3. Higher Communism and the Eradication of the Division of Labor
The hell of the first or lower stage of Communism has been vividly expressed by Marx. What of
the heaven of the higher stage, of the positive humanism of ultimate Communism? Unfortunately,
heaven's features are vague and murky indeed, perhaps too insubstantial. If Marx had published
Man is freed from the division of labor, from specialization, which prevents him from developing
Without the division of labor, and with the evil of exchange of goods and services at
Last Eliminated, Man is now free from the alienation of not consuming his own product.
This alienation is not, as many Marxists seem to believe, the result of the capitalists'
alleged extraction of the surplus produced by the workers.
More deeply, this alienation is the product of the division of labor and of specialization
itself.
That division eliminated, man, in the neo-Hegalian mystique of Marx, will return to himself,
will be united with himself, and alienation will then be ended.
All this makes a kind of sense only if one realizes that, for Marx as for Hegel, man
is a collective and not an individual organic entity.
For Hegel and for Marx, the history of man is the history, the ups and downs, of what
amounts to a single collective organism.
If for Marx there is a division of labor, specialization and exchange, this means that
man is tragically split within himself, so that the process of achieving the higher stage
of Communism, the end of human history in the same way that the kingdom of God on earth
had been an end, is a process by which man is no longer alienated from his collective
self and achieves unity with himself.
At the same time, he also achieves unity with nature, for in the Marxian system the only
Only nature is that which has been created by centuries of man's labor and activity.
Thus, as Robert Tucker points out, Friedrich Engels' famous statement about communism
has been misinterpreted widely, not least by Marxists unfamiliar with the philosophical
nature of their own system.
Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895, wrote in his Auntie Düring,
The whole sphere of the conditions of life which environ man, and which have hitherto
ruled man, now comes under the dominion and control of man, who for the first time becomes
the real, conscious lord of nature, because he has now become master of his own social
Social Organization, Man's Own Social Organization, hitherto confronting him as a necessity imposed
by nature and history, now becomes the result of his own free action, the extraneous objective
forces that have hitherto governed history pass under the control of man himself.
It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.
As Tucker points out, to the reader unfamiliar with Marxian philosophy, this passage might
well be construed as referring to man's mastery of nature via technology.
However, in actuality it refers to the mastery of technology as man's own nature outside
himself.
The kingdom of necessity is the alienated world of history, the realm of object bondage,
The extraneous objective forces over which man is to become lord in the kingdom of freedom
are understood as the externalized forces of the species self.
The nature to which man will no longer be subservient is his own nature.
In short, as in many other places in Marx, a passage which at least superficially seems
is to contain at least a modicum of sense, although fallacious, turns out on deeper study
to be but a part of the mumbo jumbo of Marx's neo-hegelian philosophy.
Particularly important for Marx is that communism does away with the division of labor.
By being free of specialization, the division of labor, and working for others, including
Man as laborer is freed from all limits. Thus liberated, man produces in order to realize his nature as a being with manifold creative capacities requiring free outlet in a totality of human life activities.
Or, as Engels put it in his Anti-During,
the disappearance of the division of labor will mean that productive labor will give each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties,
physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full.
The idea of everyone developing all of their faculties in all directions is mind-boggling,
and conjures up the absurd picture of a world of autistic dilettantes each
heedless of social demand for their services or products and each dabbling
whimsically and sporadically in every activity. This image is confirmed by
Marx's most famous passage describing the communist system in part one of his
This is The German Ideology, an unpublished essay written in 1845 and 1846.
There he writes that communism corresponds to the development of individuals into complete
individuals and the casting off of all natural limitations.
How are all natural limitations cast off?
A tall order indeed.
Let Marx explain,
One of the most apt comments
A short weekend on a farm might have convinced Marx that the cattle themselves might have
some objection to being reared in this casual manner in the evening.
More broadly, Gray remarks that each individual should have the opportunity of developing
all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions, is a dream which will cheer
Here the vision only of the simple-minded, oblivious of the restrictions imposed by the
narrow limits of human life.
For life, Gray points out, is a series of acts of choice, and each choice is at the
same time a renunciation.
The necessity of choice, Gray perceptively reminds us, will exist even under Communism.
Even the inhabitant of Engel's future fairyland will have to decide, sooner or later, whether
he wishes to be Archbishop of Canterbury or First Sea Lord, whether he should seek to
excel as a violinist or as a pugilist, whether he should elect to know all about Chinese
literature or about the hidden pages in the life of the mackerel.
The abolition of the division of labor meant also that all differences, and hence opposition
between Town and Country had to be eliminated, with industry somehow equally diffused throughout
the country, the world.
As a result, all large cities would have to be destroyed.
