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First Post
3 days ago
- Politics
- First Post
Marx unmasked: How Karl Marx's personal failings shaped a brutal, violent ideology
Understanding communism requires looking squarely at Marx himself. In him, we find the violent, exploitative, self-centred tendencies that would, under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, erupt into horrors on a global scale read more Advertisement Marx wasn't the philosopher-saint he has been made out to be. Representational image: REUTERS An ideology often mirrors its chief architect. Communism is a prime example. While many try to lay its atrocities at Joseph Stalin's feet, the seeds of violence, exploitation, and ruthlessness lie deep in the character of Karl Marx himself. Marx is often venerated as one of the greatest thinkers of modern times, the author of Das Kapital and co-author of The Communist Manifesto, whose ideas shaped the destinies of nations and ignited revolutions. Yet underneath this carefully curated myth lies the brutal reality of Marx—a life marked by personal violence, manipulative opportunism, moral inconsistency, reckless financial irresponsibility, and a shocking disregard for the welfare of even those closest to him. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD A Taste for Violence and Domination Marx's private letters and political tactics reveal not just a theoretical acceptance of violence, but a genuine appetite for it. His wife Jenny pleaded early on: 'Please do not write with so much rancour and irritation.' It was a lifelong pattern. If author Paul Johnson is to be believed, Marx's editorial meetings were so loud with shouting they had to shut the windows to avoid alarming passersby. Johnson writes in Intellectuals, '…the rows were perpetual except in Brussels. In Paris his editorial meetings in the Rue des Moulins had to be held behind closed windows so that people outside could not hear the endless shouting.' Marx's quarrels were not random; they were often deliberate instruments of domination. From his days as a young radical, he sought to browbeat anyone who disagreed with him, starting with German philosopher Bruno Bauer and extending through nearly every political associate. The brother of Bauer once mocked Marx's volcanic rages in verse: 'Dark fellow from Trier in fury raging, / His evil fist is clenched, he roars interminably, / As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair.' More troubling still, Marx's political strategy consistently embraced violence and terror. In 1850, he distributed a 'Plan of Action' in Germany explicitly endorsing mob violence and 'popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings', urging revolutionaries not merely to condone but to lend such acts 'a helping hand'. Marx could even approve of assassination if it served the cause. When a failed attempt was made on Kaiser Wilhelm I's life in 1878, his fury was directed not at the crime but at the incompetence of the would-be assassin, heaping curses on the man for failing to carry out the deed. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD A Deeply Amoral Man Though Marx cloaked himself in moral earnestness, he dismissed morality itself as 'unscientific' and an obstacle to revolution. Russian anarchist Michael Bakunin insightfully remarked that Marx's zeal for the proletariat was tainted by personal vanity, observing, 'Marx does not believe in God, but he believes much in himself… His heart is not full of love but of bitterness.' This bitterness often played out through exploitation. It began early. His dying father lamented in 1838 that Marx, only four months into his law course, had already spent more than his father had earned all winter: 'You are now in the fourth month of your law course, and you have already spent 280 thalers.' Marx did not even attend his father's funeral. Instead, he turned his sights on his mother, pressuring her for more funds, justifying it on the grounds that the family was 'quite rich' and owed it to him to sustain his 'important work'. STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD He neither pursued regular employment nor made any serious attempt to support his family. From the mid-1840s until Marx's death, Engels shouldered most of his financial burden. Yet when Engels' beloved companion Mary Burns died in 1863, Marx responded with a letter that offered the briefest acknowledgement of Engels' grief before briskly moving on to his real concern: requesting more money. If Marx's exploitation of Engels is legendary, equally telling is the way he treated his wife and daughters. The life of his wife was full of misery, largely the result of Marx's own making. 'Every day,' Marx himself conceded, 'my wife tells me she wishes she were lying in her grave.' Ironically, Marx, for all his egalitarian claims, took pride in his wife's aristocratic lineage. Johnson writes, 'Marx was proud of his wife's noble Scottish descent (he exaggerated it) and her position as the daughter of a baron and senior official in the Prussian government. Printed invitations to a ball which he issued in London in the 1860s refer to her as 'née von Westphalen'.