An essay in universal history from an Orthodox Christian Point ofView part the age of revolution

47. THREE WESTERN JEWS: (3) MARX

Karl Marx, a friend of Heine’s, was a still more developed and important example of the same phenomenon: the God-hating, Jew-hating Jew. According to Johnson, “Heine’s jibe about religion as a ‘spiritual opium’ was the source of Marx’s phrase ‘the opium of the people’. But the notion that Heine was the John the Baptist to Marx’s Christ, fashionable in German scholarship of the 1960s, is absurd. A huge temperamental gulf yawned between them. According to Arnold Ruge, Marx would say to Heine: ‘Give up those everlasting laments about love and show the lyric poets how it should be done – with the lash.’ But it was precisely the lash Heine feared: ‘The [socialist] future,’ he wrote, ‘smells of knouts, of blood, of godlessness and very many beatings’; ‘it is only with dread and horror that I think of the time when those dark iconoclasts will come to power’. He repudiated ‘my obdurate friend Marx’, one of the ‘godless self-gods’.

“What the two men had most in common was their extraordinary capacity for hatred, expressed in venomous attacks not just on enemies but (perhaps especially) on friends and benefactors. This was part of the self-hatred they shared as apostate Jews. Marx had it to an even greater extent than Heine. He tried to shut Judaism out of his life… Despite Marx’s ignorance of Judaism as such, there can be no doubt about his Jewishness. Like Heine and everyone else, his notion of progress was profoundly influenced by Hegel, but his sense of history as a positive and dynamic force in human society, governed by iron laws, an atheist’s Torah, is profoundly Jewish. His Communist millennium is deeply rooted in Jewish apocalyptic and messianism. His notion of rule was that of the cathedocrat. Control of the revolution would be in the hands of the elite intelligentsia, who had studied the texts, understood the laws of history. They would form what he called the ‘management’, the directorate. The proletariat, ‘the men without substance’, were merely the means, whose duty was to obey – like Ezra the Scribe, he saw them as ignorant of the law, the mere 'people of the land'".¹³⁸
Johnson ignores the anti-Christian essence of Talmudic Judaism. Nevertheless he is perceptive in his analysis of Marx’s Communism “as the end-product of his theoretical anti-Semitism… In 1843 Bruno Bauer, the anti-Semite leader of the Hegelian left, published an essay demanding that the Jews abandon Judaism completely and transform their plea for equal rights into a general campaign for human liberation both from religion and from state tyranny.
“Marx replied to Bauer’s work in two essays published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbucher in 1844, the same year Disraeli published Tancred. They are called ‘On the Jewish Question’. Marx accepted completely the savagely anti-Semitic context of Bauer’s argument, which he said was written ‘with boldness, perception, with and thoroughness in language that is precise as it is vigorous and meaningful’. He quoted with approval Bauer’s maliciously exaggerated assertion that ‘the Jews determines the fate of the whole [Austrian] empire by his money power… [and] decides the destiny of Europe’. Where he differed was in rejecting Bauer’s belief that the anti-social nature of the Jew was religious in origin and could be remedied by tearing the Jew away from his religion. In Marx’s view, the evil was social and economic. ‘Let us,’ he wrote, ‘consider the real Jew. Not the Sabbath Jew… but the everyday Jews.’ What, he asked, was ‘the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.’ The Jews had gradually conveyed this ‘practical’ religion to all society: ‘Money is the jealous God of Israel, besides which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence: this essence dominates him and he worships it. The god of the Jews has been secularised and has become the god of this world.’
“The Jews, Marx continued, were turning Christians into replicas of themselves, so that the once staunchly Christian New Englanders, for example, were now the slaves of Mammon. Using his money-power, the Jew had emancipated himself and had gone on to enslave Christianity. The Jew-corrupted Christian ‘is convinced he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbours’ and ‘the world is a stock exchange’. Marx argued that the contradiction between the Jew’s theoretical lack of political rights and ‘the effective political power of the Jew’ is the contradiction between politics and ‘the power of money in general’. Political power supposedly overrides money; in fact ‘it has become its bondsman’. Hence: ‘It is from its own entrails that civil society ceaselessly engenders the Jew.’”¹³⁹
There was much truth in Marx’s analysis; but it was one-sided. Contemporary European and American civilization was based on a complex intertwining of apostate Jewry and heretical Christianity. If the Jews had taught the Christians the worship of money, and gone on to enslave them thereby, the Christians had nevertheless prepared the way for this by betraying their own Christian ideals and introducing to the Jews the semi-Christian, semi-pagan ideas of liberty, equality and fraternity, human rights, etc. The Jews had seized on these ideas to emancipate themselves and then take them to their logical extreme in the proletarian revolution, taking control both of money power in the heights, and of political power in the depths of society. And so the relationship between the Jews and the Christians was mutually influential and mutually destructive.