As Engels said in Auntie During, it is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed
to us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of, but it must and
will be got rid of, however protracted a process it may be.
It is not surprising that the Soviet authorities did not take a very favorable view of Marxian
communism.
Marxian pieties can go just so far.
Thus, the Soviet Communist Party's theoretical journal, Communist, referred favorably to
The Unpublished Work of a Soviet Economist, V. M. Kriukov, who wrote that
An unintelligent person and Philistine might form his own picture of Communism approximately as follows.
You rise in the morning and ask yourself,
Where shall I go to work today?
Shall I be chief engineer at the factory, or go and head the fishing brigade?
Or shall I run down to Moscow and hold an urgent meeting of the Presidium of the Academy of Science?
Communist adds the warning, it will not be so.
No doubt, and quite sensibly.
But of course the Soviet authorities did not acknowledge the fact that by repudiating this unintelligent notion,
they were renouncing the key to the whole Marxian system, the point and goal of the entire struggle.
More importantly, the Soviet authorities jettisoned the basic goal of Marxism by abandoning the idea that communism will eliminate the division of labor.
The revision began with Stalin's last work in 1952, shortly before his death, and intensified after that.
Evading and sometimes falsifying the writings of the founders,
The Soviet revisionists were relatively sound in realism and economics, but weak on the
Marxian heritage.
Sometimes the Soviet experts simply and sharply stated the facts.
A man cannot do literally everything.
In the system of communist production relations, the division and specialization of labor will
remain essential.
And it is absolutely obvious that communist society would be unthinkable without a constantly
developing and intensifying division of labor.
Substitute the words modern or industrial for communist, and the Soviet economists were
right on the mark.
But in what sense is this communism any longer?
Six years before Antiduring, moreover, Engels betrayed the entire Marxian vision in the
course of a bitter polemic against the anarchists.
In defending the idea of authoritarianism under communism, Engels reminded the self-styled
anti-authoritarian anarchists that a revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing
there is.
It is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means
of rifles, bayonets and cannon, authoritarian means.
But more importantly, Engels jeered at the idea that there will be no authoritarianism
and hence no division of labor in a communist factory.
Engels pointed out that factory production requires both, and also demands that the workers
Subordinate Themselves to Technological Necessity Thus, keeping the machines going requires
an engineer to look after the steam engine, mechanics to make the current repairs, and
many other laborers whose business it is to transfer the products.
Moreover, he pointed out, technology and the forces of nature subject man to a veritable
despotism independent of all social organization.
Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry, Engels warned, is tantamount to
wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning
wheel.
Refreshingly sober words, no doubt, but totally alien to the spirit of Marxism, and certainly
to all that Marx said or wrote on the topic, as well as most other writings of Engels.
To Marx, all labor in future communism is not economic, but artistic—the free and
spontaneous creativity allegedly typical of the artist.
For Marx, in his economic magnum opus, Capital, communist man has been transformed from an
alienated man into an aesthetic man who regards everything in artistic terms.
Thus on the factory, industrial production under communism will have no authoritarian direction, but rather, unity will be achieved as with musicians in a symphony orchestra.
Engels, however, was an interesting case.
A bit more of an economist than Marx and the man who introduced his friend and partner to British classical economics,
Engels was capable of alternating the wildest utopian fantasies of communism with a suddenly perceptive insight into its economic difficulties.
Thus, even in Antiduring, Engels at one point admits that the task of economic science, as capitalism moves forward rapidly and inexorably to its collapse,
is to uncover, amid the changes of the economic transition, the elements of the future new organization of production and exchange, which will remove the previous malfunctioning of the capitalist economy.
It was never a task, however, that either Engels or Marx would ever bother to take up.
Furthermore, in The Principles of Communism, an essay written in late 1847 that became
the first draft for the Communist Manifesto, Engels laid bare one of the crucial, usually
implicit, assumptions of the Communist society, that superabundance will have eliminated the
problem of scarcity.
Private property can be abolished only when the economy is capable of producing the volume
This super-abundant production somehow will have been achieved by a wondrous technological progress that would eliminate the need for any division of labor.
Engels, however, in the midst of this bold assumption, felt compelled to waffle and to
admit that this Communist millennium could not be achieved immediately or at one blow,
for it would not be possible immediately to expand the existing forces of production to
such an extent that enough goods could be made to satisfy all the needs of the community.
During the transition period, at least, says Engels, industry will have to be run by society
as a whole for everybody's benefit.
It must be operated by all members of society in accordance with a common plan.
Private property will also have to be abolished, and it must be replaced by the sharing of
all products in accordance with an agreed plan.
Any believer in the labor theory of value who tried to set forth a scheme of economic
calculation under socialism would likely fasten on the idea of setting prices and paying wages
in accordance with the labor time expended on production.
