Chapter 47 of 91 · Classical Economics: An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, Volume II by Murray N. Rothbard
10. Marx's vision of communism
10.3 Higher communism and the eradication of the division of labour
10.5 Marx's character and his path to communism
10.1 Millennial communism
The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx (1818–83) is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly banal or trite statement set alongside Marxism's myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, history, culture et al. Yet Marx's devotion to communism was his crucial point, far more central than the dialectic, the class struggle, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the goal, the great end, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, would put an end to history and establish a new Heaven and a new Earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial Christians, man, led by God's prophets and saints, would establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (and, for pre-millennials, Jesus would have many human assistants in establishing such a Kingdom), so for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, would establish a secularized kingdom of heaven on earth.
In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age, of peace and harmony, a reign of justice, would be established upon the earth.
Marx emphatically rejected those Utopians who aimed to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. No, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the post-millennial coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, to the millennial sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the Last Days, before the millennium could be established. Indeed, since the immediatist post-mils refused to wait for gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate among men, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent apocalyptic final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could establish the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx's version made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the instrument of the advent of his millennium, communism.
In fact, Marx, like the pre-mils (or ‘millenarians’) went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse. For Marx as for the millenarians, writes Ernest Tuveson,
The evil of the world must proceed to its height before, in one great complete root-and-branch upheaval, it would be swept away...
Millenarian pessimism about the perfectibility of the existing world is crossed by a supreme optimism. History, the millenarian believes, so operates that, when evil has reached its height, the hopeless situation will be reversed. The original, the true harmonious state of society, in some kind of egalitarian order, will be reestablished.1
In contrast to the various groups of Utopian socialists, and in common with religious messianists, Karl Marx did not sketch the features of his future communism in any detail. Not for Marx, for example, to spell out the number of people in his Utopia, and the shape and location of their houses, the pattern of their cities. In the first place, there is a quintessentially crazy air to Utopias that are mapped by their creators in precise detail. But more importantly, spelling out the details of one's ideal society removes the crucial element of awe and mystery from the allegedly inevitable world of the future. In the same way, science fiction movies lose their glamour and excitement when, in the second half of the film, the mysterious, powerful and previously invisible monsters become concretized into slow-moving green blob-like creatures that have lost their mysterious aura and have become almost commonplace.
But certain features are broadly alike in all visions of communism. Private property is eliminated, individualism goes by the board, individuality is flattened, all property is owned and controlled communally, and the individual units of the new collective organism are in some vague way equal to one another.
This millennialist emphasis on the collective is a long way from the orthodox Christian, Augustinian, stress on the individual soul and his salvation. In orthodox, a-millennial Christianity, the individual does or does not achieve salvation, until Jesus returns and puts an end to history, and ushers in the Day of Judgement. There is no millennium on earth; the Kingdom of God remains safely, and appropriately, in heaven. But millennialism's emphasis on achieving a Kingdom of God on earth inevitably stressed – especially in the required human agency of the post-millennialists – the inevitable collective march toward the Kingdom in and through history. In what we may call the ‘immediatist’ version of post-mil doctrine, as we have seen in Volume I in the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the coercive Anabaptists of the Reformation, in Christian communists and in a secularized version in Marxism, the object is to seize immediate power in a violent revolution, and to purge the world of sinners and heretics, i.e. all who are not followers of the sect in question, so as to establish the millennium, the precondition of Jesus's Second Advent. In contrast, the gradualist post-mils, in less violent and precipitate fashion, who would seize control of most of the Protestant churches in the northern United States during the nineteenth century, wanted to use state power to coerce morality and virtue and then establish the Kingdom of God, not only in the US, but throughout the world. As one historian penetratingly concludes about one of the most prominent post-mil economists and social scientists of the late nineteenth century – a passage that could apply to the entire movement:
In [Richard T.] Ely's eyes, government was the God-given instrument through which we had to work. Its preeminence as a divine instrument was based on the post-Reformation abolition of the division between the sacred and the secular and on the State's power to implement ethical solutions to public problems. The same identification of sacred and secular... enabled Ely to both divinize the state and socialize Christianity: he thought of government as God's major instrument of redemption...2
Gradualists or immediatists, all millennialists have caused grave social and political trouble by ‘immanentizing the eschaton’ – in the political philosopher Eric Voegelin's infelicitously worded but highly perceptive phrase. As an orthodox Christian, Voegelin believed that ‘the eschaton’ – the Final Days, the Kingdom of God – must be kept strictly out of earthly matters and be confined to the other-worldly realms of Heaven and Hell. But to take the ‘eschaton’ out of Heaven and bring it down into the processes of human history, is to create grave problems and consequences: consequences which Voegelin saw embodied in such immanent and messianic movements as Marxism and Nazism.
In common with other Utopian socialists and communists, Marx sought in communism the apotheosis of the collective species – mankind as one new super-being, in which the only meaning possessed by the individual is as a negligible particle of that collective organism. One incisive portrayal of Marxian collective organicism – what amounts to a celebration of the New Socialist Man to be created during the communizing process – was that of a top Bolshevik theoretician of the early twentieth century, Alexander Alexandravich Bogdanov (1873–1928). Bogdanov, like Joachim of Fiore, spoke of ‘three ages’ of human history: first was a religious, authoritarian society and a self-sufficient economy. Next came the 'second age’, an exchange economy, marked by diversity and the emergence of ‘autonomy’ of the ‘individual human personality’. But this individualism, at first progressive, later becomes an obstacle to progress as it hampers and ‘contradicts the unifying tendencies of the machine age’. But then there will arise the third age, the final stage of history, communism, though not as with Joachim, an age of the Holy Spirit. This last stage will be marked by a collective self-sufficient economy, and by
the fusion of personal lives into one colossal whole, harmonious in the relations of its parts, systematically grouping all elements for one common struggle – struggle against the endless spontaneity of nature... An enormous mass of creative activity... is necessary in order to solve this task. It demands the forces not of man but of mankind – and only in working at this task does mankind as such emerge.3
The acme of messianic communism appears in the frenzied three-volume phantasmagoria by the notable German blend of Christian messianist and Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). Bloch held that the ‘inner truth’ of things could only be discovered after ‘a complete transformation of the universe, a grand apocalypse, the descent of the Messiah, a new heaven, and a new earth’. As J.P. Stern writes in his review of Bloch's three-volume Principle of Hope, the book contains such remarkable declamations as ‘Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem’ (‘Where Lenin is, there is Jerusalem’), and that ‘the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism’ is part and parcel of ‘the age-old fight for God’. There is also more than a hint, in Bloch, that disease, nay even death itself, will be abolished upon the advent of communism.4
In contrast, there is no more eloquent championing of orthodox Christian individualism and revulsion against collectivism, than G.K. Chesterton's critique of the views of a leading Fabian socialist, Mrs Annie Besant – in which Chesterton swats Mrs Besant's pantheistic Buddhism:
According to Mrs Besant the universal Church is simply the universal Self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man... She does not tell us to love our neighbor; she tells us to be our neighbors... the intellectual abyss between Buddhism and Christianity is that, for the Buddhist or theosophist, personality is the fall of man, for the Christian it is the purpose of God, the whole point of his cosmic idea.5
Let us turn to some of the main features of communism. In the typical communal millennial future, an epoch of bliss and harmony, work, the necessity to labour, becomes de-emphasized or disappears altogether. Labour, at least labour in order to maintain and advance one's living standards, does not ring true with very many people as a feature of Utopia. Thus, in the vision of Joachim of Fiore, perhaps the first medieval millennialist, no work would be required to disturb the endless round of celebration and prayer, because mankind would have achieved the status of immaterial objects. If man were pure spirit, it is true that the economic problem – the problem of production and living standards – would necessarily disappear. Unfortunately, however, Marx, being an atheist and materialist, could not exactly fall back on a Fiore-like communism of pure spirit. How could solidly material human beings solve the problem of production and of maintaining and expanding their living standards?
