Karl Marx: The Best Hated Man

By Paul Foot (February 2004)

Karl Marx was so famous when he died in March 1883 that eleven people went to his funeral at Highgate cemetery. The funeral oration given by his friend and collaborator Frederick Engels ended with the observation that Marx, though he was a delightful character, a loyal friend and a devoted father, was the ‘best hated and calumniated man of his times’. That may have been true at the time but it became even more true later. Most socialists and revolutionaries can expect some relief from the abuse of high society after they are dead. But Marx has gone on being attacked and insulted for the 120 years since he died. At best he has been denounced as ‘out of date’. He is also denounced as immoral and cruel to those around him – did he not sleep with his servant? And lastly and more shockingly, he has been held responsible for monstrous tyrannies of our time, in Russia, China, Cambodia and so on, that pretended to be socialist but were in fact the opposite. Leaders of every academic discipline – politics, philosophy, economics, history, science and mathematics – have united to attack Marx. They kill him again and again only to regroup and kill him again. What I want to do is to try to understand why.

Ideas

The first and most obvious answer is the power of his ideas. Engels’s oration summed them up like this:

‘Just as Darwin discovered the laws of evolution in organic nature so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history; he discovered the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art, etc; and that therefore the means of life, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation on which the forms of government, the legal conceptions, the art and even the religious ideas of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which these things must therefore be explained, instead of vice versa as has hitherto been the case.’

Central to these ideas was the fact that human society is cut into classes, based on the property they own and control, and that the history of human society is a history of a ceaseless struggle between those who have the wealth and those who don’t.

In themselves, these ideas, however profound and accurate they may be, don’t really answer our question. If the ideas were simply the result of academic scientific discovery, as Darwin’s were, then the discoverer could surely be left alone, almost revered for his discovery, as Darwin, for all the bigoted attacks on him, has been. Surely there was another element of Marx’s life and thought which singled him out for such exceptional and long-lived vituperation? To find it, we return a third time to Engels’s speech in Highgate:

‘For Marx was, before all else, a revolutionary. His real mission in life was to contribute in one way or another to the overthrow of capitalist society and of the forms of government which it had brought into being, to contribute to the liberation of the present day proletariat.’

There in a nutshell is the answer to our question. He was not only a man with revolutionary ideas. He wanted to put those ideas into practice. Nothing is more misunderstood about Marx than his own insistence that he was a ‘scientific socialist’. Did this mean, as the crudest of his supporters have sometimes claimed, that his classification of capitalist society meant that its overthrow could be accomplished by doing nothing? Quite the opposite. The science in Marx’s approach was in the analysis, not the prescription. He was irritated by philosophers who mused idealistically about the evils of capitalist society and did nothing about them. For centuries philosophers had sought to interpret the world, he observed in a famous passage, and concluded, ‘The point is to change it.’

The way to change it was the exact opposite of waiting to see if a scientific experiment would work out. It was for human beings to involve themselves in the struggle on the side of the oppressed. Marx’s life was a model of that involvement. In his youth, in quick succession, he was thrown out of Germany, Belgium and France, because he threw himself into the struggles of workers in all three countries. In France he associated closely with the fighting elements in the working class, and never forgot his admiration for them. Finally in 1849, aged 31, he came to England (where there was no immigration control) and settled here for the rest of his life. He spent a lot of that time as an investigative journalist of the highest quality. He buried himself in the information the reactionary governments of the time published about their activities. His aim was to find out relevant information and publish it to assist workers’ struggles.

The period from 1849 to 1883 when he died was a period of low class struggle. The Chartists, who had brought the country to the brink of revolution, had been defeated and the working class movement was, for the moment, cowed. Marx’s tiny organisation, the Socialist League, split and split again. In the end, when there were really only two members left, Marx and Engels, Marx decided to concentrate on his journalism and on expanding the ideas that he and Engels had set out in the Communist Manifesto of 1848. In 20 years he wrote the three great theoretical works that set out his communist theory – the Critique of Political Economy, the Grundrisse and the greatest of them, Capital. There may be some of you, like me, who find these works difficult, and so they are. But Capital in particular is well worth persevering with. It is illustrated throughout with examples of human struggle, from the British workers fighting for the ten-hour day to black Americans fighting against slavery.

