Karl Marx was a nasty man.
He was racist, snobbish, hypocritical, dishonest, spiteful, cruel, covetous, malicious, arrogant and overbearing.
Racist? He scorned Blacks, he loathed Jews (although he was descended from a long line of rabbis). Poles and Czechs, he declared, were worthy only to be subjugated by their betters – “the Austrian Germans” – or, better still, wiped off the face of the earth.
Snobbish and hypocritical? He scorned peasants – they were primitive “troglodytes”. He was repelled by “the masses”. They should and would, he predicted, inherit and rule the earth – but they were “the rabble”. On the other hand, he loved aristocracy. He was proud that his wife was an aristocrat. He kept her family name, von Westphalen, on their visiting cards. He most hated his own class, the bourgeoisie. He longed for, predicted, and rejoiced in the prospect of its utter destruction. Yet he longed to live again in the bourgeois style of his childhood, and towards the end of his life he did – kept in it parasitically and contentedly by his devoted admirer, Friedrich Engels.
Dishonest, spiteful, cruel? Engels was so devoted to Marx that he agreed to claim the paternity of Marx’s illegitimate child, Frederick Demuth. Marx begat the boy upon the subjugated body (one could fairly say slave body since he never paid her) of his servant Helene Demuth. (She even contributed her savings, from her better rewarded days with the Marx family in Karl’s childhood, to Karl’s family’s survival.) He had the baby boy taken away from her to be fostered and forbade any contact between the mother and her child.
Was Karl Marx clever? No. He left the University of Bonn without a degree. He graduated but failed an attempt to earn a doctorate at the University of Berlin. Then he had a bit of luck. The University of Jena found itself in financial straits and to raise revenue offered doctorates by correspondence. Karl had only to send it a fee along with an essay, which he did, and it mailed back a document certifying that he had a Ph.D.
He was quite unable to earn a living. Three of his seven children died in infancy and one at the age of nine because he did not get them enough to eat nor buy medical treatment for them when they fell ill – though he always managed to afford cigars. He demanded money to which he was not entitled from his widowed mother – so much that he impoverished her. He even begged, and got, small change from the poor. He did, however, promise them a glorious future when his grand economic theories proved prophetic and they ruled the world.
His theories? They were not his. He was a shameless plagiarist. Ideas that are attributed to Marx were appropriated by him without acknowledgement of their source. Examples: “Dictatorship of the proletariat” (Blanqui); “Scientific socialism” (Proudhon); “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains” (Rousseau); “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” (Saint-Simon). ); “Workers of all countries, unite” (Karl Schapp); “The workers have nothing to lose but their chains” (Jean-Paul Marat); “The Labor Theory of Value” (David Ricardo).
In 1867 Marx’s very long, wholly fallacious book Das Kapital was published. Marx and Engels claimed it “proved”, by the “iron laws of economics”, that the prevailing capitalist order would be “inevitably” overthrown by violent revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would impose Communism. The revolution was needed to force this inevitable transformation.
And then?
Well, then everyone would be happy – or else.
In the name of that vision tyrants have terrorized and impoverished nations, murdered uncountable millions by starvation, torture, slave labor, executions.
And yet it is now in high favor in the United States, formerly the land of the free and the home of the brave.
“We are trained Marxists,” Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement, boasted as its adherents rampaged through the Democrat-governed cities, injuring neighbors, burning their property, killing law enforcement-officers.
The Leftist federal government, “elected” through voter-fraud, approves of the inspiration and the action.
What can be done to stop it?
What will be done to stop it?
NOTE:
References to sources for the information in this post can be found with our essay under Pages titled The Fiddler and His Proof, a subsection of The Darkness of This World Part One. To find it go here and scroll down to essay 7.