The only question that remained was Lenin’s: kto kogo?, who would control whom? The answer to this was: the Jews would control the Christians. Why? Because the Christians, though fallen away from the true faith, nevertheless retained vestiges of Christian values and morality that restrained them from ultimate evil; they lacked that extra insight and ruthlessness that was given to the Jews for their greater ambition, greater hatred, greater proximity to Satan… And so heretical Christians might cooperate with apostate Jews in the overthrow of Christian civilization, as Engels cooperated with Marx. But in the end the heretical Christians would do the will of the apostate Jews, as Engels did the will of Marx. The only power that could effectively stand against both – and was therefore hated by both – was the power of the true faith, the Orthodox faith, upheld by the Russian Orthodox Empire. It was logical, therefore, for Marx and Engels to see in Russia the main obstacle to the success of the revolution…
Johnson continues: “Marx’s solution, therefore, is not like Bauer’s, religious, but economic. The money-Jew had become the ‘universal anti-social element of the present time’. To ‘make the Jew impossible’ it was necessary to abolish the ‘preconditions’ and the ‘very possibility’ of the kind of money activities for which he was notorious. Once the economic framework was changed, Jewish ‘religious consciousness would evaporate like some insipid vapour in the real, life-giving air of society’. Abolish the Jewish attitude to money, and both the Jew and his religion, and the corrupt version of Christianity he had imposed on the world, would simply disappear: ‘In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.’ Or again: ‘In emancipating itself from bucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself.’
“Marx’s two essays on the Jews thus contain, in embryonic form, the essence of his theory of human regeneration: by economic changes, and especially by abolishing private property and the personal pursuit of money, you could transform not merely the relationship between the Jew and society but all human relationships and the human personality itself. His form of anti-Semitism became a dress-rehearsal for Marxism as such. Later in the century August Bebel, the German Social Democrat, would coin the phrase, much used by Lenin: ‘Anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.’ Behind this revealing epigram was the crude argument: we all know that Jewish money-men, who never soil their hands with toil, exploit the poor workers and peasants. But only a fool grasps the Jews alone. The mature man, the socialist, has grasped the point that the Jews are only symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself. The disease is the religion of money, and its modern form is capitalism. Workers and peasants are exploited not just by the Jews but by the entire bourgeois-capitalist class – and it is the class as a whole, not just its Jewish element, which must be destroyed.
“Hence the militant socialism Marx adopted in the later 1840s was an extended and transmuted form of his earlier anti-Semitism. His mature theory was a superstition, and the most dangerous kind of superstition, belief in a conspiracy of evil. But whereas originally it was based on the oldest form of conspiracy-theory, anti-Semitism, in the later 1840s and 1850s this was not so much abandoned as extended to embrace a world conspiracy theory of the entire bourgeois class. Marx retained the original superstition that the making of money through trade and finance is essentially a parasitical and anti-social activity, but he now placed it on a basis not of race and religion, but of class. The enlargement does not, of course, improve the validity of the theory. It merely makes it more dangerous, if put into practice, because it expands its scope and multiplies the number of those to be treated as conspirators and so victims. Marx was no longer concerned with specific Jewish witches to be hunted but with generalized human witches. The theory remained irrational but acquired a more sophisticated appearance, making it highly attractive to educated radicals. To reverse Bebel’s saying, if anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, socialism became the anti-Semitism of intellectuals. An intellectual like Lenin, who clearly perceived the irrationality of the Russian anti-Semitic pogrom, and would have been ashamed to conduct one, nevertheless fully accepted its spirit once the target was expanded into the whole capitalist class – and went on to conduct pogroms on an infinitely greater scale, killing hundreds of thousands on the basis not of individual guilt but merely of membership of a condemned group.”¹⁴⁰
Johnson’s definition of socialism as the anti-Semitism of intellectuals has considerable psychological plausibility; but it needs to be extended and deepened. The original irrational rebellion against civilized society was the rebellion of the Jews, the former people of God, against their Lord, God and Saviour, Jesus Christ. This was the original anti-Semitism, in that it was directed both against the greatest Semite, Jesus Christ, and his Semitic disciples, and against the original, pure religion of the Semites, which Jesus Christ came to fulfil in the Church founded on Himself, “in whom there is neither Jew nor Greek”.
