Excerpt from: Deconstructing Karl Marx & Communism
[Continued from: Marx and Mankind - Part 1] The recklessness behind Marx’ rhetoric alarmed several of his contemporaries. Ruge disliked his “unconscionable, ungrounded criticisms,” claiming that Marx considered “unscrupulousness, unfaithfulness and savagery the maxim.”
“Snarling and grinning, Marx, the new Babeuf, would slaughter anyone who stood in his way.”
This harsh judgement can’t be dismissed as a groundless reproach; a few years later the thirty-year-old Marx publicly advertised terror as the fastest revolutionary way forward in the NRZ:
“There is only one means by which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that is by revolutionary terror.”
Proudhon told Marx that he would not get very far if all he had to offer the proletariat was “blood to drink.” He was of the opinion that Marx was presenting himself as an “exterminator” and politely advised him to reconsider his approach. Subsequently, Marx denounced him as a naive idiot that the world ought to forget as quickly as possible.
Marx stated very clearly in The Communist Manifesto that discourse was off the table – but then what else remains but force and capitulation?
“The charges against Communism from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious attention.”
Though Marx passionately described the dismal life of the laborers, he exhibited no qualms whatsoever about sacrificing them (or anyone else, for that matter) in (a successful) bloody revolution. Heinrich Heine, once a close friend, came to dislike his clique of German communists precisely for this reason. He detested what he perceived to be their cynical indifference towards the people they were leading to the revolution (and the inevitable slaughter that accompanied it). In the end, Heine felt it proper to refer to them as a “crowd of godless self-appointed gods.”
Marx was blamed by his own followers for allowing the reputation of the International to be that of a gang of outlaws and assassins. To a firm believer in a violent workers’ uprising like Marx, this was certainly not an accusation that would keep him awake at night. On the contrary, he very much savored this kind of notoriety. The publication in 1871 of The Civil War in France – a most blistering, hate-filled and simultaneously brilliant commentary about the defeat of the Communard uprising – shocked his comrades and opponents in equal measure. The 40-page pamphlet promptly earned Marx the nick-name “the Red Terror Doctor”, a ringing title that delighted the middle-aged activist as much as did his newfound social status: prime target of public odium.
“At this moment, I have the honor of being the best calumniated and the most menaced man in London. That really does one good after a boring twenty-year swamp idyll. The government newspaper – The Observer – is threatening me with prosecution. Let them try! Those preposterous lowlifes!
But to take delight in a title such as “the Red Terror Doctor” requires a very particular mindset. It means that one does not mind being associated with terror (it should be noted that “terrorism” approves the murdering of innocents when it serves the cause).
The popular Italian revolutionary (and devout Christian) Giuseppe Mazzini, who would later become one of the four founding fathers of modern Italy, was convinced that Marx’ and Engels’ interests were so immensely different from the needs of individual nations and peoples that their ideas “will eventually end up either not functioning, or functioning tyrannically.” History has proven him right – invariably. In an article about the International Working Men’s Association, Mazzini described Marx as:
“A man … of destructive character, and of domineering temper, jealous of others’ influence ... whose heart, I fear, contains more elements of anger, albeit righteous, than love.”
As for the revolutionary party, Marx demanded of its members absolute obedience and submission to the agenda. Karl Ludwig Bernays, a journalist who briefly worked with Marx, had second thoughts.
“You say that all those who are not rigorously with us, who do not desire the new world order in all its fullness, who hold on with but one finger to a single shred of the old world, do not help the whole overthrow – at least that is how I translate your critical, eliminative ambitions; but what are we? Who is the core of our party?”
Techov saw in Marx and Engels two calculated men concerned with organizing a strong, autonomous party of an extremely authoritarian nature:
“For this purpose, not only should everything alien to it be excluded, all people opposing it in any way should be mercilessly persecuted.”