There was method in Marx's refusal to treat the communist stage in any detail. His Utopia was shadowy. On the one hand, Marx assumed and asserted that goods in the future communist society would be superabundant. If so, there would of course be no need to refer to the universal economic problem of scarcity of means and resources as applied to ends. But by assuming away the problem, Marx bequeathed the puzzle to future generations, and Marxists have been split on the question: will communism itself bring about this magical state of superabundance, or should we wait until capitalism brings superabundance before we establish communism? Generally, Marxist groups have solved this problem, not in theory but in practice (or ‘praxis’) by cleaving to whatever path would allow them either to conquer or to maintain their power. Thus Marxist vanguards or parties, on seeing an opportunity to seize power, have been invariably willing to skip the 'stages of history’ preordained by their Master and exercise their revolutionary will. On the other hand, Marxist elites already entrenched in power have prudentially put off the ultimate goal of communism ever further into a receding future. And so the Soviets were quick to stress hard work and gradualism in persevering toward the ultimate goal.6
There are several other probable reasons for Marx's failure to detail the features of ultimate communism, or, indeed, of the necessary stages to achieve it. First is that Marx had no interest in the economic features of his Utopia; a simple question-begging assumption of unlimited abundance was enough. His main interest, as we shall see, was in the philosophic, indeed religious, aspects of communism. Second, communism for Marx was an inverted form of Hegel and his philosophy of history; it was the revolutionary end to Marx's neo-Hegelian version of ‘alienation’ and of the ‘dialectic’ process by which the aufhebung (transcendence) and negation of one historical stage is replaced by another and opposing one. In this case: the negation of the evil condition of private property and the division of labour, and the establishment of communism, in which man's unity with man and nature is achieved. To Marx, as to Hegel, history necessarily proceeds by this magical dialectic, in which one stage gives rise inevitably to a later and opposing stage. Except that to Marx, the ‘dialectic’ is material rather than spiritual.7 Marx never published his neo-Hegelian Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in which the philosophic basis of Marxism was set forth, and one essay of which, ‘Private Property and Communism’, contained Marx's fullest exposition of the communist society. One reason for his refusal to publish was that, in later decades, Hegelian philosophy had gone out of fashion, even in Germany, and Marx's followers were interested more in the economic and revolutionary aspects of Marxism.
10.2 Raw communism
Another important reason for Marx's failure to publish was his candid depiction of the communist society in the essay ‘Private Property and Communism’. In addition to its being philosophic and not economic, he portrayed a horrifying but allegedly necessary stage of society immediately after the necessary violent world revolution of the proletariat, and before ultimate communism is to be finally achieved. Marx's post-revolutionary society, that of ‘unthinking’ or ‘raw’ communism, was not such as to spur the revolutionary energies of the Marxian faithful.
For Marx took to heart two bitter critiques of communism that had become prominent in Europe. One was by the French mutualist anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who denounced communism as ‘oppression and slavery’, and to whom Marx explicitly referred in his essay. The other was a fascinating book by the conservative Hegelian monarchist Lorenz von Stein (1815–1890), who had been assigned by the Prussian government in 1840 to study the unsettling new doctrines of socialism and communism becoming rampant in France. Not only did Marx show a ‘minute textual familiarity’ with Stein's subsequent book of 1842, but he actually based his concept of the proletariat as the foundation and the engine of the world revolution on Stein's insights into the new revolutionary doctrines as rationalizations of the class interests of the proletariat.8
Most remarkably, Marx admittedly agreed with Proudhon's, and particularly Stein's, portrayal of the first stage of the post-revolutionary society, which he agreed with Stein to call ‘raw communism’. Stein forecast that raw communism would be an attempt to enforce egalitarianism by wildly and ferociously expropriating and destroying property, confiscating it, and coercively communizing women as well as material wealth. Indeed, Marx's evaluation of raw communism, the stage of the dictatorship of the proletariat, was even more negative than Stein's: ‘In the same way as woman is to abandon marriage for general [i.e. universal] prostitution, so the whole world of wealth, that is, the objective being of man, is to abandon the relation of exclusive marriage with the private property owner for the relation of general prostitution with the community.’ Not only that, but as Professor Tucker puts it, Marx concedes that ‘raw communism is not the real transcendence of private property but only the universalizing of it, not the overcoming of greed but only the generalizing of it, and not the abolition of labour but only its extension to all men. It is merely a new form in which the vileness of private property comes to the surface’. In short, in the stage of communalization of private property, what Marx himself considers the worst features of private property will be maximized. Not only that: but Marx concedes the truth of the charge of anti-communists then and now that communism and communization is but the expression in Marx's words, of ‘envy and a desire to reduce all to a common level’. Far from leading to a flowering of human personality as Marx is supposed to claim, he admits that communism will negate it totally. Thus Marx:
In completely negating the personality of men, this type of communism is really nothing but the logical expression of private property. General envy, constituting itself as power, is the disguise in which greed re-establishes itself and satisfies itself, only in another way... In the approach to woman as the spoil and handmaid of communal lust is pressed the infinite degradation in which man exists for himself.9
All in all, Marx's portrayal of raw communism is very like the monstrous regimes imposed by the coercive Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.10
Professor Tucker adds, perhaps underlining the obvious, that ‘These vivid indications from the Paris manuscripts of the way in which Marx envisaged and evaluated the immediate post-revolutionary period very probably explain the extreme reticence that he always later showed on this topic in his published writings.’11
But if this communism is admittedly so monstrous, a regime of ‘infinite degradation’, why should anyone favour it, much less dedicate one's life and fight a bloody revolution to establish it? Here, as so often in Marx's thought and writings, he falls back on the mystique of the ‘dialectic’ – that wondrous magic word by which one social system inevitably gives rise to its victorious transcendence and negation. And, in this case, by which total evil – which interestingly enough, turns out to be the post-revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat and not preceding capitalism – becomes transformed into total good.
To say the least, Marx cannot and does not attempt to explain how a system of total greed becomes transformed into total greedlessness. He leaves it all to the wizardry of the dialectic, now a dialectic fatally shorn of the alleged motor of the class struggle, which yet somehow transforms the monstrosity of raw communism into the paradise of communism's ‘higher stage’.
10.3 Higher communism and the eradication of the division of labour
The Hell of the first, or lower, stage of communism has been vividly expressed by Marx. What of the Heaven of the higher stage, of the ‘positive humanism’ of ultimate communism? Unfortunately, Heaven's features are vague and murky indeed, perhaps too insubstantial, if Marx had published his Manuscripts, to overcome the all too palpable horrors of raw communism. The key is that man is supposedly freed from the necessity of labour. The elimination of private property frees him from greed, succeeding the orgiastic culmination of greed achieved during raw communism. In particular, man is freed from the division of labour, from specialization, which prevents him from developing ‘all’ his faculties for the sheer joy of it, and ‘forces’ him to work for others – either in the market, or under the despotic power of feudalism, or oriental despotism, or under the dictatorship of the proletariat in the first stage of communism. Without the division of labour, and with the evil of exchange of goods and services at last eliminated, man is now freed from the ‘alienation’ of not consuming his own product. This alienation is not, as many Marxists seem to believe, the result of the capitalists' alleged extraction of the ‘surplus’ produced by the workers. More deeply, this alienation is the product of the division of labour and of specialization itself. That division eliminated, man, in the neo-Hegelian mystique of Marx, will return ‘to himself, will be united with ‘himself, and alienation will then be ended.
All this makes a kind of sense only if one realizes that, for Marx as for Hegel, ‘man’ is a collective and not an individual organic entity. For Hegel and for Marx, the history of ‘man’ is the history, the ups and downs, of what amounts to a single collective organism. If, for Marx, there is a division of labour, specialization and exchange, this means that ‘man’ is tragically split within ‘himself, so that the process of achieving the higher stage of communism, the end of human history in the same way that the Kingdom of God on earth had been an end, is a process by which man is no longer alienated from his collective 'self and achieves unity with himself. At the same time, ‘he’ also achieves unity with ‘nature’, for in the Marxian system the only ‘nature’ is that which has been created by centuries of man's labour and activity. Thus, as Robert Tucker points out, Friedrich Engels's famous statement about communism has been misinterpreted widely, not least by Marxists unfamiliar with the philosophical nature of their own system. Friedrich Engels (1820–95) wrote, in his Anti-DUhring:
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes the real, conscious lord of Nature, because he has now become master of his own social organization... Man's own social organisation, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed by Nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action. The extraneous objective forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself... It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.12
As Tucker points out, to the reader unfamiliar with Marxian philosophy, this passage might well be construed as referring to man's mastery of nature via technology. However,
in actuality, it refers to the mastery of technology as man's own nature outside himself. The kingdom of necessity is the alienated world of history, the realm of object-bondage. The ‘extraneous objective forces’ over which man is to become lord in the kingdom of freedom are understood as the externalized forces of the species-self. The nature to which man will no longer be subservient is his own nature.13
In short, as in many other places in Marx, a passage which at least superficially seems to contain at least a modicum of sense – although fallacious -turns out on deeper study to be but a part of the mumbo-jumbo of Marx's neo-Hegelian philosophy.
