Antisemites

"Never, after we have read The Eighteenth Brumaire, can the language, the conventions, the combinations, the pretensions, of parliamentary bodies, if we have had any illusions about them, seem the same to us again. They lose their consistency and color—evaporate before our eyes. The old sport of competition for office, the old game of political debate, look foolish and obsolete; for now we can see for the first time through the shadow-play to the conflict of appetites and needs which, partly unknown to the actors themselves, throw these thin silhouettes on the screen. These writings of Marx are electrical. Nowhere perhaps in the history of thought is the reader made to feel the excitement of a new intellectual discovery. Marx is here at his most vivid and his most vigorous—in the closeness and the exactitude of political observation; in the energy of the faculty that combines, articulating at the same time that it compresses; in the wit and the metaphorical phantasmagoria that transfigures the prosaic phenomena of politics, and in the pulse of the tragic invective—we have heard its echo in Bernard Shaw—which can turn the collapse of an incompetent parliament, divided between contradictory tendencies, into the downfall of a damned soul of Shakespeare."

"Similar though Marx and Thoreau may be in their accounts of the consequences of living in a society defined by money, their suggestions for how to respond to it are poles apart. Forget the Party. Forget the revolution. Forget the general strike. Forget the proletariat as an abstract class of human interest. Thoreau's revolution begins not with discovering comrades to be yoked together in solidarity but with the embrace of solitude. For Thoreau, Marx's first and fatal error was the creation of the aggregate identity of the proletariat. Error was substituted for error. The anonymity and futility of the worker were replaced by the anonymity and futility of the revolutionary. A revolution conducted by people who have only a group identity can only replace one monolith of power with another, one misery with another, perpetuating the cycle of domination and oppression. In solitude, the individual becomes most human, which is to say most spiritual."

"Marxism is undoubtedly a religion, in the lowest sense of the word. Like every inferior form of religious life, it has been continuously used, to borrow the apt phrase of Marx himself, as an opiate for the people."

"Liberty, happiness, autonomy, individuality, spirituality, self-guided development are ideals that Marx and Engels valued above everything else. If they are angry with the bourgeoisie, it is because the bourgeoisie seeks to deny the majority any opportunity to be free. Given Marx and Engels' adherence to Hegel's fantastic idea that no one is free as long as one person is in chains, their quarrel with the bourgeoisie is that they sacrifice everybody's freedom and individuality on capitalism's altar of accumulation."

"Even though communist parties have disappeared almost entirely from the political scene, the spirit of communism driving the manifesto is proving hard to silence."

"Marx completely lacked a scholar's conscience which is the hallmark of a genuine man of learning. In his works there is no trace of the humility of the true researcher who, aware of his own ignorance, approaches his material with an open mind in order to learn. For Marx what has to be proved is known before the research starts."

"Just heard Gen. White's proclamation that we "have Russia zeroed in from all directions." I am waiting now for Vannevar Bush and Ed Teller to announce that our new supersensitive radar picked up a rash of heart tremors from the direction of the USSR, immediately after White's remarkably insignificant statement, I could almost hear Karl Marx laughing in his tomb."

"I find it’s not necessary for me to read Marx because I already agree with him"

"He gave the impression not only of rare intellectual superiority but also of outstanding personality. If he had had as much heart as intellect and love as hate, I should have gone through fire for him. … In view of our aims, I regret that this man, with his fine intellect, is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that the most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away all the good in him. He laughs at the fools who parrot his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs over the communists à la Willich and over the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the genuine ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from government, he needs a source of strength, which he can find only in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. In spite of all his assurances to the contrary, and perhaps because of them, I took away with me the impression that the acquisition of personal power was the aim of all his endeavours."

"Marx never made a discovery in the scientific sense. He never had an illumination which turned his previous ideas upside down. He decided beforehand what he wanted to discover and then sure enough discovered it. In practice Marx and still more his friend Engels made many unavowed adjustments to their system, until by the end of their lives hardly any of it remained. At any rate it could be turned to almost any purpose from the most moderate to the most revolutionary."

