151 Years of Evil
Mike J.S
by David Horowitz
May 1998
IT HAS BEEN hardly a decade since the statues of Lenin were toppled
throughout the Soviet empire and the head of Karl Marx was severed once
and for all from any connection to a body politic. Yet the lips of the
severed head continue to move.
In the West leading intellectualsãmany who would not allow themselves to
be called Marxistsãprofess to hear a message they insist is relevant to
our times. Thus the rush to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the
publication of the Communist Manifesto, the only text that most of the
millions of soldiers in Marxist vanguards around the world ever read.
The Manifesto was an incitement to totalitarian ambitions whose results
were far bloodier than those inspired by Mein Kampf. In it Marx announced
the doom of free market societies, declared the liberal bourgeoisie to be
a "ruling class" and the democratic state its puppet, summoned
proletarians and their intellectual vanguard to begin civil wars in their
own countries, and thereby launched the most destructive movement in human
history.
Yet this birthday celebration in the commanding heights of our political
culture is marked not by judgments of its historical malevolence or even
by cautionary admonitions to potential disciples, but by fulsome praise
for its brilliant analyses and even more preposterously for its analytic
profundity and prescience. Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles
Times, not to mention usual suspects like The Nation, have embarrassed
themselves by asserting the indispensability of this tract for
understanding the failings of the very system which brought Marxism to its
kneesãcapitalism.
We might expect this of a former Communist and present-day Marxist like
Eric Hobsbawm, who contributed the egregious introduction to an
anniversary edition of the Manifesto published by the New Left Review's
Verso Press. But it is passing strange to be presented with so
historically unconscious a statement from the New York Times. Given the
current state of the intellectual culture, it is no doubt appropriate that
the Times would pick a professor of English literature for the task
(English departments being virtually the last redoubts of the Marxist
faith this side of Havana). But it is ironic that the professor, Steven
Marcus, should be a protÈgÈ of Lionel Trilling, one of the most perceptive
liberal critics of Marxism. For Marcus has written nothing less than a
birthday ode to the irascible and demonic genius from Trier, under the
title "Marx's Masterpiece at 150."
According to Marcus and the Times: "The Manifesto was and is a work of
immense autonomous historical importance. It marks the accession of social
and intellectual consciousness to a new stage of inclusiveness. It has
become part of an integral modern sensibility . . . and it remains so,
after the demise of Soviet Communism and its satellite regimes, the
descent into moribundity of Marxist movements in the world and the end of
the cold war."
To be sure, on America's benighted college campuses, unfortunately and
deplorably, this description of Marxism's currency is accurate. Marxism,
or some kitsch version of it, has indeed become "part of an integral
modern sensibility." But what about the real world, outside the ivory
tower?
Of even more consequence is the Times's endorsement of this degeneration
of intellectual lifeãwhat should properly be regarded as a social
disaster. Instead of digesting the lessons of the Communist holocaust,
closing the Marxist tent, throwing the Manifesto in the intellectual
garbage bin where it belongs, dusting off the volumes by Von Mises and
Hayek, which actually predicted the Communist fall andãfor the first time
in one's lifeãthinking about how to make bourgeois democracy work, the
Times apparently would like its progressive readers to believe that none
of this sordid revolutionary history has any relevance to the important
and present task of continuing the civil war the Manifesto first incited:
A decade after those world-historical occurrences,
the Manifesto continues to yield itself to our reading
in the new light that its enduring insights into social
existence generate. It emerges ever more distinctly
as an unsurpassed dramatic representation,
diagnosis and prophetic array of visionary
judgments on the modern world . . . . A century and
a half afterward, it remains a classic expression of
the society it anatomized and whose doom it
prematurely announced.
Prematurely! Are we to understand by this that the Times thinks the bloody
apocalypse Marx gleefully hoped for is yet to come? The answer is
obviously yes if the Manifesto has "enduring insights" into capitalist
economy. And what exactly is it that the Manifesto is alleged to have
diagnosed? This, after all, is the decisive issue. Is the Manifesto
correct in what it says about "social existence"?
In fact the Manifesto is so self-evidently wrong in its fundamental
analyses and judgments that its author could not begin to explain how the
article praising his bankrupt and discredited war cry could appear in the
Times at all. How is it that the leading institution of the "ruling class"
press, in the principal bourgeois nation on the planet, could feature such
Marxist tripe? Nor is this question incidental to the core problem of a
text whose principal thesis claiming to analyze complex societies on the
basis of a single structureãeconomic classãis announced in its very first
line: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of
class struggle."
This hypothesis is really the essence and sum of the Manifesto which is
not a call to thought, butãand this should never be forgottenãa call to
arms. The striking (and reprehensible) thesis of the Manifesto is that
democratic societies are not really different in kind from the
aristocratic and slave societies that required revolutions to overthrow.
Despite surface appearances, despite the fact that in contrast to all
previous societies, democracy makes the people "sovereign"ãdemocratic
capitalism is "unmasked" by Marx as an "oppressive" and tyrannical society
like all the rest, and therefore requires extra-legal and violent means to
liberate its victims from its yoke. That is why those who have been
inspired by the Manifesto have declared war on the liberal societies of
the West and have spilled so much blood and spread so much misery in our
time.