Particularly important for Marx is that communism does away with the division of labour. By being free of specialization, the division of labour, and working for others (including the consumers) man as labourer is freed from all limits. Thus liberated, ‘man produces in order to realize his nature as a being with manifold creative capacities requiring free outlet in a “totality of human life-activities'”.14 Or, as Engels put it in his Anti-Dühring, the disappearance of the division of labour will mean that productive labour will give ‘each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full’.
The idea of everyone developing all of their faculties ‘in all directions’ is mind-boggling, and conjures up the absurd picture of a world of autistic dilettantes, each heedless of social demand for their services or products, and each dabbling whimsically and sporadically in every activity. This image is confirmed by Marx's most famous passage describing the communist system in Part I of his ‘The German Ideology’, an unpublished essay written in 1845—46. There he writes that communism ‘corresponds to the development of individuals into complete individuals and the casting off of all natural limitations’. How are ‘all natural limitations’ cast off? – a tall order indeed. Let Marx explain. As soon as the division
of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him... He is a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.15
One of the most apt comments on this passage is the witty mot of Alexander Gray. ‘A short weekend on a farm might have convinced Marx that the cattle themselves might have some objection to being reared in this casual manner, in the evening.’ More broadly, Gray remarks ‘that each individual should have the opportunity of developing all his faculties, physical and mental in all directions, is a dream which will cheer the vision only of the simple-minded, oblivious of the restrictions imposed by the narrow limits of human life’. ‘For life’, Gray points out, ‘is a series of acts of choice, and each choice is at the same time a renunciation...’. The necessity of choice, Gray perceptively reminds us, will exist even under communism:
Even the inhabitant of Engels' future fairyland will have to decide sooner or later whether he wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury or First Sea Lord, whether he should seek to excel as a violinist or as a pugilist, whether he should elect to know all about Chinese literature or about the hidden pages in the life of the mackerel.16
The abolition of the division of labour meant also that all differences – and hence ‘opposition’ – between town and country had to be eliminated, with industry somehow equally diffused throughout the country (the world?). As a result, all large cities would have to be destroyed. As Engels said in Anti-Duhring: ‘it is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed to us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of. But it must and will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be.’17
It is not surprising that the Soviet authorities did not take a very favourable view of Marxian communism. Marxian pieties can go just so far. Thus, the Soviet Communist Party's theoretical journal Kommunist referred favourably to the unpublished work of a Soviet economist, V.M. Kriukov, who wrote that
An unintelligent person and philistine might form his own picture of communism approximately as follows: you rise in the morning and ask yourself, where shall I go to work today – shall I be chief engineer at the factory or go and head the fishing brigade? Or shall I run down to Moscow and hold an urgent meeting of the presidium of the Academy of Science?
Kommunist adds the warning: ‘It will not be so.’ No doubt, and quite sensibly. But of course the Soviet authorities did not acknowledge the fact that by repudiating this ‘unintelligent’ notion they were renouncing the key to the whole Marxian system, the point and goal of the entire struggle.18
More importantly, the Soviet authorities jettisoned the basic goal of Marxism by abandoning the idea that communism will eliminate the division of labour. The revision began with Stalin's last work in 1952, shortly before his death, and intensified after that. Evading and sometimes falsifying the writings of the Founders, the Soviet revisionists were relatively sound in realism and economics but weak on the Marxian heritage. Sometimes, the Soviet experts simply and sharply stated the facts: ‘A man cannot do literally everything’; ‘In the system of Communist production relations, the division and specialization of labour will remain essential’; and ‘It is absolutely obvious that Communist society would be unthinkable without a constantly developing and intensifying division of labour’. Substitute the words ‘modern’ or ‘industrial’ for ‘communist’ and the Soviet economists were right on the mark. But in what sense is this ‘communism’ any longer?19
Six years before Anti-Dühring, moreover, Engels betrayed the entire Marxian vision in the course of a bitter polemic against the anarchists. In defending the idea of authoritarianism under communism, Engels reminded the self-styled anti-authoritarian anarchists that ‘a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets, and cannon-authoritarian means...’. But more importantly, Engels jeered at the idea that there will be no authoritarianism, and hence no division of labour, in a communist factory. Engels pointed out that factory production requires both, and also demands that the workers subordinate themselves to technological necessity. Thus: ‘keeping the machines going requires an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and many other labourers whose business it is to transfer the products...’. Moreover, he pointed out, technology and the forces of nature subject man ‘to a veritable despotism independent of all social organization’. ‘Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry’, Engels warned, ‘is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel’.20
Refreshingly sober words, no doubt, but totally alien to the spirit of Marxism and certainly to all that Marx said or wrote on the topic, as well as most other writings of Engels. To Marx, all labour in future communism is not economic, but artistic, the free and spontaneous creativity allegedly typical of the artist. For Marx in his economic magnum opus, Capital, communist man has been transformed from an alienated man into an aesthetic man who regards everything in artistic terms. Thus, on the factory, industrial production under communism will have no authoritarian direction but rather unity will be achieved as with musicians in a symphony orchestra.
Engels, however, was an interesting case. A bit more of an economist than Marx, and the man who introduced his friend and partner to British classical economics, Engels was capable of alternating the wildest Utopian fantasies of communism with a suddenly perceptive insight into its economic difficulties. Thus, even in Anti-Dühring Engels at one point admits that ‘the task of economic science’, as capitalism moves forward rapidly and inexorably to its collapse, is ‘to uncover amid the changes of the economic transition the elements of the future new organisation of production and exchange which will remove the previous malfunctioning (of the capitalist economy)’. It was never a task, however, that either Engels or Marx would ever bother to take aip.
Furthermore, in ‘The Principles of Communism’, an essay written in late 1847 that became the first draft for the Communist Manifesto, Engels laid bare one of the crucial, usually implicit, assumptions of the communist society – that superabundance will have eliminated the problem of scarcity:
Private property can be abolished only when the economy is capable of producing the volume of goods needed to satisfy everyone's requirements... The new rate of industrial growth will produce enough goods to satisfy all the demands of society... Society will achieve an output sufficient for the needs of all members,
This superabundant production somehow will have been achieved by a wondrous technological progress that would eliminate the need for any division of labour.
Engels, however, in the midst of this bold assumption, felt compelled to waffle, and to admit that this communist millennium could not be achieved ‘immediately’, or ‘at one blow’. For ‘it would not be possible immediately to expand the existing forces of production to such an extent that enough goods could be made to satisfy all the needs of the community’. During the transition period, at least, says Engels, ‘industry will have to be run by society as a whole for everybody's benefit. It must be operated by all members of society in accordance with a common plan... Private property will also have to be abolished and it must be replaced by the sharing of all products in accordance with an agreed plan’.21
Any believer in the labour theory of value who tried to set forth a scheme of economic calculation under socialism would likely fasten on the idea of setting prices, and paying wages, in accordance with the labour time expended on production. The issue of labour-time tickets was precisely the plan proposed by Robert Owen, by the Ricardian individualist-anarchist Josiah Warren, and by the German Ricardian socialist Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805–75). One of Friedrich Engels's most penetrating economic insights came in the course of demolishing the labour-ticket money Utopian socialism of Rodbertus, a beloved figure in Germany at that time.22
Engels denounced the Rodbertus doctrine in a preface to the first German edition of Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy, the year after Marx's death (1884). Here Engels had the impudence to condemn Rodbertus's labour money as ‘childishly naive’, and to press on to scorn Rodbertus for overlooking economic law and the competitive market process:
To desire in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, to establish the determination of value by labour time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way in which it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that... one has adopted the usual Utopian disdain of economic laws.
