Some Great Men: Karl Marx

Sixty years ago Karl Marx died in London. Every year since his death he has had a greater influence on world history--above all since Lenin put his theories into practice in 1917. To-day even those who most abhor Marxism have to admit that he was a much more important historical force than such contemporary political figures as Gladstone, Disraeli, or Queen Victoria, or philosophers such as Herbert Spencer, Cardinal Newman, or August Comte, who seemed to be great in their own time.

He can justly be compared with contemporaries like Faraday, Darwin, and Pasteur, who are still influencing our lives and thoughts, because their ideas were important not only for their own time, but for many generations to come. These men applied scientific method to new fields. So did Marx.

The two volumes of his Selected Works, just published by Lawrence & Wishart, give some idea of the ground which he covered, and form an excellent introduction to his thought.

There were great socialists before Marx. They saw what sort of organization of society was needed. But they had not studied history deeply enough to analyse the process of historical change, and state the conditions by which socialism could come into being, as Marx and Engels first stated them in the Communist Manifesto.

There were great economists before Marx. But they were mostly content with describing the economic structure of society as they found it. Marx did not merely do this. He traced its origin and showed how it was decaying before his eyes, while the embryo of a new society was growing up within it in the form of the workers' organizations.

Marx was also a great historian and philosopher. Of philosophers he wrote, "Other philosophers have interpreted the world. The point is to change it." And here he was in agreement with the method of science. Hundreds of philosophers had interpreted the motions of the stars and other moving bodies. Galileo started experimenting, that is to say changing the motion or rest of material objects,

He found that Aristotle's and St. Thomas Aquinas's theories did not work. Ever since then experiment has been the method which scientists applied wherever it was possible, the method which gives the most certain results.

Academic philosophers had tried to explain the world starting from our sensations, and some of them concluded that the world consisted of nothing but sensations. Marx saw that we are just as closely related to the world by labour which changes it, as by sensation, which only copies it, and that a philosophy in which labour is not as important as sensation is of little value.

In the same way we can only get to understand the nature of society by trying to change it. No living man has a clearer grasp of the nature of society than Stalin, who has played a leading part in two great changes, the overthrow of capitalism, and the building up of socialism. Marx learned the true nature of class society from his early revolutionary work.

Just as Darwin applied scientific method to the problem of man's ancestry, and Pasteur to that of his diseases, Marx applied it to history, politics, and economics. In each case the result of the analysis was at first sight humiliating.

It was pleasanter to believe that we were made in God's image than that we were descended from monkeys, to regard an epidemic as a punishment from God rather than a result of a faulty water supply. So it hurt human pride to be told that history was determined by economic causes rather than by the ideas of great men, the judgments of God, or the racial soul rooted in blood and soil.

But humility is a condition for progress. If we believe that our ancestors were monkeys we can hope that our descendants will surpass us beyond our wildest imagination; if we know the material causes of disease we can hope to abolish all diseases as we have abolished many. If our history, laws, and morality rest on an economic basis, we can see the way to a progress which still seems impossible to many people.

By studying the laws of change in their most general form, Marx and his friend and colleague Engels not only illuminated history, but science. They did this in two ways. In the first place scientific discoveries are part of the historical process, and depend on productive forces and relations.

Newton's work was possible because people needed exact knowledge of the movements of the stars for navigation, and of cannon balls for war. He showed that they obeyed the same laws. Darwin could make his great generalizations because the exploita- tion of colonies had disclosed the distribution of living animals and plants through the world, and the development of mining had disclosed the order in which fossil animals and plants had appeared and died out in the past.

In the second place, material systems develop and perish according to dialectical principles like those which hold for human institutions. Engels was almost alone in his time in thinking that chemical atoms were not indestructible. Rutherford showed that they are born; and that they are destroyed, not usually by external forces, but by their own internal stresses.

Marx did not live to see his theories applied by Lenin. Maxwell did not live to see Hertz, Lodge, Marconi, and others apply his theory of electromagnetic waves to radio-communication. Leninism is Marxism developed by the experience of socialism in action. But it is still Marxism.

Outside the Soviet Union there is a wide and growing distrust of science. The intellectual leaders of the capitalist world, both within the churches and outside them, tell us that science is leading to increasing unhappiness, of which wars are the worst but not the only symptom, because it is applied to machines and not to the regulation of human conduct.

They are right up to a point. Marx said much the same a century ago. But he took the decisive step of showing how scientific method could be applied to human affairs on the broadest scale. So far it has only been so applied in the Soviet Union.

