WEBVTT NOTE The Marx Nobody Knows 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:13.000 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. 2 00:00:13.000 --> 00:00:19.000 A lot of food for thought, a lot of projects to work on in the future. 3 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:29.000 I would call Marx not so much a Christian heretic as I would a Christian apostate, which I think very self-consciously he was. 4 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:51.000 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. 5 00:00:51.000 --> 00:01:19.000 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. 6 00:01:19.000 --> 00:01:29.000 There is initially a very important problem which is virtually never discussed, and that is the missing manuscripts. 7 00:01:29.000 --> 00:01:44.000 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. 8 00:01:44.000 --> 00:01:59.000 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. 9 00:01:59.000 --> 00:02:11.000 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. 10 00:02:11.000 --> 00:02:15.000 I believe in Romania where he was tortured on a regular basis. 11 00:02:15.000 --> 00:02:19.000 So he has a kind of natural hostility to communist ideology 12 00:02:19.000 --> 00:02:22.000 and he got involved in a research project 13 00:02:22.000 --> 00:02:26.000 and he came across this reference in The Rebel 14 00:02:26.000 --> 00:02:31.000 to the fact that there are these enormous quantities of suppressed manuscripts. 15 00:02:31.000 --> 00:02:38.000 So about 1980 he wrote to the director of the Marx Institute in the Soviet Union 16 00:02:38.000 --> 00:02:41.440 The Soviet Union saying, is any of this true? 17 00:02:41.440 --> 00:02:47.120 And the guy wrote back and said, kind of squirmed around, but basically said, well we've had 18 00:02:47.120 --> 00:02:52.480 some trouble, we had intended to publish all of this material, but we've had some trouble 19 00:02:52.480 --> 00:02:55.680 because of the effects of the war. 20 00:02:55.680 --> 00:03:01.120 Which is World War II, which was 35 years prior, and you kind of wonder how it is the 21 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:07.940 effects of the war are still bottling up this volume of material. 22 00:03:07.940 --> 00:03:13.580 So when we make these speculations about what Marx wrote, what he really thought, I have 23 00:03:13.580 --> 00:03:19.660 a suspicion that the hardcore stuff has been suppressed from the beginning and that until 24 00:03:19.660 --> 00:03:25.500 that has ever opened up, I don't think we're really going to be able to document much of 25 00:03:25.500 --> 00:03:31.340 what we say about the man, but enough of it is available, there are enough primary source 26 00:03:31.340 --> 00:04:00.340 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, 27 00:04:00.340 --> 00:04:09.340 He writes this in passing as if this is no particular problem for Marxism. 28 00:04:09.340 --> 00:04:15.340 He writes of communist consciousness the following. 29 00:04:15.340 --> 00:04:24.340 This consciousness could only be brought to them, meaning the proletarians, from without. 30 00:04:24.340 --> 00:04:28.340 The history of all countries show that the working class, 31 00:04:28.340 --> 00:04:52.340 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. 32 00:04:52.340 --> 00:05:03.340 The founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. 33 00:05:03.340 --> 00:05:06.340 And then he goes on. 34 00:05:06.340 --> 00:05:14.340 And yet, if you think about that, this poses an enormous problem for the whole structure of Marxism. 35 00:05:14.340 --> 00:05:21.660 Socialism, because how is it that you would find the founders of scientific socialism being 36 00:05:21.660 --> 00:05:28.260 the products of the very bourgeois intellectual class which is going to be overthrown in the 37 00:05:28.260 --> 00:05:34.540 next stage of the development of world historical processes? 38 00:05:34.540 --> 00:05:38.740 And so nothing is said, Lenin simply goes on, he makes a statement, perfectly accurate 39 00:05:38.740 --> 00:05:45.640 statement about Marx's background and Engel's background. 40 00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:52.100 And the fact that communists have generally simply dropped any discussion of this very 41 00:05:52.100 --> 00:05:59.620 difficult exegetical problem, an historical problem, I think is indicative of the theoretical 42 00:05:59.620 --> 00:06:03.140 difficulties of the system. 43 00:06:03.140 --> 00:06:09.860 It's my personal opinion that the reason that Eric Hoffer was such a hot property in the 44 00:06:09.860 --> 00:06:17.420 60s is that they finally found a proletarian dock worker who could spell. 45 00:06:17.420 --> 00:06:22.020 And so they elevated him into this highly intellectual figure, I mean they had been 46 00:06:22.020 --> 00:06:27.540 waiting for this kind of incarnation of the movement for a hundred years and they brought 47 00:06:27.540 --> 00:06:57.540 The difficulty with Marx is, he of all people, 48 00:06:57.540 --> 00:07:08.340 All men in history was not the incarnation of proletarian consciousness and certainly not of proletarian background. 49 00:07:08.340 --> 00:07:18.140 And so I want to talk a little bit about his background and the difficulty that that background creates for Marx's theory. 50 00:07:18.140 --> 00:07:23.100 He was born in 1818. 51 00:07:23.100 --> 00:07:32.140 He was the son of a converted Jew, the Heinrich Marx, who for political and economic reasons 52 00:07:32.140 --> 00:07:38.540 had joined the state church in Trier in what is now Germany. 53 00:07:38.540 --> 00:07:43.740 The father was son of a rabbi. 