THE ROAD TO SALVATION (3): THE MARXIST CATASTROPHE

Visiting the agreeably historic German city of Trier on the Moselle, one muses about the Romans who named this place the capital of Gaul, as one quaffs the delicious local wine. Much less agreeable is the thought that this is the birth-place of Karl Marx, a gadfly pain in the neck in the 19^th century while alive, and the posthumous inspiration of untold misery and human suffering in the 20^th.

Marx's Birthplace in Trier

Karl Marx in 1875

Karl Marx (1818 – 1883) was born into a once-observant Jewish family, while his father was a reasonably prosperous lawyer, who baptised his children in the Prussian Lutheran church and generously supported Karl. His son was academic, eventually reading law at Berlin University from 1836. Karl was attracted to philosophy and joined the Young Hegelians, a club propagating liberal ideas. The Prussian authorities were reactionary and imbued with the spirit of Metternich, viewing him with suspicion. Marx presented his doctoral thesis to the University of Jena, a more enlightened body than Berlin University and it was accepted. He became engaged in 1842 to an aristocratic lady, Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married 5 years later, and edited a socialist newspaper in Cologne, much harassed by the censors and by the police. He fled to Paris where he met his lifelong friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels in 1844 but soon had to move again to liberal Brussels.

Marx became an advocate of violent revolution and with Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848, a year of revolutionary turmoil throughout Europe. Marx and Engels argued that history is a record of class struggle between the private property-owning bourgeoisie who exploit the impoverished masses (the proletariat) mercilessly and that it is necessary to destroy the power of the bourgeoisie by confiscation to usher in a just society. Whatever its intrinsic merits, the Manifesto made stirring reading;

The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution.
The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite!

In 1848 Marx supported insurrectionary movements in France, Germany, Poland, Hungary and even Belgium but none was successful. Soon he retreated to more tranquil Britain, where Chartism was noisy but basically law-abiding, and received support from Engels, whose father had owned a substantial cotton thread business in Salford, by Manchester.

Friedrich Engels

Anarchist Mikhail Bakunin

Marx, London-based for the rest of his life, turned his attention to economics and was famously to be found in the Reading Room of the British Museum researching his seminal Das Kapital, the first of 3 volumes being published in 1867. The final two volumes were published posthumously, finished and edited from Marx’s notes, by Engels.

Marx analysed the rise and stages of capitalism, developed his notions of class struggle and broadened the theology of his creed with studies of the labour theory of value, exploitation and dialectical materialism. His work gave insights into social and industrial changes although later commentators, like Keynes, doubted if there was much relevance to later generations. Marx believed only well- established industrial working classes like those in England and Germany could precipitate a revolution and believed peasant Russia was too backward to play a part.

Marx remained a dedicated agitator. The First International of socialist working-class parties soon fragmented into rival factions but by 1872 there was a total split and the Marxists and the Anarchists went their separate ways. The Anarchists under the Russian Bakunin wanted an extra-parliamentary struggle which the Marxists thought premature. Bakunin was more disposed to immediate violence and castigated Marxists as authoritarian and no better than the existing bourgeoisie.

For the last 10 years of his life, Marx suffered ill-health, thought at the time to be caused by liver problems. He erupted in boils and carbuncles and a recent retro-diagnosis suggests he was afflicted by the skin disease hidradenitis suppurativa aggravated by poor diet and an unhealthy lifestyle including excessive alcohol and tobacco. He died in 1883 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery in North London. Engels lived on until 1895, dying of throat cancer, with his ashes being scattered from Beachy Head, Eastbourne.

This motley crew of hairy-faced agitators might have disappeared into the mists of history were it not for the convulsions of the Great War and the collapse of Tsarist Russia in 1917. The tiny Russian Communist Party, split between Menshevik and Bolshevik, battened on to the dire sufferings of the peasant masses. Led by a fanatical but effective agitator, Vladimir Lenin, the Bolsheviks seized power and withdrew their war-weary nation from the war. Accepting as gospel the analysis of Marx, Lenin dispossessed the middle classes and started a ruthless purge of the richer peasants, the kulaks, encouraging their local murder and persecution. Around 1 million died in the 1920s.

Lenin died in 1924 but much worse was to come. His colleague and arch-revolutionary Leon Trotsky had led the Bolsheviks to triumph in the bloody civil war, taking revenge on dissidents of any kind. Trotsky sought to spread the incubus of communism everywhere and welcomed the creation of the Comintern for this purpose. He was edged out of power by the sinister figure of Joseph Stalin, a devious Georgian, suspicious, pitiless and psychotic. Trotsky himself was to be assassinated by Stalin’s agent in Mexico in 1940.

Vladimir Lenin

Leon Trotsky

 

One of the many baleful aspects of Marxism is that, in talking of class warfare, the individual and his rights are ignored. It is simpler to drum up hatred against, say,” the intelligentsia” or “the rich” than against Mr. Petrov, the grocer, with a wife, 3 kids and an old mother to support. Dehumanisation was a technique employed by Marxist and Nazi alike; a slaughter of innocents was the result.

Lavrenti Beria and Josef Stalin, creators of Terror

Lenin had first sponsored Terror but Stalin was the master-terrorist, aided and abetted by his top secret policeman, twisted Lavrenti Beria. The peasants were cowed by forced collectivization, resulting in horrendous famine, notably in the fertile Ukraine. The whole exercise was an ideological Marxist absurdity, persisted in even when failure was obvious. Political dissidents were mercilessly purged with top Bolsheviks like Carl Radek and Bukharin queueing up to confess and be liquidated in the 1930’s show trials. Lesser figures were furiously denounced, insulted and executed in hordes by state prosecutor Vyshinsky. The Marxist logic of confession was chillingly explained in Arthur Koestler’s 1940 novel Darkness at Noon. Despite plenty of evidence of Terror, the Soviet Union was able to seduce large numbers of “useful idiots” to turn a blind eye to its hideous reality and to persist in expressing utopian ecstasy at its New World. Bernard Shaw, Sydney and Beatrice Webb headed this shameful rota from the UK but Ernest Hemingway from the USA and Jean-Paul Sartre from France were similarly gulled, a huge propaganda coup for Marxism.

I will not weary you with a full account of the Marxist rise, decline and fall. The success of Soviet armies in 1945 allowed communists cruelly to dominate Eastern Europe for a generation. China ominously fell to Mao-Tse-Tung in 1949. Stalin died in 1953 and Beria was summarily shot. Russian regimes led by Malenkov, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Gorbachov became progressively less oppressive but their economic performance was feeble compared with the West. The market pricing method was anathema to Marxists, property remained “theft” and unaccountable bureaucrats tried to run a command economy – an impossibly complex procedure. The production of food and consumer goods were neglected to the anger of communist populations. Finally, the Soviet Union and her satellites collapsed in 1991 long after brave writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sinyavsky and Daniel had exposed to their own people the crimes and horrors of the Marxist state.

Between 60 and 100m people are estimated to have died under the oppression of the Marxist system between 1917 and 1991, a global catastrophe and a bitter waste of human talent. Their apologists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders are thankfully now on the precarious margins of political relevance where once their predecessors were contenders. As a Road to Salvation Marxism was a dead-end. We can say we have made our escape, but in truth it was “a damn close-run thing”.

SMD

16.08.19

Text Copyright © Sidney Donald 2019