Karl Marx and Jewish Power
Laurent Guyénot • February 17, 2020
In a recent article,
I explored the influence of Freud’s Jewishness on the formation,
reception and propagation of his psychoanalytical theory. I wish now to
do the same for Karl Marx (1818-1883). In contrast to Freud’s, Marx’s
Jewishness is seldom considered an important factor. If you type “Freud
Jewish” as key-words on Amazon.com, you will be suggested a dozen books
dealing specifically with Freud’s Jewishness, whereas “Marx Jewish” will
yield no result except Marx’s own essays “On the Jewish Question”, and a
discussion of them, with precious little about Marx’s own Jewish
background and connections.
Even
in the literature exposing the role of Jews in the Bolshevik revolution
in Russia and other revolutionary movements of the twentieth century,
such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s two-volume 200 Years Together, a contextualized analysis of Marx’s Jewishness is lacking.
One
obvious reason is that Marx was not Jewish: he had been baptized a
Lutheran at the age of six. Yet to claim that baptism had washed away
all traces of Jewishness would be absurd, and particularly ironic in the
case of a person who insisted that religion was an inessential part of
Jewishness (as we shall see).
My
purpose here is to examine Marx’s contribution to Jewish empowerment,
and, ultimately, to the historical movement toward Jewish global
domination that made a major breakthrough a century exactly after the Communist Manifesto (1848).
I
must say in preamble that the question is not: Did Marx deliberately
conspire with other Jews to advance the Jewish global agenda, while
pretending to emancipate Gentile proletarians? Jewishness doesn’t
necessarily work that way. It could be defined as the inability to
distinguish between the interest of peoples, and the interest of the
chosen people, between what is good for mankind and what is good for the
Jews. As a rule, Jews who believe they are working for the salvation of
the world while thinking Jewishly are advancing Jewish power one way or
another. This applies, of course, to Jewish thinkers who believe that
Jews have a mission to guide mankind toward perpetual peace, like
Theodore Kaufman, who in 1941 believed that the first step to that goal
was to “sterilize all Germans” (his interview with the Canadian Jewish Chronicles),
or like David Ben-Gurion, who in 1962 believed that the next step was
to make Jerusalem the “seat of the Supreme Court of Mankind, to settle
all controversies among the federated continents, as prophesied by
Isaiah.”[1]
But it also applies to Jewish thinkers who do not publicly identify as
Jews and are even critical of Jews, yet whose worldview is profoundly
biblical, that is, both materialistic and prophetic. It is a question of
inherited cognitive pattern, rather than deliberate intention. That
being said, in Marx’s case, there is evidence of intellectual
dishonesty, concealment and deception, as we shall see.
Marx’s prophecy and Bakunin’s foresight
According
to Karl Popper, “the heart of the Marxian argument … consists of a
historical prophecy, combined with an implicit appeal to the following
moral law: Help to bring about the inevitable!”[2]
There is no doubt that Marx’s prophecy of a messianic transformation of
the world was profoundly Jewish in inspiration. What distinguishes
Marx’s prophetic vision from the biblical project is that its explicit
goal (as we shall see) is the international dictatorship of a
cosmopolitan proletariat, not of Jewry. Yet, as Mikhail Bakunin warned
in Statism and Anarchy
(1873), Marx’s proletarian state “is a lie behind which the despotism
of a ruling minority is concealed.” Behind the expression “scientific
socialism”, Marx could only mean “the highly despotic government of the
masses by a new and very small aristocracy of real or pretended
scientists.”[3] That centralized state, according to Marxist doxa, will be a transitional stage before true socialism; it will “wither away”,
according to Engels’ expression. To this, Bakunin replies “that no
dictatorship can have any other objective than to perpetuate itself, and
that it can engender and nurture only slavery in the people who endure
it.” Bakunin suspected that if Marx had his way, German Jews like him
would end up ruling the communist state.
Indeed,
Marx’s revolutionary prophecy appealed particularly to non-proletarian
German Jews. Fritz Kahn hailed him as more than a prophet in Die Juden als Rasse und Kulturvolk (1920):
“in 1848, for the second time, the star of Bethlehem was raised to the
firmament … and it rose again above the rooftops of Judea: Marx.”[4]
If Marx was the Messiah in 1848, then Benjamin Disraeli could be called his prophet. In his novel Coningsby, published
in 1844, the Jewish character Sidonia—“a cross between Lionel de
Rothschild and Disraeli himself,” according to Disraeli’s biographer[5]—declared:
“That mighty revolution which is at this moment preparing in Germany, and which will be, in fact, a second and greater Reformation, and of which so little is as yet known in England, is entirely developing under the auspices of Jews, who almost monopolise the professorial chairs of Germany.”
Four years after these words were written, the Communist Manifesto was published and, almost simultaneously, the revolution broke out in Germany, as Disraeli had predicted . Jews did play a major role in the 1848 revolution, as Amos Elon has shown in his book The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743-1933. “80
percent of all Jewish journalists, doctors, and other professionals”
supported the revolution. The most prominent were Ludwig Bamberger in
Mainz, Ferdinand Lassalle in Dusseldorf, Gabriel Riesser in Hamburg,
Johan Jacoby in Koeningsberg, Aron Bernstein in Berlin, Herman Jellinek
in Vienna, Moritz Harmann in Prague, and Sigismund Asch in Breslau. “All
over the country,” Elon writes, “rabbis in their sermons greeted the
revolution as a truly messianic event.” The Jewish magazine Der Orient praised
“the heroic Maccabean battle of our brethren on the barricades of
Berlin,” and raved, “The savior from whom we have prayed has appeared.
