A most excellent and sound statement, caddie!!!!
"My master's very generous with the toys he gives his children to play with."
Posted on 05/05/2024 4:55:42 AM PDT by MtnClimber
Why and how did this angry, odious, insufferable fantasist become the intellectual lodestar for the global left?
This week, with the global celebration of May Day and with the ongoing protests on the nation’s college campuses, it is worth remembering that the man who largely inspired both was a hateful, intellectually shallow misanthrope, remembered by history and admired by jesters and dupes largely because of his odiousness.
The First of May is celebrated by socialists around the world, not specifically because of Karl Marx but to honor the anarchists hanged for the Haymarket Affair in Chicago in 1886. Nevertheless, this “International Labor Day” has very much become a Marxist tradition, formerly commemorated with parades and ceremonies by the Soviet Bloc nations and still very much acclaimed by those who still revere Marx and his communist ideology.
Marx is likewise celebrated these days in the pro-Hamas camps on America’s college campuses. The ideology of struggle expressed by the protesters is very much in the Marxist tradition. Reams of Marxist literature have been collected at various abandoned/disbanded protest sites around the country, most notably on the UCLA campus. And, of course, Marxist organizations and agitators have been front and center throughout the demonstrations. As the inimitable Mike Gonzales has repeatedly stated, noting that Marxism is always at the forefront of these types of protests: “The issue is never the issue. The issue is the revolution.”
The question is why. Why is Karl Marx, of all people, so adored and admired by the world’s angry and disillusioned youth? He was but one of hundreds of thousands of 19th-century communists and but one of hundreds of leftist intellectuals and theorists of his era. Why him?
The fact of the matter is that Marx was a loathsome person who hated nearly everyone and everything. He was aggressively lazy and didn’t have any knowledge of business, capitalism, or even any connection to the working class. As the late, great Paul Johnson noted, “the only member of the working class that he ever knew at all well, his one real contact with the ‘proletariat,’ was his household maid, Helene Demuth.” And so concerned was he with her plight that he forced himself on her, got her pregnant, denied paternity of her child, convinced Engels to pretend to be the father, and only met the child on one occasion.
More to the point, Marx was known by his friends, contemporaries, and even admirers to be a crackpot. Some of his erstwhile allies mocked his ideology as a quasi-religious attempt to replace Christian morality with something strikingly similar (Max Stirner). Some admired his ideas “in theory” but knew that they had no chance whatsoever to work “in praxis” (Ferdinand Lassalle). And still others candidly acknowledged that his economic schemes were borderline insane. Writing more than a half-century later, the renowned American leftist literary critic Edmund Wilson conceded that Marx’s foundational work, Kapital, “contains a treatise on economics, a history of industrial development, and an inspired tract for the times; and the morality, which is part of the time suspended in the interests of scientific objectivity, is no more self-consistent than the economics is consistently scientific or the history undistracted by the exaltation of apocalyptic vision.”
In short, Marx’s theories were a mess—and everyone knew it, even before World War I proved them so and forced a full-scale “revision” of the entire movement.
So again, why Marx? Why and how did this angry, odious, insufferable fantasist become the intellectual lodestar for the global left?
The answer is complicated, obviously, but can largely be broken down into three primary contributing factors.
First, Marx’s obnoxiousness proved to be an advantage as much as a liability. Marx was a bully. Indeed, he was among the most practiced and skilled bullies in the world. Anyone who dared to contradict him or to offer a competing theory of leftism was an open target for aggressive and hostile rebuttal. Marx attacked nearly all his one-time friends, including Stirner, Weitling, Bauer, and Feuerbach. He attacked the utopian socialists who preceded him. He attacked the anarchists who followed him. He attacked everyone, and he attacked them viciously and, for the most part, effectively. He successfully bullied all his potential competitors for intellectual supremacy of the left into submission or exile, often self-imposed.
