Karl Marx Was No Leftist: The Most Important Attribute To Being A Scientist Is To Have A Constantly Open Mind About Everything

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Written by Eric Zuesse

A scientist is reshaping his/her view every day and sometimes changes her mind as a result. For example: today, I came across an interesting headline, “GEORGE SOROS — Arch-Manipulator Or Wealthy Dupe?” and clicked on it, since the idea that Soros might be a “Wealthy Dupe” was something I had never previously considered; and a reader-comment there said, in response to a prior comment that had been made against Karl Marx:

“Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets.”

“Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners… The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told.”

– Karl Marx, The Russian Loan

Since I had never seen anything quite like that from Marx, I searched online to find out more about that alleged quotation from him. In my latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL (its Chapter 4, which deals with economic theory), I criticized Marx’s theory for several reasons, but had never encountered that particular statement from him, and didn’t think that he was quite so stupid. My criticisms of his philosophy were instead these:

            It’s important to remember why Marxist economies fail. That failure comes from the falsities in his theory. Among those are: 

           1. The labor theory of value cripples any Marxist economy because it is false. Marx believed it because he wanted it to be true, but it is not true. Consequently, the naturally existing feedback information that authentically free-market prices would communicate to corporate executives regarding consumer-demand is absent in Marxist systems, so that there is rampant over-production of some goods and under-production of other goods. Per-capita GDP thus is inevitably low in any Marxist economy.

           2. The class-war has never been the middle class (“the bourgeoisie”) versus everybody else; it has always been the aristocracy versus everybody else (the public). Some people say that Marx blamed the “bourgeoisie” instead of the aristocrats because otherwise he’d get no aristocratic backers and supporters and so his writings wouldn’t be published and distributed. But for whatever reason, his system made no distinction between the aristocracy and everybody else, but instead was between the middle class (which in his system merely included the aristocracy but was overwhelmingly predominantly not aristocrats) and everybody else. In other words: his system targeted the wrong enemy. It distracted the public from its actual enemy. Its actual enemy is concentrated wealth, and that’s the super-rich themselves, and the entire one-dollar-one-vote, instead of one-person-one-vote, system that they buy and impose. Concentration of wealth is the evil, and was not targeted by Marx (perhaps because he was financially dependent upon the system that existed and thus declined to “rock the boat” by telling all of the truth, even if he had possessed any accurate understanding of what it was).  

           3. Marxism is dictatorship by “the proletariat” against “the bourgeoisie” but progressivism instead supports no dictatorship at all, but only democracy, which is the opposite of any dictatorship. Democracy is one-person-one-vote and every resident upon the land being encouraged and allowed to vote, and news-media being entirely separate from the economy and from the government and controlled by neither but instead controlled in the way that a co-op is controlled — by their members — and all of which news-media are funded equally per member, by the federal Treasury, so that there is no discrimination favoring one news-medium over another news-medium. Though such a system is possible, it’s impossible under Marxism, because Marx endorsed a type of dictatorship. Therefore, even the very ideal of democracy is outright excluded in any Marxist system.

           4. Marx was not committed to basing all theory on, and deriving and establishing all theory only upon, the existing body of relevant empirical findings. He instead based his theorizing upon philosophers, none of whom understood (much less respected) science. Science isn’t a methodology, but is instead a meta-methodology. Every scientific methodology adheres to it. Marx’s views were instead shaped by various philosophies.

            5. Marx wasn’t even clear about whether his theory was based on class, at all. For example, critical race theory was supposedly created by Marxists, though critical race theory is obsessed with race and ethnicity, instead of being class-based. Marxists are confused because Marx was confused; and Marx wouldn’t have become a ‘classic’ if he hadn’t been so confused that he’d be able to win backing even from some aristocrats (the people who had most of the money). And if critical race theory isn’t Marxist, then why aren’t people who claim to be Marxists condemning it, and saying it’s not, and documenting that it’s not? Marx was a philosopher, and philosophy has always been garbage, but only some garbage has won backing from aristocrats. Marx made the compromises he had to make in order to “succeed,” in a world that would remain controlled by the aristocracy. If his work had been any good, he’d have failed. His work had to be bad in order for him to have been able to succeed at what he was doing (social philosophy). He did what he had to do.

            So: just because an economic theory happens to be different from existing economic theory doesn’t indicate that it is any better than the existing theory. It can be just as bad – or maybe even worse (such as Marxism probably is, on balance).

            Leftists are hellishly stupid for continuing with Karl Marx even after both the Soviet Union (fully) and China largely abandoned him; they hoist their mast to a corrupt and failed philosophy that condoned massive atrocities. It’s unforgivable.

