Did you know?
Lenin took the bloodthirsty Jacobins of the French Revolution as his models
Both Marx and Engels were virulent racists
The Communist Manifesto talks of the “abolition of the family”
So communism has killed approximately 100–140 million people in the past hundred years—more than Hitler, more than both world wars, more than worldwide pandemics.
But just where did this horrifically lethal set of ideas come from in the first place?
It is hard to say when and where the idea of communism first gained currency. Certain elements of the communist collectivist mindset were present as early as Thomas More’s sixteenth-century classic Utopia and even in Plato’s ancient Republic. More’s book is often pointed to as an example of pre-Marx communist thinking.
But More’s book is not really a communist manifesto. Unlike most utopians who followed him, More was no God-hater; to the contrary, he was an extremely devout son of the Church, one who went to his martyrdom for his principled defense of the teachings of his faith. Priests, churches, and the worshippers who fill them are all held in great esteem in his utopia. It’s a far cry from Lenin’s dystopia, where priests were lined up and shot by grinning executioners.1
Other popular utopian works followed in the centuries after More. But the first true precursors of the communist revolutionaries were the bloodthirsty Jacobins who turned the French Revolution into the Reign of Terror in the 1790s. Of the three ideals enshrined in the French Revolutionary motto—“Liberté, égalité, fraternité”—they, like their Marxist-Leninist admirers in the twentieth century, put all the emphasis on égalité—equality, the communist ideal. And it was a radical equality that soon ran amok, all the way to the foot of the guillotine. I had a professor in graduate school who always referred to the Jacobins as “the first communists,” and not without good reason. They declared war on many of the same targets the Bolsheviks would place in their crosshairs: aristocrats, the wealthy, the religious, their political opponents. And they are best remembered for what communists are always known for: blood.
The Jacobins used the guillotine for their bloodletting, executing their enemies with an alacrity that would not be outdone until Lenin and the boys arrived on the world scene. They even devised an impressive canal-like drainage system to collect the blood rushing from the severed necks of the victims that served as case exhibits of the human cost of their utopian collectivist fantasy. The fanatics could not run a government, but they could manage the instruments of death with startling proficiency.
The “Committee of Public Safety”—a perfectly Orwellian name the French revolutionaries came up with a century and a half before Orwell—unleashed the Reign of Terror to enforce their utopian regime of “Virtue.” Historians estimate that the Jacobins lopped off the heads of forty thousand French men and women in a single year, including the nuns whose hoisted blood-soaked skulls were a special prize. (Lenin would achieve a similar tally of murders in his first year in power. And both would be outdone by Stalin and Mao, the Kims and Pol Pot.)
The Jacobins Were Hilarious
What was their nickname for the guillotine? “The National Razor.”
History Starts with Us
The Jacobins were the first to abolish the Christian calendar and start history over again with year one of their revolution. But they wouldn’t be the last. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini—whose “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” fascism has been branded “right wing” by the Left, but who was in reality such a perfect disciple of Karl Marx (whom he called “the father and teacher” and “the magnificent philosopher of working-class violence”) that Lenin admired the Italian dictator’s writings3—declared a new era fascista beginning with his 1922 March on Rome. And Pol Pot declared his own new year one after the murderous Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. For the record, the anti-religious Left’s war on the Christian calendar has never ended. Notice how today BC (Before Christ) and AD (Anno Domini—in the Year of Our Lord) are being replaced by CE (Common Era) and BCE (Before the Common Era)?4
The Jacobins were the first totalitarians—a concept that cannot be separated from communist ideology and governance. Totalitarianism is a form of politics and governance that asserts total control. A totalitarian government refuses to acknowledge any individual authority, margin of freedom, or source of value outside the regime itself. Neither religion, nor the law, nor tradition, nor family, nor even human nature is allowed to stand out against the dictates of the ideology. The revolution must overturn every source of authority or value outside itself. Thus the Jacobins threw out even the calendar. The year AD 1794 became year one in Jacobin France.2
The Russian communists would deliberately model themselves on “the most glorious of the Jacobins of the time of the Great French Revolution,” as Soviet Comintern (Communist International) head Grigory Zinoviev put it.5 Lenin praised the “great, ineradicable, unforgettable things provided by the Jacobins in the eighteenth century,” and claimed that “the Jacobins gave France the best models of a democratic revolution.”6
Not a Dime’s Worth of Difference
In their classic study on totalitarianism, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski list several characteristics exhibited by any totalitarian regime, which
• posits an official ideology, one that attempts to justify the actions of the government (no matter how harsh) in the name of some future state of happiness;
• governs by a single, hierarchical party that is intertwined with or superior to the government;
• employs an ever-present, lurking secret police to intimidate and control and that is willing to carry out campaigns of terror against perceived “enemies” of the state;
• secures a tight grip on the armed forces (i.e., the guys who have the guns);
• monopolizes the means of mass communication;
• establishes centralized control over the economy7
Totalitarianism or communism, what’s the difference, exactly?
Fellow Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky—Lenin’s closest ally—would compare Lenin to Maximilien Robespierre, the chief instigator of the Jacobin Terror, sensing in his own comrade a closet despot looking to turn the Communist Party into a Russian version of the murderous Committee of Public Safety. He called Lenin’s methods “a dull caricature of the tragic intransigence of Jacobinism,” whereby “the party is replaced by the organization of the party, the organization by the central committee, and finally the central committee by the dictator.”8
Though the Jacobins were a model for the Soviet communists, scholars believe that the word “communism” wasn’t coined until the 1840s—in Paris,9 where it would have been one of innumerable asinine ideas emanating from the minds and mouths of the nattering nabobs in the salons and cafes of France. Leave it to a chattering class of effete intellectuals to give us something so dreadful.