The fatherland has given him to us. The messiah is freedom.” The Jewish
scholar Leopold Zunz, founder of academic Judaic Studies (Wissenschaft des Judentums),
“described what was happening in specifically biblical terms shot through with the Messianic political view which saw revolutionary politics as the fulfillment of biblical promise. Haranguing the Berlin students from the barricades, Zunz portrayed Metternich [Chancellor of the Austrian Empire] as Haman and hoped that ‘perhaps by Purim, Amalek [meaning the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV] will be beaten.’”[6]
After the failure of the revolution, many revolutionaries exiled themselves to London, where they were known as the Forty-Eighters.
Marx settled there for the rest of his life, “living encased in his
own, largely German, world, formed by his family and a small group of
intimate friends and political associates,” according to Isaac Berlin.[7]
Apart from Engels, Marx’s friends and associates were, in fact, almost
all Jewish. Marx’s influence, which had been small in the 1848
revolution, would then develop, thanks to what Bakunin would call in
1872, in an unpublished “Lettre au Journal La Liberté de Bruxelles,” his “remarkable genius of intrigue,” adding:
“he also has in his service a numerous corps of agents, hierarchically organized and acting secretly under his direct orders; a kind of socialist and literary freemasonry in which his compatriots, the German Jews and others, occupy a considerable place and deploy a zeal worthy of a better cause.”
Bakunin was particularly intrigued by Marx’s insistence on the centralization of all banking activity. The Communist Manifesto not
only proclaims the abolition of private banks, but: “Centralisation of
credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State
capital and an exclusive monopoly.” In another unpublished editorial of
1872, Bakunin wrote:
“this Jewish world is today, for the most part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand, and of Rothschild on the other. I am convinced that the Rothschilds, on their side, appreciate the merits of Marx and that Marx, on his side, feels an instinctual attraction and a great respect for the Rothschilds. / This may seem strange. What can there be in common between socialism and a major bank? The point is that Marx’s communism wants a strong centralization of the state, and where there is centralisation of the state, there must necessarily be a central bank, and where such a bank exists, the parasitic nation of the Jews, speculating with the Labour of the people, will always thrive.”[8]
Having
succeeded to get Bakunin and his “anti-authoritarian” followers
expelled from the International Workingmen’s Association (the First
International), Marx transferred its General Council from London to New
York—the city that would soon become the Western capital of Jewry, where
another German Jew, Leon Braunstein aka Trotsky, would be preparing the
Bolshevik revolution, with the financial support of Wall Street Jewish
bankers like Jacob Schiff.[9]
The Jewish Question in nineteenth-century Germany
In
order to understand Marx’s hidden agenda, the best is to start with his
first two significant articles, published in 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, four years before the Communist Manifesto. Their topic was the “Jewish Question”. Before we present what Marx had to say about it, we must recall the context.
The
“Jewish Question” is the question of the possibility and means of
Jewish assimilation. The problem, as it was commonly formulated from the
end of the eighteenth century, was that Jews considered themselves, and
were considered, as aliens in the European nations among which they
lived. One solution was to transform Jewishness from a nationality into a
religion compatible with the secular values of modern nations. Moses
Mendelssohn (1729–1786) paved the way in Germany for a “Reform Judaism”
that defined itself as purely religious and renounced nationalist
aspirations. On the basis of this new pact, Napoleon granted political
emancipation to the Jews in France, and was hailed as a liberator by
German Jews when he invaded the German principalities. Although Jewish
emancipation underwent a setback in Prussia when he withdrew in defeat,
it was complete by 1848.
However,
the assumption that Jewishness was a matter of private religion created
a new problem for the Jewish community, aggravated by residual forms of
segregation: for many secular and educated Jews, Judaism had little
appeal as a religion, and converting to Christianity seemed the logical
continuation of their conversion to the Enlightenment. Half the Jews of
Berlin converted to Protestantism or Catholicism in the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth century.