As Christianity spread among the Gentiles, this original anti-Semitism, full of hatred and “on the basis not of individual guilt but merely of a condemned group”, was transmuted into the anti-Gentilism of the Talmud, being directed against the whole of Gentile Christian society. As Christian society degenerated into heresy, the Jewish virus of anti-Christian hatred infected the Christians themselves, becoming standard anti-Semitism. The sign that this anti-Semitism was simply the reversal of the same Jewish disease of anti-Gentilism is the fact that its object ceased to be the Talmudic religion, the real source of the disease, but the Jews as a race and as a whole.
However, with the gradual assimilation of the Jews into Western Christian society during the nineteenth century, Jewish radicals such as Marx joined with Gentile intellectuals such as Engels to create a new strain of the virus, a strain directed not against Jews alone or Christians alone, but against a whole class, the class of the bourgeois rich.
In this perspective we can see that Marx’s view that the solution of “the Jewish question” lay in economics was wrong. Bauer was right that its solution was religious; but he was wrong in thinking that simply destroying the Talmud would cure the disease. For what was to be put in its place? The heretical, lukewarm Christianity of the West, which hardly believed in itself any more and was in any case, as we have seen, deeply infected by both Jewish and pagan elements?
As the example of Disraeli proves, that could never satisfy the spiritual quest of the more intelligent Jews. It could only prepare the way for a new, more virulent strain of the virus, which is in fact what we see in Marxism. The only solution was a return to the original, untainted faith of the Apostles… But that was only to be found in the East, and especially in Russia – where, however, the true faith of the Apostles lived in conjunction with both Jewish anti-Gentilism and Gentile anti-Semitism, and where the most virulent form of the virus, Marxism, would find its most fertile breeding-ground…
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Although English and French socialism contributed to Marx's thought, he probably owed even more to German atheism and historicism. Marx had no need of teachers in respect of atheism. There is some evidence that in his youth he turned against God and became a Satanist because God did not give him the girl he loved. As he said: "I shall build my throne high overhead", which is a more or less direct quotation of Satan's words in Isaiah 14.13.¹⁴¹ Again, in his doctor's thesis he wrote: "Philosophy makes no secret of the fact: her creed is the creed of Prometheus - 'In a word, I detest all the gods.' This is her device against all deities of heaven or earth who do not recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself."¹⁴² In later life Marx was known as "Old Nick", and his little son used to call him "devil".¹⁴³ "In spite of all Marx's enthusiasm for the 'human'," writes the socialist Edmund Wilson, "he is either inhumanly dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant".¹⁴⁴
Marx's atheism received an impetus from Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841), which reduced God to a psychological idea: "The divine essence is nothing else than the essence of man; or, better, it is the essence of man when freed from the limitations of the individual, that is to say, actual corporeal man, objectified and venerated as an independent Being distinct from man himself."¹⁴⁵ Marx, too, defined religion as a purely human product: "the heart of a heartless world, as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions, the opium of the people."¹⁴⁶ He praised Feuerbach, according to Isaiah Berlin, "for showing that in religion men delude themselves by inventing an imaginary world to redress the balance of misery in real life - it is a form of escape, a golden dream, or, in a phrase made celebrated by Marx, the opium of the people; the criticism of religion must therefore be anthropological in character, and take the form of exposing and analysing its secular origins. But Feuerbach is accused of leaving the major task untouched: he sees that religion is an anodyne unconsciously generated by the unhappy to soften the pain caused by the contradictions of the material world, but then fails to see that these contradictions must, in that case, be removed: otherwise they will continue to breed comforting and fatal delusions: the revolution which alone can do so must occur not in the superstructure - the world of thought - but in its material substratum, the real world of men and things. Philosophy has hitherto treated ideas and beliefs as possessing an intrinsic validity of their own; this has never been true; the real content of a belief is the action in which it is expressed. The real convictions and principles of a man or a society are expressed in their acts, not their words. Belief and act are one; if acts do not themselves express avowed beliefs, the beliefs are lies - 'ideologies', conscious or not, to cover the opposite of what they profess. Theory and practice are, or should be, one and the same. 'Philosophers have previously offered various interpretations of the world. Our business is to change it.'"¹⁴⁷