Engels goes on to assert that competition, by ‘bringing into operation the laws of value of commodity production in a society of producers who exchange their commodities’, creates the only possible organization of social production ‘in the circumstances’. Engels goes on to engage in a scornful and perceptive critique of socialist attempts at calculation (at the very least of the Rodbertus variety):
Only through the undervaluation and overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to the individual commodity producers what things and what quantity of them society requires or does not require. But it is just this sole regulator that the Utopia in which Rodbertus also shares would abolish. And if we have to ask what guarantee we have that the necessary quantity and not more of each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat, while we are choked in beet sugar and drowned in potato spirit, that we shall not lack trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons flood us in millions -Rodbertus triumphantly shows us his famous calculation, according to which the correct certificate has been handed out for every superfluous pound of sugar, for every unsold barrel of spirit, for every unusable trouser button, a calculation which ‘works out’ exactly, and according to which ‘all claims will be satisfied and the liquidation correctly brought about’.23
Engels adds that ‘If now competition is to be forbidden to make the individual producers aware, by the rise or fall of prices, how the world market stands, then their eyes are completely blinded’.
Professor Hutchison's comment on this performance by Engels is all too a propos:
Mises and Hayek could hardly have made the point more forcefully. What is most extraordinary is the combination of penetrating critical insight regarding the vital function of the competitive price mechanism as applied to the Utopian notions of Rodbertus together with the totally uncritical, purblind complacency regarding his own and Marx's Utopian assumptions (as he himself had earlier revealed them in his ‘Principles of Communism’ in such irresponsible vacuities as ‘the joint and planned exploitation of the forces of production by society as a whole’).... The hordes of infallible Prussian officials and ‘the Prussian State Socialism’, for relying on which Engels so castigates Rodbertus, would inevitably be required (and, of course, have been deployed) many times over for Engels's and Marx's own Utopian ‘planning’.24
But such few perceptions on the part of Engels come under the category of what he himself once called ‘howlers’. Apart from them, ultimate communism was naively to achieve the transcendence of both work and the division of labour. But that is not all. Along with the transcendence and negation of private property will come the negation of virtually all aspects of modern civilization, which Marx also considered 'subsidiary modes of production’ alienating man from his supposed true nature. Thus:
Religion, the family, the state, law, morality, science, art, etc., are only particular modes of production, and fall under its general law. The positive transcendence of private property, as the appropriation of human living, is, therefore the positive transcendence of all alienation and thus the return of man from religion, the family, the state, etc., to his human, i.e. social existence. (Italics are Marx's)25
But if all these cherished institutions are to be rudely stripped from man, what then remains to this poor, ‘liberated’ creature? For make no mistake, these post-Marxian creatures would be deprived of all human interrelations that make up a society. These ‘complete’ individuals would be deprived of law, family, custom, religion, and, of course, of all exchange of goods and services, i.e. they would be complete, hermetically sealed creatures each isolated from everyone else. Ironically, then, leftists who habitually though falsely denounce individualist thinkers for advocating a world of isolated ‘atomistic’, hermetically sealed individuals, themselves worship a theorist whose vision of the ideal future is precisely of such a monstrous world. At the same time, of course, each will have the consolation of knowing that they are all trivial particles in a mighty collective organism now united with ‘itself – and that any vagueness or inconsistency in this picture will be resolved by the sorcery of the ‘dialectic’, in which all contradictions transcend their negations into a higher unity.26
What will allegedly be left to man under communism is a new and bizarre form of art or aesthetics. Man will be stripped of wealth and possessions, but he will be far ‘richer’ in another sense: unalienated, and fulfilling himself in all directions, he will approach his own creations rich in the appreciation of beauty. He will be, in the words of Marx in ‘Private Property and Communism’, a ‘rich man profoundly endowed with all the senses’, he will realize his natural tendency to arrange all things ‘according to the laws of beauty’. Until communism man's appreciation of beauty had been sullied by greed and possession. But, for Marx, having, possessing, implies the 'simple alienation of all the [physical and spiritual] human senses,..’.
Professor Tucker, who has done much to explicate Marx's vision of communism, concludes that ‘economic activity will turn into artistic activity... and the planet itself will become the new man's work of art. The alienated world will give way to the aesthetic world’. But, if ultimate communism abandons and eliminates all sense of having, of ownership, in order to liberate man for purely aesthetic creation and contemplation, then communism itself must be transcended, since even communism implies some form of having or possessing. As Tucker points out, ‘Consequently, the final condition of man will be beyond all ownership, beyond the property principle, and in this sense beyond communism.’27 Hence Marx ends his fullest discussion of communism (in ‘Private Property and Communism’) with these faintly ominous sentences:
Communism is the position as the negation of the negation, and hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery. Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism as such is not the goal of human development – the structure of human society.28
So what is the final stage even beyond communism, the final-final Aufliebung, the great transcendence, the ultimate negation? It is a world beyond all ownership and all possession, a world fully liberated for the spontaneous flowering of all faculties in all directions and for the unsullied, totally sensate appreciation of pure beauty. We may be pardoned for concluding that, wittingly or unwittingly – and with Marx it is difficult to know which – the final-final stage is the stage of the graveyard for the human race. After the turmoil and upheaval of all the Aufhebungs will come the ‘peace’ of a universal cemetery. For no possession, no use of resources, means rapid and universal starvation. Deprived of all labour for productive goals and of all possessions, mankind will have precious little time left for the appreciation of pure beauty.
Whether or not they saw the full horror of Marx's ultimate ‘positive humanism’, there is no doubt that the Soviets were always uneasy at the thought of this abyss. The Soviet editor of a Russian translation of Marx's manuscripts, published in 1956, on analysing the above passage, asserts that by ‘communism as such’ Marx meant raw communism of the initial stage. But this is almost a wilful misinterpretation of Marx's final words on beyond the ultimate stage. The Soviets had trouble enough with the ‘withering away of the State’ in the highest stage of communism, which to them meant at most a shift from official state ownership of all resources to ownership by 'social’ or ‘administrative’ organizations, officially proclaimed as non-states.29 The reason that Marx suppressed the publication of this essay in his lifetime seems similar to the Soviet's burying of their allegedly final-final goal. To say that even the Marxist public is ‘not yet ready for it’ is a rich understatement; one trusts that they never will be.
In socialist practice, of course, while communist countries never got to the ‘highest stage’, there seemed to be little evidence of either a notable appreciation of beauty or of great spontaneous or artistic creativity. Perhaps even the relative physical deprivation rather than the rapid and absolute starvation of ‘beyond communism’ of twentieth century socialist regimes was responsible for the grey and grim cast universally acknowledged to pervade these countries.
But of course all these problems are neatly buried by the pervasive but implicit premise underlying all of Marx's discussions of communism: the unsupported, unquestioned assumption that throughout all these changes, production remains happily abundant, if not superabundant. Hence the economic problem is simply and quietly assumed away.