Karl
Marx’s family falls in that category. His father Herschel Levi, though
the son and brother of rabbis, became a Lutheran in order to practice
law in the Prussian courts, and had his six children and his wife
baptized in 1824, when Karl was six years old. Another famous case is
Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), who conceived of his baptism in 1825 (one
year after Marx) as the “entrance ticket to European civilization.”[10]
Marx met Heine, a generation his elder, shortly after his arrival in
Paris in 1843, and the two men met frequently until Marx moved to London
in 1849. It is believed that their conversations had a formative
influence on both men. Heine may in fact have introduced Communism to
Marx, for he wrote in 1842, one year before meeting Marx:
“Though Communism is at present little talked about, vegetating in forgotten attics on miserable straw pallets, it is nevertheless the dismal hero destined to play a great, if transitory role in the modern tragedy… There will then be only one shepherd with an iron crook and one identically shorn, identically bleating human herd.”[11]
The
dissolution of Jewish identity into a religious faith led to a reaction
in the form of a Jewish nationalist movement that would ultimately
morph into Zionism. It was the German Jewish historian Heinrich Graetz
(1817-1891), almost the same age as Marx, who gave the first impetus to a
new Jewish national consciousness with his multivolume History of the Jewish People, published in 1853 . Marx
first met Heinrich Graetz in the summer 1874, while “taking the waters”
at Carlsbad in Bohemia. The two following summers, they coordinated
they vacations there. We do not know what they talked about, but, as
Shlomo Avineri comments, “a more dramatic prefiguration of the encounter
between Zion and Kremlin could not be imagined.”[12]
Graetz reawakened the national consciousness of European Jews such as Moses Hess (1812-1875), author in 1862 of Rome and Jerusalem: The Last National Question, which
in turn impressed Theodor Herzl. According to Hess, the efforts of the
Jews to merge with a nationality other than their own are doomed to
failure. “We shall always remain strangers among the nations,” for “the
Jews are something more than mere ‘followers of a religion,’ namely,
they are a race brotherhood, a nation.”[13]
Interestingly,
before his conversion to Jewish nationalism, Moses Hess (originally
Moritz) was a pre-Marxist communist. He was the founder of the Rheinische Zeitung, for which Marx served as Paris correspondent in 1842-43 . Hess had a strong influence on both Engels and Marx.[14] Marx borrowed from Hess’ 1845 essay on “The Essence of Money” his concept of economic alienation.[15]
Hess always remained close to Marx; in 1869, at Marx’s request, he even
penned an article slandering Bakunin, accusing him to be an “agent
provocateur” of the Russian government.[16]
Marx’s response to Bruno Bauer
Marx’s essays on the Jewish Question were critical reviews of two works by Bruno Bauer (1809-1882), a leading figure of the Young Hegelians: a book titled Die Judenfrage (1842), and a follow-up article on “The Capacity of Present-day Jews and Christians to Become Free.”[17]
Bauer’s
approach to the question of Jewish assimilation was innovative. For
him, the religious nature of Judaism is the problem, not the solution.
He argued that Jews cannot be emancipated politically without first
being emancipated religiously, because the Jews’ resistance to
assimilation is based on the commandment of the Torah to live
permanently in separation from other people. The essence of their
religion is their claim to be the chosen people, and that prevents them
from even respecting other peoples.
“Jews as such can not amalgamate with peoples and associate their fate with theirs. As Jews, they must wait for a particular future, allotted to them alone, the chosen people, and assuring them the dominion of the world.”
Therefore,
there can be no emancipation of the Jews. A Jew can emancipate himself
only by ceasing to be a Jew, because his true alienation is his
Jewishness.
Bauer
was the first since Voltaire to point at the toxic influence of the
Tanakh as the key to the Jewish Question. Christians could obviously
never reach that conclusion, but even secular thinkers who subscribed to
the new science of “higher criticism” (pioneered by David Strauss’ Life of Jesus, 1835)
generally looked away from the xenophobia of the Tanakh. “One even
screams at betrayal of the human race when the critics try to examine
the essence of the Jew as a Jew,” noted Bauer.
In
his critical reviews, Marx does not argue against Bauer’s point that
Jewish religion is opposed to assimilation. Rather, he denies altogether
that Jewishness is a matter of religion.
“Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew—not the Sabbath Jew, as Bauer does, but the everyday Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew.”
Since
Marx downplays the religious definition of Jewishness, it would be
expected that he opt for the second term of the alternative and define
Jewishness as a nationality, as will his friend Hess twenty years later.
But he doesn’t. Instead, Marx posits, for the first time, his dogma
that religion belongs to the cultural “superstructure” of society, while
the real “infrastructure” is economic. The essence of the Jew, he
writes, is not his religion, but his love of money:
“What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.”
Marx
redefines Jewish religion as the cult of money: “Money is the jealous
god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist.” He does the
same for Jewish nationality, in one short sentence: “The chimerical
nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of
money in general.” It follows naturally, according to Marx, that if you
abolish money you will solve the Jewish question:
“Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make the Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society.”
Jews will be emancipated when all men will be emancipated, for there is no other emancipation than emancipation from money.
Marx
makes the radical claim that love of money and economic alienation came
to the world from the Jews. He equates economic alienation to Jewish
influence:
“the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the Christians have become Jews. … The Jew is perpetually created by civil society from its own entrails. … The god of the Jews has become secularized and has become the god of the world”
And so, “In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.” That
sounds terribly anti-Semitic, from today’s standards. Because of these
essays on the Jewish Question, Marx’s biographers have been more
concerned by the question, “Was Marx an anti-Semite?” (see Edmund Silberner’s 1949 book
of that title) than by the issue of his Jewish background, environment,
and mindset. This is best illustrated by this article by Michael Ezra, “Karl Marx’s Radical Antisemitism.”
But
in the context of the time, Marx’s view of the Jews as money
worshippers was rather banal. It was almost unanimously shared among
socialists, as Hal Draper reminds us in “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype.”[18]
It was especially common among revolutionary Jews as well as among
Zionists who were generally socialists. Moses Hess himself, for
instance, wrote in “The Essence of Money”: “The Jews, who in the natural history of the social animal-world had the world-historic mission of developing the beast of prey out of humanity have now finally completed their mission’s work.”