54 00:07:43.740 --> 00:07:46.460 His mother was also the daughter of a rabbi. 55 00:07:46.460 --> 00:07:49.780 He had rabbis on both sides of his family. 56 00:07:50.860 --> 00:07:53.180 He was trained in the gymnasium, 57 00:07:53.180 --> 00:07:54.900 had a first rate education, 58 00:07:54.900 --> 00:07:58.140 and as Murray has mentioned in his speech, 59 00:07:58.140 --> 00:08:00.820 at one stage at least in the teenage years 60 00:08:00.820 --> 00:08:03.100 was very self-consciously a Christian, 61 00:08:03.100 --> 00:08:08.100 although a liberal and pietistic garden variety of Christian, 62 00:08:08.500 --> 00:08:10.780 he was certainly not rigorously orthodox 63 00:08:10.780 --> 00:08:13.420 or tied to Christian theology, 64 00:08:13.420 --> 00:08:21.420 But he was self-consciously, publicly, a Christian gentleman, young man, son of a Christian gentleman. 65 00:08:21.420 --> 00:08:28.420 His father wanted him to go into law, more or less to inherit the family tradition now. 66 00:08:28.420 --> 00:08:35.420 He expected the young man to be productive and a solid citizen. 67 00:08:35.420 --> 00:08:42.420 The problem that Father Marx had was the problem that generations of parents have been having, 68 00:08:42.420 --> 00:08:49.460 which happens over and over as he sent him off to college and the young man 69 00:08:49.460 --> 00:08:56.860 imbibed rather deeply on the material that he was given and while the father 70 00:08:56.860 --> 00:09:00.900 really couldn't do much about it and was respectful of the son and proud of 71 00:09:00.900 --> 00:09:04.580 the son's intellectual accomplishments, the father realized very clearly that 72 00:09:04.580 --> 00:09:10.900 the son was drifting off into some kind of strange radicalism. The funny thing 73 00:09:10.900 --> 00:09:17.460 Something about this, you can go back to Aristophanes' The Clouds and find almost exactly the same 74 00:09:17.460 --> 00:09:22.260 kind of crisis taking place in this, a man who sends his kid off to study with Socrates 75 00:09:22.260 --> 00:09:27.660 and the kid comes back absolutely a lunatic and the father doesn't know what he can possibly 76 00:09:27.660 --> 00:09:33.460 do with this kid, almost exactly the same thing happens to Karl Marx's father. 77 00:09:33.460 --> 00:09:38.660 And he sees his son in whom he has invested all of this hope, this son is drifting away 78 00:09:38.660 --> 00:09:51.660 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, 79 00:09:51.660 --> 00:09:59.360 only to be scrapped the following weekend for the next all-encompassing theoretical system, and that really is what he did. 80 00:09:59.360 --> 00:10:08.360 He sent him to the University of Bonn, where the son got involved in fraternity operation, got involved in dueling, 81 00:10:08.360 --> 00:10:14.120 seemed to be just destroying himself, spending enormous quantities of the father's money, 82 00:10:14.120 --> 00:10:17.880 which was a habit, by the way, he got into, he never really got over that habit, 83 00:10:17.880 --> 00:10:21.960 and the father kept complaining and finally said, you're going to the University of Berlin, 84 00:10:21.960 --> 00:10:27.320 which was the classic academic workhouse of Europe at that time, 85 00:10:27.320 --> 00:10:33.640 and Marx dutifully went, got involved in a group of left Hegelians, 86 00:10:33.640 --> 00:10:36.600 in a group called the Doctors Club or Professors Club, 87 00:10:36.600 --> 00:10:42.000 which met in a in a tavern on a regular basis. He would go through fits of 88 00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:46.200 enormous quantities of reading and then fits of just basically boozing it up 89 00:10:46.200 --> 00:10:50.920 with the guys at the group and philosophizing. Never graduated from the 90 00:10:50.920 --> 00:10:55.800 University of Berlin, took fewer and fewer courses over the years to where it 91 00:10:55.800 --> 00:11:01.840 was maybe one course a semester, was spending the equivalent, regularly 92 00:11:01.840 --> 00:11:11.340 The equivalent to go to school of anywhere from two to three times the normal income of a family in Germany at the time. 93 00:11:11.340 --> 00:11:13.840 Enormous quantities of money. 94 00:11:13.840 --> 00:11:17.840 And then, would always be begging for more from the father. 95 00:11:17.840 --> 00:11:24.840 Finally, he could not face his doctoral examinations, and so he wrote his dissertation, 96 00:11:24.840 --> 00:11:30.840 which you've heard reference to on Democritus and Epicurus, 97 00:11:30.840 --> 00:11:35.840 and submitted it to the University of Jena. 98 00:11:35.840 --> 00:11:39.840 Back in those days, they had a system that was kind of mail-order degrees. 99 00:11:39.840 --> 00:11:41.840 If you wrote your dissertation, you got a doctorate. 100 00:11:41.840 --> 00:11:43.840 About three or four weeks later, he got his doctorate, 101 00:11:43.840 --> 00:11:47.840 and he went off to become a journalist. 102 00:11:47.840 --> 00:11:49.840 And the father never quite got over it. 103 00:11:49.840 --> 00:11:52.840 He never actually, he was dead by the time Marx graduated, 104 00:11:52.840 --> 00:11:55.840 but he never got over the fact that he would not go into law, 105 00:11:55.840 --> 00:11:57.840 would not do anything productive. 106 00:11:57.840 --> 00:12:03.340 Marx was determined not to get involved in any of these bourgeois activities such as work. 107 00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:11.840 He was absolutely philosophically and religiously opposed labor that was in any way remunerative. 