Marx and Engels: Counting the Costs of Careless Lives
The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.
Thomas Jefferson
Marx’s unwillingness to pursue a career seems to have been the main reason why his family was unsympathetic to his pleas for handouts. His mother not only refused to pay his debts, believing he would then simply contract more, but eventually cut him off completely. Thereafter their relations were minimal. She is credited with the bitter wish that ‘Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.’
Paul Johnson
At age thirty, Engels accepted his father’s offer to work in the family business... This became the source of Engels’ livelihood—and much of Marx’s. The young Engels called it “forced labor”—a painfully ironic term in view of what that phrase was to come to mean in twentieth-century Communist societies. Engels complained … “I’ve now got to be at the office no later than 10 in the morning.”
Thomas Sowell
Marx and Engel’s lives exhibit how ideas impact others. Rather than sketch a full biography of each, we can examine how their ideas impacted those closest to them through a few brief stories. The connection between the thoughts we have and the lives we live is well expressed by Francis Schaefer. He draws a connection between ideas and artistic creation when he says, “Man paints, shows creativity in science and engineering and so on ... A person’s world view almost always shows through in his creative output ... and thus the marks on the things he creates will be different.”[1] But there is no reason to limit the effect of ideas to painting, science or engineering. Our whole lives exhibit the marks of our inner thoughts.
We have already seen that communist theory, which believes that human beings are controlled by economic and class interest, cannot explain Marx and Engels. Both grew up in wealthy families. Neither were ever factory workers, but Engels did manage a factory for his father. Thus, the two communist visionaries lived off the very capitalism they sought to destroy. It should be noted that Engel’s job was far from hard. He rarely showed up to work before ten o’clock in the morning and spent much of his time on alcohol and cigars when he was not womanizing.[2] He, like so many today, dreamed of the day of casual sex and no responsibility for children. Engels wanted to call for the end of the family in one of the pair’s earliest writings, but Marx took out that passage. As Engels wrote elsewhere, “Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry. The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.”[3]
As noted in the quotes above, Marx got much of his living expenses from Engels. But the exploitation started much earlier, with Marx exploiting his own family. He manipulated them for money and pretended that he had been wronged.
Marx’s money troubles began at university and lasted his entire life … Marx borrowed money heedlessly, spent it, then was invariably astounded and angry when the heavily discounted bills, plus interest, became due. He saw the charging of interest, essential as it is to any system based on capital, as a crime against humanity, and at the root of the exploitation of man by man which his entire system was designed to eliminate. That was in general terms. But in the particular context of his own case he responded to his difficulties by himself exploiting anyone within reach, and in the first place his own family. Money dominates his family correspondence. The last letter from his father, written in February 1838 when he was already dying, reiterates his complaint that Marx was indifferent to his family except for the purpose of getting their help and complains: “You are now in the fourth month of your law course and you have already spent 280 thalers. I have not earned so much throughout the entire winter.” Three months later he was dead. Marx did not trouble to attend his funeral. Instead he started putting pressure on his mother … He argued that the family was “quite rich” and had a duty to support him in his important work. Apart from his intermittent journalism, the purpose of which was political rather than to earn money, Marx never seriously attempted to get a job … One way or another Marx got considerable sums of money by inheritance. His father’s death brought him 6000 gold francs, some of which he spent on arming Belgian workmen. His mother’s death in 1856 brought him less than he expected, but this was because he had anticipated the legacy by borrowing from his Uncle... Other sums came in through his wife and her family … Between them they received enough money, sensibly invested, to provide a competence, and at no point did their actual income fall below £200 a year, three times the average wage of a skilled workman. But neither Marx himself nor Jenny had any interest in money except to spend it … Indeed they were always in debt.[4]
But taking money from his family was not the only means by which Marx picked other’s pockets. The writing and revolutionary partnership between Marx and Engels was a long and extensive one, but it almost fell apart due to Marx’s selfishness. To understand the background of this major fight, it is worth noting that Engels had two homes. One of these was kept for business and one for his mistress. It is comical that one of the founders of communism was wealthy enough to maintain two homes rather than sharing with the poor. When Engel’s mistress died, he was deeply distressed. Marx’s response was to ignore his pain and ask for money.[5]
Engels replied coldly, and the incident almost ended their relationship. In some ways it was never the same again, for it brought home to Engels the limitations of Marx’s character. He seems to have decided, about this time, that Marx would never be able to get a job or support his family or indeed get his affairs into any kind of order. The only thing to do was to pay him a regular dole. So in 1869 Engels sold out of the business, securing for himself an income of rather more than £ 800 a year. Of this £ 350 went to Marx.
