The true socialists, Bauer, Weitling, Proudhon, Lassalle, Bakunin--I am supposing that you think all Marx's criticisms vicious and caricatural, but you have yet to show so in any concrete instance. In fact your writing is without names, arguments, references, detail. But these opponents were not quite the innocents you seem think--Bauer and Bakunin anti Semites, Weitling a champion of the lumpen proletariat and the criminals, Proudhon a petty bourgeois socialist, Lassalle a Bismarckian. And even if Marx was unfair to any one of these or other rival socialists--say Moses Hess but not Karl Grun and many other true socialists--it would not follow that Marx set out to destroy any and all rivals whom he could not control.
You also seem to think Marx had no scientific integrity--making say Theories of Surplus Value an exercise in the destruction of strawmen. You only reveal here your own astonishing ignorance. To be sure, Marx was probably less than fair to JS Mill on a few questions. But his many mistakes, prejudices and limits do not confirm your vicious description of Marx.
Between your invective and the pathetic defenses of Marx on this list, I shall stay clear. It was mistake to rejoin the list.
Rakesh
I said that Marx he had a bad temper and a bitter tongue, and that he used polemic as a political tool. Rakesh construes these obviously true facts, denied by no one one who knew Marx and obvious to any of his readers, as a personal attack on him as a human being. And Rakesk's quotes ("wild boar," "choleric" (subject to fits of rage) support this. Wsa he "urbane and polished"? WEll, I noted that he was chock full of classical education and funny as well. I never said he was a pedant (although he was immensely learned); that is a red herring. Was he mean and vicious? You bet.
RB's response is the sign of a true believer, his hero must be perfect. In fact my comments were not especially harsh, and if RB takes them as "insults" he is thin-skinned about his little divinity. I myself have a bad temper, at least from time to time, and an occasionally bitter tongue, would that it were it at as witty as Marx's, and obviously I view polemic as a political weapon, or I would nor savage RB as a true believer in the cult of Marx's perfect personality.
The fact fact is that genius can be far less genial than Marx (who wasn't genial) -- Newton, for example, was a total arrogant bastard, a megalomaniac, a religious loon, and a torturer (as Master of the Mint) who enjoyed his work. Marx's personality failings are trivial in comparison.
You want a real personal moral criticism of Marx, he not only cheated on his wife with the maid, which doesn't bother me in the slightest, but in his bourgeois respectability he disowned his son by the liaison, letting Engels, who in in his generosity was willing to do this, raise the boy as his own. Now that's a grave moral defect. Engels, who lived with his girlfriend without marrying her until her death (as did Mill, but in his case boringly chastely), was relatively unshackled from the bonds of respectability and convention that obsessed Marx, though not to the point of keeping his hands off the help. (What's it to me if it was OK with Jenny, it was pretty common then as now.) But not owning up to parenthood, that's another matter. In addition, When Engels' girlfriend died, Marx in his respectability cruelly refused to condole with him, nearly leading to the only real chance of a rupture between the friends in their lives.
In politics, Marx was unwilling to tolerate disagreement, treating all criticism as betrayal and responding to disagreement with every bit of the enormous and terrifying rhetorical arsenal he could summon. He never puts his critics in their best light, but only their worst, he is often totally unfair and makes no attempt to see what an alternative perspective might be about. He viewed political opponents and intellectual critics as targets for destruction as total as he could manage, which was often pretty total, if often both cruel and unfair. This may have been sound political strategy. It is at any rate manifest from any reading of his writings.
Whether it is an insult, I really don't care. It is a
_fact_, and only a true believer could even think of denying it. I regard Marx as one of the great German prose writers and one of the great polemicists of all time, as well as a universal genius, of course on many of the grounds that RB mentions as well as others. But not a nice man in politics or controversy. (In contrast Mill was a sweetie.)
--- Rakesh Bhandari <bhandari at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> Andie insults Marx, suggesting that his psyche was
> consumed by
> hatred, envy, negativism:
>
> "It would be more accurate to say
> that Marx did not brook disagreement that he did not
> suffer fools. (Proudhon was no fool, nor was Mill.)
>
> Politically he seems to have thought that ridicule,
> mockery, and abuse were effective weapons to dispose
> of opposition, maybe be was right.