What Marx did was to push the stereotype to its limit: he made the love of money not just an attribute of some Jews, but the very essence of the
Jews. But by doing so, he was in effect dissolving the Jewish question
into a socio-economic question: the Jew becomes the archetypal
bourgeois. By this sleight of hand, Marx eliminated the Jewish question
once and for all. He would never come back to it.[19]
In fact, never again would Marx target specifically Jewish financiers. Nesta Webster draws attention to that anomaly in her World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization (1921):
“The period of 1820 onwards became, as Sombart [Werner Sombart, The Jews and Modern Capitalism, 1911)] calls it, ‘the age of the Rothschilds,’ so that by the middle of the century it was a common dictum, ‘There is only one power in Europe, and that is Rothschild.’ Now how is it conceivable that a man who set out honestly to denounce Capitalism should have avoided all reference to its principal authors? Yet even in the section of his book dealing with the origins of Industrial Capitalism, where Marx refers to the great financiers, the stock-jobbing and speculation in shares, and what he describes as ‘the modern sovereignty of finance,’ he never once indicates the Jews as the leading financiers, or the Rothschilds as the super-capitalists of the world.”[20]
By
reducing Jewishness to capitalism, Marx was also overlooking another
side of Jewish influence in the world: the revolution. The strong
involvement of Jews in revolutionary movements would not become fully
apparent to the world before 1848, but Marx, being himself a German
Jewish revolutionary, could not be unaware of it. He could not be
ignorant of the fact that Jews loved not only money, but also the
revolution. Jewish revolutionary activity is one form of resistance to
assimilation, especially when it calls for the destruction of the
nations in the name of internationalism. By simply ignoring it, Marx
was, at the very least, concealing the role of his own Jewishness in his
revolutionary enterprise, while at the same time removing in advance
all suspicion of his Jewish sympathies.
I
believe Marx’s treatment of the Jewish question set the standard of his
subsequent method. First, Marx misrepresents the arguments of his
adversaries, often turning them upside down before proceeding to
criticize them. For example Marx pretends that Bauer sees Jewishness as a
religious faith, but that was not Bauer’s point. Rather, Bauer showed
that defining Jewishness as a religion or ethnicity makes no big
difference, because either way, the essence of Jewishness is
separateness. Being religious only worsens the xenophobic nature of
Jewishness, because it makes separateness a divine commandment rather
than simply an ancestral habit. Secondly, Marx dismisses the complexity
of things, in order to focus exclusively on a single and often secondary
aspect of reality, making it look two-dimensional. Defining Jewishness
as the love of money is obviously inadequate for anyone who has
reflected even superficially on the question. Either Marx believes what
he says, and that tells a lot about his intellectual ability, or he
doesn’t—which is more likely—, and that tells a lot about his
intellectual honesty. With the same reductionism Marx will claim in
1848, in the Communist Manifesto (Engels credited this insight to
Marx alone), that, “The history of all hitherto existing society is the
history of class struggles.” It is obvious to any (non-Marxist)
historian that class struggles fall far behind ethnic struggles in the
forces shaping history, even in modern times. Even an internationalist
socialist like Bakunin could only be puzzled by Marx’s total ignorance
of this fact:
“Marx completely ignores a most important element in the historic development of humanity, that is, the temperament and particular character of each race and each people, a temperament and a character which are themselves the natural product of a multitude of ethnological, climatological, economic, and historic causes, but which exercise, even apart from and independent of the economic conditions of each country, a considerable influence on its destinies and even on the development of its economic forces.”[21]
Coming
from someone who grew up in a Jewish home and, despite his baptism,
evolved in a mostly Jewish circle, counting among his friends zealot
Jewish nationalists, I find it unbelievable that Marx’s ignorance of the
national factor was sincere. Or perhaps, it must be considered very
typical of Jewish discourse targeted at Gentiles. In that sense, Marx’s
internationalism confirms Bauer’s remark that Jews consider only their
own nationality as real:
“According to their fundamental representation, they wanted to be absolutely the people, the unique people, that is to say the people beside whom other peoples did not have the right to be a people. Any other people was, in comparison with them, not really a people; as the chosen people they were the only true people, the people who were to be All and take the world.”
Proudhon and the socialist movement before Marx
Having
examined how Marx positioned himself on the background of the Jewish
question, we can now do the same with the social question that occupied
socialist thinkers.
At
the time when Marx and Engels joined the movement, the most influential
socialist theorist was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), of nine years
Marx’s elder. There is no better way to understand the originality of
Marx’s economic ideas than by comparing them to Proudhon’s. (Proudhon’s
work is accessible to English readers through Iain McKay’s anthology: Property is Theft! A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Anthology, AK Press, 2011. McKay’s 82-page introductory chapters, including one on “Proudhon and Marx,” can be read here).
Proudhon’s book Qu’est-ce que la propriété? (What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government)
published in 1840, had a huge echo and became a cornerstone of the
European socialist movement. Proudhon was the first to use the
expression “scientific socialism”,
meaning a society ruled by a scientific government, one whose
sovereignty rests upon justice and reason, rather than sheer will. His
book was a critic of previous theories of economy (then called
“political economy”) developed in Great Britain by Adam Smith
(1723-1790) and David Ricardo (1772-1823). As explained by McKay, “It
was Proudhon who first located surplus value production within the
workplace, recognizing that the worker was hired by a capitalist who
then appropriates their product in return for a less than equivalent
amount of wages” (McKay 66).
