What you've heard from Murray Rothbard about some of the background of the radical movements of the 19th century I think is very accurate.
A lot of food for thought, a lot of projects to work on in the future.
I would call Marx not so much a Christian heretic as I would a Christian apostate, which I think very self-consciously he was.
But he was able to tap into a long tradition of revolutionism and conspiratorialism, which had existed certainly from the 13th century and probably, as Murray hinted, can be traced back all the way to Plotinus and the influence of Neoplatonism on the early church.
But my job is not to discuss that today. We're talking more about Marx, the individual, and some interesting and not well known aspects about Marx in his life, which you can, if you work hard enough, dig out of even secondary source literature, but is not widely emphasized and certainly is not found in the textbook accounts of Marx and the influence of Marxism.
There is initially a very important problem which is virtually never discussed, and that is the missing manuscripts.
The historian always is tied one way or another to existing documentary evidence, but there is an enormous volume of suppressed material that the public is not generally aware of.
In Albert Camus' The Rebel, there is a brief reference to the fact that in the Soviet archives, this fact was picked up by a victim of communism.
His name is Richard Wormbrand. Wormbrand is a pastor out in Southern California who for about 14 years was in a Soviet prison, not a Soviet prison, but a communist prison.
I believe in Romania where he was tortured on a regular basis.
So he has a kind of natural hostility to communist ideology
and he got involved in a research project
and he came across this reference in The Rebel
to the fact that there are these enormous quantities of suppressed manuscripts.
So about 1980 he wrote to the director of the Marx Institute in the Soviet Union
The Soviet Union saying, is any of this true?
And the guy wrote back and said, kind of squirmed around, but basically said, well we've had
some trouble, we had intended to publish all of this material, but we've had some trouble
because of the effects of the war.
Which is World War II, which was 35 years prior, and you kind of wonder how it is the
effects of the war are still bottling up this volume of material.
So when we make these speculations about what Marx wrote, what he really thought, I have
a suspicion that the hardcore stuff has been suppressed from the beginning and that until
that has ever opened up, I don't think we're really going to be able to document much of
what we say about the man, but enough of it is available, there are enough primary source
I want to begin with at least a problem I think with respect to Marx and that is the old problem that Lenin points to which you're going to find if you ever come across it, there's a statement in his book,
He writes this in passing as if this is no particular problem for Marxism.
He writes of communist consciousness the following.
This consciousness could only be brought to them, meaning the proletarians, from without.
The history of all countries show that the working class,
The Theory of Socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the property classes, the intellectuals.
The founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.
And then he goes on.
And yet, if you think about that, this poses an enormous problem for the whole structure of Marxism.
Socialism, because how is it that you would find the founders of scientific socialism being
the products of the very bourgeois intellectual class which is going to be overthrown in the
next stage of the development of world historical processes?
And so nothing is said, Lenin simply goes on, he makes a statement, perfectly accurate
statement about Marx's background and Engel's background.
And the fact that communists have generally simply dropped any discussion of this very
difficult exegetical problem, an historical problem, I think is indicative of the theoretical
difficulties of the system.
It's my personal opinion that the reason that Eric Hoffer was such a hot property in the
60s is that they finally found a proletarian dock worker who could spell.
And so they elevated him into this highly intellectual figure, I mean they had been
waiting for this kind of incarnation of the movement for a hundred years and they brought
The difficulty with Marx is, he of all people,
All men in history was not the incarnation of proletarian consciousness and certainly not of proletarian background.
And so I want to talk a little bit about his background and the difficulty that that background creates for Marx's theory.
He was born in 1818.
He was the son of a converted Jew, the Heinrich Marx, who for political and economic reasons
had joined the state church in Trier in what is now Germany.
The father was son of a rabbi.
His mother was also the daughter of a rabbi.
He had rabbis on both sides of his family.
He was trained in the gymnasium,
had a first rate education,
and as Murray has mentioned in his speech,
at one stage at least in the teenage years
was very self-consciously a Christian,
although a liberal and pietistic garden variety of Christian,
he was certainly not rigorously orthodox
or tied to Christian theology,
But he was self-consciously, publicly, a Christian gentleman, young man, son of a Christian gentleman.