108 00:12:11.840 --> 00:12:21.340 He was very fortunate that he was able to get a series of jobs during this period from radical newspapers, 109 00:12:21.340 --> 00:12:32.340 Most of which were being financed by businessmen who would hire these bright young men to make critical statements about the church, 110 00:12:32.340 --> 00:12:43.340 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. 111 00:12:43.340 --> 00:12:49.340 They'd hire these radical kids to come in and write the papers, and of course the kids turned around, turned the things, 112 00:12:49.340 --> 00:12:55.780 These papers into revolutionary propaganda devices at which time the state would come 113 00:12:55.780 --> 00:13:01.840 in and shut them all down and the investment of these guys would disappear. 114 00:13:01.840 --> 00:13:07.900 It's very much actually like sending money to a Harvard University through the alumni 115 00:13:07.900 --> 00:13:15.020 annual request for funds, but it was at least in those days they attempted to make a profit 116 00:13:15.020 --> 00:13:18.400 whereas when you send the money to Harvard and Princeton you know darn well there's not 117 00:13:18.400 --> 00:13:25.400 So, in that sense, I guess, the 19th century bourgeois businessman had a little bit more sense than today's. 118 00:13:25.400 --> 00:13:34.400 Now, what happened was they began to fund Marx and he had supporters, proletarian-type supporters, who would send money. 119 00:13:34.400 --> 00:13:43.400 And what I began to do in the last year or thereabouts, I had studied Marx's later career 20 years ago 120 00:13:43.400 --> 00:13:48.280 and found out that in terms of the money that he was getting from Ingalls it 121 00:13:48.280 --> 00:13:54.760 placed him in the upper 2% of all British income recipients which is not 122 00:13:54.760 --> 00:14:01.880 usually found in the textbooks so I began to get curious this last year about 123 00:14:01.880 --> 00:14:09.160 what was the the income level that he was receiving during the period 1844 to 124 00:14:09.160 --> 00:14:17.080 1848, the formative revolutionary period in which true revolutionary consciousness was 125 00:14:17.080 --> 00:14:23.240 brought into the mind of this young bourgeois intellectual. 126 00:14:23.240 --> 00:14:29.440 What he was getting was approximately the equivalent, if you go by conventional standards 127 00:14:29.440 --> 00:14:38.320 today and comparable income levels, of somewhere between $100,000 and $125,000 per year being 128 00:14:38.320 --> 00:14:53.320 were funneled into him by these various bourgeois promoters who were trying to get these revolutionary magazines and newspapers off the ground. 129 00:14:53.320 --> 00:15:03.320 I have yet to see in any published form the fact that this was the level of income that he received. 130 00:15:03.320 --> 00:15:08.020 There are few bits and pieces, especially in the biography by Raditz, 131 00:15:08.020 --> 00:15:16.220 a very fine biography which I recommend by Fritz Raditz on Karl Marx published in the early 1980s. 132 00:15:16.220 --> 00:15:22.620 Raditz gives you the numbers, you know, the numbers of the income, 133 00:15:22.620 --> 00:15:27.920 but he doesn't make comparisons of what the purchasing power of the money was. 134 00:15:27.920 --> 00:15:39.920 and what I did, fortunately, I ran across an obscure historical document, a book published in the 30s on the national industries, 135 00:15:39.920 --> 00:15:49.420 national, they're basically trade union organizations that were set up in 1848 and they began, in this study, 136 00:15:49.420 --> 00:15:56.620 it was published by Harvard University Press about 1933 by Mackey, there were comparisons, studies were done, 137 00:15:56.620 --> 00:16:05.220 Statistics were gathered in 1848 during the revolutionary period in which the Great Revolution was taking place. 138 00:16:05.220 --> 00:16:09.420 They began to do studies of how much money that Paris workers were making. 139 00:16:09.420 --> 00:16:14.020 And it was on the basis of those comparisons that I was able to get at least kind of, 140 00:16:14.020 --> 00:16:23.420 not very accurate, not very sophisticated, but kind of preliminary estimates of how much money Marx was pulling in. 141 00:16:23.420 --> 00:16:31.940 He pulled in over a period of about four years, 15,000 to 16,000 leavers. 142 00:16:31.940 --> 00:16:36.540 I guess that's the pronunciation. My French is abominable. 143 00:16:36.540 --> 00:16:40.300 But it was in terms of the living standards of the day 144 00:16:40.300 --> 00:16:44.860 when the average family was earning four to five hundred a year, 145 00:16:44.860 --> 00:16:49.020 he was doing extremely well, extremely well. 146 00:16:49.020 --> 00:16:54.820 Now, you have the legendary Marx, the Marx of the Soho period, 147 00:16:54.820 --> 00:16:58.020 the period in which Marx lived this poverty-stricken life 148 00:16:58.020 --> 00:17:00.420 and was endlessly begging angles for money. 149 00:17:00.420 --> 00:17:04.020 And that is true. It began about 1848-49, 150 00:17:04.020 --> 00:17:06.620 when he was expelled from country after country 151 00:17:06.620 --> 00:17:08.220 because of his revolutionary activity. 152 00:17:08.220 --> 00:17:11.920 He went to London, and he did live unquestionably 153 00:17:11.920 --> 00:17:14.820 just very poverty-stricken life. 154 00:17:14.820 --> 00:17:18.720 And he was actually so poverty-stricken at one phase 155 00:17:18.720 --> 00:17:23.720 is that he did go out to an employment agency and look for a job. 156 00:17:23.720 --> 00:17:30.720 He was going to be a telegrapher at a train station, except they looked at his handwriting and they said, 157 00:17:30.720 --> 00:17:33.720 there's no possible way you could be employed here, and that was it. 158 00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:39.720 That was his one quest for employment during an academic career of about 45 years. 