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD His treatment of his three daughters further underscores his hypocrisy. For all his radicalism, Marx denied them meaningful education and forbade them from pursuing careers. Instead, they were kept at home to play piano and paint watercolours—like any bourgeois daughters—ensuring they were unprepared to make independent lives. He even disapproved of their life partners, referring to one of them disparagingly as 'Negrillo' and 'The Gorilla' simply because he had some African ancestry. Squalor and Endless Debt Despite Engels' generous subsidies and both his own and his wife's family fortunes, Marx lived a life of poverty. His annual income never fell below £200—a more than decent sum at that time—yet his family's silverware, clothes, and even furniture frequently ended up in pawnshops. At one point, Marx was so impoverished he had only one pair of trousers and could alone leave the house. A Prussian police spy in 1850 reported in detail the Marx household's squalor: 'There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture. Everything is broken, tattered, and torn, with half an inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD The report described the living room table piled with manuscripts, children's toys, dirty cups, pipes, tobacco, and rags. 'When you enter Marx's room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water… Everything is dirty and covered with dust, so that to sit down becomes a hazardous business.' It was a scene of almost grotesque Bohemian decay. Johnson believes Marx's 'angry egoism' had physical as well as psychological roots. 'He led a peculiarly unhealthy life, took very little exercise, ate highly spiced food, often in large quantities, smoked heavily, [and] drank a lot, especially strong ale, and as a result had constant trouble with his liver. He rarely took baths or washed much at all. This, plus his unsuitable diet, may explain the veritable plague of boils from which he suffered for a quarter of a century. They increased his natural irritability and seem to have been at their worst while he was writing Capital.' STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS AD It was at that time he bitterly joked to Engels, 'Whatever happens, I hope the bourgeoisie, as long as they exist, will have cause to remember my carbuncles.' Conclusion Marx's personal life, thus, was a microcosm of the ideology he birthed: violent rhetoric, personal manipulation, moral inconsistency, and relentless exploitation. He drained family and friends, lived in squalor while railing against bourgeois hypocrisy, and kept his own daughters under the very constraints he claimed to despise. Understanding communism requires looking squarely at Marx himself. In him, we find the violent, exploitative, self-centred tendencies that would, under Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, erupt into horrors on a global scale. The real Marx wasn't the philosopher-saint he has been made out to be. He was everything but saintly and philosophical. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost's views.
Express Tribune
24-06-2025
- Politics
- Express Tribune
Justice for sale: true cost of plea bargains
Listen to article The Communist Manifesto (Marx, 1996) opens with a spectre, an idea so disruptive that it promised to upend entire class structures and build a society where development was free and fair. The dream, of course, was grand. But like most idealisms, it tripped over its blind spot: humans. Marx theorised systems but underestimated their participants. William Golding may have understood better: we do not destroy systems, we build them to destroy themselves. Plea bargaining, in Pakistan, is one such self-defeating system. A mechanism born of necessity, marketed as reform, and now repurposed as cover for legalised impunity. It started with a logic: courts are overwhelmed, cases drag on for decades, prisons are overcrowded. Let the accused confess, pay back a portion of what they stole, and be released. On paper, it's pragmatic. In practice, it's industrial-scale laundering – of money, names and responsibility. In the United States, plea bargains function within a known structure. There's Rule 11, sentencing guidelines, judicial supervision. It is flawed, certainly, and often accused of coercing confessions from the poor. But the system at least performs its due process. There is a courtroom. There is a record. There is the illusion of checks. Pakistan, in contrast, has no need for illusions. Section 25 of the National Accountability Ordinance allows for what is called "voluntary return" or a "plea bargain"— terms that suggest civility. What actually happens is that the accused confesses, offers a settlement figure, and in return is granted freedom. No trial. No conviction. No record. No stigma. We don't even pretend this is justice. We just call it "recovery". And some recover remarkably well. The public was defrauded in three separate housing projects by an individual who settled each case with NAB without conviction. Each time, he re-emerged with a fresh business name, a clean legal history, and a ready