"Marx called himself a scientist; but he lacked the solid groundwork of facts on which to operate a scientific method. His theories are dogma, true only because he said so; and any study of them is nearer to theology than to science. Mr. Landauer is particularly anxious to show that Marx, though personally assertive, was not a believer in dictatorship in the Stalinist sense; and this is true. Marxism could develop into German social democracy or into Bolshevism, with a certain amount of perversion in each case; neither was more than implicit in Marx's own writings."

"You cannot conquer an awakened people. You cannot Prussianize Belgium and France. You cannot eradicate the teachings of Marx and Engels from the minds of hundreds of thousands of German Socialists. Surely they would find some way of uniting in spirit and in deed with the comrades of other nations in case of such an invasion on the part of a government which they had always understood and denounced."

"Fundamentalist religion becomes, as Marx so aptly observed, an "opiate of the masses.""

"Summarizing his deficiencies, Karl Marx was neither progressive nor enlightened; he was a racist, anti-Semite, a German nationalist, a warmonger, autocratic, anti-freedom proponent, Machiavellian, pro-Black slavery, petty, homophobic, megalomaniac, a bully and slanderer, antichoice, and a reactionary against liberalism and industrial capitalism. In almost every sense, Marx fit the quintessential image of Hitler like a tight glove, both appearing almost indistinguishable. Like father and son, Marx and Hitler were two social justice warriors, determined to weaponize intolerance, racism, and nationalism for what they call the greater good. In so many ways, considering their almost identical political and social makeup, metaphorically speaking, Hitler could easily be regarded as the son of Marx."

"No wonder therefore that almost everyone rebelled against Hegel. No one did this more effectively than Marx. Marx claimed to have laid bare with finality the mystery of all history, including the present and the imminent future, but also the outline of the order which was bound to come and in which and through which men would be able or compelled for the first time to lead truly human lives. More precisely, for Marx human history, so far from having been completed, has not even begun; what we call history is only the pre-history of humanity. Questioning the settlement which Hegel had regarded as rational, he followed the vision of a world society which presupposes and establishes forever the complete victory of the town over the country, of the mobile over the deeply rooted, of the spirit of the Occident over the spirit of the Orient; the members of the world society which is no longer a political society are free and equal, and are so in the last analysis because all specialization, all division of labor, has given way to the full development of everyone."

"Marx saw the coming of communism (in his sense) as the result of a long series of struggles, transforming conditions and men. The kind of society he envisioned required, as Lenin observed, "a person not like the present man on the street." Marx saw this new sort of person emerging as a natural result of the sobering process of a social struggle lasting perhaps a half-century. The educational role of adversity and setbacks for the proletariat was a recurrent theme in the writings of Marx and Engles. Lenin, on the other hand, believed that the proletariat would never automatically the necessary class outlook and purposeful unity: "Class political consciousness can be brought to the working class only from without." Whatever the relative merits, in terms of realism, of the Marxist verses the Leninist conceptions of the working class, this crucial shift of assumptions necessitated a fundamental change, however covert, in the line of march towards communism, both before and after the seizure of power [by Lenin and the Bolsheviks]."

"Against anarchists Marx and Engles were in the position of defending the "authority of the majority over the minority." Marxian passages defending the use of state power against individuals in this connection were later avidly quoted by Lenin in defense of an autocratic power which Marx had not contemplated."

"It had to be admitted in the end that Marx had made mistakes on many points of importance."