Some might protest that, in our discussion of communism, we have not mentioned the feature that is generally considered the hallmark of that system: the slogan, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’. This phrase seems to contradict our view that the essence of the communist society is a secularized religion rather than economics. The locus classicus, however, of Marx's proclamation of this well-known slogan of French socialism, was in the course of his vitriolic Critique of the Gotha Program in 1875, in which Marx denounced the Lassallean deviationists who were forming the new German Social Democratic Party. And it is clear from the context of his discussion that this slogan is of minor and peripheral importance to Marx. In point 3 of his Critique, Marx is denouncing the clause of the programme calling for communization of property and ‘equitable distribution of the proceeds of labour’. In the course of his discussion, Marx states that inequality of labour income is ‘inevitable in the first stage of communist society,... when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined’. On the other hand, Marx goes on,
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of individuals under division of labour, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after... the productive forces have also increased with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be fully left behind and society inscribe on its banners: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!30
It should be evident from this passage and its context that Marx's final sentence, far from being the point and the culmination of his discussion, was stated briefly only to be dismissed. What Marx is saying is that the key to the communist world is not any such principle of the distribution of goods, but the eradication of the division of labour, the all-round development of individual faculties, and the resulting flow of superabundance. In such a world, the famous slogan becomes of only trivial importance. Indeed, Marx proceeds immediately after this passage to denounce talk among socialists of ‘equal right’ and ‘equitable distribution’ as ‘ideological nonsense about “right" and other trash common among the democrats and French Socialists...’. He then quickly adds that ‘it was in general incorrect to make a fuss about so-called “distribution” and put the principal stress on it’.31'32
The absolute misery and horror of the ultimate stage (and a fortiori of the beyond-ultimate stage) of communism should now be all too apparent. The eradication of the division of labour would quickly bring starvation and economic misery to all. The abolition of all structures of human interrelation would bring enormous social and spiritual deprivation to every person. And, even the alleged ‘artistic’ intellectual and creative development of all man's faculties in all directions would be totally crippled by the ban on all specialization. How can true intellectual development or creation come without concentrated effort? In short, the terrible economic suffering of mankind under communism would be fully matched by its intellectual and spiritual deprivation. Considering the nature and consequences of communism, to call this horrific dystopia a noble and ‘humanist’ ideal can at best be considered a grisly joke, in questionable taste. The prevalent notion, for example, that Marxian communism is a glorious ideal for man perverted by the later Engels or by Lenin or Stalin, can now be put into proper perspective. None of the horrors committed by Lenin, Stalin, or other Marxist-Leninist regimes can match the monstrousness of Marx's communist ‘ideal’. Perhaps the closest approximation was the short-lived communist regime of Pol Pot in Cambodia which, in attempting to abolish the division of labour, managed to enforce the outlawry of money – so that for their tiny rations the populace was totally dependent upon the niggardly largesse of the communist cadre. Moreover, they attempted to eliminate the ‘contradictions between town and country’, by following the Engels goal of destroying large cities, and by coercively depopulating the capital, Phnom Penh, overnight. In a few short years, the Pol Pot group managed to exterminate one-third of the Cambodian population, perhaps a record in genocide.33
Since under ideal communism everyone could and would have to do everything, it is clear that, even before universal starvation set in, very little could get done. To Marx himself, all differences among individuals were ‘contradictions’ to be eliminated under communism, so that presumably the mass of individuals would have to be uniform and interchangeable.34 Whereas Marx apparently postulated normal intellectual capabilities even under communism, to later Marxists, it seems that difficulties could be alleviated by the emergence of superhuman beings. To Karl Kautsky (1854–1938), the German Marxist who assumed the mantle of the top leadership of Marxism upon the death of Engels in 1895, under communism ‘a new type of man will arise... a superman... an exalted man’. Leon Trotsky waxed even more lyrical: ‘Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, finer. His body more harmonious, his movements more rhythmical, his voice more musical... The human average will rise to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx. Above these other heights new peaks will arise’. If the beyond ultimate stage of communism ever lasts long enough to breed a new super-race, we may safely leave it to the communist theoreticians of that future day to resolve the problem of whether the ‘contradiction’ of ‘permitting’ a super-Aristotle to tower over an Aristotle may be allowed to exist.35
Neither should libertarians be taken in by the Marxian goal of the ‘withering away of the State’ under communism, or in the use of the phrase, borrowed from the cherished aim of the French free market libertarians Charles Comte and Charles Dunoyer: a world where the ‘government of persons is replaced by the administration of things’. There are two major flaws in this formulation from the laissez-faire libertarian viewpoint. First, of course, as the Russian anarcho-communist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–76) insistently pointed out: it is absurd to try to reach statelessness via the absolute maximization of state power in a totalitarian dictatorship of the proletariat (or more realistically a select vanguard of the said proletariat). The result can only be maximum statism and hence maximum slavery. As perhaps the first of the ‘new class’ theorists, and anticipating the iron law of oligarchy of Michels and Mosca, Bakunin prophetically warned that a minority ruling class will once again, after the Marxian revolution, rule the majority:
But the Marxists say, this minority will consist of the workers. Yes, no doubt... of former workers, who, as soon as they become governors or representatives of the people, cease to be workers and start looking down on the working masses from the heights of state authority, so that they represent not the people but themselves and their own claim to rule over others. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of human nature... The terms 'scientific socialist’ and 'scientific socialism’, which we meet incessantly in the works and speeches of the... Marxists, are sufficient to prove that the so-called people's state will be nothing but a despotism over the masses, exercised by a new and quite small aristocracy of real or bogus ‘scientists’.... They [the Marxists] claim that only dictatorship, their own of course, can bring the people freedom; we reply that a dictatorship can have no other aim than to perpetuate itself, and that it can engender and foster nothing but slavery in the people subjected to it. Freedom can be created only by freedom...36
Indeed, only a believer in the preposterous necromancy of the ‘dialectic’ could believe otherwise, that is, could believe that a totalitarian state can inevitably and virtually instantly be transformed into its opposite, and that therefore the way to get rid of the state is to work as hard as possible to maximize its power.
But the problem of the dialectic is not the only, indeed not even the main, problem with Marxian communism. For Marxism shares with the anarchists a grave problem of the higher stage of pure communism, assuming for a moment that it could ever be reached. The crucial point is that, both for anarchists and for Marxists, ideal communism is a world without private property, and that all property and resources will be owned and controlled in common. Indeed, the anarcho-communists' major complaint against the state is that it is allegedly the main enforcer and guarantor of private property and therefore that to abolish private property the state must also be eradicated. The truth, of course, is precisely the opposite: the state, through history, has been the main despoiler and plunderer of private property. With private property mysteriously abolished, then, the elimination of the state under communism (of either the Marxian or anarchist variety) would necessarily be a mere camouflage for a new state that would emerge to control and make decisions for communally owned resources. Except that the state would not be called such, but rather renamed something like a ‘people's statistical bureau’, as has already been done in Khadafy's Libya, and armed with precisely the same powers. It will be small consolation to future victims, incarcerated or shot for committing ‘capitalist acts between consenting adults’ (to cite a phrase made popular by Robert Nozick), that their oppressors will no longer be the state but only a people's statistical bureau. The state under any other name will smell as acrid. Furthermore, it will be inevitable, under the iron law of oligarchy, that ‘world communal decisions’ will have to be undertaken by a specialized elite, so that the ruling class will inevitably reappear, under Bakuninite as well as any other form of communism.37
And, as we have indicated, in the ‘beyond-communism’ stage, the stage of universal no-ownership and therefore of no action and no use of resources, death for the entire human race would swiftly ensue.
Marx and his followers have never demonstrated any awareness of the vital importance of the problem of allocation of scarce resources. Their vision of communism is that all such economic problems are trivial, requiring neither entrepreneurship nor a price system nor genuine economic calculation – that all problems could be quickly solved by mere accounting or recording. The classic absurdity on this matter was laid down by Lenin, who accurately expressed Marx's view in declaring that the functions of entrepreneurship and of allocation of resources have been 'simplified by capitalism to the utmost’ to mere matters of accounting and to ‘the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic’. Ludwig von Mises wryly and justly comments that Marxists and other socialists have had ‘no greater perception of the essentials of economic life than the errand boy, whose only idea of the work of the entrepreneur is that he covers pieces of paper with letters and figures’.38
It is perhaps all too fitting that we now find that the idea of communism as a simple problem of book-keeping and registration was perhaps originated by the French apocalyptic fantast and inspirer of Marx, Théodore Dézamy.39
10.4 Arriving at communism
Karl Marx had a crucial problem. He was not interested, as were the scorned ‘Utopian’ socialists, in merely exhorting everyone to adopt the communist path to a perfect society. He did not propose to leave the attainment of communism to the imperfect free wills of mankind. He demanded a certain, ‘inevitable’ path, a ‘law of history’ that would demonstrate the absolute inevitability of history's reaching its final glory in a communist society. But here he was at a disadvantage relative to the various Christian wings of messianic communism: for, unlike them, there was here no inevitable Messiah to arrive and usher in a Kingdom of God on earth. As in the case of the post-mils, however, it was up to mankind, rather than the Messiah, to establish the Kingdom. Even without a Messiah, a vigilant and growing vanguard could establish the Kingdom; and the vanguard could even help in various pre-mil versions of millennialism. So that leadership by a dedicated vanguard was very much in the messianic tradition.
As Professor Tucker points out, Marx was not lacking a moral theory. He was definitely a moralist, but a highly curious one. In his ‘mythic vision’, the ‘good’, the ‘moral’, consists of participating in the inevitable triumph of the proletarian revolution, while the ‘bad’, or ‘immoral’, is trying to obstruct it.