His father wanted him to go into law, more or less to inherit the family tradition now.
He expected the young man to be productive and a solid citizen.
The problem that Father Marx had was the problem that generations of parents have been having,
which happens over and over as he sent him off to college and the young man
imbibed rather deeply on the material that he was given and while the father
really couldn't do much about it and was respectful of the son and proud of
the son's intellectual accomplishments, the father realized very clearly that
the son was drifting off into some kind of strange radicalism. The funny thing
Something about this, you can go back to Aristophanes' The Clouds and find almost exactly the same
kind of crisis taking place in this, a man who sends his kid off to study with Socrates
and the kid comes back absolutely a lunatic and the father doesn't know what he can possibly
do with this kid, almost exactly the same thing happens to Karl Marx's father.
And he sees his son in whom he has invested all of this hope, this son is drifting away
into radicalism, and the father, in fact, once made this statement, says that like every weekend, you construct this magnificent, all-important, all-encompassing theoretical system,
only to be scrapped the following weekend for the next all-encompassing theoretical system, and that really is what he did.
He sent him to the University of Bonn, where the son got involved in fraternity operation, got involved in dueling,
seemed to be just destroying himself, spending enormous quantities of the father's money,
which was a habit, by the way, he got into, he never really got over that habit,
and the father kept complaining and finally said, you're going to the University of Berlin,
which was the classic academic workhouse of Europe at that time,
and Marx dutifully went, got involved in a group of left Hegelians,
in a group called the Doctors Club or Professors Club,
which met in a in a tavern on a regular basis. He would go through fits of
enormous quantities of reading and then fits of just basically boozing it up
with the guys at the group and philosophizing. Never graduated from the
University of Berlin, took fewer and fewer courses over the years to where it
was maybe one course a semester, was spending the equivalent, regularly
The equivalent to go to school of anywhere from two to three times the normal income of a family in Germany at the time.
Enormous quantities of money.
And then, would always be begging for more from the father.
Finally, he could not face his doctoral examinations, and so he wrote his dissertation,
which you've heard reference to on Democritus and Epicurus,
and submitted it to the University of Jena.
Back in those days, they had a system that was kind of mail-order degrees.
If you wrote your dissertation, you got a doctorate.
About three or four weeks later, he got his doctorate,
and he went off to become a journalist.
And the father never quite got over it.
He never actually, he was dead by the time Marx graduated,
but he never got over the fact that he would not go into law,
would not do anything productive.
Marx was determined not to get involved in any of these bourgeois activities such as work.
He was absolutely philosophically and religiously opposed labor that was in any way remunerative.
He was very fortunate that he was able to get a series of jobs during this period from radical newspapers,
Most of which were being financed by businessmen who would hire these bright young men to make critical statements about the church,
very strong anti-clerical position, and then very often also, to some degree or other, hostile to certain old traditions of the inherited Germanic class.
They'd hire these radical kids to come in and write the papers, and of course the kids turned around, turned the things,
These papers into revolutionary propaganda devices at which time the state would come
in and shut them all down and the investment of these guys would disappear.
It's very much actually like sending money to a Harvard University through the alumni
annual request for funds, but it was at least in those days they attempted to make a profit
whereas when you send the money to Harvard and Princeton you know darn well there's not
So, in that sense, I guess, the 19th century bourgeois businessman had a little bit more sense than today's.
Now, what happened was they began to fund Marx and he had supporters, proletarian-type supporters, who would send money.
And what I began to do in the last year or thereabouts, I had studied Marx's later career 20 years ago
and found out that in terms of the money that he was getting from Ingalls it
placed him in the upper 2% of all British income recipients which is not
usually found in the textbooks so I began to get curious this last year about
what was the the income level that he was receiving during the period 1844 to
1848, the formative revolutionary period in which true revolutionary consciousness was
brought into the mind of this young bourgeois intellectual.