>
> And since he was a master of the German language
> (he's
> really very funny in a bitter sort of way) and the
> recipient of really first rate classical education
> (nothing like reading Martial, Tacitus, Juvenal,
> Apuleius, etc. if you want to learn the art of
> abuse),
> and had a bad temper, maybe those carbuncles, he was
> a
> formidable opponent."
>
> Compare to Andie's calumny...
>
> William J Blake "Karl Marx: Titan of the Poor", New
> Masses, 5/7/40,
> on the 122nd anniversary of Marx. >
>
> Of course he was choleric and attacked like a wild
> boar. Of course
> when old friends left the cause, he assailed them.
> But if his silly
> critics will look at the then state of German and
> French polemics, in
> which he was educated, they will note that Marx is
> practically the
> most urbane and polished controversialist of that
> acrid period. And
> if in England debate was more pleasing, it was
> because nothing was
> argued. Marx wrote Lavrov to come to England where
> he would be safe.
> In Paris, he said the police arrested people for
> dangerous ideas. In
> London they police had no inkling that there could
> be any ideas,
> dangerous or otherwise...
> The artist intoxicated with Greek drama, the reciter
> of Richard III
> and Timon of Athens, the man who smashed lamp posts
> on Saturday night
> to scandalize bobbies, like college students, was no
> stuffed library
> pedant.
> When real genius came forward, as In Darwin's Origin
> of Species in
> that wondrous year 1859, Marx bowed before a
> conscientious mind. He
> knew the Malthusian assumptions but he rose above
> Darwin's sources to
> measure Darwin's achievement. When Balzac a royalist
> laid bare the
> nerves and tissues of the bourgeoisie, his devotee
> was Karl Marx.
> Socialists produced variant philosophies Marx
> thought unsound. But if
> he felt that the work was animated by a sincere love
> of the working
> class and was not noxious, he applauded. Witness his
> sympathy for
> that inspired Pfushcher Dietzgen.. Note his tribute
> for the followers
> of brave old Blanqui, heroes of the Commune. Mark
> his honest
> admiration for the Proudhonists in the Commune,
> whose principles he
> detested.
> For Marx there was no narrow dogmatism. A Man who in
> the 18th
> Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, so admirably detected
> the spiritual
> nuances of every segment of the French nobility and
> bourgeoisie (as
> arising from their material foundations) is a
> miniature artist in
> delineating character to rival La Bruyere. To anyone
> who has checked
> the thousand references to numberous worthies in the
> three volumes of
> Capital, his skill at quick personal descriptions
> remains a marvel of
> literary triumph. Witness his thumbnail sketches of
> Americans in his
> letters on our Civil War...
>
>
> "Not for nothing did Marx make his his motto 'I am a
> human being,
> nothing human is alien to me." That excerpt fromthe
> old Roman comedy
> was dear to him. If he appeared cruel in his remarks
> on Schurz and
> Kugelmann, was not their career as he prophesied? He
> foresaw the
> public future of every revolutionist and he caviled
> at
> the conduct that foreshadowed it, not because he was
> informed by
> spleen, but because his eye carried a microscope
> slide of honesty and
> acute, detailed vision. To those who wish to see the
> difference
> between marx and the economists, let them
> look at the permutations and combinations of surplus
> value, as given
> in his chapter on the total law of surplus value.
> Suddenly he
> pitches out of the orbit of economic "theory" into
> the human needs of
> men,into their biological possibilities. No Ricardo,
> no boasted
> institutionalist, has ever so summed-up theory and
> the living needs
> of men. No other man has so situated theory in a
> historic, that is, a
> human setting. No other theoretician has made
> material law
> subject to the creative will of a rising class. He
> never studied
> "laws of political economy" as the rules of Medes
> and Persians. He
> annihilated the codes of science. He saw science as
> the plastic
> servant of man, whose consciousness of necessity was
> the springboard
> to freedom. "Marx's passion came from his deep
> belief that classless
> society, producing the true individual, would at
> last break down the
> barrier between man's soul and his surrounding
> institutions, that
> paradox of art since the liberating Renaissance. He
> carried the dream
> of Leonardo da Vinci to its scientific expression.
> That goal is human
> and inspiring. Marx restored the vision of paradise,
> not in the realms of the dead, but in the living
> labor of communal man.... ">
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