The answer to the question as to what should be done is given in the mythic vision itself, and can be summed up in a single word: ‘Participate!’... So Marx... says that it is not a matter of bringing some Utopian system or other into being (i.e. of defining a social goal and purposefully endeavoring to realize it) but simply of ‘consciously participating in the historical revolutionary process of society which is taking place before our very eyes’.40
Thus, to be moral means to be ‘progressive’, to be in tune with the inevitable future workings of the laws of history, whereas the harshest condemnation is reserved for those who are ‘reactionary’, who dare to obstruct, even with partial success, such allegedly predestined turns of events. Thus Marxists are particularly vehement in denouncing revolutionary moments in which the existing rule of ‘progressives’ is replaced by ‘reactionaries’, and the clock is, miraculously, in the metaphor of historicist inevitability, ‘turned back’. For example: the Franco revolution against the Spanish republic, and Pinochet's overthrow of Allende in Chile.
But if a certain change is truly inevitable, why is it important for human agency to lend a hand, indeed to struggle mightily on its behalf? Here we turn to the critical matter of timing. While a change may be inevitable, the intervention of man can and will speed up this most desired of happenings. Man can function, in one of Marx's favourite obstetrical metaphors, as a ‘midwife’ of history.41 Man's intervention could give the inevitable a helpful push.
Yet, Marx's obstetrical analogies are only a feeble attempt to evade the self-contradiction between the idea of inevitability and action to achieve the inevitable. For according to Marx, the timing as well as the nature of events is determined by the material dialectic of history. Socialism is brought about, wrote Marx in Capital, by the ‘operation of the immanent laws of capitalistic production itself. As von Mises points out, to Marx
Ideas, political parties, and revolutionary actions are merely superstructural; they can neither delay nor accelerate the march of history. Socialism will come when the material conditions for its appearance will have matured in the womb [obstetrics again!] of capitalist society, neither sooner or later. If Marx had been consistent, he would not have embarked upon any political activity. He would have waited quietly for the day on which ‘the knell of private capitalist property sounds’.42
Marx might not have been logical or consistent, but his attitude was squarely in the millennialist tradition. As Professor Tuveson points out:
Several characteristics of historical Communist movements recall millenarian agitations. There is, for one, the well-known fanaticism of millenarian believers... The firm conviction that a sequence of events, leading to universal redemption, is ordained (or ‘determined’) would seem to lead to passivity on the part of an individual... But, characteristically, there is a vitally important qualification. Although the series of events is prophesied, their timing may be retarded by the failure of mankind. To delay the coming of redemption, then, is a great sin, against one's fellow beings, against posterity, against the power that has ordained events. But whole-hearted, zealous participation in the historically determined duties, doing what the old millenarians would call ‘doing God's will’, gives special eclat. In most millenarian groups there is something corresponding to the ‘Communist Party’. In Revelation itself there are the hundred and forty-four thousand, ‘the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb’, who are without guile, for they are ‘without fault before the throne of God’. (Revelation XIV:4–5). Thus, the whole proletariat, like the whole body of the saved, is without damning fault, but the specially distinguished group... are chosen from the chosen.43
But there was still a remaining problem: whence comes the inevitability in the Marxian schema? The proof that his cherished communist ideal would inevitably, 'scientifically’ arrive, would occupy Marx for the rest of his life. Certainly, he found the outlines of such proof in the mysterious workings of the Hegelian dialectic, which he bent to his use.
10.5 Marx's character and his path to communism
Karl Marx, as the world knows, was born in Trier, a venerable city in Rhineland Prussia, in 1818, son of a distinguished jurist, and grandson of a rabbi. Indeed, both of Marx's parents were descended from rabbis. Marx's father Heinrich was a liberal rationalist who felt no great qualms about his forced conversion to official Lutheranism in 1816. What is little known is that, in his early years, the baptized Karl was a dedicated Christian. In his graduation essays from the Trier gymnasium in 1835, the very young Marx prefigured his later development. His essay on an assigned topic, ‘On the Union of the Faithful with Christ’ was orthodox evangelical Christian, but it also contained hints of the fundamental ‘alienation’ theme that he would later find in Hegel. Marx's discussion of the ‘necessity for union’ with Christ stressed that this union would put an end to the tragedy of God's alleged rejection of man. In a companion essay, ‘Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession’, Marx expressed a worry about his own ‘demon of ambition’, of the great temptation he felt to ‘inveigh against the Deity and curse mankind’.
Going first to the University of Bonn and then off to the prestigious new University of Berlin to study law, Marx soon converted to militant atheism, shifted his major to philosophy, and joined a Doktorklub of young (or Left) Hegelians, of which he soon became a leader and general secretary.
The shift to atheism quickly gave Marx's demon of ambition full rein. Particularly revelatory of Marx's adult as well as youthful character are volumes of poems, most of them lost until a few were recovered in recent years.44 Historians, when they discuss these poems, tend to dismiss them as inchoate romantic yearnings, but they are too congruent with the adult Marx's social and revolutionary doctrines to be casually dismissed. Surely, here seems to be a case where a unified (early plus late) Marx is vividly revealed. Thus in his poem ‘Feelings’, dedicated to his childhood sweetheart and later wife Jenny von Westphalen, Marx expressed both his megalomania and his enormous thirst for destruction:
Heaven I would comprehend
I would draw the world to me;
Living, hating, I intend
That my star shine brilliantly...
and
... Worlds I would destroy forever,
Since I can create no world;
Since my call they notice never...
Here is a classical expression of Satan's supposed reason for hating, and rebelling against, God.
In another poem, Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed God's created world:
Then I will be able to walk triumphantly,
Like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.
And in his poem, ‘Invocation of One in Despair’, Marx writes:
I shall build my throne high overhead
Cold, tremendous shall its summit be.
For its bulwark – superstitious dread
For its marshal – blackest agony.45
The Satan theme is most explicitly set forth in Marx's ‘The Fiddler’, dedicated to his father:
See this sword?
the prince of darkness
Sold it to me.
And:
With Satan I have struck my deal,
He chalks the signs, beats time for me
I play the death march fast and free.
Particularly instructive is Marx's lengthy, unfinished poetic drama of this youthful period, Oulanem, A Tragedy. In the course of this drama his hero Oulanem, delivers a remarkable soliloquy, pouring out sustained invective, a hatred of the world and of mankind, a hatred of creation and a threat and vision of total world destruction.
Thus Oulanem pours out his vials of wrath:
... I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind:
Ha! Eternity! She is an eternal grief...
Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,
Made to be the foul-calendars of Time and Space,
Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,
So that there shall be something to ruin...
If there is a something which devours,
I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to ruins-
The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality:
Embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
And then sink down to utter nothingness,
Perished, with no existence – that would be really living!
And
... the leaden world holds us fast,
And we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,
Eternally chained to this marble block of Being...
and we —
We are the apes of a cold God.46
All this reveals a spirit that often seems to animate militant atheism. In contrast to the non-militant variety, which expresses a simple disbelief in God's existence, militant atheism seems to believe implicitly in God's existence, but to hate Him and to wage war for His destruction. Such a spirit was all too clearly revealed in the retort of the militant atheist Bakunin to the famous pro-theist remark of the deist Voltaire: ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create Him." To which the demented Bakunin retorted: ‘If God did exist, it would be necessary to destroy Him." It was this hatred of God as a creator greater than himself that apparently inspired Karl Marx.
Also prefiguring the man was a trait that Marx developed early in his youth and never relinquished: a shameless sponging on friends and relatives. Already in early 1837, Heinrich Marx, castigating his son Karl's wanton spending of the money of others, wrote to him that ‘on one point... you have wisely found fit to observe an aristocratic silence; I am referring to the paltry matter of money’. Indeed, Marx took money from any source available: his father, mother, and throughout his adult life, his long-suffering friend and abject disciple, Friedrich Engels, all of whom fuelled Marx's capacity for spending money like water.47
An insatiable spender of other people's money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means. While sponging on Engels, Marx perpetually complained to his friend that his largess was never enough. Thus, in 1868, Marx insisted that he could not make do on an annual income of less than £400-£500, a phenomenal sum considering that the upper tenth of Englishmen in that period were earning an average income of only £72 a year. Indeed, so profligate was Marx that he quickly ran through an inheritance from a German follower of £824 in 1864, as well as a gift of £350 from Engels in the same year.
