Posted on 09/01/2020 1:43:24 PM PDT by Heartlander
Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx's life and have never read his three-volume "Das Kapital." Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx's death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxist have only read his 1848 pamphlet "The Communist Manifesto," which was written with Engels.
Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, antifa and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life. Marx's predictions about capitalism and the "withering away of the state" turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.
When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: "Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history." Then he asked, "Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?" Friedrich Engels added: "In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States." Many of Marx's racist ideas were reported in "Karl Marx, Racist" a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.
In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx's son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had "one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood." In an April 1887 letter to Paul's wife, Engels wrote, "Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district."
Marx's anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled "On the Jewish Question." He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was "huckstering" and that the Jew's god was "money." Marx's view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, "The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way."
Marx's philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. He wrote in his 1952 memoir, "The Motorcycle Diaries": "The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent."
British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in The New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to "a new social order" that would be created "by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese." The Soviets espoused the same "Jewish world conspiracy" as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon a campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism. By the way, the Soviet public was not told that Karl Marx was Jewish. Academics who preach Marxism to their classes fail to tell their students that his ideology has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.
White liberals are useful idiots. BLM, antifa and other progressive groups use the plight of poor blacks to organize left-leaning, middle-class, college-educated, guilt-ridden suburbanite whites. These people who topple statues and destroy public and private property care about minorities as much as their racist predecessors. Their goal is the acquisition and concentration of power and Americans have fallen hook, line and sinker for their phony virtue signaling.
If the people who claim to be marxist ever really read Marx they would be quieted.
Jew Bernie Sanders is no different!
Marx also thought the idea of a Revolutionary vanguard was wrong and impossible. He was a bitter enemy of another socialist named Blanqui who advocated the need for a group of professional revolutionaries to lead the way. Lenin did exactly what Blanqui said and ignored Marx, who thought that some spontaneous revolution would happen and a decades long struggle would result in victory.
I do know that. They pretend they are better blacks than black people.
That’s not what they do at all. What they do is pretend they can tell black people what to think.
So, neo-Marxism is Marxian but not Marxist, in that it continues the conflict theory-style analysis of Marx into a different realm and does so toward essentially Marxist ends. One could say this is a distinction without a difference, but that is incorrect. The consequence of this shift is profound. It means that rather than attempting to unite workers and seize the means of economic production, as the Marxists had envisioned, the neo-Marxists wanted to change culture itself. …This James Lindsay fellow has no clue about the original Marxism—Marx and Engels absolutely did and do want to change culture itself. What else could abolishing the family, private property, religion and borders have as a goal?—because that is way, way beyond mere economics. Is there even a distinction? I say no. The Manifesto called communism “the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involved the most radical rupture with traditional ideas”—which indicates that the irrevocable alteration of culture was intertwined from the start.
Where exactly do you get that notion? Please try to find that in Marx’s own writings and not the opinions of others that are not based on what Marx wrote. This “vanguard” manifested in the personage of a communist party itself and whatever paramilitaries aid them; there can be no other definition, certainly if the goal is a revolution to seize power. (And why did you capitalize “revolutionary”?)
Marx also thought the idea of a Revolutionary vanguard was wrong and impossible …
Sanders is not a Jew any more than Marx was (and Marx’s grandfather was the rabbi of Trier, Germany). The sense of religious Jew is utterly absent.
And frankly, one canard the national socialists promote is of communism being a “Jewish plot”, while ignoring Marx’s intent to wipe out Judaism (this being Sanders’ goal herein, by extension).
Marx was also a “Free Trader” like Williams.
Sorry; I didn’t hear of them specifically using “Uncle Toms” although I believe it was used; what was more notable (and what I heard) was calling them “House N-words”, which is really hypocritical.
“(T)he first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the level of ruling class to win the battle of democracy.”One thing about communists is that in the beginning, they always talk up democracy, but only in a certain context. Later on, you get more candid talk once the power is entrenched, e.g. this from Lenin:
— Communist Manifesto, chapter 2
“What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” …
“In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat—that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.” …
— The Principles of Communism
… “ Dictatorship is a state of intense war. That is the state we are in. […] Until the final issue is decided, this awful state of war will continue. And we say: ‘À la guerre comme à la guerre—we do not promise any freedom or any democracy.’” …That was from the Third Congress of Comintern; and Lenin actually quoted Engels there.