Yet even when he was composing these huge works, even though all the time he was trying to fend off abject poverty and considerable pain from skin disease, again and again he involved himself in the working class struggles of the time. I pick out three examples.

The First International

The first was the formation of the First International – the International Working Men’s Association – in 1864. The idea for the International came from trade union leaders who were fed up with the constant importation of scab labour to break strikes and weaken trade unionism. The International needed a written introduction to set out its aims. None of the trade union leaders could write anything comprehensible. When the various factions from foreign countries had a go, they made an even greater mess of it. Marx was asked for help. He suggested a subcommittee of one, and elected himself to it. The resulting articles of the International, clear and concise, start with the ringing dedication that the self emancipation of the working class is ‘the act of the working class themselves’. The articles went on all the membership cards of the International.

The second issue was universal male suffrage. This had been the demand of the Chartists, but since their defeat it had faded into the background. In 1866 a new organisation called the Reform League was formed to resurrect the demand. Marx organised a small group of socialists to try to take control of the Reform League and commit it to universal suffrage. He was so pleased with his efforts that he described the league as ‘all our work’. This claim was an example of another characteristic of Marx that often gets him criticised – his impatient optimism. He was inclined to put the best spin on any socialist initiative. The Reform League quickly deteriorated. It was not ‘all our work’ or anything like it. It attracted all sorts of reactionaries and compromisers who eventually won the day. Marx had got it wrong, but only in his intense enthusiasm to push the struggle forward – a sin, incidentally, that we ourselves commit more often than not, and are none the worse for.

The final example of his involvement that I’ve picked out is undoubtedly the greatest.

People sometimes ask me what work of Marx they should read first, and the obvious answer is the Communist Manifesto. Second to that in my opinion is a pamphlet he wrote in 1871 called The Civil War in France. This was about the Paris Commune, formed by the working people of Paris in revolutionary circumstances in March 1871. It lasted for two months until it was suppressed by murderous military terror of the most revolting proportions. Marx followed the commune through almost every hour of its existence, demanding from friends, family and acquaintances any fragment of information from Paris. When the commune was suppressed, he sat down, boiling with rage, and in five days wrote his pamphlet which he read out loud to the council of the International. As a description of the commune, it has never been bettered before or since. It sets out, above all, the democratic nature of the commune; how it not only made laws but carried them out, how it replaced the machinery of the capitalist state with an entirely new democracy that could never be tolerated by capitalism and its armies, and, incidentally, has nothing whatever to do with the societies presided over by Stalin, Mao or Pol Pot. The Civil War in France magnificently combines Marx’s terse journalism and his fighting spirit:

‘When the Paris Commune took the management of the revolution in its own hands; when plain working men for the first time dared to infringe upon the governmental privilege of their “natural superiors”, and under circumstances of unexampled difficulty performed their work modestly, conscientiously and efficiently – performed it at salaries the highest of which barely amounted to one fifth of what, according to high scientific authority, is the minimum required for a secretary to a certain metropolitan school board – the old world writhed in convulsions of rage at the sight of the Red Flag, the symbol of the Republic of Labour, floating over the Hotel de Ville.’

That passage (and indeed the whole pamphlet) takes us closer to the reason why Marx has been hated and calumnied for so long. It is not his ideas alone which important people detest – it is the drive to put them into practice. It is not simply that his ideas have not lost their relevance over all this time – there is still a class society after all, that is every bit as foully exploitative as it ever was – it is the fact that there are people inspired by Marx who still want to change the world in the direction to which he pointed. So people are still ridiculed and abused by the professors of the profiteers because we want to fight, as he did, to rid the world of riches altogether and to get rid of poverty at the same time. Such people, such Marxists, are prepared moreover to organise to do so.

Mark Steel Presents Harriet Tubman

The always enjoyable Mark Steel presents Harriet Tubman.

