Karl Marx

Karl Marx is without doubt the world's most famous unread author. Do you know anyone who has actually read Karl's two most famous books, The Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital? The books are admittedly a bit strange. At any given place they aren't really that tough to read (in translation, of course, unless you read German), but trying to read them in toto is quite an accomplishment. After a while you start to think Karl was just stringing together as many hackneyed and clichéd phrases as possible. But that's kind of like saying the play Hamlet (which most people haven't read either although perhaps for good enough reasons) is just a bunch of quotations strung together.

Despite Karl's considerable vogue during the first three quarters of the twentieth century - at one time half of the world's countries adopted his name for their form of government - today you hear Marxism dismissed as a (ptui) "bankrupt" philosophy. After all, how can you believe someone who said that if you run your nation with an entirely capitalistic and free market system, during the inevitable and periodic economic crises the business leaders will want to maintain their high personal incomes which comes, of course, from the business profits (which Karl he called "surplus income"). So the owners must reduce the number of employees but insist that productivity actually increase. That means higher unemployment for the country, and a longer work week and less compensation for employees who do keep their jobs. If the employees complain, well, then the bosses would tell them, go look out the window and see the massive "army of the unemployed". Just be thankful, they would say, you have your job.

Fortunately nothing like this occurs today.

Even Karl's greatest admirers have to admit that Karl's writing varies in quality, comprehensibility, and usefulness in application. He could write with lucidity on topics where he was clearly not so far from the marks - if you will pardon a bad pun. And he could also write in sonorous martial "man-the-barricades" prose which was perfect for crafting empty sounding slogans but not much use in creating a working government.

Some of Karl's more severe critics point out that Karl even called for the eradication of minority races and that during the rise of the Germany's National Socialist Party, the party's leaders even praised Karl. So Karl, we read, was no better than a Nazi!

Naturally Karl's friends dismiss the claims as nonsense. Sometimes they like to blame the more embarrassing writings to Frederich Engels, Karl's wealthy friend and co-author of the Communist Manifesto. Others though say that the translation is in error and that Karl was calling for the assimilation of the minorities into a single classless society. Of course, Karl's denigrators have their own counter arguments and so far it doesn't appear that either Karl's friends or detractors have changed anyone's minds. But in any case most people won't bother reading Karl, but that's not entirely their fault. Karl's writings, as we pointed out, can be hard going.

In brief, though, we can summarize what Karl thought would happen. He believed that the gulf between the employers and employees would widen to a critical point where the workers would have no recourse but to rise up in revolution. Then, he said, the workers would triumph and establish a classless state.

For a while it looked like Karl actually knew what he was talking about. Starting in 1848 - when Karl was thirty - there were a number of workers uprisings in Europe, most notably the revolution in France where the people kicked out the Bourbon kings. A new government was established - the Second Republic (the current French Republic is the Fifth) - with reformed labor laws and free elections.

But although ostensibly everything had turned out OK, there had been considerable angst among the middle and upper class citizens that mob rule might prevail and bring in socialism. Then as now, socialism was often equated with taking from the rich to give to the poor after first defining "rich" as anyone who actually worked hard enough to earn an honest living. So when election time came the conservative candidate, Louis Napoleon Bonarparte (the nephew of the Napoleon), won in a landslide. Then in 1851, Louis set aside the constitution, declared himself King of France, and married Eugénie de Montijo from Spain with the intent of establishing a new hereditary dynasty.

Despite the irony that a popular revolution quickly resulted in a new monarchy, Louis seemed willing to compromise with the opposition and was seen as the worker's king. He began a number of projects to help modernize France, cleaned up slums, and he brought in what was then high technology industry. Times got better, jobs became plentiful, and so no one minded being ruled by a king.

So not entirely coincidentally, the vogue for revolutions faded in Europe. Karl's fortunes reflected the times. He ran afoul of the various governments of continental Europe (which didn't like radicals like him spouting off their inflammatory rhetoric) and so moved to London in 1849 where he lived in near abject poverty with his wife, Jenny, and their children. The family had to live week to week, and once Karl had to remain in his apartment because he had pawned all his clothes. Presumably it was Jenny who took the items to the pawnshop.

But back in France being the king had gone to Louis's head, and he began to see France as the savior of the world. With the intent of rebuilding the French Empire, he sent troops to Asia, Mexico, and in 1870, he declared war on Prussia. Unfortunately, the Prussians proved too much for the increasingly overextended empire, and they actually captured Louis and held him prisoner. France was forced to surrender, and in 1871 the Prussians ceremoniously paraded into Paris which they promptly left and left the city and people unharmed.

Although Louis was soon released, he was deposed by the newly formed Third Republic. But the cost of Louis's interventions and the loss of the war had been too much for the French economy. With increasing shortages of food and rising unemployment, the gulf between the rich and the poor, yes, eventually reached a critical point, and in March the people of Paris seized the city. They threw out the official municipal government, and set up their own "Commune".

The Commune established a government which advocated the separation of church and state, promised free education, and some of the more radical revolutionaries even touted equality and equal rights of women. Workers were allowed to take over businesses, various debts were forgiven, and three months later the Commune was defeated when the new president sent in the army. But although the Commune failed, Karl predicted its memory would live in history. "Working men's Paris, with its Commune," he wrote, "will be forever celebrated as the glorious harbinger of a new society. Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class. Its exterminators history has already nailed to that eternal pillory from which all the prayers of their priest will not avail to redeem them." Too bad for Karl but virtually no one this side of the Atlantic and a good chunk of the rest of the world has even heard of the Paris Commune. But this does give you a taste of Karl's prose.

Where supporters of capitalism - and even some socialists like George Orwell - disagreed with Karl was with his belief that after the revolution the new society would continue as a perpetual classless state everyone skipping about delightfully in a worker's uptopia. Au contraire, as George wrote in his books Animal Farm and 1984. Instead, the leaders of the revolution will simply form a new privileged class, and things will be the same as before. That scenario certainly seems to have played out beginning with revolutions of 1848 and continuing with those of the succeeding two centuries. Today it certainly seems countries are increasingly led by political leaders who use their positions to amass multimillion dollar incomes while maintaining their government supplied pensions and benefits while increasingly working to curtail the same benefits of lower income citizens. We've seen this occurring particularly in ...

Well, no names.

Karl's personal life was difficult, and he died in 1883. For the last three decades of his life he had lived in poverty, eking out a living writing his newspaper articles, receiving the occasional payment for a book or pamphlet, and obtaining a small inheritance from his mother. But mostly Karl - quote - "borrowed" - unquote - money from Frederich Engels. Also if rumor be true, Frederich was the father of the son of the Marx family's unmarried maid, Helene Demuth, who named her offspring Freddy.

Today, though, the accepted wisdom is that Fred was actually doing Karl a favor - a big favor. The oft-told story is that as Frederich lay dying in 1895 he said that Karl was really Freddy's father. He had claimed responsibility for his friend's peccadillo, we read, to spare the Marx family from scandal and to avoid bringing discredit to Karl's writings and philosophy. This story - Karl fiddling with Helene and Frederich taking the rap - is what is told in the various books and television shows about Karl. However, an in-depth study of the issue (no joke intended) found that there's just as much, if not more, reason to believe it was indeed Frederich who was increasing productivity in the Marx household.

In the end, Karl's biggest black eye came from the very regimes that took his name, but were really nothing more than among the worst personality cult dictatorships in history. But long before Karl died there were people calling themselves Marxists, and Karl was not particularly impressed with their efforts. Fred even quoted Karl as saying, "There is one thing of which I am certain. I am not a Marxist."

This quote is, though, second hand - Fred heard it from someone else. But one quote we can with certainty attribute to Karl is found in a letter he wrote to Fred about the Empress Eugénie.

"That angel suffers, it seems, from a most indelicate complaint. She is passionately addicted to farting and is incapable, even in company, of suppressing it. At one time she resorted to horse-riding as a remedy. But this having now been forbidden her by [her husband Louis Napoleon] Bonaparte, she 'vents' herself. It's only a noise, a little murmur, a nothing, but then you know that the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind."

So we can see that Karl's sympathy extended to all classes - not just the proletariat.

References

Karl Marx: A Life, Francis Wheen, W. W. Norton (2000). A recent and comprehensive biography. The book takes the line that Karl was Freddy's dad.

Karl Marx, Mark Steel. The Mark Steel Lectures. Although the more secondary the source the more it must be consulted with caution, this series of lectures about famous historical figures is generally accurate and entertaining. Alas, they are not, in general, available in the US.

Marx's "Illegitimate Son" or Gresham's Law in the World of Scholarship, Terrell Carver, http://marxmyths.org/terrell-carver/article.htm. As the internet becomes more and more the way of publication, good references will be found. This is an article written by Professor Carver of the University of Bristol discussing in detail if Karl was Freddy's father. The usual story is that Frederich's deathbed confession that Karl was Freddy's father was told to Karl's daughter, Eleanor.

Professor Carver points out that there is much to doubt about the authenticity of Frederich's confession. First it was only published in 1962 from excerpts of a letter written in 1898 purportedly written by Louise Freyberger who had been Fred's housekeeper after Helene died. But Louise said she heard the story from Eleanor who was no longer living. Since second hand death bed confessions given to a sole witness that was not alive when the confession was revealed are not the most reliable of historical sources, we must hold some skepticism that Karl was to blame for Helene's predicament.

Karl Marx Online Books, http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Marx%2c%20Karl%2c%201818%2d1883. It's only fair if we are going to trash Karl to at least try to read what he actually said. All his books are online and can be read by anyone. The biggest problem you'll find is to understand what he meant when he used the now clichéd terms like bourgeoise and proletariat. It is interesting, though, how he saw the establishment of the United States as a catalyst to increase the gulf between rich and poor, a country, that oddly enough, has always had a large middle class.