We celebrate the anniversary of the great teacher who has shown us the way out of our present distresses, who has demonstrated that there are no limits to the application of science. We can best honour his memory by doing all that we can to hasten the day when Marxism will be the guiding principle in the government of the country in which Marx spent most of his immensely fruitful life.

While this should be filed under “Would that mine enemy had written a book,” it really should have been posted with a major BARF ALERT!

Here’s a more accurate essay on old Karl:

The Middle Class Must Not Fail
by Taylor Caldwell
With the rise of the Industrial Civilization in the world,
about 200 years ago, there also arose a social body which we
know as the middle class. Before that, most of the world
suffered under a feudal system in which the people were
truly slaves of their governments in all things. There was
no strong buffer between them and their despotic rulers, no
assurance of freedom to pursue commerce and to live
decently, to keep the fruits of their labor and hold the
paying of tribute at a minimum. The middle class made the
dream of liberty a possibility, set limits on the
government, fought for its constitutions, removed much of
governmental privilege and tyranny, demanded that rulers
obey the just laws as closely as the people, and enforced a
general civic morality.

Sound readers looked to the experience of Rome, the first to
encourage a middle class, noting that Rome had been a strong
and prosperous republic, with much public virtue, a large
degree of freedom for every citizen, and a constitution (the
Twelve Tables of Law) on which our own is based. After the
fall of Rome, governments had everywhere destroyed the
middle class, returned to despotism, and entered the Dark
Ages. It had been centuries since a rising middle class
resolved to keep government at a minimum and to force
respect for the people and eschew tribute except for such
absolute necessities as armed forces, street protection, and
the guarantee of authority of contracts in commerce.

AN INTERNATIONAL ELITE

Those who for centuries had ruled their nations, from father
to son, in total despotism, realized that they were
threatened. Were they not the elite, by divine right? Were
they not by birth and money entitled to rule a nation of
docile slaves? Did the people not understand that they were
truly inferior dogs who needed a strong hand to rule them,
and should they not be meek before their government?

Little wonder that the elite hated the middle class which
challenged them in the name of God-given liberty. And
little wonder that this hatred grew deeper as the middle
class became stronger and imposed restrictions through which
all the people, including the most humble, had the right to
rule their own lives and keep the greater part of what they
earned for themselves.

Clearly, if the elite were to rule again, the middle class
had to be destroyed. It had to be destroyed so despotism
and the system of tribute could be returned, and grandeur
and honor and immense riches for the elite — assuring their
monopoly rule of all the world. For you see, the elite of
all nations, then as now, were not divided. They were one
international class, and worked together and protected each
other. But the middle class laughed and said “we will bind
you with the chains of our Constitution, which you must obey
also, lest we depose you, for we are now powerful and we are
human beings and we wish to be free from your old
despotism.”

The elite did not give up. While it profited from the
Industrial Revolution which under liberty of enterprise
freed the people from the feudal and despotic systems, and
which gave a new birth to the middle class, it also hated
the threat to its own authority. It did not wish to destroy
the Industrial Revolution; it wished to use it for its
exclusive purposes. In the early 19th century this elite
looked for a way, once and for all, to regain its power and
extort tribute from the people and so destroy the burgeoning
middle class which stood in its way, and to subdue the
populaces again to their proper role as slaves of government
by the elite.

CONSPIRATORIAL ADVANCE

Through the “League of Just Men”, elitist conspirators
sought a fanatic to cloak the point of their purposes in
slogans and cant. The man they hired was Karl Marx.
Certainly Marx was no worker; he had never soiled his hands
with labor. He hated the middle class, which he
contemptuously called the bourgeoisie, for he considered
himself superior in mentality and breeding to what he called
“the gross merchants of commerce and exploitation.” He did
not attack the waiting despots, no indeed. They were of one
mind with him. Rather he proposed in his books and
pamphlets the return to government of the total power to
exact tribute from the people in order that government might
better direct every phase of the peoples’ lives, as he
asserted, “for their own welfare.” The elite, in turn,
would control the governments.

Marx began to accuse the middle class of heinous crimes and
aroused the workers against their benefactors. He labored
to create envy and malice among the workers — all aimed at
the entrepreneurial middle class which had raised them from
serfdom, restored their human dignity, and given them
liberty for the first time in nearly 2,000 years.

Karl Marx was made to order by the self-styled elite. They
financed the propagation of his sedition all over Europe and
in America. They bled France and Germany with it. They
financed sedition in Russia. And the plan began to succeed.
By 1910, the Scandinavian countries had already fallen to
the socialism of Karl Marx. Only three nations stood
between the elite and their ambitions — the British Empire,
Czarist Russia and the United States of America.

Much is now made of supposed Czarist tyranny. But the fact
is that the Czar of Russia had already granted his people a
greater measure of freedom. A constitution had been
established, and a parliamentary system. Russia, too, was
well on her way to nourishing and encouraging a middle
class.

HATE AND ENVY

The elitists were anxious to promote the Marxist notion of
demanding tribute from the people, for only through forced
tribute could freedom be destroyed and the people reduced
again to forced labor for the benefit of the elite. Only
thus could the middle class be eliminated. So, we have Karl
Marx’s infamous notion: “To each according to his needs,
from each according to his ability.” That is a foundation
for slavery and tribute. Marx and the elite had a juicy
bait for the workers, who were deluded to envy and hate the
middle class which had freed them. If the riches were taken
away from the middle class, then the workers would become
their equals. Marx called this redistribution of wealth.
Not wealth from the elite, with their vast fortunes in every
country of the world — inherited fortunes which would not
be taxed as income — but wealth from the strong middle
class, which would be robbed in the name of the people.
Only “earned” income would be vulnerable to seizure.

But in the way of all this happiness for the conspiring
international elite, and the slavery of the people, stood
the United States, the British Empire and Czarist Russia.
They would have to be destroyed. Britain had only a small
income tax, used for the armed forces, for roads, for the
maintenance of law and order, and for the payment of a tiny
body of bureaucrats.

Over and over, in America, the elite tried to establish
their federal income tax, but they did not succeed. The
people were too vigilant, too jealous of their freedom, too
proud, too respectful of themselves. They embraced the
ancient proverb, “To work is to pray,” and they guarded the
fruits of their labors. No, America had no graduated income
tax to drain the capital of the hard-working middle class,
and so she became strong and rich and powerful, the envy of
nations which exacted tribute and forced labor from their
people. Attempts were made to exact such tribute from
Americans during the Civil War and the war with Spain, but
each time the Supreme Court declared that our Constitution
prohibited it. As late as 1902, the graduated income tax
was again declared unconstitutional, and the Chief Justice
observed: “It is a method to enslave our people, and deprive
them of their liberty and right to the fruit of their
labors.”

The conspiratorial elite fumed. How best, now, to institute
their system of tribute and slavery? The solution was WAR.
During wartime, governments were better able to tax the
people, harnessing their patriotism to maintain enlarged
armed services.

And so the elite began to prepare America for war, and
conspirators of the French and German and Russian and
English elite worked with them — for the destruction of
their own nationals and the elimination, once and for all,
of the defiant middle class. The American elite, under
advice of their brother conspirators in other nations,
proposed an amendment to the American Constitution — a
graduated income tax, just as Karl Marx had proposed. To
support this elite were very busy, through their henchmen,
the socialists and the populists, and through their secret
communists, in arousing the envy of the workers against the
middle class. They told the workers that they would never
be taxed, “only the rich,” and even then the highest rate
would be only two to three percent. And the taxes would go
to “our exploited workers,” through all sorts of government
benefits. The unthinking, the envious, the stupid, and the
malicious thought this was wonderful. They supported the
16th Amendment — the federal income tax — and it was
passed into law in 1913.

Now the stage was set for war, the attack on the British
Empire, Czarist Russia and the German Empire. The major thrust
of the effort to destroy the freedom of the whole world, and
reduce it to total control by the elite, had begun.

The rest is sad contemporary history. Few in America heeded what
Thomas Jefferson had said long ago, that when we are taxed on our
earned incomes, in our food and drink, in our coming and going,
in our property, we would face the return of slavery and the
reestablishment of an all-powerful and despotic elite. So it is
that we of the middle class are being destroyed through the
exaction of tribute, resulting in an ever-increasing power and
despotism of a central government controlled by a conspiratorial
elite, and everlasting wars to subdue us and drive us to our
knees.

NEVER AGAIN?

Do not believe for an instant that the world’s conspiring elite
in every nation have so much as a serious quarrel among them.
They have just one object: control through tribute. Your
slavery, through tribute, and mine. And they use wars for their
purposes just as they use inequities, harassment, bullying,
capriciousness, and extortion of their graduated income tax. The
system of taxation with which they have yoked us is really forced
tribute from the hard-working, and especially from the middle
class, who are slowly being eliminated.