By the mid-1840s, writes Edmund Wilson, Marx and Engels had taken what they wanted from the socialist utopians. “From Saint-Simon they accepted as valid his [supposed] discovery that modern politics was simply the science of regulating production; from Fourier, his arraignment of the bourgeois, his consciousness of the ironic contrast between ‘the frenzy of speculation, the spirit of all-devouring commercialism’, which were rampant under the reign of the bourgeoisie and ‘the brilliant promises of the Enlightenment’ which had preceded them; from Owen, the realization that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution. But they saw that the mistake of the utopian socialists had been to imagine that socialism was to be imposed upon society from above by disinterested members of the upper classes. The bourgeoisie as a whole, they believed, could not be induced to go against its own interests. The educator, as Marx was to write in his Theses on Feuerbach, must, after all, first have been educated: he is not really confronting disciples with a doctrine that has been supplied him by God; he is merely directing a movement of which he is himself a member and which energizes him and gives him his purpose. Marx and Engels combined the aims of the utopians with Hegel’s process of organic development.”¹⁴⁸
In this way they substituted Hegel’s idea of the historical role of nations with that of the role of class. “The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle”, wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Marx claimed that this was his only original contribution to Marxism. Be that as it may (Plato, as Sir Karl Popper points out, had said something similar), it was certainly one of the two fundamental axioms of his theory.
As Robert Service writes, “the founders of Marxism put class struggle at the forefront of their analysis; they said the working class (or the proletariat) would remake the politics, economics and culture of the entire world… Salvation according to Marx and Engels would come not through an individual but through a whole class. The proletariat’s experience of degradation under capitalism would give it the motive to change the nature of society; and its industrial training and organisation would enable it to carry its task through to completion. The collective endeavour of socialist workers would transform the life of well-meaning people – and those who offered resistance would be suppressed…
“[Marx’s] essential argument was that the course of change had been conditioned not by the brilliance of ‘great men’ or by dynamic governments but by the clash of social classes – and Marx insisted that classes pursued their objective economic interests. The French ‘proletariat’ had lost its recurrent conflict with the bourgeoisie since the end of the eighteenth century. But Marx was undeterred. He had asserted in his Theses on Feuerbach, penned in 1845: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it.’
“The ultimate objective for Marx and Engels was the creation of a worldwide communist society. They believed that communism had existed in the distant centuries before ‘class society’ came into being. The human species had supposedly known no hierarchy, alienation, exploitation or oppression. Marx and Engels predicted that such perfection could and inevitably would be reproduced after the overthrow of capitalism. ‘Modern communism’, however, would have the benefits of the latest technology rather than flint-stone. It would be generated by global proletarian solidarity rather than by disparate groups of illiterate, innumerate cavemen. And it would put an end to all forms of hierarchy. Politics would come to an end. The state would cease to exist. There would be no distinctions of personal rank and power. All would engage in self-administration on an equal basis. Marx and Engels chastised communists and socialists who would settle for anything less. They were maximalists. No compromise with capitalism [although Engels was a factory owner] or parliamentarism was acceptable to them. They did not think of themselves as offering the watchword of ‘all or nothing’ in their politics. They saw communism as the inevitable last stage in human history; they rejected their predecessors and rival contemporaries as ‘utopian’ thinkers who lacked a scientific understanding.”¹⁴⁹
The other fundamental axiom of Marx’s theory was his economic materialism, his teaching that economics is the foundation of all human civilization. Everything is determined, according to Marx, by man’s struggle for economic survival, which in turn depends on his relationship to the economic conditions of production. The juridical, political, religious, aesthetic and philosophical aspects of man’s existence are all simply “ideological forms of appearance” of the only true reality, his economic position in society – that is, his class membership. As he put it in his famous epigram: “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.”¹⁵⁰
For “I was led,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that legal relations, as well as forms of state, could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life which Hegel calls… civil society. The anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.”
As Maria Hsia Chang writes, “Classical Marxism (the ideas of Marx and Engels) conceived society’s economic base as composed of the forces of production (means of production) that determine the relations of production (the nature of economic classes and their relations – who gets what, when, and how). The economic base, in turn determines the epiphenomenal superstructure composed of such elements as law, philosophy, religion, and ideology. The relations of production were subordinate to and contingent upon the productive forces – as productive forces change, social relations change; as social relations change, all of life changes.
“Marx was unequivocal on the determinant role of the forces of procution. In the 1859 Preface to his Critique of Political Economy, he wrote that ‘in the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will,’ relations that ‘correspond to a definite state of development of their material productive forces.’ ‘The multitude of productive forces accessible to men determines the nature of society’ as well as the ‘forms of intercourse’ between human beings. Even the ‘phantoms formed in the human brain’ – religious convictions, ethics, and law – were ‘sublimates’ of the more fundamental processes of production. In the final analysis, the ‘productive forces… are the basis of all… history.’
“It follows that socialism could only be a product of a fully developed economy. As early as the German Ideology of 1845, Marx had insisted that socialist revolution could come only to advanced industrial systems because only those systems would inherit the productive potential to fully satisfy human needs without having recourse to invidious class distinctions and oppressive political rule. If an attempt were made to introduce socialism into an economically underdeveloped environment, Engels foresaw the consequence to be a ‘slide back… to [the] narrow limits’ of the old system. True socialist liberation was a function of ‘the level of development of the material means of existence’. To attempt to build communism on a primitive economic base could only be a ‘chiliastic, dream fantasy’.”¹⁵¹
“The single operative cause,” writes Berlin, “which makes one people different from another, one set of institutions and beliefs opposed to another is, so Marx now came to believe, the economic environment in which it is set, the relationship of the ruling class of possessors to those whom they exploit, arising from the specific quality of the tension which persists between them. The fundamental springs of action in the life of men, he believed, all the more powerful for not being recognised by them, are their relationships to the alignment of classes in the economic struggle: the factor, knowledge of which would enable anyone to predict successfully men’s basic line of behaviour, is their actual social position – whether they are outside or inside the ruling class, whether their welfare depends on its success or failure, whether they are placed in a position to which the preservation of the existing order is or is not essential. Once this is known, men’s particular personal motives and emotions become comparatively irrelevant to the investigation: they may be egoistic or altruistic, generous or mean, clever or stupid, ambitious or modest. Their natural qualities will be harnessed by their circumstances to operate in a given direction, whatever their natural tendency. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of a ‘natural tendency’ or an unalterable ‘human nature’. Tendencies may be classified either in accordance with the subjective feeling which they engender (and this is, for purposes of scientific prediction, unimportant), or in accordance with their actual aims, which are socially conditioned. Men behave before they start to reflect on the reasons for, or the justification of, their behaviour; the majority of the members of a community will act in a similar fashion, whatever the subjective motives for which they will appear to themselves to be acting as they do. This is obscured by the fact that in the attempt to convince themselves that their acts are determined by reasons or by moral or religious beliefs, men have tended to construct elaborate rationalisations of their behaviour. Nor are these rationalisations wholly powerless to affect action, for, growing into great institutions like moral codes or religious organisations, they often linger on long after the social pressures, to explain away which they arose, have disappeared. Thus these great organised illusions themselves become part of the objective social situation, part of the external world which modifies the behaviour of individuals, functioning in the same way as the invariant factors, climate, soil, physical organism, function in their interplay with social institutions.
“Marx’s immediate successors tended to minimise Hegel’s influence upon him; but his vision of the world crumbles and yields only isolated insights if, in the effort to represent him as he conceived himself, as the rigorous, severely factual social scientist, the great unifying, necessary pattern in terms of which he thought, is left out or whittled down.
“Like Hegel, Marx treats history as phenomenology. In Hegel the Phenomenology of the human Spirit is an attempt to show… an objective order in the development of human consciousness and in the succession of civilisations that are its concrete embodiment. Influenced by a notion prominent in the Renaissance, but reaching back to an earlier mystical cosmogony, Hegel looked upon the development of mankind as being similar to that of an individual human being. Just as in the case of a man a particular capacity, or outlook, or way of dealing with reality cannot come into being until and unless other capacities have first become developed – that is, indeed, the essence of the notion of growth or education in the case of individuals – so races, nations, churches, cultures, succeed each other in a fixed order, determined by the growth of the collective faculties of mankind expressed in arts, sciences, civilisation as a whole. Pascal had perhaps meant something of this kind when he spoke of humanity as a single, centuries old, being, growing from generation to generation. For Hegel all change is due to the movement of the dialectic, which works by a constant logical criticism, that is, by struggle against, and final self-destruction of, ways of thought and constructions of reason and feeling which, in their day, had embodied the highest point reached by the ceaseless growth (which for Hegel is the logical self-realisation) of the human spirit; but which, embodied in rules or institutions, and erroneously taken as final and absolute by a given society or outlook, thereby become obstacles to progress, dying survivals of a logically ‘transcended’ stage, which by their very one-sidedness breed logical antimonies and contradictions by which they are exposed and destroyed. Marx translated this vision of history as a battlefield of incarnate ideas into social terms, of the struggle between classes. For him alienation (for that is what Hegel, following Rousseau and Luther and an earlier Christian tradition, called the perpetual self-divorce of men from unity with nature, with each other, with God, which the struggle of thesis against antithesis entailed) is intrinsic to the social process, indeed it is the heart of history itself. Alienation occurs when the results of men’s acts contradict their true purposes, when their official values, or the parts they play, misrepresent their real motives and needs and goals. This is the case, for example, when something that men have made to respond to human needs – say, a system of laws, or the rules of musical composition – acquires an independent status of its own, and is seen by men, not as something created by them to satisfy a common social want (which may have disappeared long ago), but as an objective law or institution, possessing eternal, impersonal authority in its own right, like the unalterable laws of Nature as conceived by scientists and ordinary men, like God and His Commandments for a believer. For Marx the capitalist system is precisely this kind of entity, a vast instrument brought into being by intelligible material demands – a progressive improvement and broadening of life in its own day that generates its own intellectual, moral, religious beliefs, values and forms of life. Whether those who hold them know it or not, such beliefs and values merely uphold the power of the class whose interests the capitalist system embodies; nevertheless, they come to be viewed by all sections of society as being objectively and eternally valid for all mankind. Thus, for example, industry and the capitalist mode of exchange are not timelessly valid institutions, but were generated by the mounting resistance by peasants and artisans to dependence on the blind forces of nature. They had had their moment; and the values these institutions generated will change or vanish with them.”¹⁵²
Marx differed from Hegel also in his vision of the final outcome of the historical process. Whereas for Hegel the self-realization of the Divine Idea culminated in the Prussian State (although, looking towards America, he was inclined to hedge his bets), for Marx it culminated in the victory of the proletariat, and finally in the withering away of the now unnecessary state… One thing was certain: the bourgeoisie could not stand.
For Marx and Engels understood the characteristic of the industrial, bourgeois age that distinguished it from all previous ages – its dynamism. Whereas previous ages aimed to preserve the social structure in order to preserve their place in it, the bourgeois were in effect constantly changing it, knowing that technological advance was constantly making present relationships obsolete and unprofitable. Not only did it overthrow the old, patriarchal and feudal society that came before it: it was constantly working to overthrow itself.
“The bourgeoisie,” they wrote, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trace of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air.”¹⁵³
But this constant change, though promoted by the bourgeoisie, at the same time built up the numbers and resources of the proletariat. “Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed.”¹⁵⁴
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Was Marx’s theory true? As regards his first axiom, the idea that class conflict is the sole determinant of world history, there are countless counter-examples that disprove it.¹⁵⁵ If his second axiom, that man’s thought is determined by his economic status, is true, then there is no reason for believing it to be true insofar as Marx’s thought, too, must be determined by his economic status.
And so, since both his fundamental axioms are false, there is no reason for believing the rest of his theory. As for his prediction that true socialism could only succeed in an economically advanced society, this is disproved by its “success” in such peasant societies as Russia and China. The almost universal fall of those same societies in the late twentieth century is still further proof that Marx was a false prophet.
It is too kind to describe Marxism, as some have done, as a burning love of justice clothed in a false economic theory. Its motive power is neither the love of justice nor the love of men, but simply hatred – hatred of God and God’s order in the first place, but hatred also of men. Marx despised not only the ruling classes and the bourgeoisie, but even the proletariat whose triumph he falsely predicted, rejecting “the notion that the poor in society were inherently decent and altruistic”.¹⁵⁶ He delighted in the destruction and death that the revolution would bring (he brought only misery to his own relatives), consigning all those who opposed the laws of dialectical materialism (and many of those who did not) to “the dustbin of history”. He loved only the cold goddess History, the Moloch of the twentieth century, whose most zealous and merciless servant he was…