What he was getting was approximately the equivalent, if you go by conventional standards
today and comparable income levels, of somewhere between $100,000 and $125,000 per year being
were funneled into him by these various bourgeois promoters who were trying to get these revolutionary magazines and newspapers off the ground.
I have yet to see in any published form the fact that this was the level of income that he received.
There are few bits and pieces, especially in the biography by Raditz,
a very fine biography which I recommend by Fritz Raditz on Karl Marx published in the early 1980s.
Raditz gives you the numbers, you know, the numbers of the income,
but he doesn't make comparisons of what the purchasing power of the money was.
and what I did, fortunately, I ran across an obscure historical document, a book published in the 30s on the national industries,
national, they're basically trade union organizations that were set up in 1848 and they began, in this study,
it was published by Harvard University Press about 1933 by Mackey, there were comparisons, studies were done,
Statistics were gathered in 1848 during the revolutionary period in which the Great Revolution was taking place.
They began to do studies of how much money that Paris workers were making.
And it was on the basis of those comparisons that I was able to get at least kind of,
not very accurate, not very sophisticated, but kind of preliminary estimates of how much money Marx was pulling in.
He pulled in over a period of about four years, 15,000 to 16,000 leavers.
I guess that's the pronunciation. My French is abominable.
But it was in terms of the living standards of the day
when the average family was earning four to five hundred a year,
he was doing extremely well, extremely well.
Now, you have the legendary Marx, the Marx of the Soho period,
the period in which Marx lived this poverty-stricken life
and was endlessly begging angles for money.
And that is true. It began about 1848-49,
when he was expelled from country after country
because of his revolutionary activity.
He went to London, and he did live unquestionably
just very poverty-stricken life.
And he was actually so poverty-stricken at one phase
is that he did go out to an employment agency and look for a job.
He was going to be a telegrapher at a train station, except they looked at his handwriting and they said,
there's no possible way you could be employed here, and that was it.
That was his one quest for employment during an academic career of about 45 years.
He went home dejected and immediately wrote to Engels for more money.
Unfortunately for Engels, he could read Marx's handwriting and so would continually send money to him when he'd get these pleas.
He did work for a time for New York Daily News, which was...
Charles Henry Dana was the editor at the time and Horace Greeley was the owner.
But during most of the period, Engels actually ghost wrote the articles which Marx was submitting under his name
Marx would get one pound per article,
and that was one of the major sources of income
during this hard period.
Because it was true that during this period,
if you absolutely refused to get a job
and all of your colleagues in Europe,
that you got into the revolution,
been thrown in jail or run out of the country,
your income level tends to drop over this period.
And so he did have this tight period for about 15 years.
But understand, this was after the communist,
for the Communist Manifesto was written.
This was after the German ideology was written.
In other words, his whole world and life view
was put together during a period
in which he was making the equivalent of $100,000 a year.
That's what it boils down to.
The crisis period of his life came basically
because during that period of European history,
there were no nonprofit foundations
supported by major American capitalists
In 1864, he inherited a large chunk of money from one of his followers, Wilhelm Wulff, and the equivalent income for the average working man during the period was right at the time of the Civil War.
And you had tremendous depression going on in England because you had an American embargo being placed on the export of the South's cotton.
And so the mills had really shut down in Britain. It had disrupted manufacturing processes, the whole textile industry.
And since Engels was getting all his money because he worked at his father's textile plant and was basically the owner of the textile plant in 1864,
For Engels had had to stop sending Marx as much money.
So Marx was suffering through this period.
Well, Wolf's legacy came in, and it was the equivalent...
Well, if the average British worker was making anywhere from 35 to 50 pounds per year,
the legacy was something in the range of about a thousand pounds.
when your average year's income was 50 or less.
So he was doing very well.
Within one year, he was begging, begging Engels
to send him more money because the pawnbrokers
had gotten him again and he was still paying
30 and 40% per annum to the pawnbrokers.
He had gone through the entire thing.
The entire legacy was gone.