The issue of labor time tickets was precisely the plan proposed by Robert Owen, by the Ricardian
by the German individualist anarchist Josiah Warren and by the German Ricardian socialist Johann Carl Rodbertus, 1805-1875.
One of Friedrich Engels' most penetrating economic insights came in the course of demolishing the labor-ticket money-utopian socialism of Rodbertus, a beloved figure in Germany at that time.
Engels denounced the Roadbertus Doctrine in a preface to the first German edition of Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy, the year after Marx's death, 1884.
Here, Engels had the impudence to condemn Roadbertus's labor money as childishly naive, and to press on to scorn Roadbertus for overlooking economic law and the competitive market process.
To desire in a society of producers who exchange their commodities to establish the determination of value by labor time, by forbidding competition to establish this determination of value through pressure on prices in the only way in which it can be established, is therefore merely to prove that one has adopted the usual utopian disdain of economic laws.
Engels goes on to assert that competition, by bringing into operation the laws of value of commodity production in a society of producers who exchange their commodities, creates the only possible organization of social production in the circumstances.
Angles goes on to engage in a scornful and perceptive critique of socialist attempts at
calculation, at the very least of the Robertus variety.
Only through the undervaluation and overvaluation of products is it forcibly brought home to
the individual commodity producers what things and what quantity of them society requires
or does not require.
But it is just this sole regulator that the utopia in which Robertus also shares would
abolish.
And if we have to ask what guarantee we have that the necessary quantity and not more of
each product will be produced, that we shall not go hungry in regard to corn and meat while
we are choked in beet-sugar and drowned in potato-spirit, that we shall not lack trousers
Roadbertus triumphantly shows us his famous calculation, according to which the correct
certificate has been handed out for every superfluous pound of sugar, for every unsold
barrel of spirit, for every unusable trouser button, a calculation which works out exactly
and according to which all claims will be satisfied and the liquidation correctly brought about.
Engels adds that if now competition is to be forbidden to make the individual producers aware
by the rise or fall of prices how the world market stands then their eyes are completely blinded.
Professor Hutchison's comment on this performance by Engels is all too apropos.
Mises and Hayek could hardly have made the point more forcefully.
What is most extraordinary is the combination of penetrating critical insight regarding
the vital function of the competitive price mechanism, as applied to the utopian notions
of Rodbertus, together with the totally uncritical, purblind complacency regarding his own and
and Marx's Utopian Assumptions, as he himself had earlier revealed them in his Principles
of Communism in such irresponsible vacuities as the joint and planned exploitation of the
forces of production by society as a whole.
The hordes of infallible Prussian officials and the Prussian state socialism for relying
on which Engels so castigates Robertus, would inevitably be required, and of course have
been deployed many times over, for Engels and Marx's own utopian planning.
But such few perceptions on the part of Engels come under the category of what he himself
once called howlers.
Apart from them, ultimate communism was naively to achieve the transcendence of both work
and the division of labor.
But that is not all.
Along with the transcendence and negation of private property will come the negation
of virtually all aspects of modern civilization, which Marx also considered subsidiary modes
The Positive Transcendence of Private Property as the Appropriation of Human Living is therefore
or the positive transcendence of all alienation and thus the return of man from religion,
the family, the state, etc. to his human, that is, social existence.
But if all these cherished institutions are to be rudely stripped from man, what then remains
to this poor liberated creature?
For make no mistake, these post-Marxian creatures would be deprived of all human interrelations
that make up a society.
These complete individuals would be deprived of law, family, custom, religion and, of course,
of all exchange of goods and services.
That is, they would be complete, hermetically sealed creatures, each isolated from everyone
else.
Ironically then, leftists who habitually, though falsely, denounce individualist thinkers
for advocating a world of isolated, atomistic, hermetically sealed individuals, themselves
worship a theorist whose vision of the ideal future is precisely of such a monstrous world.
At the same time, of course, each will have the consolation of knowing that they are all
What will allegedly be left to man under Communism is a new and bizarre form of art, or aesthetics.
Man will be stripped of wealth and possessions, but he will be far richer in another sense,
unalienated and fulfilling himself in all directions.
He will approach his own creations rich in the appreciation of beauty.
He will be, in the words of Marx in Private Property and Communism, a rich man profoundly
endowed with all the senses.
He will realize his natural tendency to arrange all things according to the laws of beauty.
Until communism, man's appreciation of beauty had been sullied by greed and possession.
But for Marx, having, possessing, implies the simple alienation of all the physical
and spiritual human senses.
Professor Tucker, who has done much to explicate Marx's vision of communism, concludes that
economic activity will turn into artistic activity, and the planet itself will become
the new man's work of art.