But obviously, if Marx was as bigoted a person as were Hitler, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and other such famous bigots, then he was not merely stupid but outright evil. And that would place his falsehoods into a motivational perspective, and not merely as having been honest errors.

So: I decided to search online to see if I might be able to come up with a credible published source, sufficiently close to Marx’s own lifetime, in order to authenticate that ‘quotation’ as having been from him.

I found this article, “Karl Marx’s Radical Antisemitism”, dated 12 May 2009, from a “Michael Ezra”. It included everything that was in the reader-comment there, and attributed the source as having been: “It was in his article, “The Russian Loan,” published in the New-York Daily Tribune on January 4, 1856, that the grotesque antisemitism of Karl Marx’s writing was on full display:” Mr. Ezra, after posting excerpts from the alleged article, said:

A Marxist website has provided a list of articles written by Karl Marx between 1852 and 1861 for the New York Daily Tribune. It does not surprise me that “The Russian Loan” does not appear on this list. When apologists for Marx’s antisemitism run out of explanations, they simply ignore his words.

Horace Greeley had, in fact, hired Marx as his newspaper’s “London Correspondent” starting on 25 October 1851. But Ezra’s article might have falsely attributed that anti-Semitic statement to Marx; so, I looked further, and came upon a rare superb posting at the normally trashy Reddit site, which posting was dated 18 November 2017, and titled “The Russian Loan – Attributed to Karl Marx – New York Daily Tribute – Friday, January 4, 1856”; and, besides posting there the complete Marx article from 4 January 1856, it opened:

Nobody else has transcribed this, so I have transcribed it myself. I have seen multiple attributions of this to Karl Marx but have no conclusive evidence that Karl Marx wrote it. Can anyone chime in on that?

The Russian Loan – Attributed to Karl Marx – New York Daily Tribute – Friday, January 4, 1856

http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83030213/1856-01-04/ed-1/seq-4/

All articles by Marx (with the exception of the “Russian Loan”) have been transcribed and archived by Marxists.org and can be found here: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/newspapers/new-york-tribune.htm

So: that reader-commenter at Reddit was confirming Ezra’s statement that the Marxist-dot-org website had expurgated only this one of the numerous articles that Marx had written for Greeley’s newspaper. In other words: Marxists hide that piece of evidence, instead of allowing it to be published: even Marxists consider it to be that disgusting: they hide it from their fellow-Marxists.

However, I still felt a need to get somewhat closer to the ultimate source-document; so, I continued on.

And now I found at the Wikiquote site this:

Thus we find every tyrant backed by a Jew, as is every Pope by a Jesuit. In truth, the cravings of oppressors would be hopeless, and the practicability of war out of the question, if there were not an army of Jesuits to smother thought and a handful of Jews to ransack pockets. […] the real work is done by the Jews, and can only be done by them, as they monopolize the machinery of the loanmongering mysteries by concentrating their energies upon the barter trade in securities… Here and there and everywhere that a little capital courts investment, there is ever one of these little Jews ready to make a little suggestion or place a little bit of a loan. […] Thus do these loans, which are a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners… The fortunes amassed by these loan-mongers are immense, but the wrongs and sufferings thus entailed on the people and the encouragement thus afforded to their oppressors still remain to be told. […] The fact that 1855 years ago Christ drove the Jewish moneychangers out of the temple, and that the moneychangers of our age enlisted on the side of tyranny happen again chiefly to be Jews, is perhaps no more than a historical coincidence. The loan-mongering Jews of Europe do only on a larger and more obnoxious scale what many others do on one smaller and less significant. But it is only because the Jews are so strong that it is timely and expedient to expose and stigmatize their organization.

• “The Russian Loan,” New York Daily Tribune, 04 January 1856; reprinted in full in The Eastern Question: A Reprint of Letters Written 1853-1856 Dealing with the Events of the Crimean War, edited by Eleanor Marx Aveling & Edward Aveling; S. Sonnenschein & Company, 1897, pp. 600-606

Clicking onto the title-page there, one can quickly see the opening of the book’s Introduction, which opened:

This volume is a reprint of certain letters and articles by Karl Marx, dealing with the Eastern Question as it presented itself in the “fifties,” with the particular events that led up to the Crimean War, and with the War itself. The articles appeared in the New York Tribune. …

