Karl Marx – His 200th Birthday

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Darrell Castle talks about the 200th birthday of Karl Marx and what Marxism has meant to the world and what it means to us today.

Transcript / Notes

KARL MARX—HIS 200^TH BIRTHDAY

Hello, this is Darrell Castle with today’s Castle Report.  Today is Friday, May 11, 2018.  On today’s Report, I will be talking about the bicentennial of the birth of Karl Marx and what his life has meant to the world and what it means to us today.

Marx was born May 5, 1818, and lived for 64 years.  He was born into a middle class family and studied law and philosophy.  His maternal grandfather was a Jewish Rabbi and he also had Rabbis on his father’ side.  Eventually his father joined the Evangelical Church of Prussia but Karl was baptized into the Lutheran Church a little after that.

He was born in the small German town of Trier but had to leave for Belgium, and then France, as more and more countries grew tired of those who advocated what Karl did.  Eventually he settled in London, although he was then considered a stateless person.

Marx’s theories about religion, society, economics, and politics are together known today as “Marxism”.  He held that nothing much mattered in the human society except class struggle.  Societies develop through class struggle, which manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling classes, or the bourgeoisie, and the working classes, or proletariat.  The ruling classes control the means of production and that enables them to buy the labor of the working classes and sell it for profit.  He believed that the profit of the bourgeoisie was theft from the worker.

Eventually he predicted, through organized revolutionary action, that working classes would topple capitalism and replace it with a kind of utopia which he called “communism”.  I would argue that where Marxism has been tried throughout its history, it has never progressed beyond socialism, and that includes Soviet Russia, and China.  The Communist utopia has never been achieved because it is impossible to achieve, and efforts to achieve it led to the roughly 100 million deaths attributed to communism.

Although he wrote many things, including fiction and poetry, he is known for his two most famous works,  The Communist Manifesto, and the three volume, Das Capital.  In his poetry he often expressed high regard for Satan, and said that he had struck a deal with him.  In his poem The Fiddler, he said “With Satan I have struck my deal, He chalks the signs, beats time for me I play the death march fast and free. “

His poetry also expresses his thirst for destruction and his hatred of the existing order of society.  Some of it sounds like the biblical description of Satan’s rebellion and war against God, “Then I will be able to walk triumphantly, like a god, through the ruins of their kingdom.  Every word of mine is fire and action.  My breast is equal to that of the Creator.”

These thoughts expressed in Marx’s writings led to the deaths of 10’s of millions and probably up to 100 million.  Wherever it has been tried, mass slaughter has been the result, and any social institution independent of the all-powerful state has been undermined and destroyed.  Institutions, such as the New York Times and other media publications, apparently see no need to apologize for their advocacy of such a violent and destructive philosophy.

One week before Marx’s birthday the New York Times published an op-ed piece after having previously published a string of pro socialist articles.  The op-ed was entitled “Happy Birthday Karl Marx—You Were Right.”  It was written by Jason Barker, professor of cultural studies in Kyung Hee University, of South Korea.  It seems the New York Times is trying very hard to rehab a philosophy of murder and tyranny.  Why is anybody’s guess.

Marx was far more honest about the intent of Communism than is the New York Times today.  While the Times tries to ignore the tyranny and destruction, Marx was quite open about the things that he intended to destroy:

1. The family, because the family rests on capital, on private gain.  He believed that in its fully developed form, the family was a bourgeois or ruling class concept.  Today the family, in true Marxist thought, is under severe assault.   Pro-family organizations exist and pro-family politicians campaign but Communism’s, or better said, socialism’s long march through our institutions of education and government, have seriously eroded and degraded the family.

2. Individuality, because he envisioned egalitarianism, so the social construct of capitalist society, i.e., the individual, was contacted to capital itself.  The abolition of freedom and individuality was his aim, as he openly admitted.  The destruction of the individual was linked to the destruction of religion, especially the Christian Religion with its teaching of individual responsibility and that we are created in the image of God.  This philosophy is the antithesis of American Constitutional liberty because in America individuals have rights that even the majority, by their combined vote, cannot legally take away.  The American system, as opposed to Communism, lifts the individual’s status, and that’s one of the things that make this American system so amazing.  For perhaps the first time the individual is actually important.

3. Eternal truth, or any truth beyond the truth of class struggle.  The truths of each age are the truths of the ruling class and must therefore be overthrown.  Communism does not seek to modify truth but to overthrow and destroy it.  Communism abolishes the idea of eternal truths, such as freedom and justice, and it abolishes all religion and all morality, and is therefore in contradiction to all past historical experience.  Marxism is the antithesis of everything that is logical and good but it is a philosophy that is broadcast to us in our living rooms, and on our movie screens, and in news publications every day of our lives.

4. The nation, because working men have no country, so we cannot take from them what they have not got.  The proletariat must acquire the power of political supremacy and will then constitute the nation itself.  The proletariat will destroy the need for nations as the antagonism between people will vanish when the means of production are in the hands of the proletariat.  This philosophy is exhibited today by the continual move toward collectivization and the combining of nations into mass collectives.

5. The past, because tradition and history are just tools of the bourgeois.  Adherence to the ways of the past are just designed to distract the proletariat from its drive for emancipation and supremacy.    In the Communist society the present will dominate and destroy the past.  This is obvious in our society today as monuments to past lives are torn down or vandalized and textbooks are written to eliminate our history to keep it from the minds of the young.

Capitalism does not destroy itself, as Marx predicted.  Instead, it has ushered in the greatest period of prosperity and advancement for the greatest number of people in human history.  Sanitation, running water, electricity available to virtually everyone, preservation of food, stoves to heat the food, cars to make travel available to all, televisions, laptop computers, smart phones, on and on the list goes.  Wealth is unequally distributed but at least it exists and even the poor live lives their ancestors never dreamed of.  I’ve heard it said that the poor in capitalist societies today live better than a Roman Emperor.

On the other side, we have purges, starvation, the deaths of up to 100 million, and an aggressive power-grabbing tyrannical philosophy.

In closing, let’s make a list of the top 10 most successful and influential Marxist countries.  Can’t think of 10?   Well, how about five?  O.K., I’ll be reasonable just name one.  That’s right the answer is zero. There are and have been no examples of successful and influential Marxist countries.

What was Karl Marx right about—nothing?

At least that’s the way I see it.

Until next time folks,

This is Darrell Castle,

Thanks for listening.