There is a trend today to blame every stupid and destructive fashion and ideology – postmodernism, transgender hysteria, Black Lives Matter, critical race theory, eco-nonsense, and so forth – on Karl Marx. Often these fads, which come and go, have nothing to do with Marxism and sometimes they are the exact opposite of what Karl Marx proposed. You can blame Marx for terrible harm to humanity – or rather, for giving tyrants a theoretical framework for doing terrible harm – but you cannot blame him for many of the disastrous follies of today.
The one thing that Marxism and all these other silly dogmas do have in common is a deep hatred of Western civilisation and capitalism, and a seething resentment of the colossal successes of both in improving the welfare of mankind, especially the poor.
One must distinguish between Marxist theory, which is vague, passionate and self-contradictory, and the Marxist practice of hundreds of communist countries around the world, which is fairly consistent. Marxist government always results in tyranny, mass poverty except for the ruling elite, the brutal oppression of the working classes, and massive inequality. (Communism does not result in “equal misery for all”. It results in misery for the masses, and immense wealth for the Marxist rulers. The supreme leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Un, does not live in miserable poverty; he lives in magnificent splendour).
All Marxists, in power and out of it, despise the working classes at the same time as they glorify them. Marxists would be horrified at their children going to working class schools. In Russia, there were special elite schools for party members; in South Africa the communist leaders send their children to private schools or posh Model-C schools. In Russia, in the final days of communism, the communist leaders showed their superiority with capitalist cars and goods. In Africa, communist leaders make the workers use state schools, public health and public transport, while themselves using private health, private education and private transport (Mercs, BMWs, Range Rovers and similar vehicles for the vanguard of the revolution).
Karl Marx was born in Germany in 1818 to well-off, middle-class parents – or “bourgeois” parents. (“Bourgeois” has two meanings. Marxists say it refers to any capitalist. Everybody else says it refers to the middle-class, anyone who is neither aristocratic nor working-class. In practice, all Marxist revolutionary leaders, including Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin and Castro, were bourgeois.)
Marx soon became a writer, historian and philosopher of revolutionary ideas. He had great gifts of expression and an arresting style. His main emotion was rage. Fundamentally he was an angry poet, turning out memorable verse. His seminal work was “The Communist Manifesto”, which he wrote in 1848. I urge anyone who hasn’t read this short, furious pamphlet to read it. (It is freely available on the web.) Marx the poet, driven by emotion, always claimed to be rational and scientific. He began the Manifesto claiming that history is driven by cold, mechanical economic laws and inevitable progress from primitive beginnings to advanced futures. Ancient hunter-gatherers later became the first farmers. Later came feudalism, which gave way to capitalism in about the 17th Century.
Capitalism, with its enormous powers of production, swept everything before it. But capitalism was sowing the seeds of its own destruction by exploiting the workers, making their conditions worse and worse, until inevitably they would rise up against the system and establish communism – or “rule by the proletariat”. Marx made ten demands for the communist state, which included abolition of private property and state control of the economy and education. He advocated the abolition of the “private family”. None of his predictions came true. Under capitalism the working class became more and more prosperous.
The communist coup in Russia in October 1917, only made possible by special circumstances brought on by WW1, had nothing to do with the working classes and was led by a small group of bourgeois revolutionaries under Lenin. They established communism, which resulted in terror, famine and oppression, with the loss of tens of millions of lives. But here is the telling point: it was heavily praised by the Western wokistas of the time, precisely the same people who are now telling us that Western art and science are a meaningless colonial construct, that little children should be taught about transgenderism at school, that black people’s lives mean nothing unless white people can be blamed for their suffering, and that we shall soon (next five years? next thirteen years? next weekend?) all be wiped out by climate catastrophe because of our capitalist sins.
Take rationalism first. Marx, heaving with rage, claimed to be scientific, rational and objective. Marxists continually use phrases like “scientific socialism” and “objective reality”. Marx admired and quoted (or misquoted) scientists such as Darwin. Marxist rule in Russia proceeded from 1917, producing misery for the Russian working classes and loud applause from many Western academics and editors. In the 1950s, however, some of them began to have doubts.
In the 1960s, the postmodernist movement began, first in France, then rapidly spreading through other Western universities. Postmodernist leaders included Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Jean-Francois Lyotard. The basis of postmodernism is that there is no independent science, no objective reality and no objective logic. They are all just constructs imagined by those in power. All Western thought and science are meaningless rubbish. When Newton said that force is equal to the rate of change of momentum, this does not mean that force is equal to the rate of change of momentum, which you can show in laboratories and observe for yourself; it only means that this is the construct of some white, bourgeois Englishman whose country was busy colonising countries abroad and shipping black slaves to the Americas.