market. This is not a loophole. This is the system. At the centre of it stands the NAB chairman. He decides who gets to bargain, what the terms are, and when the deal is done. The courts are often little more than silent endorsers. Victims are not asked. The public is not told. The media may report a number, but the documents stay tucked away. And still, we insist on calling this deterrence. As though the quiet return of stolen wealth is the same as punishment. As though justice can be transacted like a tax dispute. The logic unravels when you start asking who actually benefits. The accused avoids prison. The state reclaims a portion of the loss. And the public, the ones defrauded, receive nothing. No apology. No compensation. No closure. A man who steals from the state pays the state and walks away. It's restorative, yes, but only for the powerful party in the room. The rest of us are left watching from the gallery. In another time, we held public trials. Witch-hunts, literal ones. The Salem witch trials were brutal, but at least they were honest about their spectacle. Now we conduct no trial at all. Guilt is negotiated, not examined. Evidence is sidestepped in favour of receipts. The public is asked to believe that the return of a few billion rupees justifies the loss of accountability. We have created a justice system with no memory. No scars. No institutional record. A man can offend, confess, pay, and return to public life as though nothing happened. Repeat offenders are welcomed back into business. Sometimes even into politics. And we nod approvingly because the docket is lighter. And what of those who don't or can't bargain? They rot in jails that barely qualify as habitable. The accused poor are thrown into remand cells where illness spreads faster than legal representation. Those accused of petty theft or minor offences endure years awaiting trial. They do not get settlements. They get silence. Plea or drown. That's the real choice. And yet, we continue to treat the return of embezzled funds as a moral victory. When Changpeng Zhao of Binance was fined $4.3 billion in the United States, he still served time, albeit only four months. Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder who refused to settle, got 24 years. The contrast is staggering, but also revealing. In the US, even the largest financial criminals receive punishment, but it still reflects the same inequality: cooperation is rewarded, wealth softens consequences, and high-profile plea deals come with PR statements, not moral reckoning. It's not a triumph of justice, it's a controlled descent. But even that descent exists. In Pakistan, there is no fall at all. Accountability ends with a cheque. The wealthier the crime, the better the outcome. This isn't just unsustainable, it's corrosive. It erodes what little faith remains in institutions. It reinforces the idea that laws are for the poor, and negotiations are for the elite. It teaches that crime, when well-funded, is not only survivable, it's reversible. Plea bargaining doesn't need to be abolished. But it must be reformed beyond recognition. All agreements must be made public. Repeat offenders must be disqualified. Judicial oversight must be meaningful, not procedural. And the power to investigate must be distinct from the power to pardon. Most importantly, victims. Whether individuals or the public at large, must have a place at the table. Until then, what we have is not justice. It is a system of selective mercy, reserved for those who can afford it. Because here, justice isn't blind. It knows exactly who you are. And how much you're worth.
New York Post
11-06-2025
- Politics
- New York Post
‘Woke right' influencer bullies aren't just fringe — they're a true political danger
In 2018, some activists, appalled by woke nonsense being published by academic journals, submitted nonsensical research. One paper claimed researchers 'closely and respectfully examined the genitals of . . . ten thousand dogs' to learn about 'rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks.' Some journals published it. Advertisement But one of the hoaxers, James Lindsay, claims this 'woke virus' now has spread to the right. 'There is a radical segment embedded within MAGA . . . that acts the same way, uses the same tactics, acts like the woke left,' he told me. I was skeptical. But to make his point, Lindsay pulled off a new hoax. Advertisement He rewrote parts of 'The Communist Manifesto' and, using the pseudonym Marcus Carlson (a play on Karl Marx), submitted it to the conservative magazine American Reformer. His article criticized classical liberal ideas like free markets, global trade and individual freedom, like Marx did. Yet the conservative magazine published it. Even after a reader pointed out that it was 'The Communist Manifesto,' the magazine kept its article up, writing, 'It is still a reasonable aggregation of some New Right ideas.' Advertisement The New Right, says Lindsay, acts like the woke left: 'There's the victimhood mentality, the cancel culture, struggle sessions. They bully people online with swarms; they rewrite history.' The New York Times' 1619 Project rewrote history, claiming America was founded to protect slavery. Today's woke right says Hitler 'was trying to encourage community . . . family values' (social media influencer Dan Bilzerian). 