Chapter 9

From Romantic to Scientific

and International Socialism

A. Proudhon

Fourierism in France became eclipsed by the rise of a man with a clearer and deeper socialist mind who, unfortunately for us, was overshadowed in turn by Karl Marx—Pierre Joseph Proudhon, like Fourier a native of Besançon. Fourier’s father was a shopkeeper of certain means, whereas Proudhon’s father came from a “proletarian” milieu. Pierre Joseph nevertheless succeeded in getting a good education in a collège1 where he was taught Latin and Greek which was later supplemented with Hebrew. He soon lost his Faith, became influenced by socialistic ideas, but revolted against the mad speculations and prophecies of Fourier and his disciple Considérant whom he attacked in pamphlets. He became the first truly methodical and scientific socialist thinker, yet unlike his bitter opponent, Karl Marx, he always kept—even in his “atheism”—a certain human and metaphysical outlook.2 He was, in a way, an atheist tormented by doubts, and toward the end of his life he fought bitterly against the fanaticism of antireligious haters. His socialism was “distributist” rather than collectivistic; the keyword of his economic thinking is “mutualism.” He was strongly opposed to economic liberalism because he feared bigness, the concentration of wealth, mammoth enterprises, yet he was equally an enemy of the omnipotent centralized state which figures as the keystone in all leftist thinking.

In Proudhon’s numerous books and pamphlets one finds notions and ideas which any true lover of liberty or any true conservative could underwrite, but which really are part and parcel of the “arsenal” of rightist thought. He did belong to that not so very rare category of theorists who, given the right contacts, the right friends, and the right ambiance, could have overcome the magnetism of the left.

In his Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon says that it “is surprising to observe how constantly we find all our political questions complicated with theology”3 and indeed he never entirely divorced himself from a theological outlook. He always remained a healthy antistatist and naturally a convinced antidemocrat. It is significant that one of the leading contemporary Catholic theologians, Henri de Lubac S. J. devoted a profound study to him: Proudhon et le christianisme.4 Constantin Frantz, the great German conservative, could not hide his admiration for Proudhon, but regretted that he had to cite a “French radical” because Germany, the classic country of thinkers, had become intellectually sterile.5 Proudhon, however, remained convinced that France was the nation of “golden mediocrity.”6

Let us just cite a few passages to give at least a vague idea of the part of Proudhon’s mind that was bound to conflict with the later socialist outlook which was dictatorial, centralizing and “democratic.”

“The February Revolution replaced the system of voting by ‘classes’:7 democratic puritanism still was not satisfied. Some wanted the vote given to children and women. Others protested against the exclusion of financial defaulters, released jailbirds, and prisoners. One wonders that they did not demand the inclusion of horses and donkeys.8

“Democracy is the idea of the state without limits.9

“Money, money, always money—this is the crux (le nerf) of democracy.10

“Democracy is more expensive than monarchy, it is incompatible with liberty.11

“Democracy is nothing but the tyranny of the majorities, the most execrable tyranny of all because it rests neither on the authority of a religion, nor on the nobility of race nor on the prerogatives of talent or property. Its foundation is numbers and its mask is the name of the people.12

“Democracy is an aristocracy of mediocrities.13

“Authority, which in monarchy is the principle of the governing activity, is in democracy the aim of the government.14

“The people, thanks to its inferiority and its misery, will always form the army of liberty and progress—but due to its ignorance and the primitiveness of its instincts, as a result of the urgency of its needs and the impatience of its desires, it inclines towards simple forms of authority. What it is looking for are by no means legal guarantees of which it has no concrete notions nor any realization of their power . . . it has faith in a leader whose intentions are known to them. . . . To such a leader it accords authority without limits and irresistible power. . . . The people does not believe in principles which alone could save it: it lacks the ‘religion of ideas.’15

“Democracy is, in fact, essentially militaristic.16

“Every state is by its very nature ‘annexationist.’17

“Left to themselves or led by a tribune, the masses will never accomplish anything. They have their faces turned to the past. No tradition is formed among them . . . about politics they understand nothing but intrigues, about the government only waste and sheer force; of justice only the accusations; of liberty only the erection of idols which are destroyed the next day. The rise of democracy starts an era of backwardness which will lead nation and state to their death.18

“Accept in a manly way the situation in which you are and convince yourself once and for all that the happiest of men is the one who knows best how to be poor.19

“My views on the family are not unlike those of the ancient Roman law. The father of the family is to me a sovereign . . . I consider all our dreams about the emancipation of women as destructive and stupid.20

“When we say ‘the People’ we always mean unavoidably the least progressive part of society, the most ignorant, the most cowardly, the most ungrateful.21

“If democracy is reason, then it ought to represent above all demopedy, ‘education of the people.’22

“The twentieth century is going to open up a period of federation or humanity will enter a purgatory of a thousand years.”23

Thus one should not be surprised that this man of the people, largely self-educated but possessed of a certain earthy wisdom, was bound to conflict with another man whose mind was strangely divorced from reality, a fervent hater, an illusionist, but at the same time a skilled demagogue—Karl Marx. Thse two men, even if both had a genuine claim to the label “socialist,” were temperamentally poles apart. Proudhon, in spite of his anticlericalism (which abated toward the end of his life) was deeply imbued with Christian moral principles.24 He led an exemplary pure and studious life and made every sacrifice for his ideas,25 always guided by deep and lasting affections.

A book he published in 1846, Système des contradictions economiques ou Philosophie de la misère, was the reason for the clash with Marx. The bourgeois from Trier furiously assailed Proudhon in a savage writ, La Misère de la philosophic Although Proudhon and Marx dreamed of a “withering away of the state,” Marx sought the fulfillment of his ideas by revolutionary means, by the use of brute force, by the “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Proudhon, on the other hand, was an “evolutionist”: The right order of things should be discovered, not arbitrarily blueprinted. Socialism should come gradually, in stages, without upheavals, by persuasion: It should encompass the globe through voluntary adherence and finally unite mankind not under one centralistic superstate but in a federal system, by federations deeply rooted in local customs, institutions, and traditions. Father de Lubac notes Proudhon’s sentimental attachment to the part of France in which he was born and reared—the Franche Comtè which had been under Spanish rule for a long time and where the feeling for personal liberty was particularly strong.