In short, Marx was able to run through the munificent sum of almost £1200 in two years, and two years later accept another gift of £210 from Engels to pay off his newly accumulated debts. Finally, in 1868, Engels sold his share of the family cotton mill and settled upon Marx an annual ‘pension’ of £350 from then on. Yet Marx's continual complaints about money did not abate.48
As in the case of many other spongers and cadgers throughout history, Karl Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. The difference is that Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money. Man, he thundered, was in the grip of the ‘fetishism’ of money. The problem was the existence of this evil thing, not the voluntarily adopted attitudes of some people toward it. Money Marx reviled as ‘the pander between... human life and the means of sustenance’, the ‘universal whore’. The Utopia of communism was a society where this scourge, money, would be abolished.
Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed enemy of the exploitation of man by man, not only exploited his devoted friend Friedrich Engels financially, but also psychologically. Thus, only three months after Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, gave birth to his daughter Franziska in March 1851, their live-in maid, Helene (‘Lenchen’) Demuth, whom Marx had ‘inherited’ from Jenny's aristocratic family, also gave birth to Marx's illegitimate son, Henry Frederick. Desperately anxious to keep up haute bourgeois conventions and to hold his marriage together, Karl never acknowledged his son, and, instead, persuaded Engels, a notorious womanizer, to proclaim the baby as his own. Both Marx and Engels treated the hapless Freddy extremely badly, Engels's presumed resentment at being so used providing him a rather better excuse. Marx boarded Freddy out continually, and never allowed him to visit his mother. As Fritz Raddatz, a biographer of Marx, declared, ‘if Henry Frederick Demuth was Karl Marx's son, the new mankind's Preacher lived an almost lifelong lie, and scorned, humiliated, and disowned his only surviving son’.49 Engels, of course, picked up the tab for Freddy's education. Freddy was trained, however, to take his place in the working class, far from the lifestyle of his natural father, the quasi-aristocratic leader of the world's downtrodden revolutionary proletariat.50,51
Marx's personal taste for the aristocracy was lifelong. As a young man, he attached himself to his neighbour, Jenny's father Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, and dedicated his doctoral thesis to the baron. Indeed, the snobbish proletarian communist always insisted that Jenny imprint ‘nee von Westphalen’ on her calling card.
10.6 Notes
1. Ernest L. Tuveson, ‘The Millenarian Structure of The Communist Manifesto’, in C.A. Patrides and Joseph Wittreich (eds), The Apocalypse: in English Renaissance Thought and Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 326–7. Tuveson speculates that Marx and Engels may have been influenced by the outburst of millenarianism in England during the 1840s. On this phenomenon, particularly the flare-up in England and the US of the Millerites, who predicted the end of the world on 22 October 1844, see the classic work on modern millenarianism, Ernest R. Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970). See Tuveson, ibid., p. 340, n. 5.
2. Jean B. Quandt, ‘Religion and Social Thought: The Secularization of Postmillennialism’, American Quarterly, 25 (Oct. 1973), pp. 402–3. Actually, Ely, in common with many other post-mils, was not all that gradual, as he spoke of the New Jerusalem, ‘which we are all eagerly awaiting’.
3. Quoted in S.V. Utechin, ‘Philosophy and Society: Alexander Bogdanov’, in Leopold Labedz (ed.). Revisionism: Essays on the History of Marxist Ideas (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 122.
4. J.P. Stern, ‘Marxism on Stilts: Review of Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope’, The New Republic, 196 (9 March 1987), pp. 40, 42; Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), III, pp. 423–4.
5. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: 1927), pp. 244–5. Quoted in Thomas Molnar, Utopia: the Perennial Heresy (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1964), p. 123.
6. ‘The C.P.S.U. [Communist Party of the Soviet Union], being a party of scientific communism, advances and solves the problems of communist construction as the material and spiritual prerequisites for them become ready and mature, being guided by the fact that necessary stages of development must not be skipped over...’. Fundamentals of Marxism—Leninism (2nd rev. ed., Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1963), p. 662. Also see ibid., pp. 645–6, 666–7, 674–5.
7. On alienation and the dialectic, see Chapter 11.
8. Stein treated French socialism and communism as ideologies of the propertyless proletariat, aiming to destroy the historical foundations of European society based on the principles of individual personality and private property. The difference of course, is that Marx, in contrast to the other ‘classless’ socialists and communists, embraced this connection to the proletariat, whereas Stein condemned and warned against it. See the excellent and illuminating work by Robert C. Tucker, Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961), pp. 114–7. Stein's book, Lorenz von Stein, Der Socialismus und Communismus des Heutigen Frankreichs (Leipzig: 1842), remains untranslated. (Later editions were entitled Geschichte des socialen Bewegung in Frankreich, 1850, 1921). Stein spent his mature years as professor of public finance and public administration at the University of Vienna, 1855–88.
9. Quoted in Tucker, op. cit., note 8, pp. 155. Italics are Marx's.
10. Indeed, it is no accident that Marxian historians, from Engels to Ernst Bloch, have been great admirers of these regimes and movements, first, because of their communism, and second, because they were certainly ‘people's movements’, bubbling up from the lower classes.
11. Tucker, op. cit., note 8, pp. 155–6.
12.Anti-Dühring became the common name for Engels's Herr Eugen Duhring's Revolution in Science, which came out in 1878, five years before Marx's death. Three general chapters, not focused on Duhring, came out in French in 1880, as Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which became second to the Communist Manifesto as a popular presentation of Marxism in the late nineteenth century. The English translation, authorized by Engels, was published in 1892, and therefore Engels must be held responsible for such a clumsy locution as the verb ‘environ’. See R.C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), pp. 715–6.
13. Tucker, op. cit., note 8, pp. 196–7.
14. Ibid., p. 198.
15. Tucker, op. cit., note 12, p. 160. Similarly, in his Anti-Dühring, Engels heaped scorn upon the sort of ‘Prussian socialism’ which would preserve the division of labour as ‘inevitable in the nature of things’. In contrast, Engels proclaimed that in the future communism, ‘In time to come there will no longer be any professional porters or architects, and that the man who for half an hour gives instructions as an architect will also push a barrow for a period, until his activity as an architect is once again required’. Ibid., p. 718. In this spirit, Maoist China, during the Cultural Revolution, randomly substituted surgeons and janitors for each other in hospitals.
Finally, in his Woman and Socialism (1883), the faithful German Marxist and working-class organizer, August Bebel (1840–1913), paraphrased Marx's passage for the role of women under communism: ‘At one moment a practical worker in some industry she is in the next hour educator, teacher, and nurse: in the third part of the day she exercises some art or cultivates a science; and in the fourth part she fulfills some administrative function’. Quoted in Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1981), p. 168n.
16. Alexander Gray, The Socialist Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, 1946), p. 328.
17. Tucker, op. cit., note 12, p. 723.
18. Tucker, op. cit., note 8, p. 197n.
19. On the debate within the Soviet Union on this issue, see Herman Akhminov, ‘The Prospects for the Division of Labor’, Bulletin of the Institute for the Study of the USSR (July 1964), pp. 3–18.
20. Friedrich Engels, ‘On Authority’, written in 1872 and first published in an Italian collection in 1874. Tucker, op. cit., note 12, p. 731.
21. English translation by William O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976) I, pp. 369–76. Cited in T.W. Hutchison, The Politics and Philosophy of Economics: Marxians, Keynesians and Austrians (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 9–12, 14.
22. On Ricardian socialists, and on Rodbertus's business cycle theory, see Chapter 13 below. Rodbertus was an independently wealthy Prussian politician and civil servant, who lived most of his life as a leisured and erudite Prussian country squire. (He purchased an estate near the town of Jagetzow in East Prussia, and promptly renamed himself Rodbertus von Jagetzow.) His basic thrust was that labour is bound down by the iron or brazen law of wages (so named by Lassalle, as we shall see below), but that justice can be imposed by socialism run by the state, a literally divine, self-creative living organism, best headed by the king (in short, a monarchical socialism), Rodbertus sternly warned, however, that people are not yet moral enough for such socialism – and would not be for another five hundred years. See Gray, op. cit., note 16, pp. 343–51.
23. Hutchison, op. cit., note 21, p. 15. Hutchison points out that ‘Engels's warning regarding imbalances in the supply of trousers and trouser buttons has recently acquired embarrassing relevance’ in Soviet Russia. In 1980, Pravda (Moscow) had complained that, in regard to priority of supply, ‘in the clothing industry trousers are on the list of the “most important", but zip-fasteners are not’. Ibid., p. 20n.