Yemen, Hillary Clinton and Imperial Hypocrisy

The news coming out of Yemen, a place now uncomfortable as dinner party conversation, but still client of the United States, where the death toll is now nearing 50, is as horrific as any of the events of the last period. Groups of snipers, security forces of one kind or another we assume, on roof tops aiming head shots into massed crowds of protesters leaving Friday prayers and heading for the occupied activists’ camp. Scores fell dead, dozens more wounded. A massacre by any criteria, this.

Since the United States has (overtly, at the least) supplied “more than $250 million in military and security aid to Yemen in the past five years, until 2009″.  In just 2010 aid went to $300 million (for arms sales in for go to the for more numbers that never fail to shock got to the Arms Trade page of the Global Issues site). I think we’re pretty safe in assuming those were American equipped and developed soldiers (that would be the Yemeni Army or security services), American guns firing American bullets into the bodies of Yemen’s glorious young in defense of a despot (or, if you’re Hillary Clinton a ‘moderate voice in the region’).

Here’s Hillary the last time she visited Yemen in mid-January ‘”We face a common threat posed by the terrorists and al-Qaida, but our partnership goes beyond counterterrorism,” she told reporters after a nearly three-hour meeting with Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Saleh. “We’re focused not just on short-term threats but long-term challenges,” like how to head off the mass uprising that is sweeping his despots lair.

That and the big cash-in on the perks of the War on Terror; Yemen supplies the dark holes filled with torture chambers and the torturers and doesn’t sweat the ‘rights’ business; The United States provides the to-be-tortured and 300 million greenbacks which the Yemenis return to American hands by way of contracts with Boeing or McDonnell-Douglass etc. for loads of  weapons needed to fight…a mythical Al Qaeda…it’s a racket. The Yemeni Army became a pet project of Petraeus. Contract after contract of the Military Industrial Complex was to be had in Yemen and not for the piddly-shit money they used to do business for. The game, Al Qaeda, was in town and the big money was coming in.

But for those angry, those dispossessed, those masses of Yemen so that the threat of the myth being made real is enough to be a real threat…or to look real, at least. Or at least something like that. It’s all in the dance, really. The dance of the deeply hypocritical; an ugly dance. Between the realpolotik of (neo)liberal ‘humanitarian’ imperialism and a stone cold dictator and his cronies (along with some House of Saud considerations) it can be, for anyone with a taste for principle and basic honesty, let alone a passion for social justice, lean one to feel a little queasy. And from those worlds, nothing but more misery. But the masses of Yemen are finding their own voice and developing their own demands, demands that do not follow those dance moves…at all. Clinton has called for the snipers to restrain themselves and urged Saleh to respect his promise to allow demonstrators to meet. And then she asked for the people to dialogue with the government that is assassinating them. And today 50 dead.

Clinton shamelessly held out her hand to the bereaved; ‘We extend our deepest condolences to the families and friends of those who have lost their lives and call on President Saleh to uphold his promise to protect peaceful demonstrators. All perpetrators of violence should be held accountable and brought to justice.’ Meanwhile, the support continues unabated for the Saleh regime. The dance is really quite deadly. It’s an ugly dance all around.

The people of Yemen would thank Hillary Clinton with wild cheers themselves for her support of ‘democracy’ (forgetting all that other stuff), except she is not hitting Yemen this trip. There was that embarrassing fall last time and there’s these riots and mass killings this time and that Gadaffi is a real son-of-a-bitch and Tahrir was great! but just not this trip. That and the people are too busy mourning their dead children and, perhaps, a little angry, oh let’s split the difference and call it ‘frustrated’, for the niceties demanded by high diplomatic parlance on an empty stomach and an aggrieved heart.

Long Live The Yemeni Revolution!

Libya: Rank Imperial Hypocrisy

The cynicism and hypocrisy on display over the vote in the United Nations Security Council, whose permanent members constitute a den of thieves if ever there was one, for an assault on forces loyal to Gaddafi in Libya is rank, even by the odoriferous standards of that body. The very same day the United States was, yet again, accused of a drone strike resulting in the mass murder of civilians in Pakistan. The very same day, just kilometers from where the United States’ vaunted Fifth Fleet is stationed, US allies Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were gunning down protesters on the streets of Manama. Just this morning nearly 30 protesters were killed by US ally Yemen.

