Karl Marx 20/05/13

Karl Marx was known in the 19th century as the “workmen’s friend”.

Marx believed, after his Theses on Feuerbach of 1843 that a man is a product of nurture not nature. He was a materialist of the French school. France has thrown up many intellectual fads and the Germans have adopted a lot of them.

Marx was no friend of the poor. He lambasted those who sought a doctor’s certificate to get into the workhouse, a fate which befell many of the Irish poor in the 19th century. He could well have benefited from a testimonium pauperitatas himself given his destitution on arriving in London.

Marx spent a lot of his early life excoriating religion yet it is in religion that the spirit finds its highest consolation. Marx adopted the anti-Semitic views of his new found friends in the 1840's (see The German Ideology) and he repeated those views in correspondence in the 1870's.

Marx considered while travelling in Germany from 1876 to 1878 marriage to a rich old widow who was probably a spy in the German Secret Service.

Marx in his early prose ridiculed the fashionable young, jeunes des gants jaunes, and adopted the staid dress of Freemasons in later life.

More importantly, Marx plagiarised the Factory Inspectors Reports in Capital. He copied large drafts of those reports of industrial poverty and disease to flesh out his meagre, lifeless prose. He was blind to the fact that these reports were the work of Liberals and social reformers who would later give birth to the Beveridge report and the British Labour Party. The inspectors were factory owners themselves and government officials.

01/11/13

Karl Marx glorified Prussia's drive to unite German-speaking peoples. He  and his colleague Engels both took the side of Lutheran Prussia against Catholic Bavaria and Catholic Austria in the mid-1860s war.

Marx talked of capitalists being “hostile friends” (Capital,1865-7)  but this statement ignores the reality of price fixing cartels,monopolies and trusts which had developed at every level before he died.

Marx rejected the overtures of a social democratic Crown Prince. He referred to him as Viereck (“Square”). In his famous Circular Letter to Bracke, Liebknecht and Others (1875) he showed his true nature by excoriating those who accepted punishment in the same manner as “those who desire to teach what they have not learned”.

Marx was possibly manipulated by Stieber, the Prussian police lieutenant, Hincckeedy and Engels. He never suspected Engels of any complicity with Prussian agents.

Engels for his part ridiculed charity. Both decried the” pennies to the poor” practice which does as much good today in every country as the best developed system of welfare payments. In Germany 90% of people pay the 1% Church Tax.

Marx in his early writings accused small shop keepers of “tyranny” while his family were fed and clothed by the goodwill of small shopkeepers who proferred credit in Soho from 1848 to 1852.

Marx made some strange friends through his letters to The Times. These included the anti-Semite founders of the Social Democratic Federation, Hyndman, Bax and Morris and the Conservative MP Urquhart.The latter believed that "everything Turkish was best". Proof If proof were needed that when a devil goes out of a house it brings back seven worse devils than itself after travelling across dry, arid ground…

03/12/13 and 04/12/13

Marx complained about “generalized want”. However, this was in actual fact the reality of life in the Soviet Union under his literate disciples. Poverty is a permanent,stuntinting phenomenon of every society.

Marx took great umbrage at “promoters”. He showed his anti-modern nature by complaining about natural phenomena such as advertising which emerged in the 1840s.

His modern day followers should take note of his railing against homosexual prostitutes besetting his Soho lodgings in 1852 (The Cologne Communist Trail).

In modern times his followers allude to Catholic believers as “trying to set me drunk” in a reference to priests drinking blessed wine at Mass.

Stalin. His main apologist in the 20th century was described as “a grey blur in the revolution” by independent critics and writers. Stalin's arch enemy Trotsky whom he had murdered was described as “the most capable man in the party” by the arch revolutionary and founder of the Russian Bolshevik Party, Lenin. The man described by Lenin as” the darling of the Party”, Bukharin, was murdered by Stalin in 1938.

Perestroika. Attempts to renovate Stalinism with factory committees in the 1980s ignored the fact that these committees were responsible for most of the deadly denunciations in 1938 (Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, 1970).