The alienated world will give way to the aesthetic world.
But if ultimate communism abandons and eliminates all sense of having, of ownership, in order
If we are to liberate man for purely aesthetic creation and contemplation, then communism itself must be transcended, since even communism implies some form of having or possessing.
As Tucker points out, consequently the final condition of man will be beyond all ownership, beyond the property principle, and in this sense, beyond communism.
Marx ends his fullest discussion of Communism in Private Property and Communism with these faintly ominous sentences.
Communism is the position as the negation of the negation and hence the actual phase necessary for the next stage of historical development in the process of human emancipation and recovery.
Communism is the necessary pattern and the dynamic principle of the immediate future,
but Communism as such is not the goal of human development, the structure of human society.
So what is the final stage, even beyond Communism?
The final, final Aufhebung, the great transcendence, the ultimate negation?
It is a world beyond all ownership and all possession, a world fully liberated for the
spontaneous flowering of all faculties in all directions, and for the unsullied, totally
sensate appreciation of pure beauty.
We may be pardoned for concluding that, wittingly or unwittingly, and with Marx it is difficult
to know which.
The final final stage is the stage of the graveyard for the human race.
After the turmoil and upheaval of all the Aufhebungs will come the peace of a universal cemetery.
For no possession, no use of resources means rapid and universal starvation.
Deprived of all labor, for productive goals, and of all possessions, mankind will have
have precious little time left for the appreciation of pure beauty.
Whether or not they saw the full horror of Marx's ultimate positive humanism, there is
no doubt that the Soviets were always uneasy at the thought of this abyss.
The Soviet editor of a Russian translation of Marx's manuscripts published in 1956 on
and Analyzing the Above Passage asserts that by communism as such, Marx meant raw communism
of the initial stage.
But this is almost a willful misinterpretation of Marx's final words on beyond the ultimate
stage.
The Soviets had trouble enough with the withering away of the state in the highest stage of
Communism, which to them meant at most a shift from official state ownership of all resources
to ownership by social or administrative organizations, officially proclaimed as non-states.
The reason that Marx suppressed the publication of this essay in his lifetime seems similar
to the Soviets burying of their allegedly final, final goal.
To say that even the Marxist public is not yet ready for it is a rich understatement.
One trusts that they never will be.
In socialist practice, of course, while communist countries never got to the highest stage,
there seemed to be little evidence of either a notable appreciation of beauty or of great
spontaneous or artistic creativity, perhaps even the relative physical deprivation rather
But of course all these problems are neatly buried by the pervasive but implicit premise
underlying all of Marx's discussions of communism, the unsupported, unquestioned assumption that
But throughout all these changes, production remains happily abundant, if not superabundant.
Hence the economic problem is simply and quietly assumed away.
Some might protest that in our discussion of communism we have not mentioned the feature
that is generally considered the hallmark of that system, the slogan, from each according
According to his ability, to each according to his needs.
This phrase seems to contradict our view that the essence of the communist society is a
secularized religion rather than economics.
The locus classicus, however, of Marx's proclamation of this well-known slogan of French socialism
was in the course of his vitriolic Critique of the Gotha program in 1875, in which Marx
Marx denounced the LaSallian Deviationists who were forming the new German Social Democratic
Party, and it is clear from the context of his discussion that this slogan is of minor
and peripheral importance to Marx.
In point three of his critique, Marx is denouncing the clause of the program calling for communization
of property and equitable distribution of the proceeds of labor.
In the course of his discussion, Marx states that inequality of labor income is inevitable
in the first stage of communist society when it has just emerged after prolonged birth
pangs from capitalist society.
Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development
thereby determined.
On the other hand, Marx goes on, in a higher phase of Communist society, after the enslaving
subordination of individuals under division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis
between mental and physical labor has vanished, after the productive forces have also increased
with the all-round development of the individual and all the springs of cooperative wealth
It should be evident from this passage and its context that Marx's final sentence, far from being the point and the culmination of his discussion,
was stated briefly only to be dismissed.
What Marx is saying is that the key to the Communist world is not any such principle
of the distribution of goods, but the eradication of the division of labor, the all-round development
of individual faculties, and the resulting flow of superabundance.
In such a world, the famous slogan becomes of only trivial importance.
Indeed, Marx proceeds immediately after this passage to denounce talk among socialists
of equal right and equitable distribution as ideological nonsense about right and other
trash common among the Democrats and French socialists.
He then quickly adds that it was in general incorrect to make a fuss about so-called distribution
and put the principal stress on it.
The absolute misery and horror of the ultimate stage and a fortiori of the beyond ultimate
stage of communism should now be all too apparent.
The eradication of the division of labor would quickly bring starvation and economic misery
to all.
