The Naked Communist (5 page)

Marx Writes a Book to Change the World

Much of Marx's motivation in trying to make the International Workingmen's Association a great world movement was his desire to put into practice the very theories he was struggling to put down on paper. For several years he had pampered his two pet projects -- the International and his "book." Both projects drained him of his normal physical strength. This permitted an old liver ailment to flare up again and before long he was suffering from a rash of boils which threatened to cover his entire body. Ill health was to plague him the remainder of his days. In a letter to Engels he poured out his complaints against the pain and disappointment he was suffering:

"To my extreme disgust, after being unable to sleep all night I discovered two more first-class boils on my chest." Later he wrote, "I am working now like a drayhorse, seeing that I must make the best use of all the time available for work, and the carbuncles are still there, though they are now giving me only local trouble, and are not interfering with my brain." After a particularly severe attack he wrote: "This time it was really serious -- the family did not know how serious. If it recurs three or four times more, it will be all up with me. I have wasted amazingly, and am still damnably weak, not in the head, but in the trunk and limbs.... There is no question of being able to sit up, but, while lying, I have been able, at intervals, to keep digging away at my work."
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The "work" to which Marx refers was the research and preparation of the first volume of
Capital
. Marx was convinced that a revolution would never succeed unless the working masses had a revolutionary philosophy of history, economics and social progress. He wrote
Capital
in order to show why the violent overthrow of the present order was not only justified but inescapable. Elsewhere, we shall examine the theories of Marx, but at this point it is sufficient to point out that Marx looked upon the writing of this book as an unpleasant mission which had to be completed before international communism could germinate and flourish.

During 1865, when Marx was striving to prepare a final copy of his first volume for the printer, he told Engels he wanted to "finish it off quickly, for the thing has become a perfect nightmare to me." He occasionally enjoyed periods of respite from his illness and finally wrote to Engels: "As regards the damned book, this is how the matter stands. It was finished in the end of December." Engels assured Marx that the pain and suspense of getting the book completed were as great a trial to him as they were to Marx. He wrote: "The day the manuscript goes to press, I shall get gloriously drunk!"

It was not until March, 1867, that all the revisions were finally completed and Marx set out for Germany to have the book published in his native tongue. In a short time it began to be distributed.

But when
Capital
appeared in the book stalls it was far from the literary triumph which Marx and Engels had both expected. Its line of reasoning was entirely too finely drawn for the working masses and far from persuasive among intellectual reformers. It remained for the intellectuals of another generation to make
Capital
the principal excuse for their attack on the existing order of things.

The Closing Years

By 1875 Marx had little satisfaction to draw from his life of struggle. The International had disintegrated around him and the book which was written to justify his policies was gathering dust in the bookstores across the Continent. Marx continued writing two more volumes but the flame was going out in him. After Marx's death, it would remain the task of Engels to publish the second volume in 1885 and the third volume in 1894.

The closing years for Karl Marx were sterile, lonely ones. In abject defeat he turned to the bosom of his family. Always there would be Jenny to give comfort and consolation. But the Marx children bore the scars of their upbringing. When Marx interfered with the courtship of his daughter, Eleanor, she entered a free-love union with Edward Aveling and, following a most wretched existence with him, committed suicide. Another daughter, Laura, married a renegade doctor and later died with him in a suicide pact.

By 1878 Marx had abandoned practically every aspect of his work. His rock-ribbed self confidence had been shattered. Labor leaders ignored him, reformers ridiculed him. His words carried little weight, either at home or abroad.

Thus, his morale was at the breaking point when the toll of time struck down his only kindred spirit outside of Engels -- Frau Marx. This gentle, aristocratic and long-suffering companion died of cancer December 2, 1881. Thirteen months later, Marx's favorite daughter, Jenny, also suddenly died. Thereafter, Engels noted that Marx, the man, was as well as dead. He survived his daughter, Jenny, by only two brief months. On March 14, 1883, at 2:45 in the afternoon, he died while sitting alone in his chair.

Three days later six or seven persons followed the casket of Karl Marx to Highgate cemetery in London and there his one abiding friend, Friedrich Engels, read a funeral oration. It was the kind of oration Marx would liked to have heard. It granted him in death what Marx was never granted in life unequivocal tribute of glowing praise.

Epilogue

Thus ended the dynamic, turbulent and restless career of Karl Marx. By all standards it was a pathetic life, filled with burning ambition, constant frustration and continuous failure. Whether seen from the viewpoint of friend or foe, perhaps the real tragedy of Marx's life can be found in the fact that for some amazing reason he almost instinctively planted the seeds of self-destruction in any project he promoted.

