Karl Marx’s Legacy Is Written In Blood – OpEd
May 4, 2018
May 5th marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. He is being celebrated by those who are horrified by Hitler, which makes their opposition to genocide phony. What Marx bequeathed—his legacy is written in blood—makes Hitler look benign. This is why anyone who condemns Hitler without also condemning his communist counterparts is a fraud. It is not Hitler’s body count that matters to them, it is the cause. As the Marxists are fond of saying, the truth is that which serves the cause.
Marx lived a parasitic existence, squeezing his parents for every dime he could get; he even managed to get an advance on his inheritance. His own pampered life was a far cry from the daily grind of the working class that he championed (how many workers had a maid?) As the great British historian Paul Johnson pointed out, Marx’s knowledge was not gleaned firsthand—there is no evidence that he ever set foot in a factory.
The classless society that Marx predicted would emerge under communism showcased his anthropological and sociological ignorance. Hierarchy and inequality are an essential and irrevocable part of the human condition, which is why no society in the history of the world has lacked either property.
Marx conceded that before the classless society was achieved there must be a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He even went so far as to say that “In order to establish equality, we must first establish inequality.” But as history shows, the path to the classless society always ends with the dictatorship. Who did Marx say would staff the “dictatorship of the proletariat”? Why people like him—that job would fall to intellectuals.
What would the communist paradise look like? In his famous work, The German Ideology, Marx waxes romantic, explaining how each man would act. Under communism, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity…[making] it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”