Proudhon’s
thought was in constant evolution, and therefore not totally consistent
from beginning to end, even in terminology. Nevertheless, if we want to
summarize it, we shall say that Proudhon advocated a decentralized,
self-managed, federal, bottom-up socialism, which he called “anarchism”.
His vision was based on an organic model of society, the basic cell of
which was the patriarchal family, while the “commune” was the
fundamental unit of democratic sovereignty. In contrast, “governmental
power is mechanical” and fundamentally inhuman (Confession of a Revolutionary, McKay 404).
Proudhon
consistently spoke against projects of state socialism. For him, state
ownership of the means of production was the continuation of capitalism
with the state as the new boss. Nationalization would simply make a
nation of wage-workers, and Proudhon viewed the condition of the
wage-worker as little better than slavery. State control also kills
competition, and Proudhon considered that “competition is as essential
to labour as division”; it is “the vital force which animates the
collective being” (System of Economic Contradictions, McKay 197 and 207).
Although
he called himself a revolutionary, Proudhon was a reformist and a
democrat. He recommended that workers gain political and economic
emancipation by organizing themselves in “clubs”, cooperatives and
associations for mutual credit, by electing representatives, and by
exercising pressure and influence onto the state.
Proudhon’s
central formula, “Property is theft,” is often misunderstood. Proudhon
was attacking the capitalistic property of the means of production.
Whereas the French constitution of 1793 defined property as “the right
to enjoy the fruit of one’s labor,” capitalist property is, according to
Proudhon, “the right to enjoy and dispose at will of another’s
goods—the fruit of another’s industry and labour” (What is Property? McKay
124). In fact, Proudhon formulates a thesis and an antithesis. While
claiming that “property is theft,” he devotes long pages to the apology
of the small owner, whether artisan or peasant, whose property is based
on use, what he calls “possession”. “Individual possession is the
condition of social life. … Suppress property while maintaining
possession, and, by this simple modification of the principle, you will
revolutionize law, government, economy, and institutions” (What is Property? McKay
137). Proudhon encouraged mutualist forms of possession, but he
condemned communism, which called for the complete abolition of private
property: “Communism is oppression and slavery” (What is Property? McKay 132). Proudhon’s ideal was less the abolition of private property than its fair distribution.
Marx’s hijacking of the Proudhonian legacy
In The Holy Family, published in 1845, Marx and Engels praised Proudhon’s book What is Property?
“Proudhon makes a critical investigation — the first resolute, ruthless, and at the same time scientific investigation — of the basis of political economy, private property. This is the great scientific advance he made, an advance which revolutionizes political economy and for the first time makes a real science of political economy possible.”“Proudhon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the sum of the wages of the individual workers, even if each individual labour be paid for completely, does not pay for the collective power objectified in its product, that therefore the worker is not paid as a part of the collective labour power.”
But
the praises of Marx and Engels for Proudhon suddenly ceased in 1846. Two
reasons can be conjectured. First, in 1846, Proudhon rejected Marx’s
invitation to become his correspondent in Paris. In his answer, Proudhon criticizes Marx’s will to forge a unifying dogma:
“Let us seek together, if you will, for the laws of society, the manner in which these laws are manifested, the progress of our efforts to discover them. But for God’s sake, after having demolished all a priori dogmatisms, let us not in turn dream of making our own, of indoctrinating the people; … let us show the world an example of learned and insightful tolerance, but since we are in the lead, let us not set ourselves up as leaders of a new intolerance; let us not be the apostles of a new religion, one that makes itself a religion or reason, a religion of logic. We should welcome and encourage all protestations. Let us get rid of all divisiveness, all mysticism. Let us never consider a question exhausted, and when we do get down to our last argument, let’s start again, if need be, with wit and irony! I will join your organization on that condition—or else not!”
Proudhon
also expressed reservations on the idea of violent revolution: “Our
proletariat has a great thirst for science, which would be very poorly
served if you only brought them blood to drink” (“Letter to Karl Marx,”
McKay 163-165).
The second reason for Marx’s about-face regarding Proudhon was the Frenchman’s publication of Philosophie de la Misère (or System of Economic Contradictions),
in which he developed new conceptual tools to understand the structure
of the capitalist world. Marx, who had announced in 1846 a book of
economy, was taken by surprise. He responded with a pamphlet in French, Misère de la philosophie, which
Proudhon would describe as “a tissue of vulgarity, of calumny, of
falsification and of plagiarism,” written by “the tapeworm of socialism”
(McKay 70). McKay agrees:
“While, undoubtedly, Marx makes some valid criticisms of Proudhon, the book is full of distortions. His aim was to dismiss Proudhon as being the ideologist of the petit-bourgeois and he obviously thought all means were applicable to achieve that goal. So we find Marx arbitrarily arranging quotations from Proudhon’s book, often out of context and even tampered with, to confirm his own views. This allows him to impute to Proudhon ideas the Frenchman did not hold (often explicitly rejects!) in order to attack him. Marx even suggests that his own opinion is the opposite of Proudhon’s when, in fact, he is simply repeating the Frenchman’s thoughts. He takes the Frenchman’s sarcastic comments at face value, his metaphors and abstractions literally. And, above all else, Marx seeks to ridicule him.” (McKay 70-71)
Twenty years later, and two years after Proudhon’s death, the most essential concepts of Marx’s Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, would be borrowed from Proudhon, without any credit given him . When
Marx writes that, “property turns out to be the right, on the part of
the capitalist, to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its
product, and the impossibility, on the part of the worker, of
appropriating his own product” (Capital, vol. 1, quoted in McKay 66), he is repeating what Proudhon wrote 27 years earlier in What is Property?
