Thursday, August 6, 2020

The Celestial Afterlife of Karl Marx

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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