For years since Muammar came in from the cold in 2003 European and American arms exporters have been selling weapons to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars to the Gaddafi regime. Italy, France, Germany and Britain sought to lift the arms embargo in 2004 and they got quite a return for their efforts. Those planes bombing the Libyan revolutionaries are French Mirages, and now France will send their own against the ones they sold yesterday. And then there is the oil….

I support the overthrow of Gaddafi by his own people; he should go the way of Ceausescu. I do not support the overthrow of Gaddafi by the most criminal regimes in the world, US and European imperial powers. France bombing North Africa? No thanks, seen that movie before. The United States bombing an Arab country? Way past time to end the sequels in that franchise too. There is not an instance in the last 100 years and longer, and if readers can come up with one please do share, where imperial powers have played anything but a pernicious role in the region. Just look at where those weapons Gaddafi is using to roll over the towns held by revolutionaries come from. We are to trust those same mother fuckers with saving the Lybian people? Not for a single moment.

I wish the workers movement was in a position to independently help the Libyan revolution. I wish the popular revolts in the region were able to as well. But the left can’t take responsibility for a situation where we have little or no power. Yes, I know my wishes mean nothing to those under the most dangerous, do-or-die assault from Gaddafi and they need real assistance. If we were in a position to give genuine assistance we would do so, happily. The assistance given by the imperial powers may provide a temporary reprieve from the counter-revolutionary onslaught of the regime, but that assistance is not genuine. It comes with a huge price tag; the independence of Libya.

There is much more to say on this and the situation is deserving of far more than a rant, but it’s 7 AM and a rant seems the most appropriate response I can give at the moment. Victory to the Libyan Revolution! Death to Imperialism!

Democracy: It’s Ours Versus Theirs

Some brief thoughts on the most general of levels regarding one of the big issues coming out of the struggle around the new reactionary legislation sweeping the country and the mobilizations against it. While I’m not sure this would fit on a sign, or is appropriate for one, at some point the ‘democracy umbrella’ that we are all meant to adhere to and are demanded to live under, to be sheltered by, needs to be realized to be the cage it truly is if our class is to be capable of waging its side of the class war.

Both the Democrats and the Republicans are demanding recourse to the law, some of it more legal than others. Much of the movement is seeking redress in the courts, including the union leaderships. Politics is to be about democracy and about law. Politics at the level of the struggle between classes is nothing but determining where and how force is applied however, though the law is a good barometer of the class struggle since the law seeks to codify force in society. Force can, of course, be applied without recourse to the law, but law allows for the pretense, and in a certain sense the reality, of democracy since it is ‘agreed upon’ and democracy is, in theory, the negation of force in politics.

However, it is the force available to the state (and the State) that makes these laws real, never mind what the will or interests of the people are. Force is a pink slip, a sheriff blocking a door, a budget cut, a school closing; coercions all. It is all of those things as much as it is the threat of a fine, a jail cell or a water cannon. It is a ban on collective bargaining and if you don’t like it, tough; it’s the law. Oh, and those sheriffs? They don’t call them Law Enforcement for nothing. It is the state that holds the monopoly on force. They call it the rule of law. Force can also be a sit-in, a boycott, an occupation, a strike. But to exercise this force it is often necessary…to break the law.

‘Democracy’ exists now through the medium of ‘rights’ and those rights are not at all eternal or everlasting, they are products of society, and this society is a capitalist one. Even where rights are genuinely won by workers and others the passing of the Bill only proves that rights granted can be rights revoked. Place all of the laws of your society protecting rights of property in one pile and those protecting wage earners in another. And how could it possibly be any different? No, democracy for workers and democracy for capitalists are competing democracies, not complimentary ones.

One defends a tyranny of parasitical interests pursued by an increasingly concentrated private wealth of, both in relative and absolute numbers, an infinitesimal class. It lionizes individual rights, personal ‘liberties’ and private property. The draconian bills in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin are the logical conclusion to a society based on such ‘rights’. The fusion between the corporate and the state, though as bad before is worse now…as the saying goes and the consequences of that are everywhere; from the Health Care Bill to the extension of tax cuts for the rich to the bailout of banks and business and the austerity on everyone else. Obama or Bush, the rich still rule; literally in the case of the federal level where millionaires (duly elected, of course) populate the vaunted halls and chambers of the ‘Republic’. Their democracy looks an awful lot like The Patriot Act to me.

