By Kevin D. Williamson
Thursday, August 06, 2020
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.
Marxism, 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 corpses socialism continues to produce in the
21st century — in Cuba, in Venezuela, in North Korea. That is a story that we
must never stop telling, because socialism is the author of horrors we must
never forget.
But 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.”
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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