Ode to Marx: Dead, not gone
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 Free Headline Alerts
Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
Up to his death in 1883, Marx, as well as many Marxists up to Stalin’s death and the subsequent exposure of Stalin in Russia, had believed that Marxism was a global science, determining the future of all nations. Today, even within the dictatorship of China, Marxism-Leninism is maintained only domestically. A postmortem of Marxism has been long overdue.
The best and shortest way to do this is to read “the Internationale” (the Marxist anthem). I take it from Yandex.com, the Russian analogue of Yahoo! or Google.
The key Marxist phrases are the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” (whom the Internationale calls “parasites”) and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” In the times of Marx, the proletariat consisted only of “toilers” who created wealth for the “parasites,” though the latter do not deserve even the land on which they live. Say the proletarians in the Internationale:
Only we, toilers of the global work-army,
Have the right to possess the land for ever,
While the parasites—never ever!
The key work of Marx, Das Kapital, fills 3 volumes, though his discovery can be expressed in two sentences. A “toiler” creates a commodity, for which a “parasite” pays the “toiler.” But the “parasite” appropriates part of the pay, and thus becomes rich, or even richer than he was, while the “toiler” remains as poor as he was.
But let us look at concrete life. Marx was able to create Das Kapital owing to Engels, who worked in his father’s capitalist (!) textile firm and supplied Marx with money for food and other necessities.
But what if Engels and/or his father did not exist or what if Engels considered Das Kapital a multi-volume graphomania which did not contain a single valuable or interesting sentence?
Suppose the dictatorship of “parasites” like the Engelses has been replaced by the dictatorship of “proletarians.” Will the production of goods and services go on as smoothly as did Das Kapital? Who will organize the production of all goods and services? Who will run the dictatorship of the proletariat as a society—with its police, courts, hospitals? Who will ensure the personal freedom (such as the freedom to devote his or her life to the writing of Das Kapital), social security, medical help to lonely gravely ill unfortunates?
What was to become of Marx in the dictatorship of the proletariat? Was he, a Jew, to be exterminated as were Jews in the dictatorship of Nazi Germany? Or as Jews would have been exterminated in the Soviet “dictatorship of the proletariat,” had not Stalin died in the nick of time?
When Marx wrote Das Kapital, he was not registered at any place of work or education/research. Hence in Stalin’s “proletarian dictatorship,” he would have been a “parasite” to be exiled even if he was not a Jew and his writing had copied a current day’s Pravda.
According to Marx, all disasters come because vampires underpay and mistreat toilers. This is what the toilers declare in the Internationale:
Enough of sucking our blood, vampires,
With prisons, taxation, and a low pay!
You have all the power and wealth,
And we have nothing, except death!
We will create a different world order—
And here is our battle cry:
The entire power belongs to toilers.
While all the spongers—fall through the Earth!
Despite the “revolutionary atmosphere” in continental Europe, Marx had to move to London in 1849 and to spend more than half of his life (the last 34 years) in England. Surely what the Internatonale says about the dictatorship of the rich applied to England. The Internationale proclaimed:
We despise you, rich drones,
The kings of coal and of steel.
All plants, all factories and palaces
You have built on our backs!
Everything you possess
Has been created by our toil.
It’s time! We demand the return
Of what you acquired by sheer robbery of us!
And here was Marx living in England for 34 years preaching without any trouble the “robbery of the robbers,” as Lenin put it.
Marx confused lack of personal freedom, which everyone should have, with lack, which may be infinite, of wealth, and he regarded the unequal distribution of wealth as a crime, calling for an immediate ruthless lynching of the wealthy (no jury trial).
Personal freedom in England began to arise with the jury trial even before the Magna Carta of 1215, whose jury had first of all to agree us to the defendant’s guilt.
Its common sense was obvious. One accuser can accuse a defendant of whatever comes to that accuser’s head. But at a jury trial an identical invention, voiced by several jurors, is impossible.
In the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, even wars are instigated and waged only by the rich at the expense of the proletariat:
Stop suffocating us,
To please the tyrants,
In the smoke of the war!
War on the tyrants! Peace for the people!
Go on strike, the armies at war!
If the tyrants make us
Die in battle for their sake,
Then, murderers, we will aim at you,
All cannon roaring in the battlefields.