For a long time his portrait replaced, in millions of homes, the departed images of popular piety. Millions of children awoke to life beneath the stern gaze of that massive face, framed by a thick ring of white hair, in which the outline of the moustache produces the illusion of a smile. A monumental brow, made to house two normal brains in a marble impervious to objection, casts backward a mane of silver threads whose tuft lengthens at the level of the ears like the coiffure of a sphinx. The eyebrows, in a jagged line, shelter beneath their pointed little mountain-chalet gables a pair of eyes of extraordinary keenness that hound the contradictor in every direction and see, through his frail person, the wall on which they are about to pin him. A stony figure, impervious to erosion, in which the very beard seems made of spongy limestone, an impregnable tower of thoughts that for decades dominated the tumult of civil wars and revolutionary assemblies, the din of the crowds aware of his power, who rendered to his genius the tumultuous cult of hope and of wrath: Karl Marx, “immortal guide of the working class,” the only figure in communist history whose biography has never been altered by the Soviet encyclopedia, prophet of world revolution and ideological divinity that still remains enthroned, more than a hundred years after his death, over a part of the world. When he was born in 1818, in the small Rhenish town of Trier, the great shadow of Napoleon was slowly fading from Europe like the lingering smoke of a battle. The kings, ill recovered from their emotions, made sure of the nightmare’s end by feeling for their crowns. In France, Louis XVIII, who had arrived in a wagon, departed again in a calash and returned in a carriage—a prince overly harried by events, and too intelligent, moreover, not to notice the wear of a regime restored under his kindly and faintly sarcastic protection—translated Horace and practiced the counsels of Marcus Aurelius.
Exile had taught him to be patient, and gout had made him a stoic. Frederick William III, whom neither Leipzig, nor Waterloo, nor the Treaty of Vienna could make forget the humiliation of Jena, timed the Prussian infantry and launched himself down the first tortuous paths of a policy that combined intelligence and force and that would culminate, fifty years later, in the imperial coronation of William I at Versailles, amid the ruins of France.
Dismantled for a time by the hurricane of the Revolution, the courts had recovered their customs: violins, carousels, secrets of State, frills, distinguished ignorance. Yet all around them, everything had changed. In dying, the French Revolution had given birth to a new society—bourgeois, liberal, eager to produce, to exchange, and to triumph—and one that, on reflection, bore little resemblance to its mother. The powdered wigs scarcely adorned anything but the parchment-like heads of the old diplomats; soon silk stockings would no longer be seen except on the calves of luxury servants. The citizen wore the top hat shaped like a locomotive chimney, and his tubular trousers heralded the age of the connecting rod. His furniture, too, had undergone a peculiar revolution. After the curve arched for courtship or the pastiche of the Louis XV style, after the ideal purification of lines under the Directory and the Empire, the scroll and the standard cross-piece were preparing the industrialization of comfort.
German literature was called Goethe, and French literature Chateaubriand, but the “genius of Christianity” was entering one of the many tunnels of its history, and the young Lamennais was meditating on “indifference in matters of religion.” Although the religious spirit had not died, it had at least folded its wings. The age of steam was beginning its march toward the triumphant future of technology and progress, beneath the flowers of humanitarian rhetoric and the acclamations of the bourgeois, dazzled by their imminent victory over the last tutelage of the aristocracy and the clergy. People now thought only in capital letters. Guided by Science and immersed in Progress, man was walking toward the discovery of the riches of this world. A single word sums up his philosophy of happiness on earth: materialism. With a simple adjective—rather mysterious, moreover, to most of those who use it—a young German Jew with a lion’s mane would turn this word, laden with exploitable promises, into the most terrible weapon that has ever threatened Western civilization. Materialism had liberated the bourgeois. The “dialectical” materialism of Karl Marx condemned him to death without reprieve.