'I want total Aryan victory . . . the only way we are going to make America great again is if we make this country Christian again,' says white supremacist Nick Fuentes. Advertisement Fuentes' videos have received more than 30 million views. On his show, he says, 'Jews better start being nice to people like us because what comes out of this is going to be a lot uglier and a lot worse for them.' Influencer Andrew Tate won 10 million followers largely by attacking feminism: 'I am absolutely sexist.' ''Men should be in charge, knock the women down,'' sighs Lindsay. 'The woke right literally becomes all the caricatures that the woke left said conservatives are: 'racist, sexist, homophobes.'' Keep up with today's most important news Stay up on the very latest with Evening Update. Thanks for signing up! Enter your email address Please provide a valid email address. By clicking above you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Never miss a story. Check out more newsletters 'They're fringe,' I say to Lindsay. 'No real threat.' 'That's what everybody said about woke kids on campuses,' he replies. Advertisement That shut me up. I admit I thought brainwashed college progressives would drop 'safe spaces,' trigger warnings, speech codes and other silly ideas once they had to earn a living. But I was wrong. Most didn't. Those kids brought about lots of change. Advertisement Their preferences got many companies to mandate DEI training and led many employees to fear speaking honestly at work. But today, says Lindsay, the energy is on the right: 'It's great that we're having a conservative revival . . . but there's also [something] called 'falling off the cliff.'' Elected officials now say things like, 'We should be Christian nationalists!' (Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene) and, 'I'm tired of this separation-of-church-and-state junk' (Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert). Advertisement 'Your ability to believe as you will,' says Lindsay, 'worship as you will without state interference, is a bedrock idea of the American experiment. Woke right, like the woke left, is this litany of bad ideas.' He fears that next election, the woke right will elect the woke left. 'The left is going to say, Hillary Clinton was right to call [people on the right] 'deplorable,'' he says. 'Then the left will sweep back in and dominate.' John Stossel is the author of 'Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media.'
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What America Made of Marx
The young cigar maker in New York City attended a few socialist meetings in the 1870s. But he longed to hear 'constructive' ideas about how to achieve a better life for himself and his fellow workers. Then an older craftsman, who was a veteran of the European left, offered to take him through 'something tangible' that 'will give you a background philosophy.' That something was The Communist Manifesto. The document, recalled his untutored protégé, 'brought me an interpretation of much that before had been only inarticulate feeling.' Reading that Marx and Engels hailed 'the ever expanding union of the workers' as 'the real fruit' of class struggle encouraged him to organize a durable labor movement. After the ambitious cigar worker left his rolling bench to become a full-time union leader, he would always be suspicious of intellectuals, socialist or otherwise, who believed they had a duty to tell wage earners how to liberate themselves. All his life, he adhered, in effect, to Marx's 1864 motto, 'The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.' That erstwhile cigar maker was Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor—the organization that evolved into the AFL-CIO and has dominated American unionism for well over a century. Gompers became a harsh critic of Marxian radicals: He thought their desire to yoke the labor movement to the fate of a socialist party would violate the independence of unions and lead them into a dead end of sectarianism, repression, and defeat. Still, the inspiration the young Gompers drew from the Manifesto appears to support the argument Andrew Hartman makes in his sprawling, often provocative new survey, Karl Marx in America: 'Marx gained purchase in American life because he offered a powerful theory of freedom—one that doubled as a map of an alternative American future.' If the bearded German icon left a strong imprint on organized labor—the movement he believed would be pivotal to overthrowing capitalism—then it must have shaped the views of millions of ordinary Americans who burned to change their society in fundamental ways. Hartman sweeps with gusto through over a century and a half of U.S. history, revealing the influence of Marxism on dozens of institutions, individuals, and events, obscure and famous. Did you know that the revolutionary sage wrote or co-wrote nearly 500 articles for the New-York Tribune during the Civil War era, when it was one of the most popular