That’s close enough for me; so, I now conclude that Marx was, indeed, that stupid, and that philosophers have, indeed, been hiding from the public this clearly documentable fact — which ought to have been made known to the public at least since the time when that book was published, which was in 1897, which was EVEN PRIOR TO THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION THAT INTRODUCED MARX’S COMMUNISM INTO RUSSIA ON 8 MARCH 1917, which was 61 years after Marx’s screed against “the Jews” was published. Consequently: the many Jews (or former Jews) who had been fooled to believe in Marx and in his communism, probably had had no way by which they could have figured out that their hero — whom they, in keeping with their racist ‘Holy Scripture’ (or whatever they had read from it when they had been children) —  might (on account of Marx’s genealogy) have considered to have been “a fellow Jew” — would have wanted all of them to be killed, as being “a curse to the people, a ruin to the holders, and a danger to the governments, become a blessing to the houses of the children of Judah. This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners.” In one of the rare instances when Marx had blamed aristocrats (instead of “the bourgeoisie”), he was equating them with “the Jews.” That ‘great philosopher’ was merely a stupid mental case. And philosophers, ever since, have participated, along with ‘historians’, in hiding from the public this historically important fact.

Anyone who doubts that Marx was a racist against Jews should read Ezra’s  “Karl Marx’s Radical Antisemitism”, which cites and links to not only Marx’s 1856 screed that is being discussed here but also to much else, which likewise displays Marx as having had a racist hatred against Jews shockingly similar to what Hitler expressed in his books, speeches, and such. Those statements condemn not merely what he alleges that all Jews do, but what every Jew is. It leaves no room for exceptions. Furthermore, the full text of that 1856 document as transcribed at the Reddit posting that was linked-to here, includes such assertions of racism as: “These small Jewish agents draw their supplies from the big Jewish houses, such as that of Hollander and Lehren, Königswarter, Raphael, Stern, Sichel, Bischoffsheim, Amsterdam, Ezekiels of Rotterdam. Hollander and Lehren are of the Portuguese sect of Jews, and practice a great ostensible devotion to the religion of their race.” That is “race” — NOT merely “religion — he says it’s “the religion of their race.” He is saying that the ‘race’ must be eliminated — not MERELY “the religion.” He is saying that they can’t help being what they are — and that what they are is a “curse” to everyone else. He is implying (without explicitly saying it) that all Jews must be eliminated. The Ezra article about Marx links through to an 1845 statement from Marx that “The task of abolishing the essence of Jewry is in truth the task of abolishing Jewry in civil society, abolishing the inhumanity.” Hitler said that he was eliminating the “Jewish bacillus.” His view of Jews was no different from Marx’s. Marx wasn’t thinking ONLY about economic classes (for which he blamed “the bourgeoisie” instead of “the aristocracy”), but he, in addition, was a racist.

In fact, considering that Marx said “This Jew organization of loan-mongers is as dangerous to the people as the aristocratic organization of landowners,” perhaps his having created his communism against “the bourgeoisie” instead of against “the aristocracy” reflected the fact that very few Jews then were in the aristocracy, and the vast majority of them were in the middle class — they were actually “the bourgeoisie” that he hated and built his ideology upon in order to redirect what was actually his anti-Jewish racism into the anti-middle-class sentiment that he produced as his philosophy. If that is the case, then he built his communism upon that racist sentiment instead of upon any actual economic class-analysis at all — he was merely redirecting his anti-Semitism, and produced his philosophy in that way; i.e., out of that mental illness he had. The ‘historians’, philosophers, and social ‘scientists’, misinterpreted his mental illness, as being, instead, some ‘revolutionary theory’ in the social ‘sciences’.

Marx did more than any other person to distract the world from the historical fact that throughout history the aristocracy has been the source of all imperialisms (excepting only ones that have been serving theocrats instead of aristocrats — but theocracies have been clearly only the minority of cases). The middle class (“the bourgeoisie”) have never been the beneficiaries of imperialism, but have instead suffered the wars and the slaughters and the destructions that imperialisms have produced. Karl Marx distracted leftists from the authentic “class-enemy,” which are and have been the richest 1% of the richest 1% and especially the under-a-thousand ultra-rich, the billionaires. Karl Marx has been a curse to The Left. The time has long-since come for The Left to not only reject him, but condemn him, and to remove him from its own history, as having been only a faker, and one who severely damaged the entire movement. Leftism cannot tolerate any form of bigotry — not by the majority against some minority, nor by a minority against the majority — because bigotry is based on falsehood and distracts from the actual oppressors, who are only, and each one of, the individual beneficiaries of injustice, while the public are instead its individual victims. False identification of oppressor and victim prevents justice — and justice is the supreme objective of The Left, anywhere, and in any era. Karl Marx was not a Leftist.

—————

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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