The one we propose, we seek to practice, is infinitely more expansive than theirs. It recognizes, above all, collective rights and collective control of those rights. It introduces democratic control over the economy, that most defining social relationship we are a part of. It embraces the interests of the great mass of the world, its producers, going beyond the social divisions we see as so central, so natural to our current predicament and political landscape; class, gender, race, nation, religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity, ‘ability’- all the past as present, the present as past. A society mediated by those rights, those collective rights, is the only chance at survival for our society and possibly our species in an increasingly global world facing increasingly global challenges; no, catastrophes the consequences of which are collective, even if unevenly distributed.

On the steps of Wisconsin’s State House last week I saw elements of both those competing democracies; well, one more than the other. And these things are naturally confused and intertwined and manipulated; they were all jumbled together but they were distinct. The elements of capitalist democracy I saw in Madison disgusted me; maneuvering, demobilizing, subservient, limited. That elements of collective, of workers, democracy I saw exhibited there was joyous; creative, open, energizing, versatile. It was ‘common’ in the very best sense of the term.

In this class war let us wage that war, in part, on the grounds of ‘democracy’. By all means, but let us wage it by utilizing, developing and deepening ours, throwing off the yoke of theirs in the process.

Around the Lake: A ‘Spring’ Break Roadtrip

On the road all the way around Lake Michigan over spring break last week. Though I have to say the only hint of a springtime I experienced was on the steps of the capital building in Madison, Wisconsin. Began going North to and through Michigan’s Upper Peninsula hugging Superior’s shores along the way to the Porcupine Mountains near the Wisconsin border. Lake Superior is not your normal lake. I’ve never seen it in winter. In storms it crashes blocks of jagged ice as big as cars onto the shore. It is a massive, dark and foreboding body of water. At a little town called Big Bay, the last stop on the road, one could easily imagine one was at the end of the fucking world. In Marquette I met a man who surfed (!?) the lake’s rare open flows just weeks before. People drink a lot up there, especially in winter. We’ll assume he was drunk.

Below is the Black River which begins in a Wisconsin boreal wetland and empties into Lake Superior falling 200 feet in five cataracts. In winter the ice further restricts the water’s flow and spouts of foaming, freezing spray erupt through the ice. The constant coating of water leads to the most peculiar ice forms along the waterfalls which follow one another in quick succession. All of this framed by giant firs and some of the oldest geology on the planet. It is a serenely perfect natural spot. I can’t recommend County Highway 513 through the Ottawa National Forest following the river to the lake enough. This westernmost part of Michigan is further away from my Michigan home than New York City is, so I don’t feel bad about letting go of the secret of this place. If you make the journey you deserve the beauty.

Down through a beautiful, never before seen, northern Wisconsin through the Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe reservation and eventually to Madison. That day saw a march of firefighters and of ‘Elders for Justice’ among other events. Unfortunately I was unable to get into the capital building (the status was tied up in the courts at the time), but joined the demonstrators at the doors. After being glued to the goings on in Madison the last month it was a real learning experience to be on the ground and getting a feel for the situation, even if only briefly.

Some semi-formed impressions: 1) Solidarity is beautiful; the most beautiful of human relations, 2) The diversity of the demands and protesters centered around a class perspective (even if muddled) was refreshing and frankly new to my eyes in my twenty plus years of political activity, 3) Whatever the local and state Democrats and union leaderships have done to obstruct Walker’s agenda has been done because of the actions of protesters and the outrage of workers, however the movement’s realization that they can lead themselves has yet to be realized 4) Any strategy that relies on parliamentary machinations or the Democratic Party is doomed to failure…doomed. 5) I don’t trust cops, any cops any where, even when they say or even are (temporarily) on our side and it was awful strange to be in a demo praising law enforcement; a little like sitting uncomfortably in the pew of a church of a religion not yours 6) If there is to be a general strike (big if) then why in the world would you call it for after the bill is passed? The real power of labor is labor and that has yet to be flexed in Wisconsin 7) People are in motion, things are being discussed that were undiscussed and undiscussable just months ago; a great, inspiring learning experience and class battle is being waged, it was a thrill to breathe its air.