When the savage and perhaps unexpected attack from Marx came, Proudhon did not reply. This sensitive and noble man probably considered it below his dignity to react to that boorish piece of writing. Although Proudhon could rise to great heights of enthusiasm, although he was the man who had coined the term “scientific socialism,” he was devoid of the bitter unbending dogmatism of Karl Marx. Had Proudhon retained leadership of the Socialist movement, he would have given it a more anarchical, “personalistic” character, a greater plasticity and humaneness. The Western world would have coped with it more easily. Instead Karl Marx prevailed with his rigid, secular monasticism destined to plunge civilization into abysmal misery. Daniel Halévy wrote quite rightly that, “There was a place for a great dialogue between the two men: Marx, the protagonist of the revolution of the proletarian masses, and Proudhon, the champion of the personalist revolution. The dialogue foundered and Marx is to blame for it, because the tone he gave to it right in the beginning rendered the expected discussions impossible.”26

B. Marx and Lassalle

Who was this Karl Marx, source of so much evil in the past two generations? He was born in 1818 into the family of a Jewish lawyer in the old bishopric of Trier as a subject of King Frederick William III, the Congress of Vienna having allotted the Rhenish bishoprics to Prussia. When he was six years old his father embraced the Lutheran faith of the new Prussian master and not the Catholic religion of the areas. It is difficult to find out whether this step was taken for religious or social reasons. The entire family gradually followed suit, but it is significant that as soon as little Karl was able to read he studied, together with his father, the works of Voltaire—not precisely an atheist but certainly a scoffer at orthodox Christianity. Having finished his Gymnasium (the classical high school and college), he studied law and philosophy at the Universities of Bonn and Berlin. He wrote a dissertation on Epicurus, whose philosophy has a decidedly materialistic flavor, for the University of Jena which gave him a Ph.D. In Berlin young Marx became strongly influenced by Hegel and his school. It is interesting to analyze not only the intellectual but also the emotional development of young Marx. His relation with his mother was bad; however, his relation with his father was intimate, and it is significant that he always carried with him a picture of his father which Engels placed in his coffin. Nevertheless, his father understood very well the weaknesses of his son, who spent considerable sums of money (for purposes never elucidated by research). When he wrote to his father that he was a “torn” (zerrissene) person, his father replied to him, “To be quite candid, my dear Karl, I do not like this modern word which serves as a cloak to weaklings who are at odds with the world because they do not own without effort and toil beautifully furnished palaces, vast fortunes and elegant carriages. This “tornness” [Zerrissenheit] to me is disgusting, and I expect it least of all from you. What reasons can you have for it?”27 The reasons were the precocious young man’s mad ambitions as well as the sometimes unwholesome influence of German romanticism. Professor Ernst Kux has reminded us that Marx, by no means a “scientific mind” in his younger years, belongs to the mainstream of German Romanticism. He always “felt” first and then looked for a “scientific proof of his emotions.”28

Young Marx who has a considerable appeal for the New Left, knew Bettina von Arnim and Arnold Ruge and was a close friend of Heinrich Heine who soon found him intolerable. He called Marx a docteur en révolution, and a “godless self-god.”29 Yet young Marx was basically an artist or at least a would-be artist who wrote mediocre poetry and also planned to publish a theatrical review. The nonfulfillment of his dreams made him a revolutionary, and here we have a strong analogy with Hitler. The frustrated artist wants to destroy the world which does not appreciate him. No wonder, because art is creation and a man not permitted to create is thoroughly thwarted. For Marx artistic activity was the very essence of human activity.30 His great dream was a Communist society where the “rich and profound all-round person is not restricted to an exclusive domain of action, but can develop himself in every branch, where society regulates general production and makes it possible for him to do this today and that tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, to fish at noon, to do some stock-farming in the evening, to engage in criticisms after the meals, just as he feels inclined—without ever becoming a hunter, a fisher, a shepherd, or a critic.”31 As one can easily see, the ideas of Fourier, the utopianism of an earthly paradise profoundly colored his thinking. At the same time Marx became increasingly more and more Promethean in his visions. He put man in the place of God, the notion of the imagebermensch, superman, appears in his writings.32 Needless to say, all this is a far cry from Leninism and far more akin to the New Left. Yet the purely artistic vein, his interest in art (as in the case of Hitler) never disappeared entirely. Marx always remained an estheticist.33 On the other hand, one does not find any preoccupation with ethics in Marx’s thinking or writing. A person cannot be made responsible for historical processes which happen automatically as the result of scientific laws. (Such reflections are typical for a later period of his life.34) “The Communists preach no morality.”35 Any morality leads to ideology, and ideology leads not to tragedy but to comedy. Any philosopher who preaches a system of ethics is childish enough to believe that a different conscience could change the order of things.36 How could this be if the historic process is preordained and immutable?

Originally Marx thought to enter upon an academic career and applied for an extraordinary professorship at the University of Bonn. His friends, however, dissuaded him and in 1842 (at the age of 24) he became editor-in-chief of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne. A year later the daily was stopped by government order and Marx, undaunted by this failure, married Jenny von Westphalen. (Ladies of noble blood play a major role in almost all Socialist movements: There is probably a deeper psychological reason for this phenomenon.)37 There is no doubt that Marx, initially at least, loved his wife and his daughters dearly, but he was basically not only a critic and a scoffer, but also a hater. We have seen how he treated Proudhon. Arnold Ruge with whom he collaborated (but soon fell out in Paris) wrote to Fröbel that “gnashing his teeth and with a grin Marx would slaughter all those who got in the way of this new Babeuf. He always thinks about this feast which he cannot celebrate.”38 The best description of Marx in his thirtieth year we have from Carl Schurz, American Senator and German-born forty-eighter who met him in Cologne at a public session of democratic leagues and wrote in his Lebenserinnerungen: “The stocky, heavily built man with his broad forehead, with pitchblack hair and full beard, attracted general attention. . . . What Marx said was indeed substantial, logical and clear. But never did I meet a man of such offensive arrogance in his demeanor. No opinion deviating in principle from his own would he give the slightest consideration. Anybody who contradicted him was treated with hardly veiled contempt. Every argument which he happened to dislike was answered either with biting mockery about the pitiful display of ignorance or with defamatory suspicions as to the motives of the interpellant. I still well remember the sneering tone with which he spat out the word bourgeois. And as bourgeois, that is to say, as an example of a profound intellectual and moral depravity he denounced anybody who dared to contradict his views.”39