newspapers in the nation? Or that at least two of his disciples were officers in the Union Army? Or that Franklin D. Roosevelt's 'political philosophy rhymed with Marxism'? While Hartman might overstate the importance of these political details, he largely succeeds at a different, if lesser, mission: to narrate how vital arguments about Marxist thought were to men and women who spent their lives battling about two distinct clusters of well-educated Americans, Marxism has long been a fruitful subject— either a set of ideas to think with or a cudgel to wield against ideological foes. In the first camp are radical and reform-minded intellectuals who take Marx's ideas seriously—even as they ceaselessly dispute, revise, and apply them to explain the evolving forms of American culture, economics, and politics. In the second camp thrive officeholders and propagandists on the right. For them, the old Rhinelander's name and a crude or false version of his doctrines serve as a perennial bogeyman to scare the public away from a welfare state and movements on the left. The Trump administration's recent vow to cancel federal funding that allegedly promotes some evil known as 'Marxist equity' fits a line of attack that has been around since Lenin occupied the Kremlin. Hartman's treatment of both left literati and right-wing witch-hunters brims with insight, cogently presented. In his most original foray into the burned-over ground of left intellectual history, he brings to life a number of thinkers about whom even most academics know little or nothing. There was Friedrich Sorge, who immigrated to New York from exile in Europe after fighting in the revolution of 1848 and 'was arguably better versed in Marx's writings' than anyone in his new country. Sorge, who helped found the nation's first socialist party—the Workingmen's Party of the United States—in 1876, argued that competing in elections would accomplish nothing unless wage earners first organized into powerful unions. Although neither of the parties that flew the Marxist banner across the country in the twentieth century won more than a handful of offices beyond the local level, both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party stamped their mark on American thought and culture. The SP nurtured such writers as Jack London and Helen Keller. During his five campaigns for president on the Socialist ticket, Eugene Debs articulated the need for a 'cooperative commonwealth' in terms borrowed from the Bible as well as the gospel of historical materialism. And while American Communists never abandoned their fealty to the tyrannical rulers of the Soviet Union, they did inspire such famous critics of class oppression and white supremacy as Woody Guthrie, Dorothea Lange, and Angela Davis. Among the more obscure figures whom Hartman profiles is Raya Dunayevskaya, a Ukrainian émigré, who created, after World War II, a fresh variant of the old doctrine she called 'Marxist humanism.' Her aim was to rescue a philosophy of human liberation from the Communists who had converted it into 'the theory and practice of enslavement.' Together with the great Trinidadian writer and organizer C.L.R. James, Dunayevskaya argued that Marx had sharply criticized all forms of labor under capitalism—enslaved or waged—as assaults on individual freedom. Departing from an orthodox focus on white industrial wage earners allowed them to broaden the definition of the exploited to include women, racial minorities, and students. 'Her Marxist theory of revolution was tailored for the 1960s,' Hartman aptly observes. But the radical feminists who coined the phrase 'the personal is political' grasped the same insight without seeking legitimacy in Marx's Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. Both James and Dunayevskaya arrived in the United States in the 1920s, before the Great Depression, when Marxists of all stripes understandably viewed that long downturn as proof of the chaos and misery endemic to capitalism. Surely, Americans would be open to a theory that would now seem like common sense. Organizers who happened to be Communists or Socialists played a major role in mobilizing the big strikes that birthed the unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the factories where cars, steel, and refrigerators were made: Members of the Communist Party were the chief architects of the sit-down strike in Flint, Michigan, during the winter of 1936–1937 that established the United Auto Workers as a power in the land. Yet Marxists gained more influence among writers and artists in the 1930s than among ordinary people. For all their fervor, leftist intellectuals struggled to understand why their message often failed to resonate more widely. At the polls, workers spurned Marxist candidates in favor of those from the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the patrician-turned-populist. One worker acclaimed FDR as 'the only man we ever had in the White House who would understand that my boss is a sonofabitch.' Bowing to reality, Socialist and Communist organizers narrowed their goals to union recognition, job security, and higher wages instead of a society run by and for