" On the pretext of founding a benevolent society, the lumpen proletariat of Paris had been organized into secret sections, each section led by Bonapartist agents, with a Bonapartist general at the head of the whole. Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni,[105] pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars — in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10. A "benevolent society" - insofar as, like Bonaparte, all its members felt the need of benefiting themselves at the expense of the laboring nation. This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpenproletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase. An old, crafty roué, he conceives the historical life of the nations and their performances of state as comedy in the most vulgar sense, as a masquerade in which the grand costumes, words, and postures merely serve to mask the pettiest knavery. Thus his expedition to Strasbourg, where the trained Swiss vulture played the part of the Napoleonic eagle." (The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 1852, Chapter V)
Sounds like Antifa today if you ask me.
Where exactly do you get that notion?
Here are several quotes from Marx and Engels themselves in regards to Blanquism, which is where the concept of the Revolutionary Vanguard came from.
The phantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only to seize the helm of state, but also by a display of great ruthless energy, to maintain power until they succeeded in sweeping the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. This involved, above all, the strictest, dictatorial centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government." (The Civil War in France via Selected Works, Volume I p. 31)
"We are not that stupid. The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried out by small conspicuous minorities at the head of unconscious masses, is past. Where it a question of complete transformation of the social organization, the masses themselves must also be in it, must themselves already have grasped what is at stake, what they are going in for with body and soul. The history of the last fifty years has taught us that. But in order that the masses may understand what is to be done, long, persistent work is required, and it is just this work we are now pursuing." (The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 via Selected Works Volume I pp.250-251)
"...we say to the workers: 'You have got to go through fifteen, twenty, fifty years of civil wars and national wars not merely in order to change your conditions, but in order to change yourselves and become qualified for political power." (Selected Correspondence, p. 92) As you can see, Marx did not support the idea of a Revolutionary Vanguard. Marx despised Blanqui, because he was a narcissistic egomaniac who couldn't stand anyone who didn't agree with him. You cannot find any explicit reference to the Revolutionary Vanguard in Marx's writings, simply because he never supported the idea. Lenin took the idea and promoted it in What is to Be Done? which was controversial at the time. Rosa Luxemburg herself called Lenin a Revisionist and a Blanquist. Marxists used the term as an insult, as Blanqui was considered "unscientific" and "elitist". All of this reiterates the point Lindsay makes in that Marx is so completely and utterly wrong about everything, that the Left simply has moved beyond him. Marx's theories are as ridiculous as somebody today practicing psychology and telling women the reasons they have problems is because of Penis Envy. It's laughably absurd. Quite frankly, nobody reads him anymore because he's useless. The Left has moved onto to new tactics and new concepts like Critical Theory and Neo-Marxism because it's the only way for them to try to salvage things. Quite frankly, the only reason we're even having the conversation is because Lenin used Blanqui's ideology in Marx's name, doing everything in complete violation to Marx's own ideas of how Communism would develop. Most people can't even conceptualize Marxism without Leninism.
There you go capitalizing “revolution” again. And nothing in Marx’s words said such a thing, but in fact he absolutely calls for revolution in the Manifesto.
Marx reiterates this over and over, that Capitalism’s economic forces will inherently destroy itself, therefore it is not needed to induce a Revolution …
If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if by means of a revolution it makes itself the ruling class and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production; then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. …Sounds like creating a revolutionary vanguard to me and fomenting a bloody revolution thereby. Of course, Marx is utterly wrong about such a revolution “swe(eping) away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms” because the “workers” now have become the antagonist as a class of people. But then again, he was wrong about a lot of things, and that does not prevent his acolytes/adherents from being just as wrong.
And yet they attack family, private property, religion and borders, all four of which the working class (in reality) champion.
Marx and Engels would never embrace the concept of White Privilege despite being anti-racist because the concept of having a racial or even a national identity was a “False Consciousness”. To attack somebody for being White would be counter-revolutionary because a racial identity is a delusion and separates workers from having solidarity …
Marx makes this explicitly clear in the Manifesto itself if you read it in its entirety.
"The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable." (Manifesto of the Communist Party, p. 26)
If you also read Capital, he writes of the concept of the dialectic of history. Marx states, and it is a central thesis to his entire economic theory, that the "Contradictions of Capitalism" inevitably lead to its destruction. Now as to why "Contradiction" is capitalized, it is because the term is used in a rather unique Hegelian sense. "Contradiction" does not mean logically incoherent, but the inherent tension and force in the system of Capitalism will inevitably lead to its destruction, which is an extremely Hegelian understanding of history that is entirely metaphysical and not even remotely scientific.