Second, Marx was a “revolutionary” in the sense that he advocated violent overthrow of the existing regime. Whereas many of his contemporaries were mere theorists or incrementalists, Marx favored bold, dramatic, society-transforming action. Indeed, he believed that a violent, destructive, and bloody revolution was a necessary component of the communist transformation.
Needless to say, such violent fantasies often appeal to the young and disaffected. Although most of Marx’s contemporaries favored the incremental establishment of their ideology, those who were especially antisocial and disgruntled with the status quo found his illusions of brutal heroism cathartic and enticing. Much the same is true today, as it was in the period between Marx’s and our own…
Which brings us to the third reason Marx is so revered today.
Among those who admired Marx’s call for bloody revolution was a singular psychopath who, when he was merely 17, saw his brother Sasha hanged by the Czar, who was exiled to Siberia when he was 25, and who spent much of the rest of his adulthood bouncing around and being thrown out of various countries in Europe for advocating violence in Marx’s name. That psychopath—known as Lenin—would eventually be given safe passage back to Russia by the German government, who rightfully anticipated that he would end Russia’s participation in World War I. Almost immediately after his famous arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, Lenin began consolidating power. In time, he would become the world’s first prolific mass murderer—thereby proving Marx’s augury of widespread bloodshed correct. He would also found, in March 1919, the Communist International (the Comintern), which he would use to place spies and Marxist advocates among the labor leaders in nearly every major nation on earth.
The rest, as they say, is history—ugly, brutal, repetitious, and painfully stupid history. Karl Marx was a crackpot with a shockingly poor understanding of history and economics. The same can be said of his multitudes of modern-day disciples. If they were otherwise, clearly, they wouldn’t be his disciples.
Marx's ideas on class struggle and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie resonated with those who felt oppressed by the existing social and economic structures
Marx's idealized vision of a classless, communist society where the means of production are collectively owned and controlled appeals to those who seek a more equitable and just social order. The promise of economic and social equality, as well as the elimination of private property and the profit motive, holds a certain romantic appeal for the disaffected youth seeking radical change
His theory of historical materialism, which posited that the development of society is driven by the conflicts between social classes, offered a framework for understanding the dynamics of social change. This appealed to the youth's desire for a grand narrative and a sense of purpose in their pursuit of justice and equality.
Marx's critique of capitalism and advocacy for socialism provided a seemingly simple solution to complex problems. His emphasis on the redistribution of wealth and the abolition of private property appealed to those who felt that wealth inequality was unjust and that capitalism perpetuated systemic injustices
Universal signal of distress:
May Day X 3
Avg IQ = 100. Democratic party base is the ones <85 ( ~10%) — the ones who cannot even be allowed into the Army as cannon fodder since the training is worth more than their catching a bullet that would have hit a worthwhile soldier.
Much of the world is too dumb to understand that all forms of collectivism is a death cult — their deaths.
Envy is powerful.
This is the sort Lenin (or one of his kin) called useful idiots, they support Marxism.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckRGRe3CB1E
Ideas are mind viruses.
If our society actually cared about preserving itself and preparing young people for a productive life, it would ban anyone from the field of education that thought totalitarianism was a good idea. It is an indication of a bad morals and judgement.
Or, john Lennon..imagine that.
Both very wealthy individuals btw.
You nailed it. The left teaches their followers to be simple minded, and communism can be framed extremely simply
A history professor I had described marxism as the biggest, most violent and expensive temper tantrum ever thrown.
A most excellent and sound statement, caddie!!!!
"My master's very generous with the toys he gives his children to play with."
It is easier to wallow in hatred forcing others to work for your needs and embrace everything satanic and ugly than work for goodness and responsibility.
Thanks BB. In Marxism, envy is sacred. So is murder. The more innocent the victims, the better.
Ironically Karl Marx’s ‘48er friends played a big role in founding the Republican Party. For over a decade Marx was even a featured writer for Greeley’s NY Tribune, the voice of the Whigs and GOP.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.