the working class. The larger message of Marxism wasn't getting through: As Hartman remarks, 'Either there was something wrong with their theory, or there was something wrong with the working class.' The literary critic Kenneth Burke argued that paying closer attention to how Americans actually talked about their problems could help Marxists appeal to them in terms they might grasp. Poetic discourse, he mused, would advance the class struggle better than alien-sounding jargon. In his landmark 1935 history of the Civil War and Reconstruction, W.E.B. Du Bois hailed Black people for engaging in the biggest 'general strike' in U.S. history when they fled to Union lines, depriving Confederate planters of their labor. If white workers had only shed their racial privilege, he contended, they could have forged a potent alliance across the color line. Alas, 'not enough … were familiar with Capital,' Hartman says, and so they embraced the new Jim Crow order. Du Bois remained a Marxist all his life, but some talented younger leftists soon abandoned their faith in what they took to be a failed theory and became liberal proponents of American exceptionalism. In his immensely popular 1948 book, The American Political Tradition, the historian Richard Hofstadter maintained, a bit sadly, that radical dissenters had never made much headway against a consensual culture that was 'intensely nationalistic and for the most part isolationist … fiercely individualistic and capitalistic.' Whereas the Marxists of the '30s and '40s may have failed to convert the working class, their successors in the '80s and '90s didn't even attempt as much. As conservatives from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump tore away at the legacies of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the New Left, American Marxism entered a newly insular phase. A number of scholars took refuge in spinning out new versions of Marxism whose only audience was inside academia. The literary theorist Fredric Jameson sought to unmask the alienating function of 'commodity fetishism' with 'real thought' that 'demands a descent into the materiality of language and a consent to time itself in the form of the sentence.' Hartman aptly comments, 'Cultural theory made a fetish of difficult language.' In their tome Empire (2000), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri aimed to give left anti-globalizers an updated version of The Communist Manifesto but managed only to float an abstract hope that 'the multitude's ultimate demand for global citizenship' would be realized through discrete acts of resistance in locations scattered around the world. 'While the Right has been busy taking the White House,' Todd Gitlin quipped about such fanciful notions, 'the left has been marching on the English department.' Since the Great Recession, young activists on the left have turned to a more demotic style of Marxism to make sense of economic inequality as well as to protest it. Hartman points to the 'maximally accessible' prose in Jacobin, the magazine founded in 2010 by Bhaskar Sunkara, and to podcasts like Chapo Trap House, in which 'more than a hint of Marxism' flavors relentless put-downs of deluded liberals. This new generation has failed to gain more than a few slivers of political power: Its electoral victories in Washington have been limited to a handful of candidates endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America, notably Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, and the increased prominence of Bernie Sanders. To paraphrase the famous line chiseled on Marx's gravestone in London's Highgate Cemetery: American Marxists have only analyzed the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change Hartman doesn't capture why Marxists have found difficulty in spreading the word in the United States, and often claims victories for his cherished tradition when the story is more complicated. Take the example of Samuel Gompers. What the AFL leader learned from Marx convinced him to oppose the political strategy adopted by American Marxists. A socialist attorney once called Gompers 'the most class-conscious man I know.' But that mindset drove the labor leader to avoid using socialist rhetoric or making big promises about destroying capitalism. He knew such stances would turn off most working men and women in his nation, who demanded higher wages and better treatment on the job—not a proletarian revolution. What was true of labor was even more the case for other movements on the American left whose adherents were drawn from a variety of classes. From abolitionism to the heyday of the civil rights crusade in the 1960s, most Black organizers sought legitimacy and inspiration from such texts as the Bible and the Declaration of Independence—not the words of the Manifesto. Few feminists who were not also socialists took their cues from a nineteenth-century patriarch who wrote little about women besides noting the cheap labor they provided to factory owners. And environmentalists who yearn to do away with fossil fuels know the Soviet regime that made Marxism its state religion developed some of the filthiest carbonized industries on Earth. Even those prominent American activists who did praise what Marx wrote—who included Martin Luther King Jr. in his grad-uate student days—did not employ his language or endorse his ideas as they built powerful social movements. The 'freedom' from class exploitation that Hartman heralds was not the type that motivated many Americans, other than those who joined a socialist or communist party. And the membership and electoral clout of their organizations paled beside those of parties inspired by Marxism in nearly every other industrial nation. Through most of U.S. history, influential dissenters have spoken in registers more indigenous to the republic—democratic, Christian, and populist. 