"How can the labourer be at the mercy of the upper and middle classes when these are admittedly dependent on the labourer for their very subsistence? But let us pass by this contradiction, which underlies all the teaching of Marx, and proceed to consider the consequences of accepting his theory. Let us suppose that the labourer, by working for a day, produces a table worth a pound, ten shillings of which represents the value of the wood, wear and tear of tools, rent of workshop, lighting, &c., &c., and the remaining ten shillings the wear and tear of the man, or his labour. According to Marx, the capitalist who supplies the wood, tools, workshop, &c., does so on the condition that he shall, besides being reimbursed for them by receiving ten shillings out of the price of the table, receive also, out of the other ten shillings due solely to the labourer, as large a share as he can possibly screw out of him by the threat of putting the job up to auction among his starving competitors. Let us suppose that in this way he induces the labourer to content himself with three shillings out of the ten which he has earned, and pockets seven shillings as profit. (I may observe here that Marx, with all his ingenuity, could never explain why a labourer should make a present of more than half his earnings to an employer who was absolutely dependent on him for all his wealth.) Our imaginary capitalist then, selling the table for its value - one pound, makes a profit of seven shillings. But mark what must ensue. Some rival capitalist, trading in tables on the same principle, will content himself with six shillings profit for the sake of attracting custom. He will sell the table for nineteen shillings; that is, he will allow the purchaser one shilling out of his profit as a bribe to secure his custom. The first capitalist will thus be compelled to lower his price to nineteen shillings also, and presently the competition of brisk young traders, believing in small profits and quick returns, will bring the price of tables down to thirteen and sixpence, or even lower if the reduction in price can be used as a pretext for securing another sixpence out of the labourer's three shillings. Take the price at thirteen and sixpence. if the seven shillings be indeed robbed from the labourer, then the purchaser, getting a table worth a pound for thirteen and sixpence, gets six and sixpence of the plunder, and the capitalist only sixpence; that is, the buyer is thirteen times as great a thief as the seller. But who are the buyers?"

"We never talked about men or clothes or inconsequential things we got together. It was always Marx, Lenin and revolution - real girls' talk."

"Karl Marx, in envisioning the emancipation of the working class, determined that "money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist." From antiquity to the modern era, Jews have proven tremendously useful as an external enemy, or as a scapegoat for society's ills."

"Never have I met a man [Karl Marx] of such offensive, insupportable arrogance. No opinion which differed essentially from his own was accorded the honor of even a half-way respectful consideration. Everyone who disagreed with him was treated with scarcely veiled contempt. He answered all arguments which displeased him with a biting scorn for the pitiable ignorance of those who advanced them, or with a libellous questioning of their motives. I still remember the cutting, scornful tone with which he uttered – I might almost say 'spat' – the word 'bourgeois'; and he denounced as 'bourgeois' – that is to say as an unmistakable example of the lowest moral and spiritual stagnation – everyone who dared to oppose his opinion."

"If Marx had not been more than a purveyor of phraseology, he would be dead by now."

"Marxism is a religion. To the believer it presents, first, a system of ultimate ends that embody the meaning of life and are absolute standards by which to judge events and actions; and, secondly, a guide to those ends which implies a plan of salvation and the indignation of the evil from which mankind, or a chosen section of mankind, is to be saved."

"Marx was fortunate to have been born eighty years before Walt Disney. Disney also promised a child's paradise and unlike Marx, delivered on his promise."

"Karl Marx deserves an honoured place among economic pioneers of steady state and balanced growth equilibrium. What is valid in this seminal contribution is in no sense contrary to mainstream economics of Marx’s predecessors, contemporaries or successors. Even we end with the view that Marx was not so much a mathematical economist as ‘merely’ a great economist, this recognition of his analytical abilities in no sense diminishes our appreciation of him as an original and creative shaper of the science of political economy."

"Marx has certainly had more customers than any other one aspiring economist. A billion people think his ideas are important; and for the historian of thought that fact makes them important."

"Marx … was a very bad econometrician of his times, not realizing how much real wages in Western Europe had been raised by new techniques and equipment; and he was a bad theorist because his kind of model would almost certainly lead to shifts in schedules that would raise labor's wages tremendously."