24. Ibid., pp. 15–16.
25. ‘Private Property and Communism’, in Tucker, op. cit., note 12, p. 85.
26. As Tucker puts it, 'socialized humanity is not only a classless but also a stateless, lawless, family-less, religion-less and generally structure-less collectivity of complete individuals who live in harmony with themselves, with each other, and with the anthropological nature outside them. It hardly needs pointing out that this society without social structure is not a social order in any meaningful sense of that term. Speaking in the younger Marx's vein, it is an un-society’. Tucker, op cit., note 8, p. 201.
27. Ibid., pp. 158–61.
28. Tucker, op. cit., note 12, p. 93.
29. The Soviet version of ultimate communism hardly differed from the first stage, of Soviet life itself. All the central, new, disturbing messianic or bizarre features of communism are played down or buried. Thus, to the Soviets, higher or true communism was not the end of history, but merely a society that ‘will change and improve continuously’. Communist abundance will emphatically not be fabulous lands flowing with milk and honey’. There will simply be ‘rapid and continuous advance’ of 'socialist science and technology’. Fundamentals of Marxism – Leninism, op. cit., note 6, pp. 698–9, and pp. 698–717.
30. Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (New York: International Publishers, 1938), p. 10. The critique was first published by Engels in 1891, after Marx's death. The Lassalleans were followers of the late Ferdinand Lasalle (1825–64) a blowhard and dandy who was extremely popular in Germany, especially beloved by the working class, and the preeminent organizer of the proletariat. Typically, Lassalle died early in a most unproletarian and aristocratic way – in a duel over a lady. One of Lasalle's two major deviations from Marxism was his ultra-Malthusian devotion to the Malthus-Ricardo subsistence theory of wages as determined by population growth, which he popularized in the most rigid form, and allegedly named the ‘iron law of wages’, in which form it won widespread fame. In reality, Lassalle dubbed it the ‘brazen law of wages’ (in the sense of ‘made of brass’), and his most common locution was ‘the brazen and gruesome law of wages’ (das eherne und grausame Gesetz).
Lassalle's other and more important deviation was his embrace and worship of the state. Marx saw the state as a tyrannical instrument of mass exploitation which required a violent revolution to overthrow. Lassalle, in Hegelian fashion, on the other hand, worshipped the state as a guide and developer of freedom, as the fusion of man into a spiritual whole, and as an eternal instrument for moral regeneration. The only problem with the state, for Lassalle, was the fact that it was not yet controlled by the workers, but this could be rectified simply by enacting universal suffrage, after which the state would be run by a workers' party and the workers would then become the state and all would be well. The state would promptly transfer the control of production to workers' associations which would thus circumvent the brazen law by appropriating to themselves the surplus profits now extracted by the capitalists. See Gray, op. cit., note 16, pp. 332–43.
31. Actually, Marx goes on to make a useful point: that distribution always flows from the ‘conditions of production’ and cannot be separated from it. One would like to think that this was not only an argument against the ‘vulgar socialists’ but also an implicit slap at J.S. Mill, who thought that while production was bound by economic law, ‘distribution’ could be separated from production and reformed by state action.
32. See the excellent discussion of this point in Tucker, op. cit., note 8, p. 200.
33. The Soviet people were spared the full cataclysm of communism when Lenin, a master pragmatist, drew back from the early Soviet attempt (1918–21) to abolish money and leap into communism (later deliberately mislabelled ‘war communism’), and went back to the largely capitalist economy of the New Economic Policy. Mao tried to bring about communism in two disastrous surges: the Great Leap Forward, which attempted to eliminate private property and to eliminate the ‘contradictions’ between town and country by building a steel plant in every backyard; and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which tried to eliminate the ‘contradiction’ between intellectual and manual labour by shipping an entire generation of students to forced labour in the wilds of Sinkiang. On the myth of ‘war communism’, see the illuminating discussion in Paul Craig Roberts, Alienation and the Soviet Economy (Alburquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), pp. 20–47.
34. In an amusing note, during the New Left period of the late 1960s, the Liberated Guardian broke off from the quasi-Maoist journal, The Guardian, in New York City, on the ground that the latter functioned in the same way as any ‘bourgeois’ periodical, with specialized editors, typists, copy-readers, business staff, etc. The Liberated Guardian was run by a ‘collective’ in which, assertedly, every person performed every task without specialization. The same criticism, followed by the same solution, was applied by the women's caucus which confiscated the property of the New Left weekly, Rat. Both periodicals, as one would expect, died a mercifully swift death. See Murray N. Rothbard, Freedom, Inequality, Primitivism, and the Division of Labor (Menlo Park, Calif. Institute for Humane Studies, 1971), pp. 15n, 20.
35. See von Mises, op. cit., note 15, p. 143. Also see Rothbard, op. cit., note 34, pp. 8–15.
36. Bakunin, Statehood and Anarchy: quoted in Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), I, pp. 251–2. See also Abram L. Harris, Economics and Social Reform (New York: Harper & Bros, 1958), pp. 149–50.
37. On self-ownership and on the impossibility of communal ownership, see Murray N. Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty (2nd ed., Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1983), pp. 45–50.
38. Italics are Lenin's. V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution (New York: International Publishers, 1932), pp. 83–4; von Mises, op. cit., note 15, p. 189. Also see Harris, op. cit., note 36, pp. 152–3n.
39. See the standard biography of Marx by David McLellan, Karl Marx: His Life and Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 118.
40. Tucker, op. cit., note 8, p. 229.
41. On obstetrical metaphors in Marxism, see Gray, op. cit., note 16, p. 299 and 299n.
42. Ludwig von Mises, Theory and History, (1957, Auburn, Ala.: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1985), p. 81.
43. Tuveson, op. cit., note 1, pp. 339–40.
44. The poems were largely written in 1836 and 1837, in his first months in Berlin. Two of the poems constituted Marx's first published writings, in the Berlin Atheneum in 1841. The others have been mainly lost.
45. Richard Wurmbrand, Marx and Satan (Westchester, 111: Crossway Books, 1986), pp. 12–13.
46. For the complete translated text of Oulanem, see Robert Payne, The Unknown Karl Marx (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 81–3. Also excellent on the poems and on Marx as fundamentally a messianist is Bruce Mazlish, The Meaning of Karl Marx (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Pastor Wurmbrand points out that Oulanem is an anagram of Emmanuel, the Biblical name for Jesus, and that such inversions of holy names are standard practice in Satanic cults. There is no real evidence, however, that Marx was a member of such a cult. Wurmbrand, op. cit., note 45, pp. 13–14 and passim.
47. Friedrich Engels (1820–95) was the son of a leading industrialist and cotton manufacturer, who was also a staunch pietist from the Barmen area of the Rhineland in Germany. Barmen was one of the major centres of pietism in Germany, and Engels received a strict pietist upbringing. An atheist and then a Hegelian by 1839, Engels wound up at the University of Berlin and the Young Hegelians by 1841, and moved in the same circles as Marx, the two becoming fast friends in 1844.
48. See the enlightening estimates in Gary North, Marx's Religion of Revolution: The Doctrine of Creative Destruction (Nutley, NJ: Craig Press, 1968), pp. 26–8. Also see ibid. (2nd ed., Tyler, Texas: Institute for Christian Economics, 1989), pp. 232–56.
49. Fritz J. Raddatz, Karl Marx: A Political Biography (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1978), p. 134.
50. Marx's zeal in covering up his indiscretion was at least matched by historians of the Marxist establishment, who managed to suppress the truth about Freddy Demuth until recent years. Although the truth was known to leading Marxists such as Bernstein and Bebel, the news of Marx's illegitimate fatherhood was only disclosed in 1962 in Werner Blumenberg's Marx. See in particular W.O. Henderson, The Life of Friedrich Engels (London: Frank Cass, 1976), II, pp. 833–4. Some loyal Marxists still refuse to accept the ugly facts. Thus, see the labour of love by the late leader of the ‘Draperite’ wing of the Trotskyist movement, Hal Draper, Marx-Engels Cyclopedia (3 vols, New York: Schocken Books, 1985).
51. As for Engels, he refused to marry his mistress Mary because she was of ‘low’ descent. After Mary's death her sister Lizzie became Engels's mistress. Engels magnanimously married Lizzie on her deathbed ‘in order to provide her a “last pleasure’”.
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