Did the same thing with whatever he inherited
from his mother when the mother died.
I mean, this process went on time and again in his life.
Finally Engels was able during the last 15 or 20 years of his life to place him on about a 250 pound per year pension which was something in the range of four to five times your average family income at Britain at the time.
He bought a very nice home, one of the best upper middle class bourgeois districts of London, which he lived in for the remainder of his life, writing or at least collecting as many books as he could on every conceivable topic, learning all kinds of new disciplines, learning all kinds of languages.
A remarkable scholar. There's no question that he was extremely good in terms of what he was willing to do to study so long as it was not remunerative employment.
He was willing to go to almost any length as long as he wouldn't actually have to go out and get a job and be on anybody's payroll.
Now what happened was this, and this you also don't get, it's been alluded to, and I really didn't perceive it, the importance of it, until earlier this year when I was working on a Marx biography, this project.
Das Kapital was published in 1867. Now if you get, if you go down to your friendly commie bookstore, and they're going to give you the selected writings of Marx and Engels, very common published in the U.S., or distributed in the U.S., but it's printed typeset in the Soviet Union, three volumes set, selected works, very standard set that all the scholars use.
The most peculiar fact about this three-volume set is that the center point of it is about 1860, 62, 63.
It does not include capital, but it includes the smaller works.
And all of a sudden, Marx's name disappears.
And you keep paging through the last volume and a half of this set, there are two essays, Critique of the Goethe Program, which was done in 1876, if I remember.
I know David Gordon will obviously have a more accurate date, but I think it was about 1876.
and one other one of the other major essay that he did longer work was on the
Paris Commune and that was it and so then I finally said now wait a minute
when does this break take place and it's at the publication of capital in 1867
and I thought how old was it and I rapidly computed backwards born in 1818
He was 49 years old.
And at that point, everything stopped.
He didn't do any more articles.
He didn't do any more pamphlets.
He didn't do any more newspaper articles because Engels had put him on the pension.
He absolutely stopped.
He had most of volumes two and three of capital finished.
He had the Grundrisse finished.
I mean, to the extent they were notes to himself.
And at the age of 49, he drops out.
He becomes the ultimate hippie. He doesn't again do anything except read voluminous quantities of books,
which he never referred to again, in every conceivable field.
They went in after his death. Engels went in two cubic feet of books on Soviet, not Soviet, but Russian economic statistics.
He learned Danish, he began to take all these notes on chemistry, chemical reactions, agriculture.
He learned Russian, absolutely buried himself for the next 15 years in studies so that he would never again have to publish.
And Engels begged him throughout the entire period, you've got to publish, you've got to get this into a final form.
We need the backup volumes of capital.
I know you've got them.
When are you going to get the works out?
And Marx would say over and over,
well, soon I'm working on it.
I've just got a few loose ends to tie up
and you'll have them.
He died with them.
And as has already been pointed out,
the last three paragraphs are on the definition of classes.
Now he finished that paragraph, as far as we know,
prior to the publication of Volume 1 of Capital.
He short-circuited.
Now my opinion is, and there's no way to psychoanalyze the man,
but I think what happened was he really did realize that there was no way around
the criticisms which he knew somebody was going to give him
on the labor theory of value and its relationship to prices.
I don't want to go into the technical details because you're going to get a paper I read to you tomorrow on Boehm-Bawerk's criticism of Marx,
but I think Marx was a sophisticated enough man to sit down.
He knew, he knew the objections which were going to be made, which is why he wrote volume two and three of capital.
He had the notes already in front of him, but it boils down to this.
If you have a labor theory of value,
then it's clear that you get rich
by exploiting large numbers of people.
And yet his own theory said through capitalist competition,
there'll be all of this investment in equipment,
plant and equipment and basic capital.
Instead of variable capital,
which was the wages that you would pay to the worker,
you had all of this money tied up into fixed capital
or capital equipment.