In 1867, when Marx published the first volume of Das Kapital, Proudhon’s
notoriety and influence still far exceeded Marx’s in Europe. The
International Workingmen’s Association (the First International) had
been founded in 1864 by Proudhon’s followers, who called themselves
mutualists and anti-authoritarians. Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), who
became Marx’s strongest opponent within the International after
Proudhon’s death, considered his own ideas as “Proudhonism widely
developed and pushed right to its final consequences” (as quoted in
McKay 46), although he criticized the Proudhonians’ attachment to
hereditary property. At the Geneva Congress of 1866, the Proudhonians
prevailed and convinced the Congress to vote unanimously in favor of
working towards the suppression of salaried status through the
development of co-operatives. Marxism had almost no influence on the
French Commune of 1871, which was predominantly inspired by Proudhon’s
ideas of decentralized federations of communes and workers’
associations.
The intensity of Marx’s will to supplant Proudhon can be seen in a letter to Engels dated July 20, 1870, at the dawn of the Franco-Prussian War, a war in which Marx saw the opportunity to get the upper hand over his rival:
“The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also shift the centre of gravity of the workers’ movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon’s, etc.”
The outcome of the war gave entire satisfaction to Marx.
The Communist Manifesto, a monopolist’s dream
Although
Marx’s economic theory is largely plagiarized from Proudhon, his
solutions are the exact opposite. That is because Marx’s project doesn’t
proceed from his economic theories. According to Karl Jaspers, Marx’s
approach “is one of vindication, not investigation, but it is a
vindication of something proclaimed as the perfect truth with the
conviction not of the scientist but of the believer.” British historian
Paul Johnson concurs and, after quoting from the apocalyptic and
“Luciferian” poetry of Marx’s youth, he concludes that,
“Marx’s concept of a Doomsday … was always in Marx’s mind, and as a political economist he worked backwards from it, seeking the evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it, from objectively examined data.”[22]
Therefore, Marx’s theoretical sum published in 1867, Das Kapital, is almost irrelevant to understand his program, laid out in 1848 with Friedrich Engels in the Manifesto of the Communist Party.
“The theory of the Communists,” we read there, “may be summed up in the
single sentence: Abolition of private property.” As if responding to
protests by the Proudhonians, they add:
“We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. / Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.”
Abolition of private property naturally includes “abolition of all rights of inheritance,” especially since the Manifesto also
proclaims the “abolition of the family,” seen as a bourgeois
institution “based … on capital, on private gain.” Nations will
disappear too, because “the working men have no country”; capitalism
“has stripped him of every trace of national character.”
The
current epoch “has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is
more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great
classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.” Engels
adds in a footnote to the 1888 English edition that, “By bourgeoisie is
meant the class of modern capitalists, owners of the means of social
production and employers of wage labour.” Marx and Engels await the
complete disappearance of “the lower strata of the middle class—the
small tradespeople, shopkeepers, and retired tradesmen generally, the
handicraftsmen and peasants—all these sink gradually into the
proletariat.” The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, “has concentrated
property in a few hands.”
Marx
and Engels predict that this concentration of wealth in ever fewer
hands, and the corresponding increase in misery among the growing
working class, will intensify class warfare, and lead inevitably to the
violent revolution of the proletariat. The Communists “openly proclaim
that their goals cannot be reached except through the violent overthrow
of the entire social order of the past.” After the failure of the 1848
revolution in Germany, Marx wrote
that, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of
the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be
shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary
terror.”
The
goal of the revolution is to establish the “dictatorship of the
proletariat,” as a transition toward the abolition of all classes. This
stage is necessary for the proletariat to defend itself against a
counter-revolution and to bring about the classless society. Although
the expression “dictatorship of the proletariat” doesn’t appear until
1852, the idea is clearly stated in the Manifesto:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degree, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
The
first thing to note is that Marx and Engels have no intention to appease
the antagonism between the proletarians and the bourgeois, by improving
the condition of workingmen. On the contrary, they hope that the
conflict will intensify to the point of turning into a bloody civil war.
For that, the misery of the working class must increase. We should
remember here that tearing apart the social fabric of nations by
exacerbating social, racial, generational or gender tensions is a
strategy that Jewish intellectuals have used to this day.
Secondly,
Marx and Engels have no intention to stop or even resist the progress
of capitalism. On the contrary, they call for the total disappearance of
the social and economic structures that preceded it, and look forward
to its most extreme development, when all the means of production have
fallen into a few hands. For only then, they claim, the new world can be
born. Capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but
capitalism must first reach its full maturity, which is the monopoly of a
few billionaires.
Obviously,
monopolists can support wholeheartedly that goal. Should they fear the
next step, the revolution and the appropriation of all capitals and all
means of production by the state? Not necessarily, as Bakunin argued in
1872, and as Antony Sutton explained in more detail in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (2001):
“one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary socialists — to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians — with a few notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American monopoly capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia [or Germany] to the status of a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?”