I hear many opponents of postmodernism claiming that it is “Marxist”. It is nothing of the kind. It is in complete contradiction to everything Marx wrote about scientific progress. I hear these opponents pointing out that all the postmodernist leaders were previously Marxists. That is true. They became disillusioned with Marxism as more and more horrors of communist rule emerged. So they swapped over to their new creed. But this is the point: the fundamental purpose of Marxism is to fight the West, and the fundamental purpose of the postmodernists is also to fight the West. That is all they have in common.
Take sex and marriage. Marx did not have much to say about this except to condemn the private family: husband, wife and children. He wanted communal families (or something like that). He himself showed how to wreck the family. While married to his wife, Marx impregnated the family servant, Helene Demuth, who lived with them. He disowned his resulting son, Frederick, and tried to keep the matter a secret. Marxists don’t seem to have any consistent attitudes towards homosexuality or transgenderism, one way or the other. When Fidel Castro, a rich, white bourgeois man, seized power in Cuba in 1959 and established communist rule, one of the first things he did was to persecute homosexuals. He said they were the result of capitalist depravity. (In many African countries, where homosexuality is illegal, the African leaders claim that homosexuality in Africa is a result of colonialist depravity). Throughout most of history, nobody, including Marxists, gave much thought to homosexuality or to transgenderism, which was just accepted as part of the normal background. Yet, again, I hear opponents of the present transgender madness claiming that it is Marxist. It is not.
How about the cities and the countryside, industrialisation and the green movement? In the Communist Manifesto, Marx thoroughly approved of industrialisation and the cities – although he said capitalism was abusing them. He sneered at “the idiocy of rural life”. And sure enough, when the communists came to power in Russia, they put tremendous effort into industrialisation, even if they did it far less efficiently and with far more environmental damage than the capitalists had done in the West. (The pollution in communist countries was appalling.)
The satirist P J O’Rourke, after visiting East European countries in the Soviet Union, said, “Those commies just love concrete!” But when the most extreme communists of all, the Khmer Rouge under Pol Pot, took over Cambodia in 1975, they tried to establish an agrarian socialist society. They thought the cities were sinful and the rural areas virtuous. They forced everybody into the countryside. So pure was their communism, so radical and left-wing, that they slaughtered over a million people trying to establish it. Their preference for rural life was the exact opposite of Marx’s. It is wrong to blame Marx, as many people do, for the destructive green movements of today, for the rich Western greens who want to stop all development of Africa and make Africans forsake the technologies that have made the West prosperous and clean today. They are better called “eco-fascists” since they have more in common with Hitler than with Marx or Lenin.
Finally: race. This is one of the few instances where I agree with Marx. We both have the same explanation for race and economic development. We both agree that it was because of impersonal factors and not because of race that Europe developed long before Africa. Marx doesn’t explain this, but it was geography that caused the northern hemisphere to develop before the southern. Civilisation began with agriculture, which began in the north because by geographical accident certain plants could be cultivated there, and certain animals could be farmed. Marx praised European imperialism in Africa for projecting “backward” people into capitalism – a necessary first step before communism.
In the Manifesto, he writes that capitalism had ‘co-ordinated the social development of the civilised countries’, which he explains are ‘England, America, France, and Germany’. In his 1937 introduction to the Manifesto, Leon Trotsky explains, ‘For revolutionary parties in backward countries of Asia, Latin America, and Africa’, it was essential for them to have a clear understanding of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Notice that neither Marx nor Trotsky blames anyone for the underdevelopment of Africa. But today people calling themselves Marxists do just that. They blame colonialism, although they refuse to discuss the state of Sub-Saharan Africa before the Europeans came. If you ask, ‘Why was there no writing in Sub-Saharan Africa before the Europeans came?’, you will be met with shouting and screaming, and accused of being racist for asking. Marx would have answered readily.
In the racial politics of today, blame is all important. The key need is not to help black people, not to understand whatever misfortunes they might have, but to blame white people for them. Black Lives Matter has shown clearly it doesn’t give a damn about the most pressing problems of poor black people in the USA, namely the absence of black fathers, teenage pregnancies, drug addiction, poor educational outcomes, and the terrible threat to decent black people from violent young black male criminals. Those they ignore. Instead, they are obsessed about the occasional case where a white policeman kills a black man. Woke whites feel the same. Recently President Biden has said that the greatest threat to the US is ‘white supremacy’. You cannot blame Karl Marx for any of this wicked nonsense.
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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