"It is a question of these laws themselves, of these tendencies working with iron necessity towards inevitable results. The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future." (Capital Volume I, p. 13)
"But Capitalist production begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature." (Capital, Volume I, p. 837)
This is why Marx stated that the Revolution would emerge among the Proletariat in advanced Capitalist countries, and not backwards nations. This is why Lenin and Mao were both Revisionists, because Marx stated that a feudal economy cannot transition to socialism without going through the Capitalist phase of history. Mao was successful because he defied Marx AND Lenin by mobilizing the peasants as a revolutionary cadre, which is a violation according to both. I get the impression that you have not read Marx other than selected excerpts, or simply you have only read the Manifesto. I suggest you read Thomas Sowell's Marxism: Philosophy and Economics for a primer, because everything I have mentioned is covered in that book. I also capitalize the term Revolution because Marx uses this word in a rather specific sense, much like most of his writing he uses terms with definitions that are not congruent with common understanding. This is another problem Marx has which is the result of his Hegelian influence, he is turgid and opaque in his writing style.
Sounds like creating a revolutionary vanguard to me and fomenting a bloody revolution thereby. Of course, Marx is utterly wrong about such a revolution “swe(eping) away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms” because the “workers” now have become the antagonist as a class of people. But then again, he was wrong about a lot of things, and that does not prevent his acolytes/adherents from being just as wrong.
Once again, you're interpreting Marx incorrectly. Your interpretation is actually a Revisionist stance. Marx speaks of the Proletariat as a class, not as a Vanguard. We know this because in his own correspondence and of his known personal detestation of Blanqui, he did not believe that a top-down attempt at a revolution could successfully occur in the manner he envisioned. It can be noted that Marx did not participate in revolutionary acts of violence in his lifetime, unlike other radicals of his time. Furthermore, while Marx was in support of using violence, both he and Engels were not opposed to peaceful means, much to the chagrin of Lenin who attacked Bernstein for his attempts at democratic change. Marx simply expected violence to be necessary, but ironically believed the Revolution would be less violent than preceding bourgeois revolutions.
"...the inevitable social revolution might be effected by entirely peaceful and legal means," (Capital, Volume I, p. 32.)
Engels writes, "the bourgeoisie and the government came to be more afraid of the legal than the illegal action of the workers' party, of the results of elections than of those rebellion." (The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 via Selected Works, Volume I, p. 130)
"Let us have no illusions about it: a real victory of an insurrection over the military in street fighting, a victory as between two armies, is one of the rarest exceptions." (ibid)
"The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionists", the "over-throwers",—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and overthrow. The parties of Order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves... And if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them, then in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this fatal legality." (The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850 via Selected Works, Volume I, p. 136)
Engels himself seemed to be more reluctant towards violence than Marx, as he criticized previous Reigns of Terror. Lenin would have labelled him a coward.
"We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves." (Selected Correspondence, p. 303.)
So then, why did Marx attack Jews in Zum Judenfrage? He did not just attack Judaism, but Jews themselves (the descendants of Judah). That is absolutely attacking a race. And that is what this thread is about.
Because Marx in private was a complete hypocritical scumbag who thought he was the greatest genius who ever lived and anyone who got in his way infuriated him. His biggest problem with Jews is that they were often successful in business and thus part of the Capitalist Class, and also because their identity as a Jew is yet another concept of False Consciousness. To Marx, Class was the only real identity a person could have. Marx doesn't even see Judaism as being anything other than a reflection of the economic conditions of the Jewish people, because Marx is a materialist. The Woke agenda accepts that identity is real, especially People of Color, but only inherently attacks White identity because of its supposed privileged status. Marx believed all identity other than class was a delusion and had to go.
A proletarian class that foments a revolution must have a vanguard first, as well as a rearguard. None of Marx’s writings, again, have him specifically speaking against such a formation.
I will agree that Engels in the beginning was for more peaceful transitions, saying in “The Principles of Communism” that “the communists would be the last to oppose” a peaceful abolition of private property (if such a thing were actually possible) and that he foresaw communism “transform(ing) existing society gradually and… be(ing) able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity”; but later on, he was saying things like “À la guerre comme à la guerre; we do not promise any freedom or any democracy”.
It’s a folly to characterize the Russian Empire as non-industrialized, to boot; they were not as advanced as the British or German Empires, or of course the USA, but they were absolutely not fully agrarian with the only manufacturing done by guilds and independent freemen; serfdom ended in the middle of the nineteenth century, and by the turn of the twentieth century Russia was actually the world’s leading oil producer. The communist revolution in Russia would not have gotten as far as it did without Germany’s aid (the source of the ideology) anyhow.
With all due respect, try to keep your replies brief. Proof by verbosity (also known as “argumentum verbosium”) is recognized as a logical fallacy.
That’s a large club
Thanks
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