"Marx claimed in Volume 1 [of Capital] that there was some interesting economics involved in a labor theory of value, and some believe his greatest fame in pure economics lies in his at­tempted analysis of "surplus value." Although he promised to clear up the contradiction between "price" and "value" in later volumes, neither he nor Engels ever made good this claim."

"From the viewpoint of pure economic theory, Karl Marx can be regarded as a minor post-Ricardian."

"It is tempting to compare Plato with Marx; indeed, I have done so. Like Plato, Marx looked forward to a future in which the state, law, coercion, and competition for power had vanished and politics been replaced by rational organization. But we must not press the comparison."

"Lukes's answer is difficult to summarize, but amounts to the claim that Marx did not concern himself with rights and justice, but with an ethics of emancipation."

"Marxists have always treated justice with some disdain."

"My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred. The doctrine of surplus value, which is supposed to demonstrate the exploitation of wage-earners under capitalism, is arrived at: (a) by surreptitiously accepting Malthus's doctrine of population, which Marx and all his disciples explicitly repudiate; (b) by applying Ricardo's theory of value to wages, but not to the prices of manufactured articles. He is entirely satisfied with the result, not because it is in accordance with the facts or because it is logically coherent, but because it is calculated to rouse fury in wage-earners. Marx's doctrine that all historical events have been motivated by class conflicts is a rash and untrue extension to world history of certain features prominent in England and France a hundred years ago. His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology. His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process. […] I have always disagreed with Marx… But my objections to modern Communism go deeper than my objections to Marx. It is the abandonment of democracy that I find particularly disastrous."

"Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology."

"In yet another aspect he is the last of the great system-builders, the successor of Hegel, a believer, like him, in a rational formula summing up the evolution of mankind."

"There can be no doubt about the virulence of the hostility which has been shown by the critics of Marxism. Again and again his economic theories have been said to have been killed. But the superstition which says that those who have been wrongly reported dead will have a long life has certainly proved true in regard to the ideas of Marx. No other body of economic ideas, not even classicism at the height of its power, has exerted so lasting an influence on political practice."

"I began to read Capital, just as one reads any book, to see what was in it; I found a great deal that neither its followers nor its opponents had prepared me to expect."

"Today in Korea—in Southeast Asia—in Latin America and the West Indies, in the Middle East—in Africa, one sees tens of millions of long oppressed colonial peoples surging toward freedom. What courage—what sacrifice—what determination never to rest until victory!...And arrayed against them, the combined powers of the so-called Free West, headed by the greedy, profit-hungry, war-minded industrialists and financial barons of our America. The illusion of an “American Century” blinds them for the immediate present to the clear fact that civilization has passed them by—that we now live in a people’s century—that the star shines brightly in the East of Europe and of the world. Colonial peoples today look to the Soviet Socialist Republics...One reverently speaks of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—the shapers of humanity’s richest present and future."

"Marxism has been declared dead. Yet the questions Marx raised are still alive and pulsing, however the language and the labels have been co-opted and abused. What is social wealth? How do the conditions of human labor infiltrate other social relationships? What would it require for people to live and work together in conditions of radical equality? How much inequality will we tolerate in the world's richest and most powerful nation? Why and how have these and similar questions become discredited in public discourse? And what about art?...I have been trying to decipher the moral ecology of this non-accountable economy, this old order calling itself new. What are its effects on our emotional and affectional and intellectual life? Over the past decade I would have found it harder to look steadily and long at the scene around us without using Marx's perception that economic relationships-the relationships of production-will, unchecked, infiltrate all other social relationships at the public and the most private levels. Not that Marx thought that feelings, spirit, human relationships are just inert products of the economy. Rather, he was outraged by capital's treatment of human labor and human energy as a means, its hostility to the development of the whole person, its reduction of the entire web of existence to commodity: what can be produced and sold for profit. In place of all the physical and spiritual senses, he tells us, there is the sense of possession, which is the alienation of all these senses. Marx was passionate about the insensibility of a system that must extract ever more humanity from the human being: time and space for love, for sleep and dreaming, time to create art, time for both solitude and communal life, time to explore the idea of an expanding universe of freedom. I have talked at some length about capitalism's drive to disenfranchise and dehumanize, to invade the very zones of feeling and relationship we deal with as writers-which Marx described long ago-because those processes still need to be described as doing what they still do."