Marx, who as an educated German was fully conversant with French, transferred his residence late in 1843 to Paris. He expected greater liberty under the regime of Louis-Philippe than in the Rhineland dominated by the Prussians. With Arnold Ruge he started to publish the German-French Yearbooks, but after the printing of the first issue the editors quarreled and the periodical never again appeared. It was in France that Marx broke with orthodox Hegelianism, retaining only Hegel’s concept of the dialectic process of history. Here too he met with Proudhon, received his first communications from Engels, and wrote his first bitterly hostile essay about the Jews. We have to bear in mind that Marx nurtured a real hatred for the Jews in whom he saw the very embodiment of bourgeois capitalism.40 Yet his prejudice had not only a sociological but also, as we will see, a racist character. It might be that his anti-Semitism was partly due to Bruno Bauer, a Lutheran theologian and a friend of his younger years, who had been one of the originators of Biblical criticism. Bauer’s views showed a marked anti-Jewish bias. A Hegelian in his philosophical outlook, he incurred the hatred of Marx after the latter’s break with Hegel’s philosophy and thus, together with Engels, Marx wrote one of his most venomous pamphlets: The Holy Family Against Bruno Bauer and Company. Engels, as a matter of fact, was one of the very few people with whom Marx was able to maintain a lasting friendship. This wealthy manufacturer from the Ruhr Valley also had sufficient funds to support the penurious cofounder of international socialism and communism. Lenin’s “useful idiots” thus existed long before Lenin.

The materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach made the deepest and most lasting impression not only upon Marx but also upon Engels, and it hastened their break with German idealism. Feuerbach’s criticism of religion in general and of Christianity in particular, combined with a violent materialism, (Der Mensch ist, was er isst—“Man is what he eats”) laid the foundations for Marx’s unwavering rejection and hatred of all religions. Feuerbach’s notion that culture and education can and should supplant religion has a rather German and romantic tinge, but his idea that one has to replace the readiness to “believe” with the readiness to “will” shows the direction in which Marx and Engels were also moving. Morality, Feuerbach insisted, will never be sustained by religion, but only by an improvement in living conditions—in other words, by “social betterment.” This of course is a notion which not only became typically Marxist but which is shared by the American moderate left, if not by American folklore. After all, the great consolation to so many in this valley of tears is the childlike belief in the automatic character of progress. Here we find the fulfillment of Dostoyevski’s prophecy (through the mouth of his “Grand Inquisitor” in The Brothers Karamazov) that the time shall come in which science and the sages will proclaim the nonexistence of criminals and sinners—there are only hungry people. In popular terms this means, “Poverty. . . . Poverty breeds socialism: If people have not enough to eat, they will develop a ‘communism of the stomach.’ ” This, however, is just another fallacy. And while Marx learned from Feuerbach only through books and articles, he established direct contact in Paris with disciples of Saint-Simon and also with the count’s former secretary, Auguste Comte, the father of Positivism. Comte’s effort to explain social laws by the laws of nature (which are not the “natural law”) also left a permanent imprint on Marx’s thinking.

In 1845 the Prussian government asked the French to expel Marx as a dangerous agitator, and the French complied. Thus he went to Brussels where he published his pamphlet against Proudhon in 1847. In 1848 together with Engels he issued the Communist Manifesto. A month later he was asked by the Belgian authorities to leave Brussels, whereupon he returned with Engels to a Paris seething with revolution. Louis-Philippe was then overthrown. From Paris they went to the Rhineland, to Cologne, where the revolutionary fervor reached a high pitch. There Marx published a daily paper, Die Neue Rheinische Zeitung with the subtitle Demokratisches Organ. In November of that year the paper incited its readers not to pay taxes and to engage in armed resistance against the Prussian government which had dissolved the National Assembly. Thereupon the newspaper was confiscated, Marx was arrested and tried, but acquitted by a middle-class jury. To avoid another arrest he went back to France where the government had become less radical in temper. He was thus given the choice either to leave France or to settle somewhere outside of Paris. Yet Marx had to be near big libraries—he was a real bookworm—so he went to a country which already had its own socialist movement—Britain. He found an abode in London and stayed there, working ceaselessly in the reading room of the British Museum until his dying days. His financial support came mainly from Engels, whose Calvinist-Pietist family had “paid him out,” and from the New York Tribune. Without the dollars and the marks of capitalism, there probably would have been no Socialist and Communist movements.

Let us return, however, to the Manifesto of the Communist Party. In Brussels Marx had joined a “League of the Just” which later changed its name into Bund der Kommunisten, “League of Communists”—now, by the way, the official name of the former Communist party of Yugoslavia: Savez komunista. The Manifesto, a short pamphlet of about 12,000 words, gives a vivid if unmethodical insight into the basic notions of Marxism. It was written jointly with Engels in a forceful, pungent style, yet its (German) vocabulary is such that it could scarcely be understood by the average worker and only by a minority of the working class elite. My edition, published in 192141 when education had substantially increased, contains a glossary of twelve closely printed pages—all of which proves that socialism (no less than communism) was emphatically a movement of intellectuals with complex psychological motives, intellectuals capable of mobilizing the masses, either through their writings, their oratorical gifts, or both. International socialism and communism were not born among the “toiling masses.” Nor were they invented, planned, and organized by men with overflowing affection for the downtrodden but—with few exceptions—by venomous haters. Neither love nor pity nor compassion plays a role in Marx’s heart or mind.

The Communist Manifesto, written in Brussels but first published in London, starts with the famous words: “A specter haunts Europe—the specter of Communism.”42 After a preamble it sets out to explain all of history as the history of class struggle, but the authors of the Manifesto also disclosed their conviction that prehistoric society had known no classes and that property was held in common. In other words, they adopted the Roussellian notion of a paradisiacal situation, a Golden Age, a secular version of the Biblical record.

The Manifesto then goes on to praise the “bourgeoisie” (a term, by the way, without any real equivalent in other European languages) for having overthrown feudalism and its culture, but berates it for creating an iron rule of its own. A violent critique of bourgeois civilization follows which, when all is said and done, brings out the dominant characteristic of Marx: self-hatred. Marx, the typical product of bourgeois culture, is antibourgeois; Marx, of Jewish origin, is anti-Jewish; Marx, a permanent resident of capitalist Britain, is anticapitalist; Marx having married an aristocrat is anti-aristocratic. In the third part of his Manifesto Marx even becomes boiling mad about “aristocratic socialism,” about the pro worker attitude of aristocratic opponents of the bourgeois outlook. The self-hater typically wants no allies, no help from anybody.

Still, Marx praises the bourgeoisie for having established the firm domination of the city over the countryside, for having effected mass migrations of persons to the cities, “tearing them away from the idiocy of the rural life.” Here is the voice of the rootless intellectual.

Marx also extolled the bourgeoisie for its antifeudal, antiaristocratic trend toward centralization by promotion of “one nation, one government, one law, one national class interest, one customs area.” He raves about all these achievements. But then he tries to prove that technology is in complete opposition to the then prevailing ways of production. The bourgeoisie is in the midst of a terrible crisis. Wars, general starvation, and economic chaos are menacing bourgeois society from every corner. Production is too high. The only way out is the conquest of new markets and the further brutal exploitation of the old markets. The bourgeoisie have to create new crises to survive. On the other hand they have created the working class of the proletariat that will eliminate them as they themselves have eclipsed the old ruling aristocracy.

What now follows is surprising in a way—not so surprising, however, if we remember German romanticism. It is a furious and not entirely unjust critique of modern industry, of the entire machine age, of the servitude imposed on the worker by the precursors of the assembly line. The worker, Marx says, is enslaved by the machine and by the overseers in the service of the exploiting bourgeoisie. And here he comes to the other evil: The worker receives only a fraction of the wages due to him.

But there is one consolation. The big bourgeoisie pressed everybody down to the level of the proletariat. Bigness is seemingly victorious all along the line. There are petty bourgeoisie who join the ranks of the proletariat willy-nilly. And within the proletariat a new civilization already exists: the relationship of the proletariat to wife and child, to State and nation is already radically different from the older patterns. He has no fatherland, no bourgeois morality, no religion. And whereas in the past only minorities fought for their interests, the proletarian movement is an “independent movement of the vast majority in the interest of a vast majority.” Since, in addition, the proletariat is the lowest layer, the basis of society, it cannot rise without blowing up the rest of society.

While in the past small social segments could rise socially, the worker cannot do this. He gets poorer and poorer under the iron heel of the bourgeoisie. Yet, with the proletariat the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers. Its downfall and the victory of the proletariat are equally unavoidable. (But if history works “automatically” why then organize a movement, one might ask.)

The ensuing critique of “bourgeois” property, education, morality, and sentiment is filled with weasel words, little insincerities, and wisecracks. An oblique attack is made by declaring all these values to be already nonexistent for the vast majority of the people. Nine-tenths of the population, Marx and Engels claimed, have no property anyhow. “Bourgeois marriage” is bankrupt. The Manifesto goes on to say that the Communists would not abolish the right to own individual objects, but then again it insists that private property would come to an end in the Communist order.

“The first step in the Revolution of the Workers is the transformation of the proletariat into the ruling class which is to enforce democracy.”43

Yet unlike later developments in Russia there was to be step by step transformation. “The proletariat is going to use its political domination to deprive the bourgeois gradually of its capital, to place all the instruments of production into the hands of the state which means to centralize it in the hands of the proletariat organized into a ruling class, and to increase as fast as possible the mass productive energies.

“This, of course, can only be achieved by despotic interventions against property rights . . . measures which might seem economically insufficient and untenable, but which in the course of the development achieve a wider scope and are unavoidable as the means for the transformation of the entire system of production.”

As one sees, the economic aspects are subordinate to the messianic vision.44 “The measures,” the authors add, “will be different in the various countries, but for the nations which have progressed furthest, the following ones could be enacted:

1. Expropriation of real estate, the rent being used for the expenses of the government.

2. A highly progressive taxation.

3. Abolition of the right to inherit.

4. Confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of all credit in the hands of the state through the agency of a National Bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of all means of transport under state control.

7. Increase of national factories and the means of production. Improvement of lands based on a common plan.

8. Universal conscription of labor. Organization of industrial armies, especially for agricultural purposes.

9. Unification of industrial and agrarian production. Efforts to eliminate gradually the differences between town and country.

10. Public and free education for all children. Abolition of factory work for children in its present form. Amalgamation of education with material production.

Then comes a large section which criticizes and ridicules with bitter remarks all the other Socialist and leftist trends and parties. The Manifesto ends with the declaration that Communists are ready everywhere to support the despised bourgeois in their struggle against the remnants of feudalism and monarchism. “The Communists foster the cooperation and mutual understanding of democratic parties of all countries. The Communists disdain to keep their views and plans secret. They openly declare that their aims can only be achieved through a violent overturn of the present social order. Let the ruling classes tremble before the Communist Revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Proletarians of all countries, unite!”

This document is interesting not only because it reveals the mentality of its authors, their quasireligious vistas, their petty insincerities, their romantic outlook, their dogmatism, and the inconsistencies of their views. (For instance, even granting the deadening character of modern industrial work “alienating” the laborer from his toil, the situation in this respect would not be different in a “progressive” Communist world state.)45 The most interesting aspect of the Manifesto, however, not only lies in its vision of a secular “Day of Judgment,” but in the relation of the “Preparatory Program” just cited to the existing trends in the free world of today. In other words, we can use this program as a measuring rod to see to what extent we and our contemporaries have become Marxists and, especially, to what extent the perverted scions of old liberalism in the United States and in Britain have fallen for Marxist notions. Anybody condemned to listen to the loose talk in drawing rooms or political meetings where socialism is not the official creed is always astonished to observe how much headway the “false but clear ideas” of Marxism have made and have become common property. (“Vietnam? But that’s only Wall Street wanting to profit from the rice paddies!”)

Point One has been carried out by a number of highly “bourgeois” states such as Czechoslovakia, Estonia, Latvia, and Rumania between the two wars, and by Italy after World War II. (Hungary, Spain, and Poland enforced minor agrarian reforms.) Yet it must be admitted that in the free world the confiscation and redistribution of agricultural lands was enacted to benefit the farming class and not the state. (The most radical agrarian reforms before World War I were carried out by Imperial Russia—in the nineteenth century in conjunction with the liberation of the serfs and fifty years later under Stolypin.) Agrarian reforms, nevertheless, constitute a far-reaching and doubtfully legitimate intervention in the domain of private property.46

Point Two has become the rule in the vast majority of Western nations. From the governments’ point of view it brings in amazingly little revenue:47 The “soaking the rich” formula serves primarily to satisfy the envy of the masses.48 Yet sometimes there is also another reason for progressive taxation, the state’s instinctive fear of the rich and therefore independent person.

Point Three is practiced in the West in another form. In certain countries death duties have reached a level which renders them confiscatory. As a result fortunes are frequently amassed in such a manner that they can easily be transferred invisibly or be smuggled abroad. The millionaire dying in a hotel room with three suits in his closet after having gradually given away everything is a symbol of our times. (Here again the “wicked reactionary Fascist aristocratic landowner” who cannot escond his property pays the full penalty.)

Point Four is academic in the free world, but it is all the more fervently practiced east of the Iron Curtain.

Point Five menaces all of free Europe. The “exclusive monopoly” does not yet exist in a general manner, but there is a strong tendency to nationalize the banks. Thus all the big banks of France and Austria are fully nationalized and as a result the smaller banks literally have to compete with the state.

Point Six, the centralization and nationalization of transport, is a hard fact all over Western Europe. The same is true of the means of communication. Only in the United States do we find private railroads competing against each other49—and also against an efficient network of bus companies and airlines. The American telephone system, still privately owned, is one of the best in the world.

Point Seven is far advanced in free Europe and elsewhere in the world—in India, in Africa, Latin America. In 1945-1946, in the shadow of the Red hysteria that affected even “Christian Democratic” parties from the Channel to Vienna, nationalizations were enacted right and left—partly in order to please the Socialists, partly as a manifestation of “Christian social consciousness.”

Point Eight, to tell the truth, has been more to the liking of National Socialist and other similar regimes which introduced a compulsory labor service. “Labor armies” on a voluntary basis, however, also were seen in the United States during the New Deal.

Point Nine has to be understood in the light of the Marxian notion of the “idiocy of rural life.” The farmer was always and still remains the stumbling block to Socialist experiments everywhere. Since he raises his own food and usually lives in his own house, he can be less “controlled” than anybody else. The urbanization of our civilization is a worldwide phenomenon needing no aid or planning. Whether it is a blessing is quite a different question. Yet in Russia the dream of the Agrogorod, the “Agrarian City,” is always reappearing in leading Communist circles.

Point Ten is already a largely fulfilled demand of all leftist parties. Its underlying notion is the expectation that intellectual-social leveling and standardization of knowledge at a tender age will bolster and foster equality and uniformity.50

The Manifesto by no means gives us the full Marxist theory. Still, the list of steps to be taken immediately after the proletarian victory clearly reflects the mind of the allegedly “non-Marxist” left which, partly knowingly but largely unknowingly, is imbibing ideas and notions from Marxist sources.

Marx’s further work is largely based on the Manifesto. He merely went on to intellectualizing and rationalizing his emotions. Positivism and a concomitant atheism are the foundations of his thinking. Auguste Comte and Feuerbach were his initial guiding stars. To them must be added the Hegelian dialectic.51 And as further stimuli French Socialism (Proudhon), English Socialism (Robert Owen), certain tenets of Ricardo and the personally experienced misery of the British working class whose horrors should not be underestimated.52 And since Britain was the industrial leader in the world, Marx was convinced that all the other Continental nations would have to go through the same stages of debasement—which, like almost all his other prophecies, proved untrue. The distance of a bookworm from reality can be considerable.

From his books, letters, and essays we get a more complete and fuller view of his ideas. Only the first volume of Das Kapital was published during his lifetime. The other two (in certain editions, three) volumes were compiled and edited by Engels and Kautsky from the material left by Marx after his death. A further concretization of the utopia to come cannot clearly be found in those pages. The critical side in Marx was stronger than his prophetic gifts. Hatred was stronger in him than the creative urge which needs love as a driving motor. Of all his theories as to the iniquities, dangers, and pitfalls of capitalism today, only one can still be taken seriously. That is the theory of concentration and monopolization which our classic Old Liberals consider to be as inane as the rest of Marxist doctrine. (They have a point if they bring a worldwide free trade into their calculations.) Neo-Liberalism, on the other hand, which is profoundly interested in continued competition as the life blood of a free economy, has a strict antitrust and anticartel attitude. (This, however, does not mean that every Neo-Liberal would subscribe to every bit of American antitrust legislation which, at times, is animated not by a sincere devotion to the cause of economic liberty but by anticapitalist prejudices.53) Yet, as history shows, the trend toward concentration is a problem which free enterprise in a free society can cope with. Concentration and mammothism, on the other hand, is the life principle of socialism, which is state capitalism.

None of Marx’s other prophecies relating to the evolution of “capitalism” (an unhappy term) came true. Marx lived too early: He wrote about free economy like a young man writing about life while knowing only his own age group. What a youngster writes about older persons is fatally bound to be erroneous; it can only be sheer guesswork. Later in his life Marx was fully convinced of the importance of technology and it strongly figures in his calculations, but it was then much too new an element in our civilization and too rapidly evolving for us to use it as a fixed cipher in our equations. (Nor can we really assess the coming impact of computers and automation today.) There seems to be some indication, though, that Marx was emotionally so deeply immersed in his theories that he consciously-subconsciously overlooked a number of new phenomena which must have come to his attention in the years between the publication of the Communist Manifesto and his death in 1883. Torn between his fanaticism and his burning intellectuality, he also had a quasireligious vision patterned after Biblical notions. It conceived history as starting with an innocent, paradisiacal prehistory, followed by the evil rise of classes, the family, religions, the government, and iniquitous exploiting systems of production, until he (a real prophet) and his friends were to arrive on the stage to preach the new Gospel of Salvation by writing the new Holy Scriptures. The millennium of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was not far off and it would lead to the old Paradise Lost in a better, more progressive, and more modern version. Marx, however, was too clever and also too cautious to paint that picture of a redeemed humanity with the ridiculous precision of the Utopian Socialists. He wanted to be a “scientific Socialist,” a logician, rationalist, scholar, researcher—even if his daydreams led him completely astray.

Marx’s monumental hatreds gravely conflicted with his Biblical patterns. It is difficult to say whom he loathed more, the “deviationists” in his own camp—men such as Proudhon, Bakunin, Lassalle—or the faceless, impersonal enemy, the Grande Bourgeoisie Capitaliste whom he attacked more impersonally, in a far more general way than his fellow leftists. In all this he was supported by a very facile pen, by a brilliant style enlivening even such a basically dry work as Das Kapital with purple passages. The real Marx, however, comes to life in his letters, especially when he vents his hatred on former friends, collaborators, or sympathizers. Marx actually vied with Engels in heaping anti-Jewish invectives upon the head of Lassalle, insults of a descriptive physical nature, reminding us literally of the smutty Nazi weekly Der Stürmer edited by Julius Streicher. Marx saw in Lassalle a “niggerlike Jew,” but Engels’ invectives were not more moderate either.54 In a way these attitudes are not so surprising because socialism and the Jewish outlook, the Jewish mind, the Jewish character do not easily mix.55 Belonging to a religious minority within Christendom (with which they remain mysteriously connected), the Jews are apt to have the critical bent of small religious bodies everywhere. Questioning a great deal of the intellectual-spiritual foundations on which the majority lives, these minorities will often be emphatic in their negations and thus easily become unpopular, because the Philistine hates the critic. Let such minorities rise financially and opposition against them will increase: Envy will be added to discomfort and suspicion. The situation is by no means unique, as in the case of the Calvinists in France, of the Germans in old Russia, of the Greeks and Armenians in Turkey, of the Copts in Egypt, the Parsees in India, the Indians in Africa, the Viets in Cambodia, or the Chinese in Indonesia.

Yet, although Jews might be attracted by the critical aspect of Socialist theory and even play important parts in nascent Socialist movements—the names of Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinovyev, Kún, Bernstein, Eisner, Blum, Bauer come to mind—they are constitutionally averse to its conformism, its anti-individualism, its moralizing cant, its intellectual controls.56 This may be less evident to an American or East European observer and for the same reason: In Eastern Europe there lived the most indigent part of the Continent’s Jewry and this was precisely the element which in the last three decades before the World War I largely immigrated into America. For sociological reasons they were most likely to embrace leftist ideas.57 This was by no means the case with the old established American Jewry.

Yet even in Eastern Europe a break between the forces of socialism and communism and the Jews had to come. (For a while this was obscured by the fact that the Nazis literally drove Jews in that area into the arms of organized Leftism.) There was a latent, sometimes even an open, anti-Jewish sentiment in the ranks of Europe’s Socialist parties58 and anti-Semitism did not spare Red Russia either.59 By the time World War II had broken out, Stalin had killed many more Jews than Hitler.60 Needless to say, Jewish haute finance was never really pro-Communist: Even if Jewish bankers did business with the Soviet Union, the guilt of gentile manufacturers and financiers (not to forget German generals of the Ludendorff and Seeckt type) is even more impressive.61 Antonio Machado, the great Spanish poet who died in exile, had predicted the inevitable turn toward anti-Judaism that Marxism would take.62 Marx himself had started it: “What is the secular basis of Judaism?” he asked. “Practical needs, egoism. What is the secular cult of the Jew? Huckstery. What is his secular God? Money.”63 No wonder Goebbels declared eighty years later that all socialism is anti-Semitism.64

Marxism is not only non-Jewish, it is also nonproletarian. It is absolutely bourgeois and therefore strongly appeals to the left-of-center middle-class mind with its commercial background. Waldemar Gurian was very much to the point when he wrote, “Marxism and therefore Russian Bolshevism does not voice the secret and unavowed philosophy of bourgeois society when it regards society and economics as absolute. It is faithful, likewise, to its morality when it seeks to order this absolute, the economic society, in such a way that justice, equality, and freedom, the original war cries of the bourgeois advance, may be the lot of all. The rise of the bourgeoisie and the evolution of bourgeois society have made economics the lot of all.”65 It was the late Ben Hecht who admonished his readers not to believe in the picture of the Communist as a man with a bomb in one hand and a dagger in the other. To Hecht bolshevism was a movement logically evolving from nice middle-class democracy. “Democracy,” he wrote, “was the most atrocious insult leveled at the intelligence of the race by its inferiors. Bolshevism goes one better, however.” He thought that it would be fostered in the United States one day by “our lowest types”—politicians, thinkers, and writers.66