'The people' was a more common, inclusive term than 'the working class,' and urgent calls to realize the promise of self-government resonated far more widely than stern attacks on the power of the homegrown 'bourgeoisie.' 'To make everything depend upon economic forces,' wrote the progressive thinker Richard T. Ely in 1894, 'is shutting one's eyes to other forces, equally great and sometimes greater.' He added, 'one must be blind to historical and actual phenomena who would make religion merely a product of economic life.' Hartman tends to disparage this tradition as 'moral leftism,' but it has been a major driver of nearly every insurgency of consequence in U.S. the right, however, the M-word has long proved an effective weapon in its perpetual war against anyone branded as enemies of liberty and the nation itself. This assault began during the presidency of FDR. 'So help me God,' Father Charles Coughlin vowed in 1936 to his huge radio audience, 'I will be instrumental in taking a Communist from a chair once occupied by Washington.' But invocations of Marx became routine during the Red Scare after World War II and have rarely been absent since then. Senator Joseph McCarthy denounced a 'religion of immoralism … invented by Marx … and carried to unimaginable extremes by Stalin.' Reagan gave Richard Nixon some advice about how to campaign in 1960 against his Democratic opponent for the presidency: 'Shouldn't someone tag Mr. Kennedy's bold new imaginative program with its proper age? Under the tousled boyish haircut is still old Karl Marx—first launched a century ago.' In recent years, Trumpist hacks with big followings gleefully slap the label 'cultural Marxism' onto any phenomena they detest, from critical race theory to teachers' unions to the alleged bias of the liberal media. In a 2021 book, the talk-show jockey Mark Levin called on all Americans 'who love their country, freedom, and family' to fight back against Marxists who 'pursue a destructive and diabolical course for our nation, undermining and sabotaging virtually every institution in our society.' What makes such attacks plausible to millions of Americans was—and remains—the public's ignorance of what Marx actually wrote and believed. Hartman takes pains to show that both liberal critics and right-wing demonizers got his favorite thinker terribly wrong. He argues, with persuasive quotations, that Marx was opposed to neither free speech nor democracy, and thus the tyrannical regimes run by his would-be followers would have appalled him. But if far more Americans think Castro, Stalin, and Mao were genuine Marxists than will ever read a page of Capital, The Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, or even the Manifesto, that is just further proof of the small impression his American disciples have made on their fellow citizens. Despite the right's hostility, some of Marx's ideas still have great value almost 150 years after he died. As I wrote in these pages back in 2016, Marx 'brilliantly captured the propulsive dynamic' of the capitalist economy that has now conquered the entire world. What's more, 'our credulous addiction to the magical little computers in our pockets and purses demonstrates the wisdom of the section about 'the fetishism of commodities' in the first volume of Capital.' Anyone who cares about the multiple injuries of class can also learn from Marx's thorough dissection of the system of labor and production that generates so much wealth and so much pain. Yet, at the core of his thought is the determination that capitalism, like all earlier forms of class society, will inevitably fall victim to its own contradictions. After helping dig its grave, proletarians will begin to construct a world of caring and abundance for all. In 1938, George Orwell wrote that 'to the vast majority of people, Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.' But the gospel of self-reliance and the unions that struggle mainly for better pay and shorter hours have appealed to far more Americans than has the future predicted by Marx and echoed by his disciples. In the twenty-first century, a lot more working women and men have been willing to vote for an authoritarian billionaire who relishes destruction of the welfare state than have rallied to gain a measure of economic power for themselves. A theory that does not unravel that contradiction can do little to defeat Trumpism or build a more egalitarian society for Americans or anyone else.