But the problem is as you got more and more
by the Marxian theory you would have of this incredible falling rate of profit and in fact the only rational thing to do was to sell all the equipment, move the entire plant to either India or China and hire nothing but cruelly labor because if your profit's only going to be the capital, you're not going to be able to make a profit, you're not going to be able to make a profit.
clearly come from the exploitation of labor, clearly you're an idiot if you're putting all of your money into fixed capital equipment.
He knew there was no answer for it. Boehm-Bawerk pilloried him in 1884.
The only advantage that Marx had at that time was that he had died in 1883.
But the fact of the matter was, he was a sophisticated enough scholar that I believe he realized what the problem was.
And he wrote this letter, his classic letter, in 1858, back to Engels, in which he said,
very shortly I'm going to be done with all of this economic scheisse, which I'm going to leave untranslated.
But he did decide that he would not spend the rest of his life cranking out scheisse.
and he didn't, he was sick of it and he dropped it.
Now, this leads back, I think, to a problem in his own life,
a problem which the biographers don't usually like to stress,
and that is he never ever abandoned his commitment to bourgeois life,
bourgeois culture, bourgeois standard of living.
And, in fact, he was way above bourgeois at the, as I say, at the end of his life.
Certainly, he was in the top four or five, maybe three percent of income.
Certainly, during the periods when he would get the inheritances or a legacy,
it would knock him up into the upper one or two percent of levels of British income.
Lived in a great home, nice home.
His wife would give very fancy balls and parties.
They would invite in bourgeois acquaintances in the community.
He lived a very, very nice life during the phase of his life when he was writing Das Kapital.
So what it boils down to is this, in the phase of the period of the Communist Manifesto 1848,
he was in the top 1 or 2 percent of income of the continent of France and in the period
of writing Das Kapital at the end of it and finishing up, of course he didn't finish up
but getting the manuscripts ready for the last two volumes of capital.
He again was at least in the top four or five percent of British income.
This makes it somewhat difficult to defend Marxist economic theory in the concept of
class alignment and the commitment of the entire party to gain the support of the proletariat
based on the incredible oppression of the proletariat because it's clear from the life
of Marx and Engels that the best way to get yourself real proletarian commitment is to
is to be born a bourgeois and go to college, which is almost exactly what we have found
in the history of Marxism ever since, and the only exceptions that you find to the history
of Marxist society were, according to Marxist theory, there cannot possibly be a revolution,
because they have not industrialized.
So in fact, the major targets in the West, the industrialized West, your major successful
targets of the Marxist world view has been the bourgeois upper middle class and wealthy
income level graduate student in major universities or poverty stricken peasants whose societies
have not yet gone through industrialization.
In other words, in terms of the Marxist theory, the two places which you would not look to
get all of your support ideologically have been the only two places that they have been
Unable historically to gain the support, and so they don't talk about it.
They simply don't talk about it in terms of their own histories of their own movement.
Now let's go to the kind of question that I think has to be raised.
If you find that you're recruiting precisely from those elements of the population which
should be least attuned and least receptive to your message, then on what basis are you
gaining the recruits?
The first choice is, are you gaining them because of the truth of the system, the ideological
rigor of the system?
And the second position, the second question which you would ask is, are you winning them
because of their perceived self-interest in moving out of their existing class and into the communist cadre.
In other words, what is it? Is it intellectual rigor, the vision of the overall system of Marxism,
or is it simply good old-fashioned capitalist self-interest that is bringing these people into your movement?
And the difficulty they find, time and time again, is that it is this accent in Marxism, which Mises stressed in socialism,
this accent on historical inevitability, which has been the great tool of gaining support among these groups
that normally you would not expect to move to your ideological system, given Marxist class analysis.
And Mises said the most important single doctrine of all of Marxism is the doctrine of the inevitability of the success of the proletarian revolution.
He said all the rest of it is secondary compared to the power of that one idea.
Now Murray has traced briefly in his presentation something about the doctrine, Christian doctrines of eschatology.
And I think those are very, very important doctrines.
and this particular discussion that he raised has not usually been found in even the more specialized monographs of the background leading up to Marxist history.