Yet the partial victories of Marxism—which, as a doctrine, found a resonance only among the partly educated, the “lowest types”—are due to the religious crisis which is a moral, a philosophical, and a theological one at the same time. As E.F.W. Tomlinson said, “Because men cannot do without a philosophy, and if they reject the good one they must do with the dregs of all the rest. Dialectical materialism is an agglomeration of all the dregs of the wayward metaphysics of the nineteenth century.”67 Alongside this, as we have said before, there is in Marxism a curious eschatological vision, consciously-subconsciously copied from Christianity, an ecstatic waiting for the Second Coming of the Pan-Proletarian Christ, oddly counterbalanced by the antinomy of a purely mechanical predetermined notion of history with loud if not hysterical appeals to sanguinary revolutions and sacrifices. This dogmatism and orthodoxy jointly create the bad conscience among the watered-down Marxists, the “Social Democrats” Western style and the Laborites when they are confronted with the Communists. This bad conscience is the reason why so many Social Democrats or Socialists in the satellite world let themselves be bossed, forced, and coaxed into unitary Socialist (de facto completely Moscow-controlled) parties of which the Socialist Unitary Party (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, S. E. D.) of the so-called German Democratic Republic (D. D. R.) is the most typical. This is also the reason why Western Socialist parties, when hearing the “call of the wild,” suddenly get weak in their knees.

In England Marx had contacts with the English Socialists who were, in a way, the forerunners of the Labor party. The founder of British Socialism was Robert Owen, the son of a shopkeeper. At the age of twenty this gifted man was the director of a textile factory and soon succeeded in making himself independent. In New Lanark, in Scotland, he established a model factory which can be regarded as a social rather than a socialistic experiment.68 Yet Owen did not stop at the realization of social ideas. Soon he began to show an interest for socialistic dreams. In 1824 he went to the United States where he bought the lands, property, and livestock of Georg Rapp, leader of a German Communist sect, who had established a settlement in New Harmony, Indiana, not far from Evansville. The “Rappites” went to Pennsylvania and in 1826 New Harmony was revived with a fresh crop of immigrants under Owen’s guidance. Some of them were men of intelligence, education, and high moral qualities; others were eccentrics and “marginal characters” who disturbed the whole order. Thus the experiment failed totally within two years.

Owen returned to England in 1829. He, the man of mere reforms, had now become a radical Socialist. Because of his attacks on “organized religion” and on the basic tenets of Christianity he lost much of the general respect as well as the public support he had received in earlier years. Although he was one of the cofounders of the first trade unions in 1833, Owen’s interest lay rather in the guilds and cooperatives than in modern type trade unions. With advancing years his crotchety and cranky ideas multiplied. Actually he founded a new ethical system (rather than a religion) which his supporters spread all over England in “Halls of Science.” The essence of this teaching was that man is essentially a product of his environment, an idea which profoundly influenced Marx and can be considered today an almost essential part of the folklore of Western half-education. For Marx it was the system of production that formed man and created the superstructure of all thinking: Marx attacked free will no less than Owen, who was convinced that through environment anyone’s character could be formed, made to order. His strong belief in education found a powerful echo in Northern Europe and North America. Yet in spite of his determinism, his attitude toward ethics was a far more positive one than that of Marx. Before his death Owen turned toward spiritualism.

Marx founded his International Workers’ Association in 1864, six years after Owen’s death. This was the First International whose history is marked by the bitter struggle between the real Socialists and the Anarchists under Bakunin’s leadership.69 Marx’s strong dislike for Russia and the Russians70 was partly colored by his hatred for Bakunin, the Russian anarchist nobleman who in turn converted Prince Kropotkin to his ideas.71 Marx had Bakunin expelled in 1872 and the seat of the First International was transferred to New York where the organization died a lingering death. The antagonism between the professorial, petty stickler, Marx, and the dashing ex-officer of the Imperial Russian Army had been ruinous.

Nor did Marx get along with another dashing person, Ferdinand Lassalle. Son of a Jewish merchant in Breslau and the first organizer of the German workers, Lassalle was an immensely colorful character. Again and again accused of this or that political misdemeanor, he was frequently acquitted. Courageous, witty, a lover of the fair sex, and a playwright, he was liked neither by Marx nor by Engels. Long connected with Countess Sophie Hatzfeld, whose lawyer he was, he was finally killed in a duel with a Rumanian near Geneva over the hand and heart of Helene von Dönniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat.

Lassalle was intellectually not unique, but he had an excellent mind and published several essays on a variety of political and social questions as well as a volume on Heraclitus from a Hegelian viewpoint. He dreamed of the emancipation of the German worker through the aid of the state and made a passionate appeal to William I to transform the Kingdom of Prussia into a “social monarchy.” Bismarck, who knew him well and respected him, said in his eulogy in the Diet that Lassalle had been a thorough royalist, though not quite sure whether Prussia should be ruled by the Hohenzollerns or the Lassalles. A brilliant conversationalist, impeccably dressed, a gourmet, this high-living man who was the idol of the German working class unavoidably became the object of Marx’s intense hatred. Had he lived longer—he was only thirty-nine years old when he died—he would in all likelihood have given an entirely different turn to the development of socialism in the heart of Europe and thus to the world. Marx must have breathed more freely when his competitor died in 1864. Three years later the first volume of Das Kapital was published.

The weaknesses of Marxian thought are manifold. The “mature” Marx became less interested in philosophical quests. His general disillusionment due to political disappointments (above all the failure of the Paris Commune) increased his bitterness heightened by constant financial worries.72 His character drove all his friends away with the exception of Engels. He sought forgetfulness in the arms of his housekeeper, Helene Demuth (which means “humility”), who bore him a son whom Engels loyally claimed to have begotten. (The true story leaked out much later.73) Bitterness perhaps also acted as a brake on his mind and work, which made very slow progress. His solitude and isolation caused him to make grave errors precisely concerning the human character, errors which subsequently affected the entire Marxist landscape, primarily in countries where Marxism became the state religion. Marx seems to have been unaware of the dictum of Pascal that man is neither beast nor angel, and he who wants to turn him into an angel will inevitably degrade him to the level of a beast—a thought also expressed in our thesis of the enforced monastic life. Indeed the coercive “Paradise” becomes a Hell. Another short-circuit in his line of thought is due to his rejection of ideology, while he himself created one.74 He could point out that what he preached was not an ideology which, naturally, rests on mere ideas, but that it represented an outline of facts and laws which were active in this world. He just told the shape of things to come against which resistance was vain—just as one could not fight an exact meteorological forecast. Yet if this really were the case, why then the movements, the parties, the intrigues, the secret police, the concentration camps, the armies, the wars, the propaganda, the broadcasts? Only to speed up a “natural evolution”? In that case shouldn’t a little patience be called for? Questions like these have remained unanswered now for some time. Yet Marx had and still has a fairly universal appeal. He appeals to the “left” in us, he personifies a temptation which we have to overcome. Jean Paul in his Quintus Fixlein says that in every century the Almighty sends us an evil genius to tempt us. In the nineteenth century this spirit was Karl Marx.