159 00:17:39.720 --> 00:17:44.720 He went home dejected and immediately wrote to Engels for more money. 160 00:17:44.720 --> 00:17:52.720 Unfortunately for Engels, he could read Marx's handwriting and so would continually send money to him when he'd get these pleas. 161 00:17:52.720 --> 00:17:59.720 He did work for a time for New York Daily News, which was... 162 00:17:59.720 --> 00:18:05.720 Charles Henry Dana was the editor at the time and Horace Greeley was the owner. 163 00:18:05.720 --> 00:18:13.720 But during most of the period, Engels actually ghost wrote the articles which Marx was submitting under his name 164 00:18:13.720 --> 00:18:16.840 Marx would get one pound per article, 165 00:18:16.840 --> 00:18:19.880 and that was one of the major sources of income 166 00:18:19.880 --> 00:18:21.480 during this hard period. 167 00:18:21.480 --> 00:18:23.600 Because it was true that during this period, 168 00:18:23.600 --> 00:18:25.480 if you absolutely refused to get a job 169 00:18:25.480 --> 00:18:27.200 and all of your colleagues in Europe, 170 00:18:27.200 --> 00:18:29.160 that you got into the revolution, 171 00:18:29.160 --> 00:18:32.000 been thrown in jail or run out of the country, 172 00:18:32.000 --> 00:18:35.200 your income level tends to drop over this period. 173 00:18:35.200 --> 00:18:39.280 And so he did have this tight period for about 15 years. 174 00:18:39.280 --> 00:18:42.480 But understand, this was after the communist, 175 00:18:42.480 --> 00:18:45.180 for the Communist Manifesto was written. 176 00:18:45.180 --> 00:18:48.160 This was after the German ideology was written. 177 00:18:49.220 --> 00:18:52.220 In other words, his whole world and life view 178 00:18:52.220 --> 00:18:54.320 was put together during a period 179 00:18:54.320 --> 00:18:57.980 in which he was making the equivalent of $100,000 a year. 180 00:18:57.980 --> 00:19:00.140 That's what it boils down to. 181 00:19:00.140 --> 00:19:04.380 The crisis period of his life came basically 182 00:19:04.380 --> 00:19:07.120 because during that period of European history, 183 00:19:07.120 --> 00:19:09.400 there were no nonprofit foundations 184 00:19:09.400 --> 00:19:11.600 supported by major American capitalists 185 00:19:11.600 --> 00:19:41.520 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. 186 00:19:41.520 --> 00:19:51.520 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. 187 00:19:51.520 --> 00:19:59.520 And so the mills had really shut down in Britain. It had disrupted manufacturing processes, the whole textile industry. 188 00:19:59.520 --> 00:20:10.520 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, 189 00:20:10.520 --> 00:20:14.520 For Engels had had to stop sending Marx as much money. 190 00:20:14.520 --> 00:20:17.520 So Marx was suffering through this period. 191 00:20:17.520 --> 00:20:25.520 Well, Wolf's legacy came in, and it was the equivalent... 192 00:20:25.520 --> 00:20:31.520 Well, if the average British worker was making anywhere from 35 to 50 pounds per year, 193 00:20:31.520 --> 00:20:38.520 the legacy was something in the range of about a thousand pounds. 194 00:20:38.520 --> 00:20:41.520 when your average year's income was 50 or less. 195 00:20:41.520 --> 00:20:43.320 So he was doing very well. 196 00:20:43.320 --> 00:20:46.800 Within one year, he was begging, begging Engels 197 00:20:46.800 --> 00:20:49.040 to send him more money because the pawnbrokers 198 00:20:49.040 --> 00:20:50.920 had gotten him again and he was still paying 199 00:20:50.920 --> 00:20:53.640 30 and 40% per annum to the pawnbrokers. 200 00:20:53.640 --> 00:20:55.880 He had gone through the entire thing. 201 00:20:55.880 --> 00:20:57.440 The entire legacy was gone. 202 00:20:57.440 --> 00:20:59.280 Did the same thing with whatever he inherited 203 00:20:59.280 --> 00:21:02.640 from his mother when the mother died. 204 00:21:02.640 --> 00:21:06.720 I mean, this process went on time and again in his life. 205 00:21:06.720 --> 00:21:24.720 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. 206 00:21:24.720 --> 00:21:44.720 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. 207 00:21:44.720 --> 00:21:54.720 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. 208 00:21:54.720 --> 00:22:00.720 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. 209 00:22:00.720 --> 00:22:13.720 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. 210 00:22:13.720 --> 00:22:41.720 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. 211 00:22:41.720 --> 00:22:54.720 The most peculiar fact about this three-volume set is that the center point of it is about 1860, 62, 63. 212 00:22:54.720 --> 00:22:59.720 It does not include capital, but it includes the smaller works. 213 00:22:59.720 --> 00:23:04.720 And all of a sudden, Marx's name disappears. 214 00:23:04.720 --> 00:23:20.720 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. 215 00:23:20.720 --> 00:23:25.720 I know David Gordon will obviously have a more accurate date, but I think it was about 1876. 216 00:23:25.720 --> 00:23:33.720 and one other one of the other major essay that he did longer work was on the 217 00:23:33.720 --> 00:23:40.960 Paris Commune and that was it and so then I finally said now wait a minute 218 00:23:40.960 --> 00:23:47.800 when does this break take place and it's at the publication of capital in 1867 219 00:23:47.800 --> 00:23:54.600 and I thought how old was it and I rapidly computed backwards born in 1818 220 00:23:54.600 --> 00:23:57.480 He was 49 years old. 221 00:23:57.480 --> 00:24:01.480 And at that point, everything stopped. 222 00:24:01.480 --> 00:24:02.680 He didn't do any more articles. 