By Walter Williams, JWR
Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx’s life and have never read his three-volume “Das Kapital.”Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx’s death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxist have only read his 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto,” which was written with Engels.
Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, antifa and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life.
Marx’s predictions about capitalism and the “withering away of the state” turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.
When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history.” Then he asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Friedrich Engels added: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” Many of Marx’s racist ideas were reported in “Karl Marx, Racist” a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.
In a July 1862 letter to Engels, in reference to his socialist political competitor, Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx wrote: “It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother had not interbred with a nigger. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product. The obtrusiveness of the fellow is also nigger-like.”
In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had “one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood.” In an April 1887 letter to Paul’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”
Marx’s anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled “On the Jewish Question.” He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was “huckstering” and that the Jew’s god was “money.” Marx’s view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”
Marx’s philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. He wrote in his 1952 memoir, “The Motorcycle Diaries”: “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”
British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in The New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to “a new social order” that would be created “by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese.”
“millions enslaved and murdered” And who, pray tell, started two world wars in 30 years which killed 100 million people and wounded and maimed countless others? The Commies? Or the super-rich and powerful rulers of the world who wanted world domination, wanted to acquire other countries’ territories by force, to enslave the Untermenschen (and their own peoples as well), wipe out the Jews, and to destroy the accursed Commie state (WWII)?
And who continue to foment wars and conflicts all over the world for the simple reason that if there is peace, no one will need to buy their expensive weapons which they sell to BOTH sides of the war or conflict.
Yeah, Marx was a humanitarian (NOT). He came up with a social order against the nature of man which helped get millions enslaved and murdered plus did nothing positive to improve the lot of man.
He did not understand Free Enterprise and the nature of man to try and improve his lot. He did not understand how this could benefit the most people and allow people to advance based on their talents and hard work.
Then the failures of the world still reflect on his writings to justify stealing from some and giving it to others who did not work for it!
@ Adam Dalgiesh:
I won’t recap my previous post but if you, Adam, were born in Germany and baptized at the age of six (which was then officially (if not at the grass roots level) considered as nullifying your Jewishness) who knows what you would think or write about Jews.
Ironically, his best friend and frequent co-author Engels thought that Marx’s works were inspired by his Jewishness (in a good way).
Isn’t the United States the arch-capitalist country?
I thought in the US it is considered the best and highest compliment.
In his pamphlet “On the Jewish Question,” Marx saw connections between the Jews, the Unites States, and the concept of the rights of the individual. All three, in his opinion, were evil. He condemned the U.S. Bill of Rights for giving rights to individuals , but saying nothing about the rights of the “species,” and not requiring people to be “species beings” (i.e. workers devoted to the well-bing of hmaniity as a whole). He saw the United States as the arch-capitalist country, and hence a truly Jewish country–although there were relatively few American Jews in 1844 when the pammphlet was written.
Hear! Hear! Prove that his contemporary bigotries in any way distort his basic economic theory that capital agglomerates within any given technological level of development till the business oligarchs buy or push around the elected reps. We have seen as much in 18th century British Whig history and the 20th century oil and motor lobbies. Newton was not a pleasant personality but you would not use his personal failings to rubbish his physics. That must be done with physics. Ditto Marxist economics. One function of a modern govenment is to use the tax and budget to enable all to have access to health and education and so opportunity to climb social ladders. When governments like Lebanon and Colombia are too weak to make the rich half pay enough tax to put an effective mayor and an honest school and health centre in every market town and even village you get “Communists” who are a symptom of bad government or rather lack of it at grass roots level. Provide minimal Frecnh third republic government and “reds” evaporate.
We can call Marx all sorts of names but we cannot deny his contribution to social sciences and to the world history in general.
People who only have enough brains to use his terminology as swear words (except for the word “capitalism”, of course) shouldn’t be discussing his (or anyone’s) ideas at all.
If your main criteria for choosing which works of world literature (for example) to read is that the author not be an anti-Semite, you will never read any of them.
The same is true if you start basing your decisions to partake of any product of human endeavor by first checking whether it was invented, made, written, or sung, etc. by a “good person” – you’d have to walk around naked, hungry, dirty, sick, and homeless, God forbid.
Talent and intelligence don’t belong exclusively or even mostly to “good people”, and you cannot equate these qualities with goodness or morality which is sad but true.