After the Cold War ended, many people thought that communism was a dead issue, and fashionable pundits like Francis Fukuyama claimed that we were witnessing the global triumph of liberal capitalism. But communism, in fact, never went away, and in these days we have witnessed its revival with, for example, the Marxist policies advocated by Kamala Harris. It is essential in these circumstances to be reminded of communism’s grim record. And who better to do it than Sean McMeekin, who my readers will remember for his excellent book Stalin’s War. In To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism (Basic Books, 2024), McMeekin has attempted nothing less than a global history of the entire communist era. In this week’s column, I’m going to discuss a theme of great interest in this book.
Many contemporary Marxists anxiously distance themselves from Lenin and Stalin, averring that the system that prevailed under their leadership was far distant from the “true” communism of Karl Marx. McMeekin shows us, however, that Marx was himself a fire breather and hater of no mean proportions.
Marx is often portrayed as motivated by love of the working class, if not all of humanity. Actually, starting from the time he was a university student, he displayed contempt and hatred for the masses he deemed beneath him. As McMeekin writes, “Rather than appreciating the good fortune that allowed him to live this agreeable life of leisure [made possible by an allowance from his father], Marx wrote poetry that was angry and misanthropic. In Savage Saga, published in January 1841, a twenty-two-year-old Marx lambasted that humans were tired, empty, frightened, the ‘apes of a cold God,’ a God who warned his apes, ‘I shall hurl gigantic curses at mankind.’” In this connection, McMeekin might also have mentioned Reverend Richard Wurmbrand’s Marx and Satan (Crossway, 1986). Marx’s adoption of a Luciferian persona was, in fact, a frequent motif in nineteenth-century Romanticism, analyzed in the famous book of Marion Praz, The Romantic Agony (Oxford, 1930).
Marx’s misanthropy continued throughout his adult life, leading him to a distorted version of Hegelian philosophy. In Hegel’s philosophy of history, war plays a role in the advance of history toward its goal—freedom (of course very different from the way we Rothbardians regard freedom)—though his support for war is much disputed among Hegel scholars. (Michael Rosen’s excellent book The Shadow of God (Harvard, 2022) includes a careful study of this issue.) Marx moved war to the center of the historical process. Only a major war could ignite a revolution, the violence and destruction of which would purge humanity and prepare the way for the communist future. As McMeekin puts it:
In Marx’s version of the Hegelian dialectical Aufhebung [overcoming], class would abolish itself, thus making class conflict impossible. The “total revolution” to bring this about would. . .require political violence. The last word in human affairs, he wrote almost with gleeful anticipation, was “combat or death: bloody struggle or extinction.”
Because of the vast changes that bringing about communism would require, only a world war would suffice to make it possible, as anarchist critics of Marx, most notably Michael Bakunin, were quick to recognize:
As some of Marx’s anarchist critics, particularly those on the anarchist left, such as Michael Bakunin, perceived, the maximalist Marxist program, requiring state control of the banks, industry, agriculture, and economic exchange, could only be achieved with massive violence and force. . . Absent the catalyst of war, Communist Revolution was inconceivable. . . Only the utter devastation of the First World War did enough damage [to allow the success of the Bolshevik Revolution].
In his efforts at total destruction, Marx did not spare women, children, and the family. He denounced in a notorious passage of the Communist Manifesto, the “bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child.” It is evident that one of the key points of contemporary cultural Marxism—its “woke” attack on the traditional family—has its roots in words of the Master, and those of us opposed to this assault should bear this pedigree in mind as we struggle against it.
Marx was an active participant in the labor movement, but his involvement did not incline him to treat workers as his equals, even though a proletarian uprising was supposed to be central to the overthrow of capitalism. Workers needed the guidance of elite intellectuals, most definitely including himself:
Marx’s first experience with labor and labor organizers did not enflame him with a desire to change the world to improve their lot. Rather, the lack of intellectual sophistication of real workers reinforced his belief that doctrine must come first and that the historical dialectic must be respected.
As Bakunin and other anarchist critics recognized, Marx aimed for a bloody revolution that would put him and his friends at the top:
Bakunin wrote that after a communist revolution, “the leaders of the Communist party, in other words Marx and his friends. . . would concentrate the reins of government in a strong hand, because the ignorant people require strong supervision.”
The importance of rule by a vanguard group of communist intellectuals was continued by Lenin and Stalin and their successors, including Fidel Castro, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, and Mao Zedong. Indeed, the Chinese leader was perhaps the most insistent of these on his own rule as an elite intellectual entitled to guide the masses, and his philosophical “wisdom,” such as it was, was spread far and wide in the Little Red Book, distributed in millions of copies. Mao had the additional advantage that the importance of the Mandarin caste in ruling society has been the major force in creating social institutions ever since the creation of the first Chinese empire, a point amply documented by the great dissident Marxist and Sinologist Karl Wittfogel in his major work Oriental Despotism (Yale, 1957). Mao was the greatest mass murderer of all time—a fact which has not deterred the “woke anti-racists” of our time from celebrating him. Hitler was also a socialist intellectual who was a mass murderer, and this juxtaposition should not surprise us.
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