223 00:24:02.680 --> 00:24:03.880 He didn't do any more pamphlets. 224 00:24:03.880 --> 00:24:09.840 He didn't do any more newspaper articles because Engels had put him on the pension. 225 00:24:09.840 --> 00:24:11.680 He absolutely stopped. 226 00:24:11.680 --> 00:24:15.440 He had most of volumes two and three of capital finished. 227 00:24:15.440 --> 00:24:18.080 He had the Grundrisse finished. 228 00:24:18.080 --> 00:24:20.560 I mean, to the extent they were notes to himself. 229 00:24:20.560 --> 00:24:23.440 And at the age of 49, he drops out. 230 00:24:23.440 --> 00:24:31.140 He becomes the ultimate hippie. He doesn't again do anything except read voluminous quantities of books, 231 00:24:31.140 --> 00:24:34.800 which he never referred to again, in every conceivable field. 232 00:24:34.800 --> 00:24:46.640 They went in after his death. Engels went in two cubic feet of books on Soviet, not Soviet, but Russian economic statistics. 233 00:24:46.640 --> 00:24:57.040 He learned Danish, he began to take all these notes on chemistry, chemical reactions, agriculture. 234 00:24:57.040 --> 00:25:09.320 He learned Russian, absolutely buried himself for the next 15 years in studies so that he would never again have to publish. 235 00:25:09.320 --> 00:25:15.200 And Engels begged him throughout the entire period, you've got to publish, you've got to get this into a final form. 236 00:25:15.200 --> 00:25:18.940 We need the backup volumes of capital. 237 00:25:18.940 --> 00:25:20.280 I know you've got them. 238 00:25:20.280 --> 00:25:22.200 When are you going to get the works out? 239 00:25:22.200 --> 00:25:24.080 And Marx would say over and over, 240 00:25:24.080 --> 00:25:25.680 well, soon I'm working on it. 241 00:25:25.680 --> 00:25:28.240 I've just got a few loose ends to tie up 242 00:25:28.240 --> 00:25:29.240 and you'll have them. 243 00:25:30.840 --> 00:25:31.820 He died with them. 244 00:25:31.820 --> 00:25:34.840 And as has already been pointed out, 245 00:25:34.840 --> 00:25:39.840 the last three paragraphs are on the definition of classes. 246 00:25:39.840 --> 00:25:43.040 Now he finished that paragraph, as far as we know, 247 00:25:43.040 --> 00:25:48.320 prior to the publication of Volume 1 of Capital. 248 00:25:48.320 --> 00:25:50.640 He short-circuited. 249 00:25:50.640 --> 00:25:54.800 Now my opinion is, and there's no way to psychoanalyze the man, 250 00:25:54.800 --> 00:25:59.560 but I think what happened was he really did realize that there was no way around 251 00:25:59.560 --> 00:26:03.240 the criticisms which he knew somebody was going to give him 252 00:26:03.240 --> 00:26:08.760 on the labor theory of value and its relationship to prices. 253 00:26:08.760 --> 00:26:17.760 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, 254 00:26:17.760 --> 00:26:21.760 but I think Marx was a sophisticated enough man to sit down. 255 00:26:21.760 --> 00:26:28.760 He knew, he knew the objections which were going to be made, which is why he wrote volume two and three of capital. 256 00:26:28.760 --> 00:26:32.760 He had the notes already in front of him, but it boils down to this. 257 00:26:32.760 --> 00:26:35.340 If you have a labor theory of value, 258 00:26:35.340 --> 00:26:36.960 then it's clear that you get rich 259 00:26:36.960 --> 00:26:39.140 by exploiting large numbers of people. 260 00:26:39.140 --> 00:26:42.180 And yet his own theory said through capitalist competition, 261 00:26:42.180 --> 00:26:44.480 there'll be all of this investment in equipment, 262 00:26:44.480 --> 00:26:47.560 plant and equipment and basic capital. 263 00:26:47.560 --> 00:26:48.960 Instead of variable capital, 264 00:26:48.960 --> 00:26:51.740 which was the wages that you would pay to the worker, 265 00:26:51.740 --> 00:26:55.440 you had all of this money tied up into fixed capital 266 00:26:55.440 --> 00:26:56.860 or capital equipment. 267 00:26:57.960 --> 00:27:00.080 But the problem is as you got more and more 268 00:27:00.080 --> 00:27:30.080 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. 269 00:27:30.080 --> 00:27:38.080 clearly come from the exploitation of labor, clearly you're an idiot if you're putting all of your money into fixed capital equipment. 270 00:27:38.080 --> 00:27:46.080 He knew there was no answer for it. Boehm-Bawerk pilloried him in 1884. 271 00:27:46.080 --> 00:27:52.080 The only advantage that Marx had at that time was that he had died in 1883. 272 00:27:52.080 --> 00:28:01.280 But the fact of the matter was, he was a sophisticated enough scholar that I believe he realized what the problem was. 273 00:28:01.280 --> 00:28:08.680 And he wrote this letter, his classic letter, in 1858, back to Engels, in which he said, 274 00:28:08.680 --> 00:28:15.580 very shortly I'm going to be done with all of this economic scheisse, which I'm going to leave untranslated. 275 00:28:15.580 --> 00:28:21.580 But he did decide that he would not spend the rest of his life cranking out scheisse. 276 00:28:21.580 --> 00:28:27.660 and he didn't, he was sick of it and he dropped it. 277 00:28:27.660 --> 00:28:35.380 Now, this leads back, I think, to a problem in his own life, 278 00:28:35.380 --> 00:28:39.340 a problem which the biographers don't usually like to stress, 279 00:28:39.340 --> 00:28:45.900 and that is he never ever abandoned his commitment to bourgeois life, 280 00:28:45.900 --> 00:28:49.500 bourgeois culture, bourgeois standard of living. 281 00:28:49.500 --> 00:28:55.300 And, in fact, he was way above bourgeois at the, as I say, at the end of his life. 282 00:28:55.300 --> 00:29:00.020 Certainly, he was in the top four or five, maybe three percent of income. 