During their meeting, Techov got Marx drunk on purpose to hear him out, but the former officer could not be charmed:
“For our purpose at hand, I regret that this man, beside his eminent intellect, does not have a noble heart to offer. I am convinced that a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him. He laughs at the fools who parrot his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs at communists à la Willich, and at the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the pure-blooded ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from their seat, he needs a source of strength, which he can only find in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. In spite of all his assurances to the contrary, and perhaps because of them, I took away the impression that personal dominion was the aim of all his endeavors.”
In vino veritas, then? Twenty-four years later, Bakunin, who acknowledged Marx’ brilliance but loathed his character, cast a final judgement on his rival. His words, written shortly after the breakup of the International, confirmed his early impressions of Marx as much as they echoed Techov’s assessment:
“Marx does not believe in God, but he believes very much in himself, and relates everything to himself. His heart is not full of love but of bitterness, and he has very little natural benevolence for mankind ... Mazzini wanted to impose on humanity the yoke of God, Mr. Marx aspires to impose his own.”
On September 8, 1872, the day after The Hague congress of the International, Marx declared (in what was presumably his last public speech):
“We do not deny that there are countries, such as America and England, and if I was familiar with its institutions, I might include Holland, where the workers may attain their goals by peaceful means.”
Marxists have used this sentence as an excuse to claim that Marx actually wasn’t a proponent of violence – but in their argument they always omit the next line, which provides the proper framework:
“That being the case, we must recognize that in most continental countries the lever of the revolution will have to be force; a resort to force will have to be necessary one day in order to set up the rule of labor.”
At most, Marx conceded that there might be exceptions to the rule that force was the way. In 1880, he wrote to Henry Hyndman that he considered an English revolution not “necessary,” but “possible,” again affirming the possibility of a peaceful revolutionary approach.
It would or course be wrong to take everything that revolutionaries say at face value. Engels admitted himself that The Communist Manifesto disclosed the communists’ party politics only “in so far as they belong to the public.” There is Marx's telling letter of 1864 in which he complained about not being able to use “the old boldness of language” while drafting a new charter for the International, for fear that its other members would not accept it. Thus, it cannot be ruled out entirely that these very rare mentions of peaceful ways were mere diplomacy on the part of Marx. Furthermore (and this affirms the previous), on January 5, 1879 (seven years after the Hague Congress and four years before his death), The Chicago Tribune published an interview with Marx in which he in a most refined manner affirmed that violence was the only way – or at least a necessary ingredient of the revolution: “No great movement has ever been inaugurated without bloodshed.” Of this he was firmly convinced: in a circular letter of the same year addressed to Bebel, Liebknecht, Kautsky, and others, Marx and Engels distanced themselves from the German Social-Democrat Party. The reason for their disengagement (besides the with Marxian scrutiny detailed inadequacies of its leaders) was that the party “is showing that it does not wish to pursue the path of forcible, bloody revolution.” All of this should make it clear that Marx never abandoned his opinions regarding violent revolution as he grew older.
Based on these citations and first-hand testimonies, it would seem that the urge to dominate and the desire for destruction so vigorously expressed in Marx' poetry weren't merely stylistic exercises after all. Rather, they were expressions of genuine passions – passions that persisted to define him throughout life. The dark fury expressed in his poems stayed with him throughout his life, nor did he abandon his fixation on violence as the solution. But how could these fierce sentiments not have affected, contaminated, or even subverted whatever good intentions he might have had for mankind? Indeed, an indelible resemblance remains between Marx and his poetic villain Oulanem, who saw the whole of society as a grotesque abomination and who, driven by an endless rage, wanted to see everything destroyed: “A curse will finish what a curse commenced.” Contrary to his one-dimensional world antagonist, Marx proposed a utopian solution that, according to the laws of the dialectic, would materialize of itself in all its glory, if only we overthrew the old world by force first. But what promise of worldly utopia, throughout all of human history, did not end as a “curse”?
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