There is one book that at least does cover it fairly well.
It is written by a mathematician who still lives in the Soviet Union.
His name is Igor Shafarevich and it is called the Socialist Phenomenon.
Right Up to the Modern World.
Now, I'm going to throw this in as an aside.
It may not be of any use to you, but you've got to understand something extremely important.
I'm going to give you a date.
Historians are always looking for watershed dates.
We write dissertations about them.
We make ourselves famous if we can just find a watershed date.
The watershed date is 1660.
In 1660, the Puritan experiment failed politically in Britain and they brought back King Charles II, the Cavalier, the representative of the Stuart monarchy, to take over as the English monarch.
They welcomed him back and did their best not to remind them that 11 years before they had chopped off his father's head.
So they were these great supporters of the monarchy and they brought them back in and with that was the collapse of the Puritan experiment.
I mean the Cromwell forces, the Digger communist forces, the Leveller forces, all of them were swept away during the reaction period from 1660 to 1670.
And there was tremendous reaction.
And any pastor who did not swear in 1662 to the Anglican faith was thrown out of the pastorate, hundreds of these Puritan preachers were thrown out of the pastorate, they could no longer preach, they could no longer get into the churches, and it was a revolution, it was a very effective political revolution against the Puritan movement, and it never again surfaced.
Now, what you've got to understand was during this period that these revolutionary movements, which had been tied to Christianity, Christian language, what Murray has called Christian heretical doctrines, overnight, and Chauffeur Average talks about it, overnight, all that language disappeared, just categorically disappeared.
And from that point on, to the extent that you had popular revolutionary tracks, the language was secularized.
Now, I don't think the system was secularized, but the language was secularized.
And so, you did not have the discussions of the Holy Spirit.
You did not have the age of the Father, the age of the Son, the age of the Holy Ghost.
But what you get to encompass in the 19th century is the age of religion, the age of metaphysics, and the age of reason.
The same tripartite division, but completely empty of the old theological language.
and Shafarevich talks about that he said from that point on from 1660 approximately 1660 on you don't find
Christian heretics or the language of Christian heresy in the tracks of the revolutionaries any longer
But of course the concepts stay the same the goal the political motivation stays the same the great vision of the secular
foundation of it theologically
disappears
Until
1965 and then all of a sudden overnight almost literally overnight there was a
shift. Stimics such as Otto Scott have traced it to the failure of the
communist revolution in Indonesia. There was an attempted coup you may have seen
the movie the year of living dangerously it's a it's a movie about that period
and the communist revolution failed there and there was an enormous reaction against it in which as many as a hundred thousand Chinese were killed because the Chinese have been extremely successful entrepreneurs in the country they owned a big chunk of the capital and the anti-communist terrorism that resulted was to a great extent racially oriented and Scott says at that point
At that point, it became aware in the highest levels of communist planning in the Soviet Union
that you could no longer attempt successfully to take over a nation that had deep religious roots.
You would have to restructure your ideology and your pitch, basically, your pamphlets,
so that the language of the existing religious, what would you call it, superstructure in Marxist language,
but in fact it was admission that it wasn't just superstructure, it was infrastructure, it's a basic commitment of the population, you have to switch your language.
Thus was born, and now promoted, liberation theology, which is sweeping Latin America, has taken over seminary after seminary.
Malachy Martin's book, The Jesuits, showed that since 1965 it has utterly swept through and captured the Jesuit order.
All of this based on the original concept, I believe, going back to Joaquin, that you've got to have a religious and theological motivation if you're going to successfully capture the minds of the people.
I see Marx as a kind of brief period, the Marxist vision as a brief period in which atheism, while the motivating goal of the founder, in effect has been repudiated.
And the rise of liberation theology, especially in Central America, I think is almost like a nail in the coffin.
We do have the discussions now, well, is Gorbachev really going to decentralize and are they really going to turn the collective farms over to the people and so forth?