283 00:29:00.020 --> 00:29:04.020 Certainly, during the periods when he would get the inheritances or a legacy, 284 00:29:04.020 --> 00:29:09.140 it would knock him up into the upper one or two percent of levels of British income. 285 00:29:09.140 --> 00:29:11.380 Lived in a great home, nice home. 286 00:29:11.380 --> 00:29:16.300 His wife would give very fancy balls and parties. 287 00:29:16.300 --> 00:29:20.340 They would invite in bourgeois acquaintances in the community. 288 00:29:20.340 --> 00:29:27.500 He lived a very, very nice life during the phase of his life when he was writing Das Kapital. 289 00:29:27.500 --> 00:29:33.020 So what it boils down to is this, in the phase of the period of the Communist Manifesto 1848, 290 00:29:33.020 --> 00:29:37.980 he was in the top 1 or 2 percent of income of the continent of France and in the period 291 00:29:37.980 --> 00:29:42.700 of writing Das Kapital at the end of it and finishing up, of course he didn't finish up 292 00:29:42.700 --> 00:29:45.940 but getting the manuscripts ready for the last two volumes of capital. 293 00:29:45.940 --> 00:29:51.060 He again was at least in the top four or five percent of British income. 294 00:29:51.060 --> 00:29:57.100 This makes it somewhat difficult to defend Marxist economic theory in the concept of 295 00:29:57.100 --> 00:30:04.600 class alignment and the commitment of the entire party to gain the support of the proletariat 296 00:30:04.600 --> 00:30:10.260 based on the incredible oppression of the proletariat because it's clear from the life 297 00:30:10.260 --> 00:30:15.920 of Marx and Engels that the best way to get yourself real proletarian commitment is to 298 00:30:15.920 --> 00:30:21.920 is to be born a bourgeois and go to college, which is almost exactly what we have found 299 00:30:21.920 --> 00:30:27.400 in the history of Marxism ever since, and the only exceptions that you find to the history 300 00:30:27.400 --> 00:30:33.640 of Marxist society were, according to Marxist theory, there cannot possibly be a revolution, 301 00:30:33.640 --> 00:30:36.280 because they have not industrialized. 302 00:30:36.280 --> 00:30:44.280 So in fact, the major targets in the West, the industrialized West, your major successful 303 00:30:44.280 --> 00:30:51.880 targets of the Marxist world view has been the bourgeois upper middle class and wealthy 304 00:30:51.880 --> 00:30:59.320 income level graduate student in major universities or poverty stricken peasants whose societies 305 00:30:59.320 --> 00:31:02.760 have not yet gone through industrialization. 306 00:31:02.760 --> 00:31:07.400 In other words, in terms of the Marxist theory, the two places which you would not look to 307 00:31:07.400 --> 00:31:12.120 get all of your support ideologically have been the only two places that they have been 308 00:31:12.120 --> 00:31:18.800 Unable historically to gain the support, and so they don't talk about it. 309 00:31:18.800 --> 00:31:25.780 They simply don't talk about it in terms of their own histories of their own movement. 310 00:31:25.780 --> 00:31:31.800 Now let's go to the kind of question that I think has to be raised. 311 00:31:31.800 --> 00:31:40.140 If you find that you're recruiting precisely from those elements of the population which 312 00:31:40.140 --> 00:31:48.100 should be least attuned and least receptive to your message, then on what basis are you 313 00:31:48.100 --> 00:31:52.340 gaining the recruits? 314 00:31:52.340 --> 00:31:57.740 The first choice is, are you gaining them because of the truth of the system, the ideological 315 00:31:57.740 --> 00:32:01.560 rigor of the system? 316 00:32:01.560 --> 00:32:06.700 And the second position, the second question which you would ask is, are you winning them 317 00:32:06.700 --> 00:32:18.700 because of their perceived self-interest in moving out of their existing class and into the communist cadre. 318 00:32:18.700 --> 00:32:26.400 In other words, what is it? Is it intellectual rigor, the vision of the overall system of Marxism, 319 00:32:26.400 --> 00:32:36.200 or is it simply good old-fashioned capitalist self-interest that is bringing these people into your movement? 320 00:32:36.200 --> 00:32:46.200 And the difficulty they find, time and time again, is that it is this accent in Marxism, which Mises stressed in socialism, 321 00:32:46.200 --> 00:32:55.200 this accent on historical inevitability, which has been the great tool of gaining support among these groups 322 00:32:55.200 --> 00:33:04.200 that normally you would not expect to move to your ideological system, given Marxist class analysis. 323 00:33:04.200 --> 00:33:14.700 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. 324 00:33:14.700 --> 00:33:20.200 He said all the rest of it is secondary compared to the power of that one idea. 325 00:33:20.200 --> 00:33:29.700 Now Murray has traced briefly in his presentation something about the doctrine, Christian doctrines of eschatology. 326 00:33:29.700 --> 00:33:32.700 And I think those are very, very important doctrines. 327 00:33:32.700 --> 00:33:45.700 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. 328 00:33:45.700 --> 00:33:49.700 There is one book that at least does cover it fairly well. 329 00:33:49.700 --> 00:33:54.700 It is written by a mathematician who still lives in the Soviet Union. 330 00:33:54.700 --> 00:33:59.700 His name is Igor Shafarevich and it is called the Socialist Phenomenon. 331 00:34:29.700 --> 00:34:32.700 Right Up to the Modern World. 332 00:34:32.700 --> 00:34:35.700 Now, I'm going to throw this in as an aside. 333 00:34:35.700 --> 00:34:40.700 It may not be of any use to you, but you've got to understand something extremely important. 334 00:34:40.700 --> 00:34:41.700 I'm going to give you a date. 335 00:34:41.700 --> 00:34:44.700 Historians are always looking for watershed dates. 