can be cogent, right-wing, pro-Trump and view Marx as visionary in some ways… and be right! It’s complicated. However, unbounded admiration for Marx, and adoption of the Marx cult is also very simple, and completely erroneous. Much of the failure of the opposition to plutocracy originates just there: Marx made the left not just hateful, but so stupid, it cannot cogently act.

Indeed, much of the most determined part of the “left”, by embracing Marxism, thus the most delirious part of Marxism, embraced, however unwittingly, much of what constituted Nazism. Not a good idea. Nazism, tribalism gone mass murdering in a weird, yet neurohormonally addictive interpretation of the theory of evolution, could only fail, as open societies such as Nazism’s ultimate enemies, in particular the French Republic next door, were, and are intrinsically… superior (Nietzsche said as much, but not this way).

Some will say Marx was just the opposite… Well, look at what he wrote: if it walks like a duck, talk like a duck, flies like a duck, waddle like a duck, looks like a duck, and duck Adolf recognizes it as his own, should not it be called a duck?

Patrice Ayme

 

Tags: Engels, Marx, racism