“Given the history of murderous communist regimes like Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it is tempting to infer that Marx encouraged tyranny. But Marx did not advocate violence or political repression, and he would be appalled by the atrocities committed in his name.
“He pressed for revolution, but he envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic, like the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet rule in 1989.”
The Marx to whom Berger was referring was Karl, not Groucho. So, I read that paragraph again, thinking that perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me. Karl Marx “did not advocate violence or political repression”? That is not my recollection, and I think I’ve read everything the bohemian scribbler ever wrote, whether with pens or crayons. He “envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic”? Did I miss something in all that Marxist stuff I read? Marx called for a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Can dictatorship ever be consensual and serene?
What seemed to be unadulterated revisionism in Berger’s article prompted me to take up Kengor’s suggestion. I read “The Communist Manifesto” again for probably the third or fourth painful time. I arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Berger does not understand it.
Despite left-wing academia’s frequent embrace of Marx, “The Manifesto” comes across to a reasonable and thoughtful person as mind-boggling nonsense. It’s gobbledygook writ large, as if cooked up by nincompoops. It’s the sort of thing one would expect from a witch doctor who misdiagnoses the problem and then prescribes all the wrong medications, who thinks the patient who suffers from a toothache needs his feet removed.
“The Manifesto” consists of one oversimplification after another: Everything, including what and how a person thinks, reduces to the rigid economic “class” into which he was born. Everybody is either an oppressor or a helpless lump of the oppressed. Life is all about conflict.
The book’s generalizations are so sweeping and unsupported as to be ridiculous and meaningless, such as the claim that if you are a male capitalist employer (a “bourgeois” in Marx’s pejorative terminology), you see your wife as nothing more than “a mere instrument of production.” At the same time, you and your fellow male capitalist employers “take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.” People are thus reduced to caricatures and homogenized in the Marxian blender so that no exceptions can corrupt the preconceived stereotypes that serve the Marxian narrative.
At one point, Marx and Engels sputter this fatuous bunk: “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit.” That’s right. “Not a bit,” the two pseudo-intellectuals proclaim. Nobody anywhere knows of anybody working for wages who owns a thing after he gets his paycheck. Nobody has ever seen or heard of a worker who saves and invests, starts a business, or improves his economic condition by accumulating property.
Oh, I thought, I’m sure Marx and Engels have footnoted this. I’ll look at the bottom of the page to discover the source of this absurdity ... oops, no footnotes. None! The authors of this spleen-venting screed labeled a “manifesto” expect you to take their word for it. And you’d better not disagree because, they assert in shameless arrogance, “The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination.”
Let’s return to the paragraph I cited from Berger’s article. He wants us to believe that Marx was a peaceful fellow. In re-reading “The Communist Manifesto,” I looked for anything indicating that Marx opposed violence. I found otherwise—on page after page.
Marx despised religion but postured as a prophet. He wrote that history is marching inevitably toward a communist future in which all government will magically “wither away” after a period of a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He never explained what would prompt anybody with total power to suddenly proclaim of his own volition, “See you later, I’m out of here.” Did Marx know this by using tarot cards, reading palms, or employing a Ouija board? Did he read animal entrails? From where did his super confident knowledge of the future come?
Don’t ask me. I don’t believe in witchcraft or soothsaying folderol. But it’s obvious from “The Manifesto” that Marx (and his pal Engels) saw it as a given that violence would achieve the communist objective. Consider this paragraph:
“The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.”
Can centralizing all instruments of production in the hands of the state be achieved peacefully? Berger may think so, but Marx did not. Read on:
“Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.”
That’s word salad for “We’ll have to kick the [expletive] out of a lot of people.”
“The Manifesto” claims that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up“ in a single sentence: ”Abolition of private property.” Perhaps Marx somehow saw a future Berger skipping over that, so he reinforced it with this assurance: “You reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.”
Marx criticizes socialists who do not understand the necessity of revolutionary violence. They naively “wish to attain their ends by peaceful means” that, according to him, are “necessarily doomed to failure.” Does this paragraph from “The Manifesto” make you think of the nonviolent Mahatma Gandhi or of a maniac with violent proclivities?
“In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. ... They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.”
The “forcible overthrow” of not some but “all existing social conditions.” How could Berger get away with claiming that a man who put his name to such a chilling statement was a peacenik?
Perhaps the most famous part of “The Manifesto” is the list of pithy declarations of what the communists want done—known as the “10 Planks” of the document. Are they mere helpful tips for better living, or are they prescriptions for the violence that Berger denies? Let’s look at just a few of them:
Alas, methinks I belabor the point. Read Paul Kengor’s “The Devil and Karl Marx” if you need more evidence that Karl Marx was not just a Red Mr. Rogers.
Will someone at Lycoming College call out Berger for intellectual malpractice? Maybe some of his fellow academics? I’m not holding my breath.