30/11/13

Lenin once wrote “Karl Marx did not provide recipes for the revolutionary cake shops of the future”. Yet in Capital Marx wrote of the managerial class making capitalists irrelevant and providing the means of socialism.By old Hobsbawm's translation this means middle management whereas Marx meant the Jeff Bezos's of his time.

This Marxist paradigm was used by Lenin after the 7th of November 1917 to run the Russian economy until April 1918 when it became clear that Russian exports were 0.5% of 1913 levels and the economy had collapsed, resulting in mass starvation.

18/1/16

Marx spoke with great authority on France and its periodic turnarounds in the 19th Century.

He claimed in his commentaries on these revolutions that Marshall Housman flattened the old revolutionary districts and built broad sweeping boulevards suitable for raking with cannon fire in any future revolution. He wrote these words without checking his facts. So if you are ever in Paris you will find the old Faubourg Saint Honore with its pre-1789 narrow streets suitable only for a single vehicle with John Law's Church and the hilly broad boulevard Saint Michel on the south inner side with its streets by their very nature unable to be traversed by cannon.

Marx wrote of the decline of the Faith due to revolutionary  upsurges. Yet go to the Saint Eustache in the first Arrondissement and you will see teeming congregations and private charity funded by Catholics, Protestants and Jews.

6.2/.2016

In Capital, Marx castigated the factory-owners of the reformed congregations in Lancashire and Yorkshire for reading the Bible on Sunday evening in those trying times when the industrial movement was taking hold.It was probably Mayor Joseph Chamberlain of Birmingham who this slight was aimed towards.This epigram originated probably with Engels who lived in Manchester amongst the Lancashire mill owners. Many of the mill owners were enlightened by their Faith and built mill cottages and tied houses for the teeming work force often escaping eviction, filth and disease, poverty and malnutrition in Ireland.    

16.3.2021

While Marx could justifiably talk of "ticket of leave men" i.e those released from a bond by written notice,we can rightly be sure that there is much to be suspicious of in Friedrich Engels in terms of manipulation of Marx and militarism in that he always believed in a statist,militarist Prussia. He published the Prussian Military Question barely four years before German Unification.

The scandalisation of the faithful and religion (7/2009)

A profound transformation in the relationship between the labour movement and the faithful is a prescient necessity. Socialists seek to meddle in every matter of common interest under the sun whereas Christian democrats draw from the Christian tradition. The origin of the doctrines, writings and observations of the pedagogues of the 19^th century was the Acts of the Apostles where charity manifested itself in those who “sold all their possessions and gave the money to the poor”.

 Secular matters are temporal and are governed by the Old Testament. In the Old Testament we read of the early call to nationhood of the Jews under King David. Some imagine that social democracy is inimical to Christianity or, more accurately, the Judaeo-Christian tradition. This is untrue. The long, slow, difficult transition from nomadic existence to political existence and stability is fraught with many wars, pitfalls and lurches backwards into slavery and exile in the early Jewish tradition.

In modern times we witness a transition between Kantian free thinking and primitive materialism in 18^th century Germany and France to the out workings of Rousseau and Voltaire’s atheism in Regicide France. Later came anarchism, socialism, syndicalism, existentialism, Stalinism, Trotskyism and ecology, a socially impairing and tragic course which made France prey to foreign invasion and conquest. France has spread its errors to the furthest corners of the globe and has become a land of thieves and criminals. There the police make no effort to enforce constitutional rights on property, the person and attrition. In Ireland people must shed their long held views on cooperation with civil policing.

Stalinism has fallen and we are now faced with the collapse of free market, unregulated capitalism. 

We must return to a society which perished at some time between the rise of the Norman Church –State dichotomy in 1066 and 1214. The anti clerical views of the British media in the 21^st centaury is not a sign of progress but a sign of moral ill health. (Only a tiny fraction of the Catholic clerics accused of scandalous behaviour of the quarter  of them charged have been found guilty by the courts. These allegations are based on the suggestions of impropriety by “spiritists  and mediums” (Isaiah) and as we know them today, psychiatrists and Humanists. There is no higher form of humanism than the Christian humanism of the Bible).