Thus, in the last fifteen years of his life Marx lived off the retirement income of a friend, who had earned his money from capitalism. Nevertheless, Marx “seems to have lived at the rate of about £ 500 a year, or even more … Hence the letters requesting additional handouts from Engels continued.”[6]It is not hard to imagine how his views impacted his wife and children. His belief in his redemptive mission excused him from the need to work or provide for his family as others had to. “In later years while his family was starving he could be found at the library.”[7]
Further, let us return to Jefferson’s quote. As he said, it does no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. Marx, it would seem, believed himself to be a god. Let us remember his poetry:
Then I will wander godlike and victorious
Through the ruins of the world
And, giving my words an active force,
I will feel equal to the creator.[8]
We can see how those who worked closest to him on the communist project felt when his unbelief impacted their interactions with him. As one colleague said, “Marx loved his own person much more than he loved his friends and apostles, and no friendship could hold water against the slightest wound to his vanity ... Marx will never forgive a slight to his person. You must worship him, make an idol of him, if he is to love you in return; you must at least fear him if he is to tolerate you.”[9] Another said of Marx, “‘if his heart had matched his intellect and he had possessed as much love as hate, I would have gone through fire for him.’ But ‘he is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that a most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him… the acquisition of personal power [is] the aim of all his endeavours.’ One writer struck the same note: ‘Marx does not believe in God but he believes much in himself and makes everyone serve himself. His heart is not full of love but of bitterness and he has very little sympathy for the human race.”[10]
Finally, we can come to Marx’s adultery with his household maid. His household servant’s son was born in 1851. Marx refused to acknowledge his responsibility and denied the rumors that he was the father. His maid, however, insisted on acknowledging the boy as her son. He was put into foster care. While the boy was allowed to visit the Marx household, he was forbidden to use the front door and obliged to see his mother only in the kitchen. Marx was terrified that his paternity would be discovered and that this would do him fatal damage as a revolutionary leader. Here too, Engels took the blame for Marx until Marx passed away. However, as his own death approached, Engels was unwilling to take the blame. One of his final acts was to document that Marx was the father of the child.
In final analysis, Marx and Engels ideas were deeply exploitative. Their personal beliefs that God did not exist affected their neighbors and their family. As one author has said of Marx, “His deep sense of insecurity pushed him to create out of his own imagination a device for interpreting history which made progress inescapable and a Communist millennium unavoidable. His personal attitude toward religion, morals and competition in everyday existence led him to long for an age when men would have no religion, morals or competition in everyday existence. He wanted to live in a classless, stateless, noncompetitive society where there would be such lavish production of everything that men, by simply producing according to their apparent ability, would automatically receive a superabundance of all material needs.”[11] Here we see more picked pockets and broken legs from those who claim that beliefs in God and morality do not matter. None of this was illegal, yet others were hurt deeply. This was not the end of the damage, for Marx and Engel’s ideas took on a life of their own and would march godlike and victorious through a ruined world. Should one question whether later communists truly reflected Marx’s ideas, one only needs to know what Marx wrote on the day his newspaper shut down. Its last printing read, “When our turn comes, we shall not disguise our terrorism.”[12]
[1] Francis Schaefer, How Should We Then Live (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2005), loc 1136, Kindle Edition. [2] Thomas Sowell, The Vision of the Anointed (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pg 62, Kindle Edition. It is strange that women often advocate most for communist ideas given its founders exploitation of women. [3] Paul Kengor, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 2017), pg 28, Kindle Edition [4] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper Collins, 2008) loc 1687, Kindle edition. [5] Ibid, loc 1699 [6] Ibid, loc 1697 [7] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 13, Kindle Edition. [8] Thomas Sowell, Marxism (New York: Quill, 1985), pg 166. [9] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 21, Kindle Edition. [10] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), loc 1609, Kindle edition [11] W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist (Salt Lake City: Izzard Ink Publishing, 2015), pg 20, Kindle Edition. [12] Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (New York: Harper Collins, 2008), loc 1609, Kindle edition. Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Devil in History (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012), pg 138, 167, 169, Kindle Edition.
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