Down to Chicago for a few days. I’ve spent a lot of time in Chicago, but this trip meandered through dozens of the city’s neighborhoods and I saw many parts of the city I’ve never seen before. At first I thought I might be able to squeeze in a taco from every street stand in Chicago, but after the first night of trying I thought better of the plan. One thing’s for sure, Chicago has food. There’s plenty to say about Chicago; as a Midwesterner it, not DC or New York or LA, is my capital city. Despite it being the fourth wealthiest city in the world, it still feels awfully proletariat. Perhaps it is because all of that wealth is tied up in a relatively few rich folks, that and the mile after mile of rail yards, canals, warehouses and factories (many idled) . Parts of Chicago looked like Detroit; post-industrial and hollowed out. Parts of it, much smaller parts, are as wealthy as the wealthiest neighborhoods in the world. And parts of it are so maddeningly ‘middle class’ in the exact American usage of the term. It is a terribly segregated city, its racial politics on display everywhere. Streets can change abruptly from black to brown to white. It’s all awfully familiar, and it feels like home.

Above is the reason for the great Pullman Strike of 1894. This ‘model’ community built by the railroad robber baron was meant to be a showcase of enlightened industrialism. It turned out to be a nightmare. Many of the homes were shoddily built, even lacking plumbing. Workers had to pay for the use of the library. When Pullman decreased wages in 1893 he refused also to decrease the rents and goods of his paternal charges who worked sixteen hour days. In May of 1894 3000 workers, residents of the buildings above, went on a wildcat strike. Within weeks 250,000 rail workers around the country were on strike. Led by the American Railway Union and Eugene Debs, Chicago became a battlefield. Thousands of troops and National Guard were deployed to protect scab workers and company property, barricades were erected on Pullman town’s streets.Over a dozen workers were killed and many hundreds arrested. Among those arrested was Debs himself. Not then a revolutionary or even a socialist Debs, who was initially very reluctant to support the boycott strikes of the ARU in support of the Pullman workers, was sent to prison as part of a policy to crush the ARU. A successful policy as it turned out. But history was to have its revenge. In Woodstock, Illinois’ federal prison Debs was introduced to the writings of Karl Marx including his Wage Labour and Capital. When Debs walked out of prison he walked out a socialist, going on to become the most effective revolutionary working class leader the country has yet witnessed winning a million votes in 1920. In relative terms, Debs did nearly three times as well as Nader in the 2000 election…and on a socialist platform. Many of the houses of Pullman are still occupied, if far the worse for wear. The three thousand acre site is now a Historic District, but not one of those gentrified ones, not even close. Go to Pullman comrades and walk the streets that Debs and the workers of the ARU walked. All the way south in Chicago below 103rd, it’s worth the trip.

A trip to Chicago would be incomplete without engaging the experimental (all terms for this music are inadequate) music the city is legendary for. In 1965 the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, forerunner to the Art Ensemble of Chicago, was formed and damn near fifty years later the city still produces its fair share of the avant-garde. Curated by Ken Vandermark, the Resonance Festival opened during the visit at the Hideout, which bore a striking resemblance to the bar in The Deer Hunter. Highlight: Chicago’s own Michael Zerang.

East from Chicago on a rainy day home. And now back to the grind with ‘two, three…many Madisons!’ on my mind….

‘I come because tyranny planted my seed in the hot desert sand’

Just returning from a trip around Lake Michigan; the frozen shores of Superior to Madison and then Chicago.  Pictures and a report will be posted in the next days. In the meantime let’s revisit the theme of the last weeks; revolution. This might be my favored song on the subject; Scotland’s great Dick Gaughan doing New York anarchist and Yiddish poet  Joseph Bovshover’s ‘Revolution’. Play it loud and play it repeatedly comrades. Shout it, study it, work for it, make it.