The abolition of all structures of human interrelation would bring enormous social and spiritual
and even the alleged artistic, intellectual and creative development of all man's faculties in all directions would be totally crippled by the ban on all specialization.
How can true intellectual development or creation come without concentrated effort?
In short, the terrible economic suffering of mankind under communism would be fully matched by its intellectual and spiritual deprivation.
Considering the nature and consequences of communism, to call this horrific dystopia a noble and humanist ideal can at best be considered a grisly joke in questionable taste.
The prevalent notion, for example, that Marxian Communism is a glorious ideal for man, perverted by the later Engels or by Lenin or Stalin, can now be put into proper perspective.
None of the horrors committed by Lenin, Stalin or other Marxist-Leninist regimes can match the monstrousness of Marx's Communist ideal.
Perhaps the closest approximation was the short-lived communist regime of Paul Pott
in Cambodia, which, in attempting to abolish the division of labor, managed to enforce
the outlawry of money, so that for their tiny rations the populace was totally dependent
upon the niggardly largesse of the communist cadre.
Moreover, they attempted to eliminate the contradictions between town and country by following the Engels' goal of destroying large cities and by coercively depopulating the capital, Phnom Penh, overnight.
In a few short years, the Pol Pot group managed to exterminate one-third of the Cambodian population, perhaps a record in genocide.
Since under ideal communism everyone could and would have to do everything, it is clear that even before universal starvation set in, very little could get done.
To Marx himself, all differences among individuals were contradictions to be eliminated under communism, so that presumably the mass of individuals would have to be uniform and interchangeable.
Whereas Marx apparently postulated normal intellectual capabilities even under communism,
to later Marxists it seems that difficulties could be alleviated by the emergence of superhuman beings.
To Karl Kautsky, 1854-1938, the German Marxist who assumed the mantle of the top leadership of Marxism
Upon the Death of Engels in 1895, Under communism, a new type of man will arise, a superman,
an exalted man.
Leon Trotsky waxed even more lyrical.
Man will become incomparably stronger, wiser, finer, his body more harmonious, his movements
more rhythmical, his voice more musical.
The human average will rise to the level of an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx.
Above these other heights, new peaks will rise.
If the beyond ultimate stage of communism ever lasts long enough to breed a new super
race, we may safely leave it to the communist theoreticians of that future day to resolve
the problem of whether the contradiction of permitting a super Aristotle to tower over
or an Aristotle may be allowed to exist.
Neither should libertarians be taken in by the Marxian goal of the withering away of
the state under communism, or in the use of the phrase borrowed from the cherished aim
of the French free market libertarians Charles Comte and Charles de Noyer, a world where
the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things.
There are two major flaws in this formulation from the laissez-faire libertarian viewpoint.
First, of course, as the Russian anarcho-communist Mikhail Bakunin, 1814 to 1876, insistently
pointed out, it is absurd to try to reach statelessness via the absolute maximization
of State Power in a Totalitarian Dictatorship of the Proletariat, or more realistically,
a select vanguard of the said proletariat.
The result can only be maximum statism, and hence maximum slavery.
As perhaps the first of the new class theorists, and anticipating the iron law of oligarchy
of Michel and Mosca, Bakunin prophetically warned that a minority ruling class will once
again after the Marxian revolution rule the majority.
But the Marxists say this minority will consist of the workers.
Yes, no doubt, of former workers who as soon as they become governors or representatives
of the people cease to be workers and start looking down on the working masses from the
of the Heights of State Authority, so that they represent not the people but themselves
and their own claim to rule over others.
Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of human nature.
The terms scientific socialist and scientific socialism, which we meet incessantly in the
works and speeches of the Marxists, are sufficient to prove that the so-called people-state will
will be nothing but a despotism over the masses, exercised by a new and quite small aristocracy
of real or bogus scientists.
They, the Marxists, claim that only dictatorship, their own, of course, can bring the people
freedom.
We reply that a dictatorship can have no other aim than to perpetuate itself, and that it
It can engender and foster nothing but slavery in the people subjected to it.
Freedom can be created only by freedom.
Indeed, only a believer in the preposterous necromancy of the dialectic could believe
otherwise.
That is, could believe that a totalitarian state can inevitably and virtually instantly
be transformed into its opposite, and that therefore the way to get rid of the state
is to work as hard as possible to maximize its power.
But the problem of the dialectic is not the only, indeed not even the main problem with
Marxian communism, for Marxism shares with the anarchists a grave problem of the higher
and the Higher Stage of Pure Communism, assuming for a moment that it could ever be reached.
The crucial point is that both for anarchists and for Marxists, ideal communism is a world
without private property, and that all property and resources will be owned and controlled
in common.
Indeed, the anarcho-communists' major complaint against the state is that it is allegedly
The Truth, of course, is precisely the opposite.