He was the eldest of a family of eight children (five girls and three boys) settled in a middle-class house in Trier, whose nondescript appearance resembled that of any town hall or any primary school in the chief town of a canton. His father, the lawyer Heinrich Marx, son of a former village rabbi, had built himself a solid position in the city’s court of appeal. His mother, belonging to an old family of Dutch rabbis, is regarded among historians as a prosaic spirit, little gifted for controversy and quick to remind the family’s orators of domestic realities. One day she would be reproached, as unbecoming, for this ironic remark: “My son, instead of writing about capital it would be better if you amassed some.” Heinrich Marx, by contrast, was a brilliant and liberal spirit, passionate about the play of ideas, and whose influence over his son was certainly very great—in any case, as great as the young Marx’s character would allow. To save the situation and the future of his children, threatened by the anti-Semitic measures of the Prussian chamber, which had just forbidden Jews access to public office and to most of the liberal professions, he had converted, together with his family, to Protestantism, and he did so easily, since he had long been removed from any religious practice. This “conversion” would obviously leave no trace in the mind of the young Marx, who throughout his life would despise beliefs and the supernatural—until the day when he himself, without realizing it, founded a religion of atheism that would surpass the Inquisition in dogmatic rigor and would restore to men the hope in the inaccessible, beyond a “classless society.”
He was a student like all the others, including the usual tendency toward Romantic versification—perhaps somewhat more diligent in work and in amusement, and one who passed abruptly from studious wakefulness to nocturnal revelry. He wrote poems in which maidens, their dresses soaked with tears, die of love beneath the impassive stars, while misunderstood young cavaliers kill themselves in church during the wedding of the faithless beloved. It is a pity that these touching writings have not yet appeared, under his prestigious signature, as comic strips. But this outburst of sentimental fever, cured with beer, soon vanished. The young Marx had no lyrical vocation.
After a year of fruitless dreams at the University of Bonn, he gave up sobbing with the literature of his century and entered the University of Berlin. Finally, at the University of Jena, he would obtain the diploma of doctor of philosophy. His vigorous intelligence had, in search of deeper realities, effortlessly demolished the papier-mâché of the Romantic constructions. The natural violence of his temperament changed direction, rose, and passed from the scenery of novelistic fiction to the higher plane of ideas. Marx was then already what he would remain to the end: combative, sure of his intellectual capacity, of a realistic logic, inclined to irony, animated by the unshakable conviction that his sole duty was to “work for the good of humanity,” as he had written at the age of fifteen in “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession.”
His father, a liberal and sensitive man, watched with concern as his son’s character gradually took on the hard, monolithic profile that would make him traverse the century like a bullet driven by the charge of an explosive thought. In a moving letter, discovered by the scholar Auguste Cornu, he writes to him: “At times I cannot defend myself against ideas that sadden and disquiet me like a somber foreboding: I feel suddenly invaded by doubt, and I ask myself whether your heart matches your intelligence and your spiritual qualities, whether it is accessible to the feelings of tenderness that here on earth are a great source of consolation for a sensitive soul, and whether the singular demon of which your heart is clearly the victim is the spirit of God or, on the contrary, that of Faust. I wonder whether you will ever be able to enjoy a simple happiness, the joys of family, and whether you will be able to make happy those around you.” But the young Marx was already beyond the reach of this kind of reasoning. His spirit, in search of the ideal, suffered all the agitation, all the turmoil of a missionary surer of the principles of his mission than of the content of his doctrine, or of a prophet urged to speak but who still does not quite know what to say. He was an addict of the ideas we would today call far-left, but which then existed only in a gaseous state, for no mind had yet solidified them into a body of doctrine.
Twice his health, worn out by exhaustion, faltered: his family reproached him for neglecting the gentle young woman of Trier who would become his companion and the sole love of his life, Jenny, daughter of the imposing Baron von Westphalen.
His father died without having obtained a valid answer to his anxious questions, which—as the biographers can attest—arose again and again. His mother complained of the lack of consideration shown by the Westphalen family. Jenny, a model of tenacity, withstood the assaults of her own kin, who refused to imagine the union of a young woman of the most ancient nobility of Europe with a young bourgeois—a revolutionary, to make matters worse—and one who was beginning to be all too well known in the political assemblies.
