Karl Marx

Been meaning to read this biography for a long time, Karl Marx by Jonathan Sperber.  I know Marx is a complete fraud, and this bio confirmed that.  Here are some facts about Marx’ life, before we get to his warped view of humans and society.  He was born Jewish; his father changed religions to keep his job in what was then Prussia.  Marx went on to espouse vile anti-semitism, buying into all manner of stereotyping about Jews.  He never held a real job in his life, but depended largely on donations from wealthy patrons, who apparently were brain-dead in terms of understanding what Marx was advocating.  He fought with his mother, expecting her to support him when he couldn’t get a real job, as opposed to saving her inheritance to help Marx’ siblings and to provide a living for herself.

Marx was an intellectual in the worst sense, a person of “ideas” who because of his personal lack of any real experience of work and responsibility was free to just daydream up his bizarre philosophies which ultimately have led to the death of billions of humans and their complete lack of freedom–economic, political, religious or personal.  Born at a time when Europe was aflame with political change and revolution, Marx initially was in a supporter of democracy and personal liberty.  But like all authoritarians, when it became apparent that the mass of people would not support his looney-tunes ideas, he abandoned the pretense of democracy and freedom and ultimately supported violence to achieve control.

Marx resonates with the whacked pro(re)gressives in America and elsewhere because what he really espoused was that certain smart people, obviously including him, know what is best for everyone else and are therefore entitled to impose their views and policies by force and to suppress any dissent or opposition by force, including widespread murder.  Russia, because of the fundamentally barbaric nature of most of its population, became the epitome of this approach, and while not a communist country today, retains the totalitarianism of Lenin, Stalin, et al, and exported that totalitarian approach to a number of other countries, including most notably China, which has also abandoned communist economics, while creating an even more pernicious form of totalitarian control of a population.

Marx was inspired by the German philosopher Hegel, who was all the rage when Marx first went to University.  I had the misfortune of reading Hegel’s works extensively when I did an independent study on philosophy in my undergraduate education.  Hegel was one of several philosophers at the time who attempted to explain reality and human perception of reality.  His writings are ultimately a mix of mysticism and unintelligible delusions about human nature and life.  He created a notion of history moving by contradictions that get resolved and lead to new contradictions and of humans “alienating” their true nature and ultimately reincorporating it.  As I said, useless intellectualization, so perfect fodder for Marx, who attempted to apply this approach to history and government, resulting in gibberish.

Marx’s economic works, written later in his life and most prominently found in Capital, are similarly devoid of any practical basis or support in data.  They envision a static world, with humans divided into classes like workers, business owners, farmers and in some cases royalty, since at his time many developed countries were still ultimately governed by heriditary monarchies.  He envisioned first a revolution by what we might today call the middle class against the monarchies and then a second revolution by workers against the middle class.  Marx believed this working class or proletariat would be the spearhead for creating the heaven on earth of communism, which is deeply, deeply ironic given that working people have suffered most under communist governments and continue to do so today, just ask Cubans or Venezuelans.

His actual ideas about how an economy operated, with any personal experience of work or business being completely absent, are accepted by no one today.  Despite the fact that Marx lived at a time when the industrial revolution had begun, he failed to appreciate the role of innovation in spurring productivity and changing the nature of human work.  For someone with a supposedly theory of history approach to any subject, he did not comprehend how quickly and dramatically human society and life were changing.  Today’s “working” class in America has a far higher income and living standard than did the middle class, or even the upper class, in Marx’ time.  The notion of social mobility, or people moving up or down in income or “class” is completely absent from his work, yet even in his time it was common.

Marx never actually spelled out in any detail how his actual government in a communist regime would work, who would be in charge, how would policy be made, would there be a government and if so how would officials be chosen, how would disputes be resolved, if there is no private property, how would you allocate what people need to live on, how and why would people be motivated to create and produce anything if they simply had to give it away.  His focus was almost exclusively on the process of getting to communism, the conditions and actions, usually subversive, needed to overthrow existing systems of economics and government.

Everytime I read about Marx and Marxism I am struck by the mystery of why his ideas endure and why he is still the lodestar for whacked radical ideologues and wannabee totalitarian dictators.  The answer is that it has nothing to do with his actual ideas, other than the notion of group conflict.  He persists because he provides the supposed theoretical justification for those dictators-in-waiting, who claim to be representing the interests of the working class.  The notion of conflict, oppression, revolution has been extended by current whackos from class to supposed conflicts between any group–racial, sex-based, sexual orientation; just pick a group and you can call them oppressed and marginalized, crying out for justice to be delivered by these omniscient ideologues.

Despite misgivings based on free speech concerns, the world would be best off if Marxist ideas were completely banned from being taught anywhere, or perhaps limited to use as an example of how dumb ideas can lead to so much misery.  It is difficult for me to fully express how despicable and destructive I find this human being to have been.