But the old system died, I believe, as soon as the development of liberation theology and the development of the communist alliance with liberation theology began to make major moves in Latin America and especially Central America.
of America. If you've abandoned the atheism of the Marxist system, if that is no longer
a high priority on the agenda, then I think after that the system just simply disintegrates.
Because I see that as the great motivation of Marx. To create a secular atheistic millennium
with all of the benefits and all of the promises of the old millennium that Joaquin was trying
and that the whole Taborite movement, 16th century radical movements, and obviously as
already been mentioned the murderous side of the Anabaptists, all of that tradition was
brought in lock, stock and barrel in terms of the vision of it into Marxism, but it just
won't play in Peoria, or if it plays in Peoria it's only in the city college of Peoria that
it's going to play, it is not going to play out where the people are.
And so I believe Marxism is now using liberation theology, the language of Christianity, in
a sense going back to 1658 and earlier as a kind of motivational shot in the, I mean
they're shooting up on God is what it boils down to.
The atheists are now committed, organizationally, that they cannot be successful if they don't
once again go back to the religious roots, pull the language of theology, the language
of millennialism, and transmit it almost as the old alchemist philosopher's stone to transmit
and transmute the old language of 1640 which was theological into a new kind of transformation
which again is theological, still is messianic, still is millennialist, still is communist
to the core, but which can now be sold to the audience that you're trying to hit today
which is overwhelmingly religious because they aren't selling the product in the urban
Industrial West. It doesn't have a market. If you're going to sell this product where
the people are, you've got to sell it on the basis of religious language and religious
commitment. And I see this as really the end of Marxism. Now, this is not to say that the
basic vision has been overwhelmed. It hasn't been. Because it was not volume two of Capital
Capital, or even Volume 1 of Capital, which was the way that they made the pitch in 1867.
It was this vision of the transformation of man, of the transformation of man by means
of transforming the institutions of society, of remaking man in the image of this messianic
character.
That was the original motivation of the Marxist movement.
Not all the footnotes in Capital and not all the talk about which chart is the accurate
taught the chart, they were not, they didn't care about the organic composition
of capital. I mean, there is nobody that you're going to find in Central
America, you know, you don't come across the dead bodies of revolutionaries and
employees of the Nicaraguan government closely clutching to their breasts a copy
Copy of Das Kapital, that is not what you're going to find, but you may well find some
tract by the people's church on the liberation of man under the new alliance between the
Nicaraguan government and the state religion, which is now liberation theology, and openly
so.
So what I'm saying is this, the life of Marx is a giant refutation theology of who you
It's not based on the rigors of the system intellectually, it's based on this vision
of world transformation and the other very self-interested vision of whose side do you
get on early in order to be able to drive the push of the New World Order.
I want to leave, I think, with a quote from Mises, a section from Notes and Recollections.
Here I think is the essence, and Mises saw it, of the impossibility of trying to assess
the triumph of the Marxist system and the success of the revolution by taking seriously
anything in the Marxist corpus.
This is from page 5 of his notes and recollections.
Herr Scobar, a petty police official who later became Chancellor of Austria toward the end
of 1915, reported to his superiors that he doubted the possibility of a Russian Revolution.
Who then could make this revolution?
Certainly not this Mr. Trotsky who used to read newspapers in the Cafe Central.
In the version I've also seen of that statement, which I've not been able to track down, the
guy actually said certainly not this Mr. Bronstein sitting over there with the cup of coffee.
Because Mr. Bronstein wore glasses, he read, he drank coffee.
He was in the bourgeois setting of a free society.
Surely not Mr. Bronstein over there was going to lead this revolution successfully.
In effect, I think the West has taken too seriously the Marxist system.
It is only by denying the Marxist system, the atheism, the religious underpinnings,
The Supposed Rationality, the success of it at the key period of the industrial west.
It is only by throwing out all of that, going almost to its exact opposite, that you're
going to make sense of the appeal of the communist movement, that you're going to make any sense
whatsoever of the history of scientific socialism.
It is only when you finally abandon Marxism as a tool of intellectual and social analysis
that you can make any sense of Marxism whatsoever.
Thank you very much.