C. The Fabians

Marx died in 1883. German socialism, which means the German Social Democratic party, went through a very difficult period. It became more and more evident that many of the ideas and theories of Marx were not true to fact, true to life. Revisionism loomed around the corner. In 1889 the Second International was established. Engels died in 1895. By this time only fanatics still insisted that the “forces of reaction” were hell-bent on destroying, exploiting, and humiliating the working class, which had friends, supporters, defenders in all social layers and camps. One of the major reasons for the break between William II and Bismarck was the difference in their attitudes toward organized labor and social legislation. The young emperor was prolabor. Bismarck had to remind him that the owners and the directors of the factories were also his subjects, expecting loyalty from him as he expected loyalty from them.75

Revisionism or rather a more elastic version of socialism was also born in Britain. In 1883 an ethical discussion club in London fathered a special group which slowly assumed a Socialist character. George Bernard Shaw, Sidney and Beatrice Webb (later Lord and Lady Passfield), and William Morris belonged to it. By 1887 the “Fabian Society” (“Society of the Fabians”) had a definite profile. Soon the Fabian Tracts began rolling from the printer’s press. The society took its name from Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, the Roman general famous for his hesitant and cautious way of waging the Second Punic War. In other words, the society adopted a manner of investigating and promoting Socialist ideas entirely at variance with Continental dogmatism and very much in keeping with the trend toward understatement, compromise, and halfway measures so characteristic of the English (and, one might add, the Austrians, who have their own version for the word “muddling through.”)

Much of the economic theory of the Fabians was supplied by George Bernard Shaw, whose persuasive arguments and dashing literary style were the talk of the British intellectual world. (Still, the Irish in him often made him talk with his tongue in his cheek, and he could be extremely nonconformist among these neoconformists, for instance, by praising Mussolini which evoked shrieks of indignation.) Sidney Webb criticized the Marxist theories concerning the increasing misery of the working class and the inevitable collapse of the entire capitalist system. Orthodox Marxism was rejected as much as the theory of class war. These ideas just did not appeal to the English character. Yet there was considerable enthusiasm for the nationalization of the means of production, which included the soil. This reflected the potent influence of the American Henry George and his single tax.

It was only after 1890 that the Fabians (in this respect strongly animated by Beatrice Webb) tried to hitch their wagon to the rising star of the trade unions. Fabians were among the founders of the Independent Labour Party in 1893 and the British Labour Party in 1900. They did not, however, concentrate on the Labour Party alone but tried to propagandize the ranks of the other parties as well. They were particularly successful with the left wing of the Liberal party which gradually veered under Lloyd George’s leadership toward social legislation and Socialist ideas. A young ambitious apostate from the Tories with very radical ideas delighted Lloyd George and enchanted Beatrice Webb. His name was Winston S. Churchill.76 Indeed many of the great social reforms before World War I were enacted by the Liberals but promoted, suggested, and sponsored by the Fabians. The program adopted by the Labour Party in 1918 was drawn up by Sidney Webb and in the years to come the Fabians were not only extremely active in the field of social legislation but also in foreign politics where they later strongly supported the League of Nations and methodically promoted leftist causes all over the globe.

The influence of the Fabians on the American scene was and remains considerable. They have always maintained intimate connections with a number of American universities and with the Foreign Policy Association which they often provided with speakers lecturing all over the United States. Typical of them was Professor Harold Laski, famous for his correspondence with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for his clever formulations, and for his sometimes unbridled imagination.77 In the moral disarmament of the English-speaking countries vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, the Fabians played an eminent role. They loved disarmament—an affection influencing labor policies during the 1930s and leading, in combination with Tory provincialism, to the state of dangerous unpreparedness that prevailed when the Nazi menace appeared on the horizon. One really could not disarm, ridicule “Colonel Blimp,” sneer at “militarism,” and make a stand against the brown bullies. It was dangerous to rely on the Red Army alone.

Fabians, on the other hand, supplied socialism in Eastern Europe with ample intellectual ammunition. One of the Fabians, J. A. Hobson, together with G. D. H. Cole, an initiator of “Guild Socialism,” was the author of Imperialism, published in 1902.78 This book inspired Lenin to write his pamphlet Imperialism as the Last Stage of Capitalism which came out in 1915. In this work the Russian Social Democrat living in his Swiss exile claimed that capitalism, as a last means of expansion, has to engage in aggressive wars not only to conquer new markets, but also to divert the masses from the class struggle.

Fabianism is more than just the organized and publicized outlook of a group of intellectuals. It represents a version of leftism most congenial to Britishers and Americans. Fabianism has been instrumental not only in undermining the belief in free enterprise, individuality, and personal responsibility in favor of the Versorgungsstaat, the “Provider State” rather than “Welfare State,” but also in spreading an atmosphere of illusion and confusion as regards the dangers from the East. Psychologically and intellectually American pseudoliberalism, the entire left-of-center mentality not only west of the Atlantic but even west of the Channel is deeply indebted to Fabianism which in that area, to be true, often met halfway with popular notions and concepts. The ideology of the “moderate left” in the English-speaking countries, however, is by no means harmless or only of academic interest. As we are going to see in another chapter, this mixture of prejudices and ignorance has already led twice in our century to major catastrophes whose effects are still with us all. It might even lead to further evil developments.