Chapter Five: KARL MARX AND HIS MANIFESTO: The Federal Reserve Conspiracy by Antony Sutton from archive.org

Chapter Five: 
KARL MARX AND HIS MANIFESTO 



The modern welfare state such as we have in the United 
States has a remarkable resemblance to the Communist Manifesto 
supposedly written by Karl Marx in 1848. The ten points of the 
Marxian Manifesto, a program designed to overthrow the middle 
class bourgeoisie (not the big capitalists) have been implemented 
by successive Democrat and Republican governments since 
Woodrow Wilson under guidance of a self-perpetuating 
establishment. 

Marx's big enemy was the middle class, the bourgeoisie. 
Marx wanted to seize property from this middle class in a 
revolution led by the so-called working class, or the proletariat. 
Unfortunately for Marx the working class has never had too much 
liking for communist revolution, as we saw in the Revolutions of 
the 1980s. In practice, communist revolution is led by a handful 
of communists. How can a revolution be made and kept in power 
by a small group? Only because communists have always had 
help from the so-called ruling class - capitalists and bankers. This 
aid and assistance has been consistent from financing Marx's 
Manifesto in 1848 down to the late 20th century when a David 
Rockefeller-dominated Administration is helping Communist 
revolution and revolutionaries in Central America, Angola and 
Mozambique. 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy 

Let's start with the 1848 Manifesto. Marx wanted to seize middle 
class property. In the Manifesto, Marx phrased the objective like this: 

In the first instance, of course, this can only be effected by 
despotic interference with bourgeois methods of production; that 
is to say by measures which seem economically inadequate and 
untenable, but have far-reaching effects, and are necessary as 
means for revolutionizing the whole system of production. (1) 

To bring about this "despotic" seizure of middle class property, 
Marx laid out a ten-point program of "measures" as follows: 

These measures will naturally differ from country to country. 
In the most advanced countries they will, generally speaking, take 
the following forms: 

1. Expropriation of landed property, and the 
use of landrents to defray State expenditure. 

2. A vigorously graduated income tax. 

3. Abolition of the right of inheritance. 

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigres and rebels. 

5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means 
of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 

6. Centralisation of the means of transport in the hands of 
the State. 

7. Increase of national factories and means of production, 
cultivation of uncultivated land, and 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

improvement of cultivated land in accordance with a general plan. 

8. Universal and equal obligation to work; organisation of 
industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 

9. Agriculture and urban industry to work hand-in-hand, in 
such a way as, by degrees, to obliterate the distinction between 
town and country. 

10. Public and free education of all children. 
Abolition of factory work for children in its present 
form. Education and material production to be 
combined} 2 ^ 

As we shall see later, Marx's ten points for destruction of the 
middle class have almost been completed in the United States. The 16th 
Amendment, for example (the income tax) is an archaic political 
concept that goes back some 4,000 years in history to the time of the 
Pharaohs in Egypt. 

The Pharaohs and their elitist advisors had the notion that the 
entrepreneur, the businessmen, and the workers of Egypt who produced 
the wealth of that civilization somehow were not competent to manage 
that wealth. 

These elitist advisors and Pharaoh said, "Look, we're going to 
force you people to do what we know you should. Because after all, 
were omnipotent, we are standing up here looking down on all of you 
and we can decide what is best for all. Much better than each of you can 
individually decide for yourselves. We're going to force you to have a 
government retirement program, so that when you reach retirement age 
you can retire with some dignity. We're going to force you to do what 
we know you should do, because we know you won't do it if left to your 
own devices. Also, we're going to force you to have a government food 
storage program. We're going to 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy _ 



store grain in the government granaries because we know that you are 
not competent - you are not capable of storing food by yourselves. 

"Furthermore, we know you can't take care of your health so we're 
going to force you to have a government medical program. We know 
health is important and we know that you don't have the responsibility 
or capability for looking after yourselves. We're going to force it on you 
for your own best interests. 

"The method used to accomplish these objectives was to withhold 
a fifth part of the production of Egypt. If you go back and read the Old 
Testament it says, "That the Pharaoh had decided to take up a fifth 
power of the production of Egypt and to store it in granaries for the 
benefit of all." 

The modern day proponent of the Pharaoh's philosophy is none 
other than Karl Marx and the Communist Manifesto. The Manifesto has 
become the most significant economic document of the 20th Century. 
The significance lies in the unfortunate fact that the Manifesto is the 
economic guiding light of our leadership today, of the executive branch 
of our government and in most cases the leadership of both parties in 
this country who work to support and bring about the measures of the 
manifesto. 

Basically what the Manifesto states is that when you have 
implemented these 10 programs in any free enterprise system, 
"capitalism" will have been destroyed and a communist state 
established in its place. This is what Marx wrote: 

Strictly speaking, political power is the organized use of 
force by one class in order to keep another class in subjection. 
When the proletariat, in the course of its fight against the 
bourgeoisie, necessarily consolidates itself into a class, by means 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

of a revolution makes itself the ruling class, it forcibly sweeps 
away the old system of production. 

Item 2 of Marx's Manifesto reads as follows: A heavy, 
progressive, or graduating income tax" 

This became the 16th Amendment of the United States 
Constitution, the law of the land in our country since 1913. 

Later on in 1913 we saw the passage of the Federal Reserve Act. 
Interestingly enough the idea for that program is in Karl Marx's 
program in the Communist Manifesto as Item 5 and is possibly the most 
important point in the Communist Manifesto. Item 5 reads as follows: 
Centralization of Credit in the hands of the state by means of a 
National Bank with state capital and exclusive monopoly. 

In other words Marx proposed a scheme exactly like the First 
Bank of the United States and the Federal Reserve Act with 
establishment of a fractional reserve central banking system on the 
model of the earlier European central banks. 

Karl Marx as a Plagiarist 

Marx was a brilliant fellow. He was no fool. Marx knew that if he 
could place under the control of a small group of men the ability to 
control the supply of money and credit of any nation, he could boom or 
bust those economies almost at will. By having foreknowledge of 
economic and monetary policies, billions of dollars of wealth could be 
transferred from one group to another, from the suffering middle class 
to the ruling elite. To do this required propaganda and in the mid-19th 
century the pamphlet was an effective means of propagandizing. 

A most interesting feature of the brief Manifesto has been almost 
universally ignored by academics, i.e., that the Manifesto doesn't favor 
the working class at all and it certainly doesn't favor the middle class 
which is targeted for elimination. 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy 

The Manifesto is a blueprint for elitist control. The Manifesto 
favors takeover of political and economic power by an elite. And when 
we look at the source of the assistance given to Marx, it is clear that the 
benefits to the elite were obvious even in the 1840s. 

Marx was certainly paid to write the Manifesto, as we shall see 
later. Furthermore, the Manifesto was plagiarized from an obscure 
French socialist named Victor Considerant, and his work, Principes du 
Socialisme: Manifeste de la Democratic au Dix Neuvieme Siecle, 
published in 1843. The second edition of Considerant's work was 
published in Paris in 1847, a year before the Manifesto and while Marx 
and Engels were living in Paris. 

The plagiarism was spotted by an even more obscure writer, W. 
Tcherkesoff, and published in precise detail in his Pages of Socialist 
History (Cooper, New York, 1902). 