Sutton
sees no Jewish conspiracy in this collusion between the Bank and the
Revolution. But documents relative to the failed Russian revolution of
1905 show that there is another dimension to that unnatural alliance, as
explained in this article by Alexandros Papagoergiou. In 1904, Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte was tasked to secure
a huge foreign loan to stabilize Russian public finances. He tells in
his memoirs that, after turning down the offer of the Jewish banks
headed by the Rothschilds, because it was conditioned on “legal measures
tending to improve the conditions of the Jews in Russia,” he was able to raise the enormous amount of 2,250,000,000 francs via “Christian Banks”.[23]
Revolutionary riots started soon after. A report of the Russian Foreign
Minister to Tsar Nicholas II notes that it happened “just at the time
when our government tried to realize a considerable foreign loan without
the participation of the Rothschilds and just in time for preventing
the carrying out of this financial operation; the panic provoked among
the buyers and holders of Russian loans could not fail to give
additional advantages to the Jewish bankers and capitalists who openly
and knowingly speculated upon the fall of the Russian rates.” According
to the report, the revolutionaries “are in possession of great
quantities of arms which are imported from abroad, and of very
considerable financial means,” which had been collected by Anglo-Jewish
capitalists “under the leadership of Lord Rothschild, … for the
officially alleged purpose of helping Russian Jews who suffered from
pogroms.”[24]
Marxism vs Zionism: the dialectical pliers
Jewish
movements seem to be working history through dialectical antagonisms
that ultimately advance the Big Project. The capacity of the Jewish
community to present itself either as a religion or as a nationality,
depending on the circumstances, is the prime example. After gaining
political emancipation in the name of religious freedom in the first
part of the 19th century, European Jews were in the position
to reclaim their special nationhood. For a few decades, reformed rabbis
would ostensibly oppose Jewish nationalism, proclaiming in the 1885
Pittsburgh Conference: “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a
religion community.”[25]
Yet the same Pittsburgh Conference saw no contradiction in adopting the
theory of German rabbi Kaufman Kohler, that “Israel, the suffering
Messiah of the centuries, shall at the end of days become the triumphant
Messiah of the nations,”[26] which amounts to say that Israel is not an ordinary nation, but the super-nation. In the 20th century, any trace of a contradiction between Reformed Judaism and Zionism was removed.
The
early collaboration between Marx and Hess and the late encounter
between Marx and Graetz both prefigure another dialectical opposition
between Communism (the International revolution aimed at destroying
Christian nations) and Zionism (the national project aimed at building
the Jewish nation). Both movements developed in the same milieu. Chaim
Weizmann recounts in his autobiography (Trial and Error, 1949)
that in early twentieth-century Russia, revolutionary communists and
revolutionary Zionists belonged to the same milieu. Weizmann’s brother
Schmuel was a communist, and that was not a source of family discord.
These divisions were relative and changeable; many Zionists were
Marxists, and vice versa. The borderline was all the more vague
that the Communist Bund, born the same year as Zionism (1897), inscribed
in its revolutionary agenda the right of the Jews to found a secular
Yiddish-speaking nation. As Gilad Atzmon recently wrote,
the Bund was “also an attempt to prevent Jews from joining the
‘Hellenic’ route by offering Jews a tribal path within the context of a
future Soviet revolution.”
But
the most important thing to note is that, from the early days, Jewish
revolutionary activity provided Zionists with a diplomatic argument in
favor of their alternative program for the Jews. Herzl mentions in his
diary (June 4, 1900) that “intensifying Jewish Socialist activities” was
a way to “stir up the desire among the European governments to exert
pressure on Turkey to take in the Jews” (Palestine was then under
Ottoman control). He hawked Zionism as a solution to the problem of
Jewish revolutionary subversion when meeting Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898,
and again when meeting Russian ministers in St. Petersburg in 1903.[27] The next generation of Zionists continued the stratagem. Churchill, who spoke with one voice with Chaim Weizmann,[28] dramatized the opposition between the “good Jews” (Zionists) and the “bad Jews” (communists) in his 1920 article “Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish people.”
He referred to Bolshevism as “this world-wide conspiracy for the
overthrow of civilization” and to Zionism as the solution “especially in
harmony with the truest interests of the British Empire.” (Churchill’s
later alliance with Stalin proves that his Zionism was stronger than his
anti-communism.)
In
the aftermath of World War II, the rivalry between the Communist and the
Capitalist worlds remained the indispensable context for the creation
and expansion of Israel. That explains why Roosevelt’s administration,
largely controlled by Jews, helped Stalin conquer half of Europe and
thwarted all attempts to stop him. Curtis Dall, Roosevelt’s son-in-law,
has revealed a secret diplomatic channel demonstrating that the White
House went out of its way to give the USSR all the time and the armament
necessary to invade Central Europe.[29]
Thus the Second World War was completed with the determined aim of
laying the foundations for the Cold War, that is, a highly explosive
polarization of the world that would prove crucial for Project Zion. In
fact, during this whole period, it is almost impossible to distinguish,
among the Jewish advisors of Roosevelt and Truman on foreign policy, the
pro-Communists from the pro-Zionists, as David Martin remarks in The Assassination of James Forrestal. A case in point is David Niles
(Neyhus), who was guilty of spying for the Soviets while advising
Roosevelt, but then played a key role in Truman’s support of the U.N.