Then light came to the young Marx under the glacial guise of the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, master of the dialectic, former Lutheran seminarian of Tübingen and refined burnisher of a hyperintellectualist doctrine, which posits at its origin the very principle of the Idea, whose development, through the contradictions of history, constitutes the reality of all things. Hegel’s celebrated “dialectic” consists in reconciling an affirmation and the subsequent negation in the higher unity of the synthesis. An example: the idea of “being” introduces that of “non-being” or “nothingness,” and these two contradictory ideas together form the notion of “becoming”; indeed, the things that “come to be” both are and are not at once, since they “change” or “transform themselves.” In turn, the notion of “becoming” heralds a group of opposing thoughts about “life” and “death,” reconcilable, in their turn, in the conceptual unity of “evolution,” and so on; once this mechanism is set in motion, nothing can any longer halt its movement in three beats—thesis, antithesis, synthesis—until the complete absorption of the real into logic.
This Hegelian interweaving (one row plain, the next purl)—an original way of leading the mind to identity through contradiction—furnished Karl Marx with the definitive instrument of his thought, the method he needed to explore the history of human societies, to criticize the civilization of his age, and to formulate his own conception of the world, in which the Hegelian oppositions between “capitalism” and “the proletariat” would be resolved in the unity of the “classless society.”
The year is 1843; Karl Marx is twenty-five years old and has resolved his first dialectical synthesis by marrying his social antithesis, Jenny von Westphalen, with whom he moves to Paris, the favorite abode of the revolutionary spirits of Europe. When he arrives in the city on the Seine, there is in all of France but a single social law—and what a law! Defended in the Chamber of Peers by Montalembert, who had vigorously attacked “the industries that tear the poor man, his wife, and his children from the customs of family life, from the benefits of life in the countryside, in order to shut them up in unwholesome barracks, veritable prisons in which every age and every sex is condemned to a systematic and progressive degradation,” it set the age of admission of children into the factories at “eight years” and regulated the working day at eight hours for workers between eight and twelve years of age, and at twelve hours for those between twelve and sixteen. This was the law, and there was no other. Even the illustrious physicist Gay-Lussac, honored with a street in the Latin Quarter, had opposed the bill, declaring that “the employer was absolute master in his own house.”
This modest law of 1840 is the first “social law” enacted in France. Previously, all labor legislation was governed by the “Le Chapelier law” of 14 June 1791, which prohibited combination “among citizens of the same trade or profession”—in practice directed against the construction workers who collectively demanded a wage increase—and by a decree of 3 January 1813 upholding the prohibition on “children under ten years of age” working in the mines.
None of the great men of the Revolution had had the slightest intuition of the workers’ problems. Neither Mirabeau, nor Danton, nor Robespierre, nor “the friend of the people,” Marat, had foreseen the economic evolution of the society of their time. The Le Chapelier law had been adopted and applied without any opposition whatsoever, not even from the workers, and for nearly thirty years the imperial decree of 1813 was the only text that showed any interest in the countless children literally imprisoned at a very early age in veritable industrial prisons. The condition of the workers was, on the whole, wretched. A child earned from thirty to fifty centimes a day; depending on the trade, an adult’s wage varied between one and two francs, save in times of economic depression. In Lyon, Blanqui recounts, “the working women earn three hundred francs a year, laboring fourteen hours a day at trades in which they must hang from straps in order to use their feet and hands at once, whose continuous and simultaneous movement is indispensable for weaving braid.” An unofficial investigator notes that in “certain establishments in Normandy, the whip figures among the instruments of the trade.”
Thus, while Stendhal described in detail the delicate loves of his worldly beetles; while Musset, disconsolate, contemplated his own pallor on the Grand Canal, and the bourgeoisie, marveling at the progress of commerce and industry, left religion to the women in order to throw itself into the profitable mysticism of “business”—behind all this scenery, a whole people of the disinherited lived without joy, without hope, and, at times, without bread. The feudal system had been destroyed, but, within the “bourgeois regime,” a new category of serfs had replaced the old one. There were no longer peasants, “serfs of the glebe,” around the castles. But around the factories, multiplied by the entrepreneurial genius that animates the age, the great concentrations of workers were little by little forming a distinct class, ignored by the law, with a wretchedly regarded existence, and one that would come to be called “the proletariat.”
The Hegelian method had furnished Karl Marx with the tool his thought required. The cruelty of the “proletarian condition” outraged him, multiplied his will to action a hundredfold, and transformed the young thinker, passionate about philosophical speculation, into the most consistent and most formidable revolutionary general of all time. Nascent Marxism would be an explosive mixture of logic and indignation.
