There are more Marxists teaching in Sociology Departments in America than living in the former Soviet Union. These sociologists hold themselves out as scientists despite the fact that they fail consistently in their efforts to predict the future. In fact, most of them lack the competence to accurately predict the past. Among the least competent and most intellectually dishonest is Gary L. Faulkner, Professor Emeritus from the University of North Carolina.
Faulkner recently claimed that Marx predicted the events we are seeing in the Occupy Wall Street movement. He also claimed that events from the 20th Century bolster the credibility of Marx as both an economist and political prophet. He further castigates Republicans for their refusal to embrace Marxism. Faulkner states, “There is something really ironic about Republican’s hatred of Marxism. Years ago Marx predicted capitalism would collapse. The reason - workers would rebel.”
And they did. They rebelled in China, Russia, North Korea, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Vietnam. Their rebellion produced Marxist governments. And the governments killed millions. The numbers of murders are striking:
Marxist China 65 million
Marxist USSR 20 million
Marxist North Korea 2 million
Marxist Cambodia 2 million
Marxist Afghanistan 1.5 million
Marxist Vietnam 1 million
Marx predicated all of this, right? Wrong. But we could have seen it coming. Marx was a violent man who unleashed racist and anti-Semitic assaults on anyone who dared to oppose the use of violence as a means of creating change.
Ferdinand Lassalle was one labor leader Marx hated for his desire to come up with practical solutions rather than violent confrontation. Lassalle’s opposition to violence caused Marx to dub him a “Jewish n****r” and a “greasy Jew.” Marx also said of Lassalle “the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicate(s) he is a descendent of the Negroes who joined in Moses flight from Egypt unless his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a n****r.”
There is little question that Marx would have carried out violence on a large scale. But his poor physical condition prevented him from doing so – instead leaving the work to followers such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. His heavy smoking and drinking zapped his energy. His refusal to bathe – a trait also shared by Mao - resulted in boils all over his body. They brought on nervous collapse and fits of rage – both of which would have prevented him from working and earning his own living had he decided to do so.
Marx had a passionate hatred of capitalism because he was simply unable to handle money and to organize his own financial affairs. His inability to stay out of debt explains why his theory of capital is so deeply rooted in anti-Semitism. It also explains why he stole many of his most deeply anti-Semitic passages from Martin Luther.
Because he refused to work, even his own family remained unsympathetic to his requests for handouts, which he began making in college and kept making throughout the duration of his life. His own mother was credited with saying that she wished Karl would start accumulating capital instead of just writing about it.
Although he wrote about the need for revolution, Marx had a strange hatred for those who came from the revolutionary class. His son-in-law Paul Lafargue was from Cuba and had some black blood. He tried to keep his daughter from marrying him and later resented him for refusing to honor his wishes. Consequently, Marx referred to him as “Negrillo” and “the Gorilla.”
In short, Marx considered both work and the worker to be beneath him. He lived nearly his entire adult life off of handouts from Engels, the co-author of The Communist Manifesto. While he was living off of Engels’ capital, Marx kept a peasant woman around the house and refused to pay her for her services. Later, he fathered an illegitimate child by her and refused to provide financial support or even to acknowledge that he was the father. In other words, he exploited her labor and then abandoned her after she went into labor. Marx was not a great man worthy of admiration.
Nor was Marx a great prophet. He understood that there would always be men incapable of taking care of themselves. He understood that they would resort to violence whenever they did not get what they wanted. He also understood that there would always be academics who admired gross incompetence and the propensity towards violence.
Marx did not need a crystal ball to arrive at these truths. All he needed was a mirror.
Source: Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York, 1988).
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