(Continued from Part I before it.)
The very first mistake in comprehending the Karl Marx phenomenon is customarily to assume that he was the father of the Communist movement, or, by the same token, had any control over it. True that his many associations with European political activists had made him rather well known to the revolutionary circles of Europe, and respected as a promising young intellectual and writing talent of liberal persuasion. When a secret society which would soon become known as the Communist League, was formed in London in 1847, Marx was not even there, and had nothing to do with it. It was the organizing committee of that society that made the first move, to contact Marx for the purpose of writing a suitable “program statement” for them.
After much hesitation, he decided to accept the challenge, together with Engels joined the organization, and set to work on what was to become the historical Communist Manifesto. From such small details it ought to be obvious that neither he nor Engels had an executive say in the workings of what would later become the First International, as he was always exploited as a symbol, whereas in practical terms his power was next to non-existent.
One might want to draw a parallel with Hitler perhaps, who was not his party’s founder either and who was at least initially similarly used for the political purposes of others. (Hitler’s role as a police informer, in this instance, is beside the point.) But the more important fact remains that Der Führer would be able to snatch the party control from the hands of his puppeteers, whereas Marx was never able to accomplish a similar feat. In the same vein, Hitler had been keen on appropriating his party all along, whereas Karl Marx had a yo-yo relationship with his executives: withdrawing from the group, but then,--- always disappointed in his other alternatives, always coming back into the fold, readmitted, but never quite trusted.
How would one explain his decision, in 1849, in the wake of the 1848 revolutions in Europe, to completely withdraw from circulation his prized Communist Manifesto, written just recently less than two years before, and to abolish the Communist League, also just created about that time? Needless to say, his naïvely selfish move to command both what had never been his and what was not his own anymore had no practical effect whatsoever, except to put his ‘Communist ties’ in temporary suspension.
Now, then, his simultaneous shocking advocacy of a political coalition between the working class whom he claimed to represent, and the liberal Jewish bourgeoisie, whom he had purportedly condemned, has been a very little-known historical fact, and, to my knowledge, completely unexplained, and even swept under the rug. The glaring historical chasm between Marx and “Marxism” starts in the general ignorance of the public and in the deliberate suppression of such small print by the conniving experts, who, in this case, as in many other cases, have shown an astonishing lack of enthusiasm for the truth.
It is a fact that during this “year of discontent,” Marx was frantically trying to make a deal with the Jewish liberals, whose support he was desperately seeking, in spite of all his racial reservations. No such luck! He lost his bid in a spectacular fashion, abandoned and exposed for criminal persecution by the community of Jewish well-to-do liberals. Indicted on several charges, he was however acquitted by the jury, but banished from his continental places of residence, moving to London where he would, in time, be buried, and where in 1969 I had a chance to see his grave at the Highgate Cemetery, another personal brush with history, like I experienced in Egypt with the Pyramids, or in Rome with Il Colosseo, or in many other such meaningful places which I chanced to experience in the course of the long and richly eventful first thirty-three years of my life…
The founding of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, historically known by the first word International, as always, had nothing to do with Marx, but he did receive an invitation to it, for the simple reason that it took place in London, where he resided. His journalistic talents and (as an erstwhile editor of the Rheinische Zeitung) newspaper publishing experience were gently appreciated as always, but as always his executive power was bubkes. His symbolic value, however, soared to unprecedented heights as soon as the opening salvos of the Paris Commune of 1870 were heard across Europe.
That glorious Paris Commune proved to be a curse, disguised as a blessing. The ugly factional strife within the International, which had been there all along, working steadily in the background, exploded obscenely into the open, and ripped it apart. The British trade union faction, which, in the context of that organization, constituted its right wing and, to scandalize the popular misconception about Marx’s leftist extremism, was the closest to a political ally Marx ever hoped to get, left the International, joining forces with the Liberal Party of Britain, in their quest for political reform, in the spirit of the future Euro-Socialism, leaving Marx waving to them his nostalgic goodbye, as with their cause was his heart now, and apparently forever after.
The story of Marx contra Bakunin is a richly meaningful tale told elsewhere. It will suffice to say, however, that Bakunin’s alleged defeat in the struggle for the control of the International, oddly signified the curtains for the Organization itself, as it moved to New York, ostensibly to consolidate its victory over the notorious Russian, only to be pronounced dead on arrival there.
As for Marx himself, he was doomed to spend the last decade of his life in helpless frustration, as his name was disattached from his person, to become the symbol of what he did not subscribe to. He suffered from a chronic mental depression throughout that last decade, and his writing spring virtually dried up.
He was a revolutionary prophetic thinker, deploring the destructive character of financial capitalism bent on taking over the world, and seeing the best way to defeat it in the empowerment of the blue-collar working class and in building a classless “Communist” society, where ‘Loving your Neighbor’ was the ruling ethics of society, and not the principle of laissez-faire greed, whose only social promise was that to allow the rich to get even richer was the best way to assure that a few crumbs would then fall off their table, thus making the life of the working poor a little bit better under the principle of trickle-down economics.
Alas, his anti-capitalist ideas and the political aspirations of the European Jewish liberals taking charge of the Communist movement in a bitter fight for self-empowerment, happened to be ethically and, in practice, implicitly and as a matter of fact, at cross purposes.
So much for Karl Marx, but only in so far as the present entry is concerned.
More about him in the Marx contra Bauer sequence, but here was hopefully a fitting partial tribute, which ought to be paid to Marx as a giant of human thought and also a Jew.
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