The framework of his war machine against the world of profit is ready. The gluttonous anarchy of the society of his age points out to him his enemy: “bourgeois capitalism”; his troops: the proletariat; the battlefield: the mine, the factory, the workshop, all the places of labor or of misery in the city and in the countryside.
Destiny provides him with an invaluable ally in the person of the young Friedrich Engels, born in 1820 into a wealthy industrial family of Bremen. He is a keen spirit, as skilled in business as he is nimble in political decision; an elegant figure who would be the Saint-Just of the new Robespierre—a farsighted Saint-Just who would save his friend from destitution and sustain to the very end the disastrous domestic economy of the theorist of the universal economy.
From that moment on, numerous political texts would bear the joint signature of the two friends, without it being possible, even today, to distinguish each one’s contribution to the common work. Together they drafted the famous Manifesto of the Communist Party, whose publication coincides with the revolution of 1848 and which contains the principal features of the doctrine long imposed—and aggravated by fanaticism—upon hundreds of millions of human beings.
Like Engels, Karl Marx is a thoroughgoing atheist, and, despite the illusions of a certain number of contemporary Christians, atheism constitutes the very essence of Marxism. It is useless to dream of a Marxism separated from its organic irreligion and limiting its ambition to a reform of the structures of the economy. Integral atheism provides “Marx-Engels” with the foundation of their doctrine, that “historical materialism” for which the society and the morality of individuals are determined by the forms of production. From this observation unfolds the “dialectical” movement of Marxism, which sees in history a permanent class struggle between those who possess—and whom the defense of their interests “dehumanizes”—and those who possess nothing—and whom their condition of dependence “alienates.” Hegel, whose thought moved from the Idea to the real, arrived at a vague conservative spiritualism most pleasing to the Prussian government, which, according to this doctrine, turned out to be the best of possible governments, since it constituted, under the master’s jurisdiction, the latest incarnation of the Idea. But Karl Marx, an irreverent disciple, would turn Hegel’s logic inside out like a glove. He would move from the real to the Idea, and, as if by magic, everything that in the philosophy of the pastor’s son led to conservatism would, in that of the rabbi’s grandson, lead to revolution. Being an emanation of the possessing classes, the Prussian government, like all the governments of the world, is but a moment of the dialectic: so too is the bourgeoisie, whose inevitable conflict with its social antithesis, the proletariat, necessarily brings about the revolution, in which that bourgeoisie, reduced by the concentration of wealth to an ever-smaller number of owners, will be submerged and liquidated by the growing mass of the proletariat. Once victorious, the working class will abolish the private ownership of the means of production and exchange, saving at the same time, in the synthetic paradise of the classless society, all men liberated from the economic system that dehumanized some and alienated others.
This is the outline of a doctrine whose surreptitiously religious cast it is impossible to ignore. It is an atheist counter-type that would soon become an insolent totalitarian caricature of traditional Judeo-Christianity: from original sin (the fall into private property) to the Redemption of the Poor (Christ, God made man, and the proletarian, man made god); from the captivity in Egypt (in the capitalist clutches) to the Promised Land of collectivism, by way of the Church (outside the party there is no salvation), the infallible magisterium of Moscow, and the so-called “self-critical” confession—not forgetting, on the supreme plane of mysticism, that sort of dialogue of man with man in a kind of divinization without love. For if the advent of the kingdom of God is the work of charity, that of the classless society can be hastened only by the joint effort of violence and hatred.
For long years, from one expulsion to another and from hotel to furnished lodging, Karl Marx would lead the life of an outlaw scant of resources, leaving in France, in Belgium, in Germany, and later in London, where he would end his days, various groups of disciples who one day in 1864 would form the driving element of the Workers’ International—the indirect result, in short, of his forced wanderings. His itinerary is strewn with dead leaves, gazettes without readers, seized books and pamphlets that devoured his meager income, his wife’s small fortune, and the money of his friends—except that of the shrewd Engels, who steered their fraternal boat like a lifeboat, without avarice but with discernment. Karl Marx experienced to the point of nausea the depressing dialectic of need and of credit, harassed by creditors he did not pay, in a perpetual state of doctrinal tension unfit for any work other than that of social prophet. For him, whatever his love for his own, public life had absolute priority over private life. His endurance of misery and misfortune was, moreover, prodigious. Overwhelmed by the tears and the just recriminations of his wife, struck down on several occasions by the most terrible blow that can wound a human being—the death of a child—he remained standing, immovable and as if shielded against the violence of destiny by the violence of his own thought.