The meaning of the first sentence of the Manifesto, then, is this: All
(non-socialist) societies are divided into classes that are "oppressed"
and those who oppress them. Capitalism is no different, even though its
revolutions may have instituted democratic political structures designed
to enfranchise the "oppressed." For the very idea of democracy in a
society where private property exists, according to the Manifesto, is an
illusion: "The executive of the modern state is but a committee for
managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." In other words,
democratic elections are a sham. Civil war is the political answer to
humanity's problems: "Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose
but your chains." The solution to all fundamental social problemsãto war,
to poverty, to economic inequalityãlies in a conflict that will rip
society apart and create a new revolutionary world from its ruins. This is
the enduring and poisonous message of the Manifesto, and why its believers
have left such a trail of human slaughter in their path as they set about
to create a progressive future.
Almost every important analytic thesis of the Manifestoãincluding its
opening statementãis patently false. History is not the history of class
struggle, as defined by Marx, i.e., the struggle of economic oppressor and
oppressed. Not even the historical event which provided the basis for
Marx's theoretical model, the French Revolution, is explicable in these
terms. Historians like Simon Schama and Francis Furet have established,
beyond any reasonable doubt, that capitalism was already thriving under
the monarchy, and it was the nobility, not the bourgeoisie, that upended
the ancien rÈgime). When we look at the twentieth century, whose course
has largely been determined by forces of nationalism and racism, which
Marx utterly discounted, the hopeless inadequacy of his theories becomes
impossible except for those blinded by faithãto ignore.
According to Marx, the bourgeois epoch possesses a distinctive feature:
"It has simplified the class antagonisms: Society as a whole is more and
more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes,
directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat." But, of course,
it hasn't. Which is one reason why Marxism has failed, as a program, in
all the industrialized countries.
In fact, much of the Marxist critique of capitalism reflects nothing so
much as a romantic longing for a feudal past in which social status was
pre-ordained and irrevocable, and stamped every individual with a destiny
and a grace:
The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every
occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with
reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the
lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into
its paid wage labourers.
Of course, it has not exactly done this either. More likely it has turned
physician, lawyer, scientist, and poet into entrepreneurs themselves. In
the open societies created by capitalist revolutionaries, they can set up
as independent contractors; they can incorporate themselves; and they can
move up the social and economic scale to heights undreamed of when their
status may have been "reverential" but where it was also fixed by the
immutable relations of an authentic "class society," which bourgeois
society is not. The complexity and fluidity of class structure in
developed capitalist societies has made a mockery of the core principles
of Marxist belief.
Marx was a first-rate intellect and a brilliant writer, and his
descriptions of the progressive economic expansion of market societies
under the leadership of the "bourgeoisie" are memorable and provide most
of the basis for claims that the Manifesto is an accurate and "prescient"
work. Marx famously extolled the capitalist class for constantly
"revolutionizing the forces of production," concluding: "The bourgeoisie,
during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and
more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations
together."
This sentence encapsulates both the seductive power of Marx's writing and
the sinister import of his theory. The description would seem to be an
endorsement of capitalism, indicating the immense value to all members of
society in the encouragement it has provided to an entrepreneurial class
to create more social wealth than the world has ever known. It would
hardly seem to provide an argument for the permanent war that Marx goes on
to advocate against the bourgeoisie in the name of human progress. But
even in the sentence quoted, one sees how the theory is designed to cancel
the praise. Marx identifies the creative entrepreneurs as "rulers" in a
sense designed to parallel that of absolutist monarchs and slave-owners,
and thus to detach them from the reality of their achievement and from the
fact that they earn the power they accumulate, and thus to incite social
resentment and hatred against them. The theory further postulates that the
productive forces these entrepreneurs have created have "outgrown" them,
and make it necessary to destroy their "rule."
In Marx's colorful prose: "Modern bourgeois society . . . is like the
sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world
whom he has called up by his spells." Marx is referring here to the
business cycle and its economic crises.
In these crises there breaks out an epidemic that, in
all earlier epochs, would have seemed an
absurdityãthe epidemic of over-production.
Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of
momentary barbarism; it appears as if a famine, a
universal war of devastation had cut off the supply
of every means of subsistence.
According to Marx the bourgeoisie is at war with the very forces of
production that it has called into being ("The weapons with which the
bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the ground are now turned against the
bourgeoisie itself.") And there is more. The forces of production called
into being by the bourgeoisie have also created a class, the proletariat,
which is its victim and its antagonist. The proletariat has no property
itself, and therefore is in a position to abolish private property which
is the "condition" of bourgeois production and bourgeois oppression, to
remove the bourgeois "rulers" from their corporate thrones and to create a
cooperative society in which the economy can be organized according to a
"social plan." This development emanating from the logic of History that
Marx has discovered, has all the inevitability of a natural force:
The advance of industry, whose involuntary
promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation
of the labourers, due to competition, by their
revolutionary combination, due to association. The
development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts
from under its feet the very foundation on which the
bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products.