The state, through history, has been the main despoiler and plunderer of private property.
With private property mysteriously abolished, then, the elimination of the state under communism
of either the Marxian or anarchist variety would necessarily be a mere camouflage for
a new state that would emerge to control and make decisions for community-owned resources,
except that the state would not be called such but rather renamed something like a People's
Statistical Bureau, as has already been done in Gaddafi's Libya, and armed with precisely
the same powers.
It will be a small consolation to future victims incarcerated or shot for committing capitalist
acts between consenting adults, to cite a phrase made popular by Robert Nozick, that
their oppressors will no longer be the state, but only a people's statistical bureau.
The state under any other name will smell as acrid.
Furthermore, it will be inevitable under the iron law of oligarchy that world communal
decisions will have to be undertaken by a specialized elite, so that the ruling class
will inevitably reappear under Bakuninite as well as any other form of communism.
And as we have indicated in the Beyond Communism stage, the stage of universal no ownership
and therefore of no action and no use of resources, death for the entire human race would swiftly
ensue.
Marx and his followers have never demonstrated any awareness of the vital importance of the
problem of allocation of scarce resources.
Their vision of communism is that all such economic problems are trivial, requiring neither
The classic absurdity on this matter was laid down by Lenin, who accurately expressed Marx's view in declaring that the functions of entrepreneurship, and of allocation of resources, have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, to mere matters of capital, and to mere matters of capital, and to mere matters of capital, and to mere matters of capital, and to mere matters of capital, and to mere matters of capital.
Ludwig von Mises wryly and justly comments that Marxists and other socialists have had
no greater perception of the essentials of economic life than the errand boy, whose only
The only idea of the work of the entrepreneur is that he covers pieces of paper with letters
and figures.
It is perhaps all too fitting that we now find that the idea of communism as a simple
problem of bookkeeping and registration was perhaps originated by the French apocalyptic
Fantastic Fantast and Inspirer of Marx, Theodore Des Amis
4.
Arriving at Communism
Karl Marx had a crucial problem.
He was not interested, as were the scorned utopian socialists, in merely exhorting everyone
to adopt the communist path to a perfect society.
He did not propose to leave the attainment of Communism to the imperfect free wills of
mankind.
He demanded a certain inevitable path, a law of history that would demonstrate the absolute
inevitability of history's reaching its final glory in a Communist society.
But here he was at a disadvantage relative to the various Christian wings of Messianic
Communism.
For unlike them, there was here no inevitable messiah to arrive and usher in a kingdom of
God on earth.
As in the case of the Post Mills, however, it was up to mankind, rather than the messiah,
to establish the kingdom.
Even without a messiah, a vigilant and growing vanguard could establish the kingdom, and
The Vanguard could even help in various pre-mill versions of millennialism, so that leadership
by a dedicated Vanguard was very much in the messianic tradition.
As Professor Tucker points out, Marx was not lacking a moral theory.
He was definitely a moralist, but a highly curious one.
In his mythic vision, the good, the moral, consists of participating in the inevitable
The answer to the question as to what should be done is given in the mythic vision itself,
and can be summed up in a single word, participate.
So Marx says that it is not a matter of bringing some utopian system or other into being, that
is of defining a social goal and purposefully endeavoring to realize it, but simply of consciously
participating in the historical revolutionary process of society, which is taking place
before our very eyes.
Thus to be moral means to be progressive, to be in tune with the inevitable future workings
as of the laws of history, whereas the harshest condemnation is reserved for those who are
reactionary, who dare to obstruct, even with partial success, such alleged predestined
turns of events.
Thus Marxists are particularly vehement in denouncing revolutionary moments in which
the existing rule of progressives is replaced by reactionaries, and the clock is, miraculously,
and the metaphor of historicist inevitability turned back, for example, the Franco Revolution
against the Spanish Republic and Pinochet's overthrow of Allende in Chile.
But if a certain change is truly inevitable, why is it important for human agency to lend
a hand, indeed to struggle mightily on its behalf?
Here we turn to the critical matter of timing.
While a change may be inevitable, the intervention of man can and will speed up this most desired
of happenings.
Man can function, in one of Marx's favorite obstetrical metaphors, as a midwife of history.
Man's intervention could give the inevitable a helpful push.
Yet Marx's obstetrical analogies are only a feeble attempt to evade the self-contradiction
between the idea of inevitability and action to achieve the inevitable.
For according to Marx, the timing as well as the nature of events is determined by the
material dialectic of history.
Socialism is brought about, wrote Marx in Capital, by the operation of the imminent
laws of capitalistic production itself.
As von Mises points out, to Marx, ideas, political parties and revolutionary actions are merely
superstructural.
