Pop Marx

Will Wilkinson poses a piquant question for debate: shouldn't people who are admittedly influenced by Karl Marx be more embarassed than those who are influenced by Ayn Rand? What We Are Not Embarrassed By

The most powerful way to argue the affirmative is to compare the number of human beings murdered by the devotees of each. That line of attack ought to be decisive, but I’m afraid it won’t get you far with the multitude of highly-self-regarded thinkers influenced by Karl Marx. Fact is, commitment to some kind of socialism and fluency in the jargon of Marxism used to be mandatory for serious intellectuals. And there’s something glamorous in the very idea of the intellectual. Even for those of us who came of age after 1989, Marxism, like cigarettes, remains linked by association to the idea of the intellectual, and so, like cigarettes, shares in the intellectual’s glamour. I don’t know if cigarettes or Marxism have killed more people, but it’s pretty clear cigarettes are more actively stigmatized. Marxists, neo-Marxists, crypto-Marxists, post-Marxists, etc. have an enduring influence on intellectual fashion.

As if "the number of human beings murdered" has ever made a difference. Marxism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism have long been the intellectual preserve for those who would rule, rather than lead. Like rivalries in the faculty lounge, the dramas and plots of the Left are eternal and unchanging. Everytime they have been able to grasp absolute power, their nobly phrased campaigns for Freedom, Equality and Social Justice turn into revenge fantasies driven by "re-education" at gun point.

For whatever reason, the last few weeks have seen the publication of biographies of two of the Left's big guns: Friedrich Engels and Leon Trotsky. Are there really people out there who care enough to want to read about these guys? Apparently, yes. Consider Tristram Hunt's "Marx's General:" The Champagne Communist

Mr. Hunt paints ­sympathetic portraits of ­communism's founding circle, enamored of Hegelian ­philosophy and other ideas floating around ­19th-century Europe. We meet, for instance, the colorful Polish aristocrat August von ­Cieszkowski, who turned the hyper-abstract reasoning of German idealism into "praxis," an unlovely word for practical revolutionary activity. Then there is the ex-rabbi ­Moses Hess, "the first communist of the party," who argued that theology was anthropology and that anthropology was ­socialism: in short, that ­communism would bring about heaven on Earth, the ­fulfillment of religion by its negation. Engels had a falling out with Hess and cuckolded him in an act of vengeance, writing to Marx about the ­exquisite sight of Hess ­brandishing his pistols and ­parading his horns before the whole of Brussels.

When Engels first arrived in Manchester, he was astonished to find a working class with, as he put it, "more knowledge than most 'cultivated' ­bourgeois in Germany." But when it came to writing "The Conditions of the Working Class in England" (1844)—­described by Mr. Hunt as a tour de force—Engels ­airbrushed out the "cultivated" aspect of British working-class life. ­Instead he described ­urban ­industrial horror and talked of "the dissolution of mankind into monads."

Wow, what a guy! Engels was somone who couldn't be trusted around your wife, and who lied about the condition of the English working class to better fuel revolutionary resentment. Sign me up for whatever Utpoia he's selling!

Then there's the new book by Bertrand Patenaude about Leo Trotsky's " Tragic Last Days" in Mexico. Twilight In Mexico

Mr. Patenaude deploys the past—describing family deaths and ideological feuds, among much else—to feed the tense atmosphere in that Mexican household, where American sympathizers spread their duties to include fine-tuning the alarm system and scrutinizing visitors. Trotsky, disturbed in his work, heaps scorn on their sunbathing wives. The Americans dislike the food. Natalia needs someone to drive her to the shops. There are picnic excursions to relieve the ­tedium. Trotsky has a passionate fling with Rivera's wife, the painter Frieda Kahlo. But then in the last years his happiness is retied to Natalia's and to the 50 white rabbits and chickens he keeps in the ­courtyard.

Picnics, rabbits, sunbathing American wives, and Frieda Kahlo, oh my! As Ilya Solmin points out, Patenaude's book, along with the absurdly laudatory review linked above (published in the Wall Street Journal!), follows the path worn by earlier historians of the Left, who have seen Trotsky as a tragic martyr who would have done Soviet Communism "correctly," and thus would have saved The Cause from being discredited by decades of murder and repression. Hah! Maybe Trotsky wouldn't have killed millions like Stalin, but he certainly knew how to kill by the thousand.

More important, Trotsky remained an object of high regard among American intellectuals, even after he was exiled from the Soviet Union. :

Trotsky had more intellectual sympathizers in 1930s New York than anywhere else. The story of how they came to their senses over the myth of dialectical ­materialism has been told before. But they did Trotsky and justice a real service when, led by the philosopher John Dewey, a group of them agreed to travel to ­Mexico and ­question him on the charges that Stalin was then ­hurling at him at the Moscow show ­trials—conspiring with "fascists" to destroy the ­Soviet Union. The ­Commission of Inquiry, as it was called, ­acquitted Trotsky. Dewey described it as "the most ­interesting single
intellectual experience of my life."

John Dewey is about as close as you can get to an American "philosopher" who won't embarass you in certain circles. Yet, he was as much a part of the Left's dramas over Communism as anyone else. You would think this would be scandalous and grounds to question his thinking. But, of course, it's not. There may not be very many avowed Marxists out there, but there are certainly many who follow a Marxist interpretation of history, politics, society and economics, even if they may not admit it (or even realize it). The continued publication of laudatory biolgraphies of men who were among the scum of the earth is testament to that.