Revolution?

Revolution means “a turning around” or “turning backward”. Such a turnaround or moral renovation is a turning away from violence and atheistic barbarism.

Teutonic mists. The wealthy Germans and the poor Irish: 2 (05/07/12)

Teutonic mists. The wealthy Germans and the poor Irish: 2 (05/07/12)

There are many myths in England about the generosity of the Nordic and German Welfare States. The reality is that the bureaucracy eats up the wealth of Germany and the unemployed are destitute and homeless. The Northern European system of the Danish and Norwegian monarchies make for predictability in social relations. The Swedish welfare state is a myth.

In Germany the Hartz 4 social reform made under Hans Muentefering cut Social Assistance (Sozialhilfe) from 124 Euros a month to 90 Euros a month. Only the Christian Democrats opposed this manoeuvre by the Social Democratic Party. Rent allowance is also paid to the needy in Germany. As in Britain, there is a financial incentive to claim Disability Allowance (Behindertegeld). The German Christian Democrats, Lefts (Linken), to which Sinn Fein is allied, and Social Democrats showed their faces to the disabled by allowing experimentation with the stem cells of aborted foetuses. The German Disabled Federation condemned this diabolical scheme.

In Ireland those not qualifying for unemployment assistance which is not limited to the German qualifying period of one year receive 187.40 Euros a week indefinitely as long as they are capable of and available for work.Social Assistance is paid at the same rate as unemployment benefit.There is generous rent allowance.

People do not understand that the equivalent of the National Manpower Service, the government Careers Advisory Service, justly abolished by Thatcher in the UK, employs one hundred thousand bureaucrats in Germany and delivers only a couple of hundred jobs to  graduates. The bureaucracy soaks up the wealth of Germany.

In Sweden the unemployed single mothers are reduced to dire poverty by the

non-existent social state which is so widely praised in Britain, Ireland and the United States, an illusion shared by many Marxists.

In Germany Unemployment Benefit is set at the rate of a half of net wages for the duration of six months to one year. Their system is communal and there is no guarantee of Social Assistance in small towns because the Germans are a parochial people..The only positive aspect which is not shared by any other country other than Russia is the ten thousand Euro state gift for the birth of a child. The collapse of the German family and The Contraceptive Mentality required urgent action by the Christian Democrats after the 2007 General Election.

The employer- trade union conferences award unemployment pay in Denmark and Norway. In 2003 Denmark an unemployed worker is paid 80% of their previous wage according to sectoral wage agreements administered by the Lohnorganisationen.

Clearly the payment is for a limited period since we learn that there is compulsory referral for retraining by state welfare authorities. No social payments are made if retraining is refused.

The wealthy Germans?  The socially responsible Swedes? The generous Danes?

Teutonic mists and myths!  

Chartism and its legacy (4/12/12)

Chartism was the first democratic movement of modern times. Its aim was essentially to bring about universal suffrage. In their social teaching Harney, O’Brien and Jones agitated for a return to the land of the industrial working classes and built model villages. Their agitation ended in 1848 when they marched on London. They ran out of steam thereafter and Marx latched onto the dogends which were left as usual, holding the large Irish element in contempt. Marx corresponded with Harney who showed little or no interest in having anything to do with Marx.

The Chartists’ ideals of a return to the land, housing estates and countryside communes were given new life in the period from 1900 to 1937 with housing estates in London and the development of new towns.

The vitality of the Chartists lives on. In 1918 universal suffrage was granted in Britain.

Christian Democracy and Social Democracy (28/11/12)

Marx once wrote in the context of a revolutionary programme drawn up by the Eisenachers that the programme of the Social Catholic movement (‘Das Zentrum’) was the origin of most of the practical programme of social democracy. By social democracy was meant in the 1860s the drive to disposess all independent businesses. He condemned those who called for agitation against Das Zentrum.