Let Tcherkesoff explain Marx's plagiarism in his own words: 

I felt myself stupefied, indignant, even humiliated, when, 
about a year ago, I had occasion to read the work of Victor 
Considerant, "Principles of Socialism: Manifesto of the 
Democracy of the Nineteenth Century," written in 1843, second 
edition published in 1847. There was reason for it. In a pamphlet 
of 143 pages, Victor Considerant expounds with his habitual 
clearness all the bases of Marxism, of this "scientific" Socialism 
that the parliamentarians desire to impose upon the whole world. 
Properly speaking, the theoretical part, in which Considerant 
treats of questions of principle, does not exceed the first 50 pages; 
the remainder is consecrated to the famous prosecution that the 
government of Louis Philippe brought against the journal of 
the Fourierists, "La Democratic 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

pacifique, " and which the jurors of the Seine quashed. But in these 50 
short pages the famous Fourierist, like a true master, gives us so many 
profound, clear, and brilliant generalizations, that even an infinitesimal 
portion of his ideas contains in entirety all the Marxian laws and 
theories -including the famous concentration of capital and the whole of 
the "Manifesto of the Communist party. " So that the whole theoretical 
part, that is chapters one and two, which Engels himself says "are on 
the whole as correct today as ever," is simply borrowed. This 
"Manifesto," this Bible of legal revolutionary democracy, is a very 
mediocre paraphrase of numerous passages of the "Manifesto" of V. 
Considerant. Not only have Marx and Engels found the contents of their 
"Manifesto" in the "Manifesto" ofV. Considerant, but the form and the 
titles of the chapters have also been retained by the imitators. 

Paragraph two in the second chapter with V. Considerant bears 
the title: "The present Situation and '89; the Bourgeoisie and the 
Proletarians." "The Bourgeois and the Proletarians," is the title of the 
first chapter with Marx and Engels. 

V. Considerant examines different Socialist and revolutionary 
parties under the name of Democracy and his paragraphs bear the 
titles: 

Stagnant Democracy; 

Retrograde Democracy; 

The Socialist Party in the Retrograde Democracy; 

The titles with Marx and Engels are: 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy 

Reactionary Socialism 

Conservative and Bourgeois Socialism 

Critical Utopian Socialism and Communism 

Would not one think all these titles belonged to the selfsame 
work? When comparing the contents we shall see that in reality 
these two manifestos are identical/ 31 

Line by line Tcherkesoff demonstrates Marx to be a common 
thief. The great Marx, the adored Marx, rates no more than a third-rate 
school boy! 

There can be no argument concerning the massive influence of 
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on world history. Yet, by contrast, the 
secondhand nature of Marxist ideas and arguments have always been 
overlooked. 

How about Marx's collaborator - Frederick Engels? The 
sloppiness of Engels' work has been documented in the introduction to 
Condition of the Working Class in England by W. O. Henderson and 
W. H. Chaloner (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1958). 

As far back as 1848 Bruno Hildebrand compiled a detailed 
criticism of Engels' book and particularly his biased interpretation of 
British government reports. Engels wanted to prove a case and distorted 
the facts to make the case. Further pointed out by Henderson and 
Chaloner, "Engels' vivid imagination was sometimes used in lieu of 
facts." For example, on page 118 of Henderson we find: 

In evidence before a Parliamentary enquiry the Nottingham 
coroner stated that one druggist had admitted using 13 cwt. of 
treacle in a year in the manufacture of Godfrey's Cordial. But in 
the 1887 edition of Engels this became "used thirteen 
hundredweight of laudanum in one year in the preparation of 
Godfrey's Cordial. " 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

Laudanum is of course tincture of opium and far different from 
treacle. The implication is that the children of the working class were 
being drugged. 

Marx's Financial Backers 

Where did Karl Marx get his money? How did he live? On 
investigation we find that funds came mainly from four sources, and 
each of these four sources can be linked to the ruling elite in Germany 
and the United States. 

The conduit for financing the printing of the Manifesto was none 
other than Louisiana pirate Jean Laffite, who was, among his later 
occupations, a spy for Spain and a courier for a group of American 
bankers. 

The evidence for this twist in modern history has been ignored by 
modern historians although the documents, authenticated by Library of 
Congress and other sources, have been available for some 30 years. 