One cannot pore over the almost endless products of his pen -- the weighty, complex books or the reams of sniping, feverish correspondence without feeling that Karl Marx projected into Communism the very essence of his own nature. His resentment of political authority expressed itself in a ringing cry for universal revolution. His refusal or inability to compete in a capitalistic economy wrung from him a vitriolic denunciation of that economy and a prophecy that its destruction was inexorably decreed. His deep sense of insecurity pushed him to create out of his own imagination a device for interpreting history which made progress inescapable and a Communist millennium unavoidable. His personal attitude toward religion, morals and competition in everyday existence led him to long for an age when men would have no religion, morals or competition in everyday existence. He wanted to live in a classless, stateless, noncompetitive society where there would be such lavish production of everything that men, by simply producing according to their apparent ability, would automatically receive a superabundance of all material needs.

Another characteristic of Marx which he shared with his intellectual off-spring -- Communism -- is that both must be viewed from a distance to be admired, even by friends. It is for this reason that biographers often treat Marx as though he were two persons. From a distance they might feel to admire his theories but upon close contact Marx becomes a different entity. Thus, Bakunin could call Marx the "supreme economic and socialist genius of our day" and then give the following evaluation of Marx, the man: "Marx is egotistical to the pitch of insanity....

"Marx loved his own person much more than he loved his friends and apostles, and no friendship could hold water against the slightest wound to his vanity.... Marx will never forgive a slight to his person. You must worship him, make an idol of him, if he is to love you in return; you must at least fear him if he is to tolerate you. He likes to surround himself with pygmies, with lackeys and flatterers. All the same, there are some remarkable men among his intimates. In general, however, one may say that in the circle of Marx's intimates there is very little brotherly frankness, but a great deal of machination and diplomacy. There is a sort of tacit struggle and a compromise between the self-loves of the various persons concerned; and where vanity is at work there is no longer place for brotherly feeling. Every one is on his guard, is afraid of being sacrificed, of being annihilated. Marx's circle is a sort of mutual admiration society. Marx is the chief distributor of honours, but is also the invariably perfidious and malicious, the never frank and open, inciter to the persecution of those whom he suspects, or who had the misfortune of failing to show all the veneration he expects. As soon as he has ordered a persecution there is no limit to the baseness and infamy of the method."

The acid of boiling intolerance which Marx frequently poured down on the heads of his followers may be partially explained by his own complete certainty that the theories he had concocted were infallible gems of cosmic truth. In his heyday of abounding strength Marx often bowled over his opposition with mountain-moving declarations of supreme self-confidence:

"Historical evolution is on your side," he shouted to his followers. "Capitalism, brought into being by the laws of historical evolution, will be destroyed by the inexorable working of these same laws. The bourgeoisie, the business manager of the capitalist system, appeared on the stage of history with that system, and must make its exit when that system walks off the stage. You, proletarians, keep capitalism going by your labour, and maintain the whole of bourgeois society by the fruits of your industry. But socialism will be a necessary organic outcome of capitalism, the essence of the latter being implied in the essence of the former. With the end of capitalism, comes the beginning of socialism as a logical consequence. You proletarians, as a class, being the incorporators of the forces and tendencies which will do away with capitalism, must necessarily make an end of the bourgeoisie. You merely need, as a class, to fulfill the evolution which your mission calls on you to fulfill.
All you need is to will!
History makes this as easy as possible for you. You need not hatch out any new ideas, make any plans, discover a future State. You need not 'dogmatically anticipate the world.' You need merely put your hands to the task which is awaiting you. The means by which you will do it are to be found in the unceasing, purposive, consistent fighting of the class struggle, whose crown will be the victory of the social revolution."

When Marx died there was little to suggest to him in his closing hours that he yet would be remembered for the thing he had striven unsuccessfully to produce -- a genuine revolution. While Western Europe wrote off revolutionary violence as a mere phase of Nineteenth Century social reform, a great slumbering giant in Eastern Europe was about to be rudely awakened by Marx's revolutionary call to arms. This, of course, was Russia.

Before studying the revolution in Russia, we must turn to a brief review of the theories which Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels left as a legacy to the disciples of World Communism. In these theories may be found the explanation for many things in the Russian Revolution and in subsequent Communist activities which otherwise might be difficult or impossible to understand.

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Chapter Two
The Appeal of Communism

"How could a great scientist or anyone with so much education fall for Communism?" During the past 20 years this question has echoed around the land with each fresh exposure of Red espionage. It has been amazing to many people to discover that Communism appeals to certain educated individuals because it includes an intriguing "philosophy of nature." In this philosophy Communism does seem to explain the origin and development of everything in existence -- life, planets, galaxies, evolution, and even human intelligence. To those who have not previously delved into philosophy these concepts sometimes prove infatuating and persuasive. Therefore, in this chapter we shall deal with them.

Perhaps this material may prove to be difficult reading. However, the theories of Communism will be far easier to digest in this brief, concentrated form than they would be if the student attempted to spend several months digging them out of far-flung, technical treatises in Communist literature.

Every student should pursue his studies of Marxism until he has discovered the answers to such questions as these: