During the late 1980s, Communists ceased to dictate the affairs of Eastern Europe and Russia. Even China and Vietnam, once rigidly extreme examples of Marxism, adopted capitalist methods. Despite the retreat of much of the world from his teachings, Karl Heinrich Marx, a German Jew, descended on both sides from generations of rabbis, remains the most influential political philosopher in Jewish and indeed world history.Marx was born in Trier, a small town in the Rhineland. His father, Heinrich was a prosperous lawyer, his uncle, the town’s rabbi. Seeking to improve his position by denying his heritage and over the rabbi’s objections, Heinrich converted his immediate family, including six-year-old Karl, to the Lutheran Church.
Instead of the yeshiva, Karl went to a secular gymnasium. The conversion of Karl Marx would have the gravest consequences on the future of much of the world.Marx was educated at universities in Bonn, Berlin, and Jena (the last, more a degree market than a school). He was particularly drawn to the philosophic teachings of G.W.F. Hegel. Marx first thought he would become a poet, then a philosopher, and finally a journalist. He met another young Jewish thinker, Moses Hess, who had founded the Rhenish Gazette.
Hess initially used his journal to criticize the reactionary policies of the Prussian government. Marx overwhelmed Hess, taking on editorial control, attacking the local government, and after fifteen months was stripped of his German citizenship and deported to France for criticizing Berlin’s alliance with Moscow.With his newly wed twenty-nine-year-old wife, Jenny von Westphalen (whom he married after seven years of courtship, the death of her objecting father, a baron, and wearing down her widowed mother), Marx settled in the Paris of Balzac, Chopin, and Sand and gained the acquaintance of another German expatriate, poet Heinrich Heine.
During this period, Marx also met the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the French radical author Pierre Joseph Proudhon.However, Marx’s most fortunate encounter was with Friedrich Engels, the impressionable son of a wealthy German textile manufacturer. Engels was a curious mixture of capitalist factory owner and revolutionary. Marx was impressed by Engels’s writings on the English working class and his ability to express himself clearly and simply. For nearly the next forty years, Engels would largely support his friend (often to his own detriment). Other than an occasional newspaper job, Marx never worked for a living, preferring to spend his days studying and writing articles and manifestos (all eagerly edited by Engels).
To this day it is often impossible in Marxist literature to distinguish the ideas of Marx from the style of Engels.Expelled again, this time from Paris to Brussels, Marx, living on Engels’ support, wrote his first important work, The Poverty of Philosophy, in 1847. One year later, Marx and Engels published their most important joint work, The Communist Manifesto. Only days after its publication (and having nothing to do with its radical ideas), workers in France and Germany rebelled against political oppression. It was as if Marx and Engels had predicted their revolt. Yet Marx’s class war was not on the revolutionaries’ minds, but rather progressive, liberal politics. During these unstable years, Marx predicted (almost forty times) that the era of class struggle would foster rebellion. He was mostly wrong about the near future but brutally accurate about the next century.
Throughout his life, Marx bitterly opposed the tsarist regime in Russia, identifying it as the most oppressive in the world. Ironically, Marxism would be responsible for Stalin’s massacre of millions of landed peasants and the frigid death of the Gulag.Much more than his friend, the lyrical poet Heine, Karl Marx became a virulently self-hating Jew. His vicious temperament (whether a product of his miserable life or equally difficult self), loathing for Jewish culture, warping of his people’s history, and fiercely analytical mind, combined to form one of the most influential economic and political systems of any age (Marx’s well-known anti-Semitism strangely did not discourage young Jews of future generations from leaving behind their heritage to follow his example).
Marx viewed his ideas as rooted in and compelled by history. It was imperative to him that people understand his interpretation of history and act accordingly. For him, his ideas were a new Gospel—Marxism as Torah and Talmud uttered by its only prophet.A specter is wandering over Europe now—the specter of Communism.The workers have nothing to lose but their chains. Workers, everywhere, UNITE!Drawn to the revolutionary fires of 1848, Marx returned to Germany. He began to publish and distribute a new Rhenish Gazette, was quickly arrested and tried for sedition, and won an acquittal by his own eloquent defense. Although they lost in the courts, the authorities found another, more effective way of silencing Marx.
He was expelled forever from his homeland as a subversive alien.Refused admittance to France and Belgium, Marx and family traveled to England. For most of the rest of his life, Marx lived in abject poverty in London’s slums. Several of his children died in young childhood. Marx chose to work only on his research and writings, spending hours in the British Museum compiling statistics to justify his philosophic claims. A small allowance from Engels, some journalistic work for the New York Tribune of Charles A. Dana, and the remains of an inheritance from his wife’s mother sustained the family.Marx’s personal fury over his wretched condition exploded in Das Kapital (“Capital”), a huge and severe indictment of the economics of his contemporary society.
The volume was to be the first in a series of tomes, which Engels completed from Marx’s voluminous notes after his death.Marx’s only effort to organize in the spirit of his beliefs was an involvement in the First International of the 1860s. Marx was placed on the council of this loose confederation of workers. He proceeded with bulldog perseverance first to dominate and then, when he could not get his complete way, to destroy the organization. (To his credit, during these years, and despite a racist bent, Marx loudly supported the North in the American Civil War, trumpeting with the fervor of an abolitionist the delivery of African-Americans from slavery.) In 1870, Prussia savagely defeated France. Marx supported the leftist revolutionaries of the Paris commune who attempted in vain during a period of political vacuum to seize control of France.
In their frenzy, the commune leaders executed the archbishop of Paris and other prominent leaders. Establishment forces reacted with a massacre of their own, staining the medieval byways of old Paris blood red. For his support, Marx became internationally known as the infamous “Red Doctor.” In the common psyche, communism became synonymous with deadly violence, an association which Lenin and Mao later proved true.In his remaining years, Marx was viewed (mostly by much younger, idealistic followers) as the gray eminence of communism. After the quickly successive deaths of his beloved Jennys, wife and daughter, he raged no more. Marx was buried in Highgate Cemetery in London. His grave became almost a holy shrine to his believers.Marx’s work is an integral (and, for some, hateful) part of mankind’s intellect.
From Marxism came the famous “isms” of Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao. Partly in reaction to his leftist creed came the fatal onslaught of the Fascists and Nazis.Marx’s concept of the exploitation of the workers by the bosses was, however, only part of economic life. Ideas of “surplus value,” or excess left to owners after exploitation of workers, did not fully explain how output was affected, quality controlled, or worth created. Marx seemingly ignored the fact that people were worth something too. Spiritual, cultural, and intellectual capital did make a difference. His intense concentration on the causes and operations of systems failed to recognize the interplay of people making things happen. Initiative has never been induced by a five-year plan.
Marx’s personal aloofness and arrogance also served as the prime example for future communist leaders. Lenin believed strongly that the masses had to be led by an elite; left alone, they would barely aspire to trade unionism. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” became a hollow phrase connoting terror, dull lives, conformity, class-consciousness but no conscience, democratic republics without democracy. Marx’s dream of a Utopia far from his impoverished existence was a world under control. He forgot basic Jewish principles that man cannot avoid responsibility by retreating into regulated behavior. The world is too complex for so simplistic an answer.