They can neither delay nor accelerate the march of history.
Socialism will come when the material conditions for its appearance will have matured in the
womb, obstetrics again, of capitalist society, neither sooner or later.
If Marx had been consistent, he would not have embarked upon any political activity.
He would have waited quietly for the day on which the knell of private capitalist property sounds.
Marx might not have been logical or consistent, but his attitude was squarely in the millennialist tradition.
As Professor Tuvesson points out, several characteristics of historical communist movements
Let's recall millenarian agitations.
There is, for one, the well-known fanaticism of millenarian believers.
The firm conviction that a sequence of events leading to universal redemption is ordained
or determined would seem to lead to passivity on the part of an individual.
But characteristically, there is a vitally important qualification.
Although the series of events is prophesied, their timing may be retarded by the failure
of mankind.
To delay the coming of redemption, then, is a great sin, against one's fellow beings,
against posterity, against the power that has ordained events.
But wholehearted, zealous participation in the historically determined duties, doing
what the old millenarians would call, doing God's will, gives special eclat.
In most millenarian groups, there is something corresponding to the Communist Party.
In Revelation itself, there are the 144,000, the first fruits unto God and to the Lamb,
who are without guile, for they are without fault before the throne of God.
Revelation 14, verses 4 through 5.
Thus the whole proletariat, like the whole body of the saved, is without damning fault,
but the specially distinguished group are chosen from the chosen.
But there was still a remaining problem.
Whence comes the inevitability in the Marxian schema?
The proof that his cherished communist ideal would inevitably, scientifically arrive would
occupy Marx for the rest of his life.
Certainly, he found the outlines of such proof in the mysterious workings of the Hegelian
dialectic, which he bent to his use.
5.
Marx's Character and His Path to Communism
Carl Marx, as the world knows, was born in Trier, a venerable city in Rhineland, Prussia,
in 1818, son of a distinguished jurist and grandson of a rabbi.
Indeed, both of Marx's parents were descended from rabbis.
Marx's father, Heinrich, was a liberal rationalist who felt no great qualms about his forced
conversion to official Lutheranism in 1816.
What is little known is that in his early years, the baptized Carl was a dedicated Christian.
In his graduation essays from the Trier Gymnasium in 1835, the very young Marx prefigured his
later development.
His essay on an assigned topic, on the union of the faithful with Christ, was orthodox
evangelical Christian.
But it also contained hints of the fundamental alienation theme that he would later find
in Hegel.
Marx's discussion of the necessity for union with Christ stressed that this union would
put an end to the tragedy of God's alleged rejection of man.
In a companion essay, Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession, Marx expressed
a worry about his own demon of ambition, of the great temptation he felt to invade against
the deity and curse mankind.
Going first to the University of Bonn, and then off to the prestigious new University
of Berlin to study law, Marx soon converted to militant atheism, shifted his major to philosophy,
and joined a Doctor Club of young or left Hegelians, of which he soon became a leader
and general secretary.
The shift to atheism quickly gave Marx's Demon of Ambition full reign.
Particularly revelatory of Marx's adult as well as youthful character are volumes of poems,
most of them lost until a few were recovered in recent years.
Historians, when they discuss these poems, tend to dismiss them as inchoate romantic
yearnings, but they are too congruent with the adult Marx's social and revolutionary
doctrines to be casually dismissed.
Surely here seems to be a case where a unified, early-plus-late Marx is vividly revealed,
Thus, in his poem, Feelings, dedicated to his childhood sweetheart and later wife, Jenny von Westfallen, Marx expressed both his megalomania and his enormous thirst for destruction,
Heaven, I would comprehend, I would draw the world to me. Living, hating, I intend that my stars shine brilliantly.
And, Worlds I would destroy forever, since I can create no world, since my call they
notice never.
Here is a classical expression of Satan's supposed reason for hating and rebelling against
God.
In another poem, Marx writes of his triumph after he shall have destroyed God's created
world.
Then I will be able to walk triumphantly like a god through the ruins of their kingdom.
Every word of mine is fire and action.
My breast is equal to that of the Creator.
And in his poem Invocation of One in Despair, Marx writes, I shall build my throne high
overhead, cold, tremendous shall its summit be, for its bulwark, superstitious dread,
for its martial, blackest agony.
The Satan theme is most explicitly set forth in Marx's The Fiddler, dedicated to his father.
See this sword?
The Prince of Darkness sold it to me.
And with Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me.
I play the Death March, fast and free.
Particularly instructive is Marx's lengthy, unfinished poetic drama of this youthful period,
Ulanum, A Tragedy.
In the course of this drama, his hero, Ulanum, delivers a remarkable soliloquy, pouring out
sustained invective, a hatred of the world and of mankind, a hatred of creation, and
a threat and vision of total world destruction.