It is extraordinary that the first academics to report this source of 
financing for Marx were writing in French, not English! It was a French 
book by Georges Blond entitled Histoire de la Filibuste that contains 
the remarkable story of Karl Marx as a friend of Jean Laffite the pirate 
who "financed the printing of the Manifesto of the Communist party." 
Where did Blond get his information? It originated in two privately 
printed books published in New Orleans by Stanley Clisby Arthur, Jean 
Laffite, the Gentleman Rover and The Journal of Jean Laffite. These 
books contain original documents describing meetings between Marx 
and Laffite and the method used to finance the Manifesto. 

Now of course if you look up the name Jean Laffite in the 
Encyclopedia Britannica, you will learn that Laffite died in 1823 and 
therefore could not possibly have financed Marx in 1847 and 1848. 
Unfortunately the Britannica is wrong, as it is on many other points. 
Laffite went underground about 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy 

1820 and lived a long and exciting life as courier for American 
bankers and businessmen. 

Laffite's courier and underground work for American bankers is 
noted in The Journal: 

We employed four men as secret officers to spy and report 
every pertinent conversation and to make verbal reports about 
any new happenings. We carried out our secret missions very 
well. We had only two ships operating under private contract with 
banking interests in Philadelphia. We decided, and took our oath, 
never to visit saloons or travel the same route twice, or ever go 
back to Louisiana, Texas or Cuba or any of the Spanish speaking 
countries.^ 

In the same Journal under date of April 24, 1848 we find the note: 

My interviews were brief, but direct. I lived at the home of 
Mr. Louis Bertillon in Paris and sometimes hotels. I met Mr. 
Michel Chevreul, Mr. Louis Braille, Mr. Augustin Thierry, Mr. 
Alexis de Tocqueville, Mr. Karl Marx, Mr. Frederic Engels, Mr. 
Daguerre and many others. (5) 

Then Laffite goes on to the eye-opening statement: 

Nobody knew the real facts about my mission in Europe. I 
opened an account in a bank in Paris, a credit in escrow to 
finance two young men, Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels to help bring 
about the revolution of working men of the world. They are now 
working at it. (6) 

So here we have it. Jean Laffite was the agent of American 
banking interests and arranged for the financing of the Manifesto. In 
The Journal the reader will find other prominent names, i.e., Dupont, 
Peabody, Lincoln and so on. 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

While Jean Laffite was in Brussels he wrote at length to his artist 
friend De Franca in St. Louis, Missouri about financing Marx. Here's 
the translation of the letter dated September 29, 1847: 

I am leaving Brussels for Paris, in three or four weeks I will 
go to Amsterdam, then enroute for America. I have had a number 
of conversations with Mr. Marx and Mr. Engels, but have refused 
to participate in the conferences with the other debaters to 
compose the manifest, because I do not wish to be identified with 
the other men. 

Mr. Engels is going with me to Paris so that I may prepare a 
schedule to finance Mr. Marx and him, for a long time in advance, 
to proceed with their manuscripts, and to put in texts "Capital and 
Labor. " From the beginning it seemed to me that the two young 
men are themselves gifted and endowed, I firmly believe, with the 
highest intelligence and that they merit this is justified by the 
statistic research in the discovery on "La Categorie du Capital," 
Value, Price and Profit. 

They have penetrated a forgotten time in the exploitation of 
man by man without halt. From the Serf, of the Feudal Slave, and 
the Salaried Slave, they discover that exploitation is at the base of 
all evil. It has taken a long time to prepare "The manifests for the 
workers of the world. " A great debate took place between the two 
young men and others from Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, and others 
from the Swiss Republic. 

I am enthused in regard to the manifests and other prospects 
for the future, as I heartily support the two young men. I hope and 
I pray that the 



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The Federal Reserve Conspiracy 

projects may become joined in a strong doctrine to shake the 
foundations of the highest dynasties and leave them to be devoured 
by the lower masses. 

Mr. Marx advises and warns me not to plunge into all 
America with the manifests because there are others of the same 
kind for New York. But I hope that Jean or Harry will show the 
manifests to Mr. Joshua Speed, and he, in his turn, can show them 
to Mr. Lincoln. I know that nothing else can confuse it, as it would 
have the same chance. Its reception at Washington would be a 
sacred promise that the path that I am on is in conformity with the 
policy at present pursued in the Republic of Texas. 

Mr. Marx accepts some of my texts on the communes that I 
was forced to abandon some time ago, weighing carefully rules 
and regulations not based on a strong foundation, as so-called 
pure and simple Utopia, without preamble or body, without an 
apparent base to build on. I was in accord with the two young men 
at this date, apropos of my Utopian dreams of the past. 

The sacrifice was made to preserve the great manuscript that 
was composed and its constitution, to endure forever with the 
radiance of the stars, but not for those in power to abuse or 
exploit. 

Oh! to my dismay; I have agreed to the abuses practiced in 
the last part of the same year after the Dragon was eradicated and 
utterly abolished. I have described my second commune which I 
was forced to break up and abandon to the flambeau March 3, 
1821, I then took the resolution to withdraw without convert. I am 
no longer aiding those who are opposed to my principles. 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 

I must stop. I will bring several manuscripts and the 
manifest. I hope that Jules and Glenn are progressing at school 
with Miss Wing and Miss Burgess. I know they have much 
patience as teachers. Glenn is not as strong as Jules. (6) 

The second source of American financing for Karl Marx came 
from Charles Anderson Dana, Editor of the New York Tribune owned 
by Horace Greeley. Both Dana and Greeley were fraternally associated 
with the Clinton Roosevelt we cited in Chapter Three and with his 
Roosevelt Manifesto for dictatorial government. Dana hired Marx to 
write for the New York Tribune. This Marx did, in over 500 articles 
spread over ten years from 1851 to 1861. 

Marx's prime source of German funds came from his associate 
Frederic Engels, son of a wealthy Bremen cotton manufacturer and 
subsidy provider to Marx for many years. 

More surprising is the subsidy to Marx from the Prussian elite. 
Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. Jennys brother Baron 
Ferdinand von Westphalen was Minister of the Interior in Prussia 
(overseeing the police department) while Karl was under "investigation" 
by this same Prussian department. 

In other words, Marx's brother-in-law was in charge of 
investigating subversive activities. Over the years the von Westphalen 
family strongly supported Marx. For 40 years the Marx's maid, Demuth, 
was paid by the Westphalens and in fact Demuth was personally 
selected for the job by Baroness Caroline von Westphalen. Two of Karl 
Marx's early essays were actually written in the von Westphalen estate 
at Kreuznach, and money from the estate was left to Marx. 

In brief, between the American bankers and the German 
aristocracy Marx was well funded for the Manifesto and later writings. 
Why would the elite fund Marx? Simply 



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because the entire Marxist philosophical battery is aimed at 
extermination of the middle class and the supremacy of the elite. 
Marxism is a device for consolidating power by the elite. It has nothing 
to do with relieving the misery of the poor or advancing mankind: it is 
an elitist political device pure and simple. 



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Karl Marx and His Manifesto 



Endnotes to Chapter Five: 



(1) Ryazinsky, Communist Manifesto, (New York: Russell & Russell, 
Inc., 1963) p. 52. 

(2) Op. Cit. 

(3) W. Tcherkesoff, Pages of Socialist History, p. 56 

(4) The Journal of Jean Laffite (The Pirateer - Patriot's own story) 
(Vantage Press, New York, 1958) p. 126 

(5) Op. Cit. p. 132-33 

(6) Ibid. 

(7) From the translation in Stanley C. Arthur's Jean Laffite, 
Gentleman Rover (Harmanson, New Orleans, 1952) pp. 262 and 
265. 



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Chapter Six 

ABRAHAM LINCOLN: 

LAST PRESIDENT TO FIGHT THE 

MONEY POWER