Behind this attack are the self-styled elite, secure in their own
power and riches. Most of them have huge fortunes which are tax-
exempt. But every man and woman of us — we of the middle class
— are taxed in our food and drink, in our comings and goings.
The harder we work, the more tribute we have to pay for the elite
are determined that never again will the middle class challenge
them, and never again will we be able to save money and so rise
to power, and never again will we protest the slavery they have
planned for us.

But many of us still dare to protest, and will continue to do so
while God gives us breath. To be effective, we know we must
direct our attacks on the real criminals, the wealthy and
powerful secret elite of all the world — the conspirators
laboring night and day to enslave us. Even our own government is
now their victim, for it is the conspiratorial elite who choose
our rulers, nominate them, and remove them by assassination or
smear.

I have fought these enemies of liberty in every book I have
written. But too few have listened to me, as too few have
listened to others who have warned of these conspirators. The
hour is late. Americans must soon listen and act — or endure
the black night of slavery that is worse than death.

* * * *
(From Grolier’s Academic American encyclopedia)
Caldwell, Taylor

Janet Miriam Taylor Holland Caldwell, b. Sept. 7, 1900, d. Aug.
30, 1985, was a popular American novelist who began her prolific
career with Dynasty of Death (1938), a fictional biography about
the fortunes of two powerful families of armament manufacturers
over the course of 60 years. Many of her other novels followed
this generational pattern, including The Captain and the Kings
(1972; film, 1976) and Glory and the Lightning (1974). Caldwell,
who also wrote under the pseudonym Max Reiner, also wrote The
Devil’s Advocate (1952), Dear and Glorious Physician (1959), and
Answer as a Man (1981).
Bibliography: Stearn, Jess, The Search for the Soul:
TaylorCaldwell’s Psychic Lives (1973).

I am unimpressed. Imagine Al Gore claiming that his philosophical roots lie with Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, and Albert Einstein, because “Hey, they were geniuses and I am a genius, so that means that there is a direct descent from them to me.”

Uh, no.

In the case of Karl Marx, he was briefly the editor of a newspaper, before taking on a new career as a blowhard and a sponge off other people’s money. Being an editor, and a human slug, he wanted to make money the easy way, by ghost writing for Friedrich Engels, who if he hadn’t dropped out of high school, would probably have been an unhappy, leftist academic, like so many we know today.

His modern descendant is Al Franken, a bitter, hate-filled ex-comedian who was never funny, nearly choking on his own bile, who wants political power more in the hope of hurting the people he hates than doing anything positive.

Karl Marx didn’t need any intellectual predecessors to what he wrote. The world of his time sucked, the promise of industrialism had turned hateful and destructive, and people were seen as little more than commodities. But things were already starting to change for the better. Social change because of democracy, not tyranny.

For all his efforts to co-opt science, Marx’s only thought was to use it, like everything else, full of contempt for any real value outside of Marxist ends.

As Stalin demonstrated with Lysenko, and Al Gore demonstrates with the help of James E. Hansen’s gleeful fudging of data, the ends justify the means. Science is only good if it agrees with me and helps me to do what I want.

That is not scientific in the least.

This is the exact opposite of the real science found in the several parts of what is improperly lumped together as “Darwinism”, along with far less objective parts. I say this because if the parts are examined, only *some* of them are objectionable to those who disagree. Not all. Some are very common sense.

For Marxists to claim intellectual descent from Darwinism is hooey.

A real descendant of Charles Darwin is found in one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, Dr. Paul Ehrlich (not to be confused with the scientific fraud Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich, who wrote ‘The Population Bomb’.)

Dr. Paul Ehrlich was a German scientist who, while following the rules of science implicitly, discovered the first effective treatment for the then dread disease syphilis. To do this, he rigorously tested and documented over 600 new compounds he had created before discovering success with number 606.

At the time, around the world, millions of people were killed, crippled, driven insane and blinded by the disease. With amazing results, requests came pouring in from around the world for the new drug. And by sheer luck, the Germans had the most advanced chemical industry at the time, and no hesitation about dedicating an entire factory to its production.

Ehrlich was awarded the Nobel Prize, not just for this extraordinary invention, but because in the process, he created an entirely new branch of medicine, and did so with strict adherence to the scientific rules.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.