"[W]hen Karl Marx, the most consistent translator of the altruist morality into practical action and political theory, advocated a society where all would be sacrificed to all, starting with the immediate immolation of the able, the intelligent, the successful and the wealthy—whatever opposition he did encounter, nobody opposed him on moral grounds. Predominantly, he was granted the status of a noble, but impractical, idealist."

"The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was published in 1848 and is now re-issued with an interesting introduction by Yanis Varoufakis, Greek economist and politician. He hails the Manifesto as an inspiration to collective action for a better future "urging us to become agents of a future that ends unnecessary mass suffering and to inspire humanity to realize its potential for authentic freedom". Varoufakis interprets the Manifesto not as a call to state authoritarianism, as communism became in practice, nor just an analysis of bitter and enduring class conflict, but rather as a 'liberal text', which he believes is even more relevant today than when it was written."

"The Marxist theory of history, in spite of the serious efforts of some of its founders and followers, ultimately adopted this soothsaying practice [of evading testability]. In some of its earlier formulations (for example in Marx's analysis of the character of the 'coming social revolution') their predictions were testable, and in fact falsified. Yet instead of accepting the refutations the followers of Marx re-interpreted both the theory and the evidence in order to make them agree. In this way they rescued the theory from refutation; but they did so at the price of adopting a device which made it irrefutable. They thus gave a 'conventionalist twist' to the theory; and by this stratagem they destroyed its much advertised claim to scientific status."

"J. Robert Oppenheimer: [[wikipedia:Ernest_Lawrence|[Ernest] Lawrence]], you embrace the revolution in physics, can’t you see it everywhere else? Picasso, Stravinsky, Freud, Marx..."

"If you look at early texts and cultures, the magical powers that the shaman hopes the gods might give him, flying, turning into animals, invisibility, poetry – as if poetry was a magic power. As if it was the equivalent of turning into a dog or flying. As if. What does this tell us? Maybe there was a time when we could legitimately ask the gods for it as a gift. But we know there aren't any gods, and that they can't give those gifts, so the best thing we can do is go to church, listen to the lesson and hope we don't burn. Have no direct contact with whatever form of god we choose to worship. It's like the magical or spiritual equivalent of the big flaw in Marxism. Karl Marx, lovely geezer, very humane, a bit middle class but we'll gloss over that, but his big flaw was that when he said "The reins of society will inevitably rest in the hands of those who control the means of production" didn't take into account middle management. All the people who get between those with the means of production and the society. That translates onto a spiritual level as the shift from our earliest beliefs, which are all shamanic."

"Marx's economic teachings are essentially a garbled rehash of the theories of Adam Smith and, first of all, of Ricardo."

"On the one hand, Karl Marx wrote of the inevitability of socialism. But on the other hand, he organized a socialist movement, a socialist party, declared again and again that his socialism was revolutionary, and that the violent overthrow of the government was necessary to bring about socialism."

"All the sophisticated syllogisms of the ponderous volumes published by Marx, Engels, and hundreds of Marxian authors cannot conceal the fact that the only and ultimate source of Marx's prophecy is an alleged inspiration by virtue of which Marx claims to have guessed the plans of the mysterious powers determining the course of history. Like Hegel, Marx was a prophet communicating to the people the revelation that an inner voice had imparted to him."

"Karl Marx, a visionary, figured out that you can control a slave much better by convincing him he is an employee."

"[B]esides sharing with the pessimist Ricardo the historicization of the economy, by dint of categories such as scarcity and production as well as the , Marx the revolutionary shared also with his century, as we have seen, the unholy alliance between positivism and eschatology. There are worse ways of grasping the philosophical gist of Marxism."