The only news he awaited and received with joy was that which brought him confirmation of his theories: depressions, economic crises, strikes, revolutionary roars, uprisings. Day after day his historical figure was outlined in ever clearer strokes against a stormy sky. In the extremist committees, men admired a philosopher capable of speaking with such authority a mysterious scholastic language, of which nothing would be understood were it not so easily converted into the simplest formulas of action: exploitation of man by man, class struggle, revolution, liquidation, liberation. Respect gave way to an admiring attitude, and veneration to respect. He is the first pope of “communism” (he adopted an old word to designate something new, unlike most politicians). Proudhon, whose impracticable theories exposed him to the master’s mockery, like Bakunin and all the rest, suffered his influence in spite of themselves. And even Count Tolstoy himself, an amiable jester, placed his immense fortune at his disposal… before departing without its having been diminished.
The fame of the doctrinaire extended far beyond revolutionary circles, and his prestigious successes softened neither his character nor the harshness of his retorts. He did not argue; he wielded arguments as a single block, crushed whoever contradicted him, and walked off shaking his mane.
Celebrities approached him less readily than the workers did: Reclus complained that he had not risen from the far end of the drawing room to receive him, and that he remained “constantly near a bust of Olympian Jupiter, as though wishing to allude to the place he occupies among the great figures of humanity.” That butcher devoured, above all, paper. In London, where he spent the greater part of his last thirty years, moving from one district to another according to the state of his resources, the patience of his landlords, and the friendly subsidies of Engels, he wrote his most important work, Capital, in complex sentences, coiled like springs and fashioned with no concern for their conclusion. The crucial point of the argument is the theory according to which labor, like any other commodity, has its value, determined by the needs of the worker, and its surplus constitutes “surplus value,” whose profit reverts to capital.
His difficulties henceforth resolved thanks to Engels, who knew how to manage his own affairs for their common benefit, Marx modified, abandoned, and ceaselessly took up again the great work of his life, which would remain unfinished. From the day the Communist Manifesto hurled at the world its brilliant and somber “Proletarians of all countries, unite!”, his theories received but a semblance of application during the brief days of the Paris Commune. But he was sure, with the certainty of a believer, of the final victory of his doctrine. A certain peace descended upon the last days of his life, which, however, were pierced by two searing sufferings: the death of his wife and that of his daughter, Jenny Longuet. Shortly after this last blow, on entering his room on 14 March 1883, Engels found him quietly asleep forever. His tomb is in Highgate.
Most Marxists know Capital no better than Catholics know the Summa of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Marx’s thought, which likewise seems to issue from heavy industry, has bequeathed a method pompously styled scientific and a revolutionary catechism that has traveled around the world. But the philosophico-economic theories drawn from Marxism have everywhere been refuted by the facts and have yielded good results nowhere. Despite the abolition of private property—the symbolic end of the “exploitation of man by man” in the socialist countries—and the direct or indirect liquidation of millions of human beings sacrificed to ideology, or to the party’s “ideology,” no one has lived, not even for a single day, the ideal of the classless society. No people in the world has passed over to communism through the effect of Marxist logic, and all those who have lived through this experience were forced into it by force of arms, under cover of two world wars. To the doctrinal misfortune must be added the fact that, at the same time as it compelled the “bourgeois” governments to conceive, at last, an often effective social policy, Marxism has contributed to the consolidation of capitalism.
Karl Marx sincerely wanted the liberation of humanity, and his followers imprisoned it in an unprecedented totalitarianism; he wanted a new man, and that new man had the head of a political commissar; he thought the “dictatorship of the proletariat” would last a few weeks, and it endured for seventy years. It may be said that Marx had foreseen everything except Marxism, which, like a sacrament of darkness, produced everywhere the opposite of what it meant.
“Reason thunders in its crater,” said the magnificent anthem of the working class. Today only the crater can be seen, where the homeland of socialism has been buried and, with it, hopes betrayed.
Author: André Frossard
Source: Encuentra.com
