Karl Marx in the light of history (4/2012)

Karl Marx was lauded by James Connolly as “the best friend Ireland ever had”.This is untrue. Karl Marx despised the Irish and was a Freemason and anti-Semite.

Karl Marx came from an old rabbinical family in Trier, Germany. Trier lies in the Rhineland and was considered a liberal part of Germany. Karl Marx saw the usurper Napoleon as a liberating force for Germany but did not want to be associated with the Mayenne Clubs that celebrated the Haut-Rhin expansion into Germany so as not to alienate Prussian-dominated imperialism.

In his critique of Hegel for his doctoral thesis there is a lot of torrid prose which does not elucidate his dialectics as he later claimed. Indeed we have to wait until the 1970’s for a full exposition of the spiral of descending logic and syntheses from Moscow in an academic elucidation of these principles. Marx simply said in his Introduction to Capital Vol.1 which was published in 1866 to 1867 that he had turned Hegel’s logic “on its head”.

In his writing on the Irish famine of 1846 to 1848 Marx showed little sympathy for the Irish as human beings. It was Engels in 1841-1842 who truly embraced the Irish as human beings when he wrote about their sufferings in Manchester, living in flooded basements with a single chair and rickety old table and a bag of potatoes(The Condition of the English Working Classes). Engels was a rich man who provided employment in his cotton mill, Barmen and Engels. 

Marx looked to the Fenians who were merely political proselytisers exploiting the Irish for their  living expenses and money for their  personal needs (Archbishop Moriarty, 1867.)

Regarding the Catholic faithful, Marx characterised the Irish Catholics in England as belonging to the criminal classes. He spoke of English Catholics as a mixture of  nobility and Irish lumpen proletarians.

Marx himself lived in dire poverty from 1848 to 1852 before he joined the Freemasons. He moved his wife, servant and three children from a two-bedroom flat in Soho to a commodious house in Hampstead. He then travelled widely to Carlsbad and Algiers.

A German tailor who died of consumption in Manchester, Wilhelm Wolff, willed him £358 in 1857 after spending his life in poverty in a one-room lodging. This equates to over £360,000 today. Marx used the money to buy arsenic which he spread on his carbuncles. (Marx had clearly been poisoned)

Marx was bitterly anti-Semitic despite coming from a rabbinical family. 

 His father was a lawyer who changed his religion to Lutheranism to avoid prohibitions on Jews entering the Prussian civil service in the Rhineland. Marx, as an exile in 1845 to 1846 in Brussels, wrote bitter anti-Semitic prose about the Jewish Bauer ‘brothers’. In 1878 he was still writing anti-Semitic letters against Jews in the Social Democratic movement. He characterised their names such as Rosenberg as “fragrant”.

Marx’s legacy is one of discontent, psychological disorder and violence. He was an anti-Irish racist and a Freemason.

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Marx's great legacy is materialism. He saw in money and trade the cornerstones of capitalism and modern industrial society.

In Rerum Novarum the Catholic Church in the 1883,the year of  Marx's death tried to reassert it's leadership of the poorer classes by calling for the organisation of industrial organisations and trade unionist and that drew a line in the sand with rich  patrons in France and Germany and the US heretics.

In 1937 after the Moscow Trials came to a head with the trial of Zinoviev,Kamenev and Bukharin the Vatican intervened with another Papal Encyclical title On Bolshevik Atheism a radical departure from socialism as previously developments had formed in the post-Civil War years.

There is little of historical significance in any Papal Bull or Vatican Encyclical since it is invariably 'too little,too late' to alter prescient rumours of revolution and war.

However,since I am a Catholic I take the Church to be a truer witness and more stable witness than any revolutionary socialist or atheistic heretic who is living off public doles or a jailbird like Stalin who went to prison for the robbery of the Georgian State Treasury in 1913.