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.