What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above
all, is its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory
of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Under the spell of prose like this, whole generations of "progressives"
have been blinded to the obvious bounties of democratic capitalist
societies and encouraged to make war on them, and with a nihilistic fury
inspired by illusions of "social justice" producing human tragedy beyond
measure. The heirs of Marx are still at it. In the wake of the Communist
catastrophe, they are willing to acknowledge only that Marx's economic
categories are too narrow and that the proletariat has failed to make the
revolution. But the core Marxist model, the model which proposes that
democratic societies are oppressive and tyrannical, that they deserve not
fundamental allegiance and constructive attention but venomous scorn and
nihilistic rejection, that democratic processes and institutions are a
sham, that the just solution to social problems lies along the path of
civil confrontation and political warfareãthis model is alive and well
among radical feminists, racial separatists, queer nationalists, and the
rag-tag intellectual army of post-modernists, critical theorists, and
kitsch Marxists that inhabit our universities and evidently our editorial
rooms as well.
Contrary to the Times, and other institutions of the "bourgeois" media
that have followed its lead, what needs to be emphasized on this 150th
anniversary of The Communist Manifesto is that Marx was totally,
tragically, destructively wrong. He was wrong about the oppressive nature
of the bourgeoisie and the outmoded nature of capitalist production, wrong
about the increasing misery of the working class, and wrong about its
liberating powers, wrong about the increasing concentration of wealth and
the increasing polarization of class under capitalism, wrong about the
labor theory of value and the falling rate of profit, and wrong about the
possibility of creating an advanced and democratic industrial society by
abolishing private property and the market in order to adopt a "social
plan."
If Marx's economics were already outdated and false when he wrote the
Manifesto, even worse was his political ignorance. He was, in particular,
disastrously deaf to all the resonances of the Anglo-American
constitutional tradition and the accumulated democratic wisdom ascending
from the Magna Carta to the American Constitution. Here in its implacable
arrogance is how the "visionary" prophet who wrote the Manifesto actually
saw the political future:
When, in the course of development, class
distinctions have disappeared, and all production
has been concentrated in the hands of a vast
association of the whole nation, the public power
will lose its political character. Political power,
properly so called, is merely the organized power of
one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat
during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled,
by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as
a class, if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself
the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by
force the old conditions of production, then it will,
along with these conditions, have swept away the
conditions for the existence of class antagonisms
and of classes generally, and will thereby have
abolished its own supremacy as a class.
One billion people have been impounded in totalitarian states and gulags,
and one hundred million people have been murdered in our lifetime by
Marxists acting on these false premises. That they should be endorsed
today by anyone at all is a moral disgrace. This is what we should
remember on the 150th anniversary of Marx's destructive work. Political
power is not "merely the organized power of one class for oppressing
another." In democratic market societies, where social mobility is fluid,
the people are sovereign and the rule of law prevails, classes do not
"oppress" one another, and those who inflame the passions of revolution
are inciting their followers to criminal acts. Period.
Private property may be the basis of class divisions, as Marxists claim,
but private property has been proven by all history to be the
indispensable bulwark of human liberty, the only basis for producing
general economic prosperity and social wealth that human beings have yet
discovered. There are no democratic societies, or industrial societies or
post-industrial societies that are not based on private property and
economic markets. Those who make war on private property, make war on
human liberty and human well-being.
As noted above, the writer of the Times review is a professor of English
literature. At any other moment in our intellectual history his choice for
an assignment of this importance might be dismissed as mere happenstance.
But Marcus's views reflect the appalling state of literary studies in
American colleges, which under the aegis of tenured radicals have become a
pretext for teaching Marxist kitsch under rubrics like "post-modernism,"
"post-structuralism," and "critical" and "cultural" studies. These
pseudo-Marxists share Marx's hatred of all bourgeois societies like our
own. As the professor, himself, put it in the Times: "Whether it is
regarded as capitalist democracy as civil society, as the welfare state in
transition or as the modern social contract, bourgeois society remains
alive and well which means of course, as it always has, that it is in a
hell of a state."
The sub-text is that American society is a society to be rejected and
despised as a social hell, that its institutions are institutions to be
subverted and destroyed. This is the curriculum in all too many college
classrooms today. This is the real meaning of The Communist Manifesto on
its 150th anniversary, and of the celebrations of the Manifesto by an
intellectual class whose own record in this bloodiest of centuries, is a
sordid and sorry one of apology and support for the totalitarian enemies
of America both abroad and within.
Reply to mike1@@@winternet.com. +--+--+--+--+--+--+--+
A lickspittle thief named <wt...@mindspring.com> "Upaya" wrote:
> I'll be laughing every time I pay my taxes just thinking that they're
> reduced by the amount extracted by the state from the inheritance of some
> vicious little yuppy wannabe....
"I am a *free* man, lickspittle; and there's *nothing* you can do about it.
I am the only free man on this train. The rest of you are *cattle*."
-- The anarchist, "Dr. Zhivago"