Thus, Ulanum pours out his vials of wrath.
I shall howl gigantic curses on mankind.
Ha!
Eternity!
She is an eternal grief!
Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical, made to be the foul calendars of time and
space, having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined, so that there shall be something
to ruin.
If there is a something which devours, I'll leap within it, though I bring the world to
ruins.
The world which bulks between me and the abyss, I will smash to pieces with my enduring curses.
I'll throw my arms around its harsh reality, embracing me, the world will dumbly pass away,
and then sink down to utter nothingness, perished, with no existence.
The Leaden World holds us fast, and we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened, eternally chained to this marble block of being, and we, we are the apes of a cold god.
All this reveals a spirit that often seems to animate militant atheism.
In contrast to the non-militant variety, which expresses a simple disbelief in God's existence,
militant atheism seems to believe implicitly in God's existence, but to hate him and to
wage war for his destruction.
Such a spirit was all too clearly revealed in the retort of the militant atheist Bakunin
to the famous pro-theist remark of the deist Voltaire.
If God did not exist, it would be necessary to create him.
To which the demented Bakunin retorted, if God did exist, it would be necessary to destroy him.
It was this hatred of God as a creator greater than himself that apparently inspired Karl Marx.
Also prefiguring the man was a trait that Marx developed early in his youth and never
were relinquished, a shameless sponging on friends and relatives.
Already in early 1837, Heinrich Marx, castigating his son Carl's wanton spending of the money
of others, wrote to him that, on one point you have wisely found fit to observe an aristocratic
silence, I am referring to the paltry matter of money.
Indeed, Marx took money from any source available, his father, mother, and throughout his adult life, his long-suffering friend and abject disciple, Friedrich Engels, all of whom fueled Marx's capacity for spending money like water.
An insatiable spender of other people's money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means.
While sponging on Engels, Marx perpetually complained to his friend that his largesse was never enough.
Thus, in 1868, Marx insisted that he could not make due on an annual income of less than 400 to 500 pounds,
a phenomenal sum, considering that the upper tenth of Englishmen in that period were earning an average income of only 72 pounds a year.
Indeed, so profligate was Marx that he quickly ran through an inheritance from a German follower
of 824 pounds in 1864, as well as a gift of 350 pounds from Engels in the same year.
In short, Marx was able to run through the munificent sum of almost 1200 pounds in two
and two years later accept another gift of 210 pounds from Engels to pay off his newly accumulated debts.
Finally, in 1868, Engels sold his share of the family cotton mill and settled upon Marx an annual pension of 350 pounds from then on.
Yet Marx's continual complaints about money did not abate.
As in the case of many other spongers and cadgers throughout history, Carl Marx affected a hatred
and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to catch and use so recklessly.
The difference is that Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes
toward money. Man, he thundered, was in the grip of the fetishism of money. The problem was the
The existence of this evil thing, not the voluntarily adopted attitudes of some people toward it.
Money Marx reviled as the pander between human life and the means of sustenance, the universal horror.
The utopia of communism was a society where this scourge, money, would be abolished.
Carl Marx, the self-proclaimed enemy of the exploitation of man by man, not only exploited
his devoted friend, Friedrich Engels, financially, but also psychologically.
Thus, only three months after Marx's wife Jenny von Vestfallen gave birth to his daughter
Franziska in March 1851, their live-in maid, Helena Lenkin de Moot, whom Marx had inherited
from Jenny's aristocratic family, also gave birth to Marx's illegitimate son, Henry
Frederick.
Desperately anxious to keep up haute bourgeois conventions and to hold his marriage together,
Carl never acknowledged his son, and instead persuaded Engels, a notorious womanizer, to
proclaim the baby as his own.
Both Marx and Engels treated the hapless Freddy extremely badly.
Marx's presumed resentment at being so used providing him a rather better excuse.
Marx boarded Freddie out continually and never allowed him to visit his mother.
As Fritz Radatz, a biographer of Marx, declared, if Henry Frederick de Moot was Karl Marx's
son, the new mankind's preacher lived an almost lifelong lie and scorned, humiliated,
and disowned his only surviving son.
Engels, of course, picked up the tab for Freddie's education.
Freddie was trained, however, to take his place in the working class, far from the lifestyle
of his natural father, the quasi-aristocratic leader of the world's downtrodden revolutionary
proletariat.
Marx's personal taste for the aristocracy was lifelong.
As a young man, he attached himself to his neighbor, Jenny's father, Baron Ludwig von
Westphalen, and dedicated his doctoral thesis to the Baron.
Indeed, the snobbish proletarian communist always insisted that Jenny imprint, ne von
and Vistfalen on her calling card.