336 00:34:44.700 --> 00:34:46.700 We write dissertations about them. 337 00:34:46.700 --> 00:34:50.700 We make ourselves famous if we can just find a watershed date. 338 00:34:50.700 --> 00:34:55.700 The watershed date is 1660. 339 00:34:55.700 --> 00:35:12.700 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. 340 00:35:12.700 --> 00:35:21.700 They welcomed him back and did their best not to remind them that 11 years before they had chopped off his father's head. 341 00:35:21.700 --> 00:35:29.700 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. 342 00:35:29.700 --> 00:35:43.700 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. 343 00:35:43.700 --> 00:35:45.700 And there was tremendous reaction. 344 00:35:45.700 --> 00:36:07.700 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. 345 00:36:07.700 --> 00:36:32.700 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. 346 00:36:32.700 --> 00:36:41.700 And from that point on, to the extent that you had popular revolutionary tracks, the language was secularized. 347 00:36:41.700 --> 00:36:48.700 Now, I don't think the system was secularized, but the language was secularized. 348 00:36:48.700 --> 00:36:53.700 And so, you did not have the discussions of the Holy Spirit. 349 00:36:53.700 --> 00:36:57.700 You did not have the age of the Father, the age of the Son, the age of the Holy Ghost. 350 00:36:57.700 --> 00:37:08.700 But what you get to encompass in the 19th century is the age of religion, the age of metaphysics, and the age of reason. 351 00:37:08.700 --> 00:37:14.700 The same tripartite division, but completely empty of the old theological language. 352 00:37:14.700 --> 00:37:21.540 and Shafarevich talks about that he said from that point on from 1660 approximately 1660 on you don't find 353 00:37:22.100 --> 00:37:27.740 Christian heretics or the language of Christian heresy in the tracks of the revolutionaries any longer 354 00:37:28.020 --> 00:37:35.700 But of course the concepts stay the same the goal the political motivation stays the same the great vision of the secular 355 00:37:36.340 --> 00:37:38.340 foundation of it theologically 356 00:37:38.460 --> 00:37:40.460 disappears 357 00:37:41.860 --> 00:37:43.860 Until 358 00:37:43.860 --> 00:37:51.820 1965 and then all of a sudden overnight almost literally overnight there was a 359 00:37:51.820 --> 00:37:59.020 shift. Stimics such as Otto Scott have traced it to the failure of the 360 00:37:59.020 --> 00:38:05.220 communist revolution in Indonesia. There was an attempted coup you may have seen 361 00:38:05.220 --> 00:38:09.260 the movie the year of living dangerously it's a it's a movie about that period 362 00:38:09.260 --> 00:38:39.260 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 363 00:38:39.260 --> 00:38:45.260 At that point, it became aware in the highest levels of communist planning in the Soviet Union 364 00:38:45.260 --> 00:38:52.260 that you could no longer attempt successfully to take over a nation that had deep religious roots. 365 00:38:52.260 --> 00:38:58.260 You would have to restructure your ideology and your pitch, basically, your pamphlets, 366 00:38:58.260 --> 00:39:07.260 so that the language of the existing religious, what would you call it, superstructure in Marxist language, 367 00:39:07.260 --> 00:39:15.260 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. 368 00:39:15.260 --> 00:39:28.260 Thus was born, and now promoted, liberation theology, which is sweeping Latin America, has taken over seminary after seminary. 369 00:39:28.260 --> 00:39:36.260 Malachy Martin's book, The Jesuits, showed that since 1965 it has utterly swept through and captured the Jesuit order. 370 00:39:36.260 --> 00:39:50.260 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. 371 00:39:50.260 --> 00:40:06.260 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. 372 00:40:06.260 --> 00:40:13.260 And the rise of liberation theology, especially in Central America, I think is almost like a nail in the coffin. 373 00:40:13.260 --> 00:40:24.260 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? 374 00:40:24.260 --> 00:40:41.260 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. 375 00:40:41.260 --> 00:40:47.260 of America. If you've abandoned the atheism of the Marxist system, if that is no longer 376 00:40:47.260 --> 00:40:53.020 a high priority on the agenda, then I think after that the system just simply disintegrates. 377 00:40:53.020 --> 00:40:59.540 Because I see that as the great motivation of Marx. To create a secular atheistic millennium 378 00:40:59.540 --> 00:41:04.820 with all of the benefits and all of the promises of the old millennium that Joaquin was trying 379 00:41:04.820 --> 00:41:13.860 and that the whole Taborite movement, 16th century radical movements, and obviously as 380 00:41:13.860 --> 00:41:20.180 already been mentioned the murderous side of the Anabaptists, all of that tradition was 381 00:41:20.180 --> 00:41:27.900 brought in lock, stock and barrel in terms of the vision of it into Marxism, but it just 382 00:41:27.900 --> 00:41:34.660 won't play in Peoria, or if it plays in Peoria it's only in the city college of Peoria that 383 00:41:34.660 --> 00:41:40.580 it's going to play, it is not going to play out where the people are. 384 00:41:40.580 --> 00:41:47.540 And so I believe Marxism is now using liberation theology, the language of Christianity, in 385 00:41:47.540 --> 00:41:55.740 a sense going back to 1658 and earlier as a kind of motivational shot in the, I mean 386 00:41:55.740 --> 00:41:59.220 they're shooting up on God is what it boils down to. 387 00:41:59.220 --> 00:42:06.300 The atheists