Herald Malaysia
16-05-2025
- Politics
- Herald Malaysia
134 years later, Rerum Novarum inspires Leo XIV and still shapes Catholic social teaching
When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church on May 8, he chose the name Leo XIV in part, he said a few days later, to honor Leo XIII and his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum, a foundational document in Catholic social teaching that addressed the challen May 16, 2025 Credit: Sach336699/Shutterstock By Tyler Arnold When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elected supreme pontiff of the Catholic Church on May 8, he chose the name Leo XIV in part, he said a few days later, to honor Leo XIII and his historical encyclical Rerum Novarum , a foundational document in Catholic social teaching that addressed the challenges of the industrial revolution. Now, the new pope says, it can help us, along with the full body of social teaching, to navigate the developments of artificial intelligence. Today, on the 134th anniversary of the release of Rerum Novarum — published May 15, 1891 — CNA takes a look at the significance of this encylical. As European society was grappling with the impact of the industrial revolution and the rise of socialist ideology in the late 1800s, Pope Leo XIII issued a papal encyclical that expressed empathy with the discontentment of laborers but outright condemnation of the socialist movements of the time. The encyclical emphasizes a need for reforms to protect the dignity of the working class while maintaining a relationship with capital and the existence of private property. The message was promulgated fewer than 50 years after Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published 'The Communist Manifesto' in 1848 and after Pope Pius IX denounced both socialism and communism in his 1849 encyclical Nostis et Nobiscum . Pope Leo XIII's teachings can still help inform readers on the proper relationship between labor and capital. Leo XIII writes of a 'great mistake' embraced by the socialist-leaning labor movements, which is the notion that 'class is naturally hostile to class' and 'wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict.' This view, he asserts, is 'so false … that the direct contrary is the truth.' 'It [is] ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic,' Leo XIII teaches. 'Each needs the other: Capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital.' The pontiff, who reigned from 1878 until his death in 1903, saw a need 'in drawing the rich and the working class together' amid the strife brewing between these groups throughout the continent. This can be done, he said, by 'reminding each of its duties to the other' and 'of the obligations of justice.' For the laborer, this includes a duty 'fully and faithfully to perform the work which has been freely and equitably agreed upon' and to never destroy property, resort to violence, or riot to achieve a goal. For the wealthy owner, this includes a duty to 'respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character' and to never 'misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain or to value them solely for their physical powers.' 'The employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family or to squander his earnings,' Leo XIII says. Leo XIII contends that employers must pay workers the whole of their wages and workers must do all of the work to which they agreed. But, in the context of wages, he adds that this 'is not complete' because workers must be able to support themselves and their families. 'Wages ought not to be insufficient to support a frugal and well-behaved wage-earner,' Leo XIII writes. '... If a workman's wages be sufficient to enable him comfortably to support himself, his wife, and his children, he will find it easy, if he be a sensible man, to practice thrift, and he will not fail, by cutting down expenses, to put by some little savings and thus secure a modest source of income.' In certain cases, Leo XIII encourages the intervention of government, such as when 'employers laid burdens upon their workmen which were unjust,' when 'conditions [were] repugnant to their dignity as human beings,' and when 'health were endangered by excessive labor.' He adds that such interventions should not 'proceed further than [what] is required for the remedy of the evil.' Leo XIII also expresses support for 'societies for mutual help' and 'workingmen's unions' but also exerts caution against any associations that promote values contrary to Catholic teaching. He encourages the creation of associations that are rooted in Catholic teaching. The pontiff says there is much agreement 'that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class.' Yet, he accuses socialists of 'working on the poor man's envy of the rich' to 'do away with private property' and turn 'individual possessions' into 'the common property of all, to be administered by the state or by municipal bodies.' 'Their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer,' Leo XIII says. 'They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the state, and create utter confusion in the community.' Using this remedy to resolve poor conditions for the laborer, the pontiff contends, 'is manifestly against justice' because 'every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own.' He further argues that government intrusion into the rights of property and the right to provide for one's family is 'a great and pernicious error.' 'That right to property … [must] belong to a man in his capacity of head of a family; nay, that right is all the stronger in proportion as the human person receives a wider extension in the family group,' Leo XIII says. 'It is a most sacred law of nature that a father should provide food and all necessaries for those whom he has begotten; and, similarly, it is natural that he should wish that his children, who carry on, so to speak, and continue his personality, should be by him provided with all that is needful to enable them to keep themselves decently from want and misery amid the uncertainties of this mortal life.' Rerum Novarum set the foundations of Catholic social teaching about labor. Other popes have since built on the teachings laid out in the encyclical, including Pope Pius XI's 1931 encyclical Quadragesimo Anno on the 40th anniversary of Leo XIII's writing and Pope John Paul II's 1981 encyclical Laborem Exercens on the 90th anniversary.--CNA