Partition Plan and the recognition of Israel.[30]
The
Cold War proved instrumental when Nasser, Israel’s most formidable
enemy, was pushed into the communist camp in 1955, setting off an
intense Zionist campaign to present him as a danger to the stability of
the Middle East, and to present Israel, by contrast, as the only
reliable ally in the region. The Cold War was also the crucial context
for Israel’s defeat of Egypt in 1967 and Israel’s annexation of
territories stolen to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon.
Laurent Guyénot, Ph.D., has recently edited some of his Unz Review articles in book form, under the title Our God is Your God Too, But He Has Chosen Us: Essays on Jewish Power. He is also the author of From Yahweh to Zion: Jealous God, Chosen People, Promised Land … Clash of Civilizations, 2018, and JFK-9/11: 50 years of Deep State, Progressive Press, 2014.
Notes
[1] David Ben-Gurion and Amram Duchovny, David Ben-Gurion, In His Own Words, Fleet Press Corp., 1969, p. 116. Ben-Gurion’s prophecy appeared in the magazine Look on January 16, 1962, reproductions of which can be found on Internet.
[2] Karl Popper, Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1976), Routledge, 2002, books.google.com
[3] Bakunin, Statism and Anarchy, trans. Marshall S. Shatz, Cambridge UP, 1990, pp. 538-545.
[4] Quoted in Alexandre Soljénitsyne, Deux siècles ensemble (1795–1995), tome I: Juifs et Russes avant la Révolution, Fayard, 2003, tome 1, p. 269.
[5] Robert Blake, Disraeli (1966), Faber Finds, 2010, p. 202.
[6] Amos Elon, The Pity of It All: A History of Jews in Germany 1743-1933, Metropolitan Books, 2002, pp. 153, 157, 163-164.
[7] Isaac Berlin, Karl Marx: His Life and Environment, 1939, 2nd ed, 1948, p. 17.
[8] Aux compagnons de la Fédération des sections internationales du Jura, quoted in Henri Arvon, Les Juifs et l’Idéologie, PUF, 1978, p. 50. Partial quote in Francis Wheen , Karl Marx, Fourth Estate, 1999, p. 340.
[9] Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (1976), Clairview Books, 2011.
[10] Quoted in Kevin MacDonald, Separation and Its Discontents: Toward an Evolutionary Theory of Anti-Semitism, Praeger, 1998, kindle 2013, k. 4732–4877.
[11] Amos Elon, The Pity of It All, op; cit., p. 146.
[12] Shlomo Avineri, Karl Marx: Philosophy and Revolution, Yale UP, 2019, pp. 171-172.
[13] Moses Hess, Rome and Jerusalem: A Study in Jewish Nationalism, 1918 (archive.org).
[14] Sydney Hook, “Karl Marx and Moses Hess,” 1934.
[15] Shlomo Avineri , Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism, 1985.
[16] Read Bakunin’s response to Hess’s article, “Aux citoyens rédacteurs du Réveil”
[17] French translation, Bruno Bauer, La Question juive (1843), Union générale d’Éditions, 1968, on
[18] Hal Draper, “Marx and the Economic-Jew Stereotype,” from Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, Vol.1: State and Bureaucracy, Monthly Review, New York 1977, pp. 591-608. Read also Gary Ruchwarger, “Marx and the Jewish Question: A Response to Julius Carlebach,” Marxist Perspectives, Fall 1979, pp. 19-38.
[19] I am aware that another “anti-Semitic” article, unsigned and titled “The Russian Loan” (New York Daily Tribune, January
4, 1856), has been attributed to Marx by his daughter, but I find
Marx’s authorship dubious. See the discussion on its authenticity here.
[20] Nesta Webster, World Revolution: The Plot Against Civilization, 1921 , on archive.org, pp. 95-96.
[21] “Lettre au Journal La Liberté de Bruxelles,” October 5, 1872.
[22] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1990), HarperCollins, 2007.
[23] The Memoirs of Count Witte, Doubleday, Page & Co, 1921, on archive.org, pp. 292-294.
[24] Quoted in Boris Brasol, The World at the Cross Roads, 1923, on archive.org, pp. 74-78.
[25] Quoted in Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel? (1953), Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 14.
[26] Kaufmnann Kohler, Jewish Theology, Systematically and Historically Considered, Macmillan, 1918 (www.gutenberg.org), p. 290.
[27] The Complete Diaries of Theodor Herzl, edited by Raphael Patai, Herzl Press & Thomas Yoseloff, 1960, vol. 1 , pp. 362–363, 378–379, and vol. 3, p. 960.
[28] Martin Gilbert, Churchill and the Jews: A Lifelong Friendship, Henry Holt & Company, 2007.
[29] Curtis Dall, FDR: My Exploited Father-in-Law, Christian Crusade Publications, 1968 , pp. 146–157.
[30] David Martin, The Assassination of James Forrestal, McCabe Publishing, 2017, pp. 57-65. On Nile’s influence in the U.N. vote, see Alfred Lilienthal, What Price Israel ? (1953), 50th Anniversary Edition, Infinity Publishing, 2003, p. 50.
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