are now committed, organizationally, that they cannot be successful if they don't 388 00:42:06.300 --> 00:42:11.560 once again go back to the religious roots, pull the language of theology, the language 389 00:42:11.560 --> 00:42:20.860 of millennialism, and transmit it almost as the old alchemist philosopher's stone to transmit 390 00:42:20.860 --> 00:42:31.140 and transmute the old language of 1640 which was theological into a new kind of transformation 391 00:42:31.140 --> 00:42:37.260 which again is theological, still is messianic, still is millennialist, still is communist 392 00:42:37.260 --> 00:42:42.940 to the core, but which can now be sold to the audience that you're trying to hit today 393 00:42:42.940 --> 00:42:48.020 which is overwhelmingly religious because they aren't selling the product in the urban 394 00:42:48.020 --> 00:42:54.020 Industrial West. It doesn't have a market. If you're going to sell this product where 395 00:42:54.020 --> 00:42:58.420 the people are, you've got to sell it on the basis of religious language and religious 396 00:42:58.420 --> 00:43:04.280 commitment. And I see this as really the end of Marxism. Now, this is not to say that the 397 00:43:04.280 --> 00:43:13.280 basic vision has been overwhelmed. It hasn't been. Because it was not volume two of Capital 398 00:43:13.280 --> 00:43:20.320 Capital, or even Volume 1 of Capital, which was the way that they made the pitch in 1867. 399 00:43:20.320 --> 00:43:26.520 It was this vision of the transformation of man, of the transformation of man by means 400 00:43:26.520 --> 00:43:33.400 of transforming the institutions of society, of remaking man in the image of this messianic 401 00:43:33.400 --> 00:43:34.640 character. 402 00:43:34.640 --> 00:43:37.520 That was the original motivation of the Marxist movement. 403 00:43:37.520 --> 00:43:42.360 Not all the footnotes in Capital and not all the talk about which chart is the accurate 404 00:43:42.360 --> 00:43:47.280 taught the chart, they were not, they didn't care about the organic composition 405 00:43:47.280 --> 00:43:56.440 of capital. I mean, there is nobody that you're going to find in Central 406 00:43:56.440 --> 00:44:04.680 America, you know, you don't come across the dead bodies of revolutionaries and 407 00:44:04.680 --> 00:44:10.640 employees of the Nicaraguan government closely clutching to their breasts a copy 408 00:44:10.640 --> 00:44:16.160 Copy of Das Kapital, that is not what you're going to find, but you may well find some 409 00:44:16.160 --> 00:44:22.600 tract by the people's church on the liberation of man under the new alliance between the 410 00:44:22.600 --> 00:44:29.040 Nicaraguan government and the state religion, which is now liberation theology, and openly 411 00:44:29.040 --> 00:44:30.480 so. 412 00:44:30.480 --> 00:44:38.400 So what I'm saying is this, the life of Marx is a giant refutation theology of who you 413 00:44:38.400 --> 00:44:47.220 It's not based on the rigors of the system intellectually, it's based on this vision 414 00:44:47.220 --> 00:44:54.160 of world transformation and the other very self-interested vision of whose side do you 415 00:44:54.160 --> 00:45:03.400 get on early in order to be able to drive the push of the New World Order. 416 00:45:03.400 --> 00:45:13.880 I want to leave, I think, with a quote from Mises, a section from Notes and Recollections. 417 00:45:13.880 --> 00:45:21.000 Here I think is the essence, and Mises saw it, of the impossibility of trying to assess 418 00:45:21.000 --> 00:45:25.960 the triumph of the Marxist system and the success of the revolution by taking seriously 419 00:45:25.960 --> 00:45:30.560 anything in the Marxist corpus. 420 00:45:30.560 --> 00:45:37.200 This is from page 5 of his notes and recollections. 421 00:45:37.200 --> 00:45:45.560 Herr Scobar, a petty police official who later became Chancellor of Austria toward the end 422 00:45:45.560 --> 00:45:55.480 of 1915, reported to his superiors that he doubted the possibility of a Russian Revolution. 423 00:45:55.480 --> 00:45:59.720 Who then could make this revolution? 424 00:45:59.720 --> 00:46:06.800 Certainly not this Mr. Trotsky who used to read newspapers in the Cafe Central. 425 00:46:06.800 --> 00:46:12.200 In the version I've also seen of that statement, which I've not been able to track down, the 426 00:46:12.200 --> 00:46:21.360 guy actually said certainly not this Mr. Bronstein sitting over there with the cup of coffee. 427 00:46:21.360 --> 00:46:28.620 Because Mr. Bronstein wore glasses, he read, he drank coffee. 428 00:46:28.620 --> 00:46:34.220 He was in the bourgeois setting of a free society. 429 00:46:34.220 --> 00:46:41.600 Surely not Mr. Bronstein over there was going to lead this revolution successfully. 430 00:46:41.600 --> 00:46:49.740 In effect, I think the West has taken too seriously the Marxist system. 431 00:46:49.740 --> 00:46:57.420 It is only by denying the Marxist system, the atheism, the religious underpinnings, 432 00:46:57.420 --> 00:47:07.420 The Supposed Rationality, the success of it at the key period of the industrial west. 433 00:47:07.420 --> 00:47:14.180 It is only by throwing out all of that, going almost to its exact opposite, that you're 434 00:47:14.180 --> 00:47:19.780 going to make sense of the appeal of the communist movement, that you're going to make any sense 435 00:47:19.780 --> 00:47:24.700 whatsoever of the history of scientific socialism. 436 00:47:24.700 --> 00:47:31.120 It is only when you finally abandon Marxism as a tool of intellectual and social analysis 437 00:47:31.120 --> 00:47:34.660 that you can make any sense of Marxism whatsoever. 438 00:47:34.660 --> 00:47:35.380 Thank you very much.