Books: Marx Debunked

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In Paris he hobnobbed with Friedrich Engels, elegant, fox-hunting scion of a prosperous German textile tycoon. With him Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto (1848), with him he shared his ideas, hopes, miseries and triumphs. Engels gave him implicit intellectual and political obedience, supported him most of his life and finally settled an annuity on him. In 1848 both Marx and Engels were neckdeep in the revolutionary wave that swept over Europe.

With the first gunshots, Marx rushed back to the Rhineland to edit the New Rhenish Gazette. The chapter on this episode shows the extent to which Marx's tactics are still standard Communist equipment. The New Rhenish Gazette was a tight little dictatorship of the proletariat run by a back-room clique of case-hardened Communists. But communism or socialism were rarely mentioned in its columns ; the paper posed as a liberal organ. The Communists posed as liberal patriots. In the name of liberalism, Marx shouted for war between Prussia and Denmark. He knew that war is good growing weather for communism. The result, as always, was the gradual discrediting of the liberals.

Character Assassination. Other enlightening chapters describe Marx's tactics of character assassination (still standard Communist practice) against anybody who threatened his exclusive leadership. One of his victims was Wilhelm Weitling, a tailor's apprentice, one of the few proletarians who has ever become an intelligent Communist leader. Marx falsely accused Weitling of being a literary crook and hounded him to the U.S. Another target was Ferdinand Lassalle, brilliant founder of the German Social Democratic Party. Marx somewhat inconsistently referred to Lassalle as "Baron Izzy" and "the little Jew." Another victim was Michael Bakunin, an ardent Russian anarchist who threatened Marx's, control of the First International (founded in 1864 in London). Marx charged Bakunin with shady financial dealings and with being a Czarist agent. He could not make the charge stick, but Bakunin withdrew to lick his wounds.

After the collapse of the 1848 revolutions, Marx spent the rest of his life fighting off creditors, plotting against the public peace, burying his son,* suffering from attacks of carbuncles that sometimes covered him from head to foot, grinding away at economics so that he could "prove" (in Capital) that capitalism was inevitably doomed and that socialism was its inevitable successor, lashing his enemies with invective sometimes worthy of an Old Testament prophet and sometimes unprintable. When he was buried in a cemetery in Highgate, London, only eight friends were at the grave.