In the 1930’s Das Zentrum was known as the People’s Party and under Von Papen gave their votes to Hitler. Von Papen was murdered soon afterwards. He gave his votes to Hitler because of the danger of Stalinism.

In 2004 the Hartz Four changes of the SPD meant that Income Support was cut from 124 Euros per month to 90 Euros per month. Germany is a rigid bureaucratic country and the differentials between workers and unemployed grew.

The Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union opposed this heartless manoeuvre and subsequently came to power.

That plan and me 2/2012

In 1989- 1990, I devised a Programme of Irish Socialists which I circulated to over a hundred trade unionists, unemployed groups, tenants groups, residents groups and politicians. In 1995 this plan became the National Development Plan after fourteen and a half million Irish pounds had changed hands between the brother of the General Secretary of the Labour Party,Ruairi Quinn, and Guinness Mahon Bankers.

Judge for yourself from what I recall from the contents of this plan as to who is responsible, as principal, for the transformation of the South.

The plan was on one page as follows:

 1: Transport. Motorways between Dublin and Waterford, Cork, Limerick, Galway, Sligo, Derry and Belfast. A tramway for Dublin. Electrification of the railways.Extension of the Dart to all suburbs in Dublin.Construction of an Undergound to link Connolly ,Heuston and Pearse Street Street Railway Stations.

 2: Health. Public health insurance.

3: Education. Free university education. Democratic control of primary and secondary schools.

4.: Housing. Demolition of all slums and construction of family houses.

5: Communities. Libraries, sports centres, leisure centres,town libraries,local arts centres and community halls. Olympic stadium .

6: Dublin Pedestrianisation of streets with O’Connell  Street turned into a concourse for public meetings .

7: Taxation .A progressive income tax.

8: Defence. Compulsory military service

9: The North. Irish Unity and decriminalization of the IRA.

10: Irish language. Irish language TV station.

11: Fiscal matters. Repudiation of the National Debt.
12: Nationalisation of the means of distribution, production and exchange.
13: Agriculture. Keeping as many people on the land as possible.
14: A new Constitution.

Ruairi Quinn is still the prisoner of these ideas in the field of education as is is Adams as regards the National Debt.

I have moved on and returned to the church.

Joseph Paul McCarroll

J’accuse (a brass neck)

J’accuse (a brass neck)

Richard Barrett ( Cusick) is the former gauleiter of People before Profit, a front group of the Socialist Workers Party and he was formerly of Globalize Resistance, SWM, TCD SWSS etc etc. He won a place in the Dail because the maverick republican, O Broin, stood aside.

I have known Barrett Banger Cusick for many years. I am a Law graduate who took a close interest in political economy which I studied for fourteen years. I submitted a plan and prospectus for fighting elections in 1995 to this group. Bitter fruit, I now think!

In the early part of the last decade, Cusick TD and Allen were the main spouters at  Socialist Worker gatherings. I attended these meetings. A constant theme of Cusick’s rhetoric was payments to corrupt politicians. Hypocrisy! While claiming Unemployment Assistance, Cusick TD was drawing two hundred euros a week (2003) from donations by SWP members and has done so for many years.

I am a Law graduate with a first in Philosophy of Law and fourteen years of study in political economy, pure economics (microeconomics) philosophy, European, US and Russian history and languages of which I speak six.I am a worker’s son, something Cusick is not. Cusick TD decried me as a “paranoid schizophrenic” in front of a packed gathering of SWP delegates in 2003 along with Bryce and Wingfield.

Strange fruit of years of organising meetings in the radical history sphere and writing articles on misappropriation of Peace and Reconciliation funds,health and safety exposures and labour movement activityand organising trade union recruitment drives.

Mister Plumy Voice, raise your voice against yourself! The Socialist Workers Party ? Not Socialist! Not workers! Not a party!

In his own words:Shameful.Despicable.

Vamoos, you charlatan!