The founding document for the communist movement is The Communist Manifesto, written in 1848 by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto refers to a pre-existing idea of “communism,” but the term is not much older than that, and it is possible that Marx and Engels themselves had coined it a few years earlier. In any case, they certainly popularized it.
The Yankee Utopians
Between the French Revolution and Marx came a number of socialists and collectivists who are aptly dubbed the “Yankee Utopians” in Daniel Flynn’s history of the American Left.10 Not all were technically Americans, but all had their impact on American soil with the ideological colonies they established or inspired in the 1800s. Some were English; others (naturally) were French. They included Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane, and John Humphrey Noyes, who dubbed himself a “Bible communist.”
The career of the English Robert Owen (1771–1858), who planted his shovel in the core of the American heartland two decades before Marx and Engels published their manifesto, illustrates the persistence—and some of the dangers—of certain communist ideas that were attractive even before the word “communism” was popularized, and that continue to seduce intellectuals and idealists who haven’t learned anything from the abject failure of those ideas over the past two hundred years.
“I [have] come to this country to introduce an entire new state of society,” Owen stated in his April 27, 1825, address at the public hall of his “New Harmony” utopian community. He came “to change it from the ignorant, selfish system, to an enlightened, social system, which shall gradually unite all interests into one, and remove all cause for contest between individuals.”11
“Individual” was a dirty word to Owen. (He would have agreed wholeheartedly when President Obama deplored the American “bias toward individual action” and said that that Americans must unite in “collective action” and achieve “collective salvation.”)12 Owen said he had come “to change from the individual to the social system; from single families with separate interests, to communities of many families with one interest.”
Owen marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with his own “Declaration of Mental Independence”: “I now declare. . . to the world,” proclaimed Owen, “that Man up to this hour, has been, in all parts of the earth, a slave to a Trinity of the most monstrous evils. . . to inflict mental and physical evil upon [our] whole race. I refer to Private, or Individual Property, Absurd and Irrational Systems of Religion, and Marriage, founded on Individual Property.” He called for nothing less than a “revolution” to deliver mankind from private property, marriage, and religion.
Religion was worst of this “hydra of evils”—“All religions have proved themselves to be superstitions,” scoffed Owen—but he didn’t like private property or the family much better: “The forms and ceremonies of Marriage. . . were contrived and forced upon the people at the same time that property was first divided among a few leading individuals and Superstition was invented: This being the only device that could. . . permit them to retain their division of the public spoils, and create to themselves an aristocracy of wealth of power and of learning.”
Owen’s new society was a collectivist colony that pooled property, profits, and people, replacing the nuclear family with the collective family. Children were removed from parents into separate parts of the collective for proper “education.”
The New Harmony colony floundered within just two years. Owen squandered most of his personal fortune on his failed colony, but his leftist vision remained alive. “The social system is now firmly established,” he asserted.13 Of course it was.
Even before it folded, Owen took frequent sabbaticals from his little commie commune. This is typical of communist utopians: they rarely abide by the standards they impose on the people in whose names they govern. Owen and Fidel Castro and Mao and the Kims and all the other champions of “the people” never live by the rules they apply to everyone else. And no wonder. Given the choice, no one wants to live by rules so completely at odds with human nature. So the stupid system is always for the stupid sheep, never for the shepherds. Collectivists can never tolerate collective life. The one saving grace of Robert Owen’s “New Harmony” communist utopia was that he wasn’t in control of the government, so he couldn’t force people to stay in it.
Despite the failures, the true believers never give up the dream; they remain committed to the communist vision. Robert Owen’s “New Harmony” utopia dried up, but dozens of others would spring up around the country in the mid-1800s. There were over forty of them by the mid-century, and rarely did any of them last more than four years.14
But the faith lived on. In fact, it still lives on in America today.
Marx and Engels met in August 1844 in the left-wing looney bin that was Paris, where Marx had moved a year earlier with his wife and begun studying the French Revolutionaries and other utopian socialists, attending workers’ meetings, and engaging in other leftist activities.15 In 1847 a secret society of German émigré workers organizing in Paris, Brussels, and London under the name the “Communist League” commissioned Marx and Engels to write, as historian Martin Malia has put it, a “programmatic statement” to serve as a sort of “revolutionary catechism.” That was the origin of The Communist Manifesto,16—the original blueprint for the communism that has troubled the world ever since, in various guises in different nations, whether it has been called “Marxism-Leninism,” as in Russia, “Maoism,” in China, or “twenty-first-century socialism” in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela.
As Aristotle observed, “Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.”17 And in fact the world’s ugliest ideology was delineated by one of history’s most unattractive characters. As a family man—in fact, all around, simply as a human being—the founder of communism left much to be desired.18 Marx’s conduct as a son, a husband, a father, a writing partner is not without relevance to the noxious Marxist ideology.
First consider Marx’s relationship with his parents. As a grown man, Marx was a leech on his poor father and mother, draining his hosts. Even after he was married and had children of his own—teenagers, in fact—the man refused to work, instead sucking as much income from his parents as possible. He was draining his parents’ life savings dry. His long-suffering mother was ultimately driven to express the wish that “Karl would accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.”19
But Karl preferred opining on his imagined communist utopia to working. He was too busy devising his vital (actually life-destroying) theories in his personal office or the public library to bother earning an income to provide for his family. He demanded that others provide his income.
Long before there was Minnie the Moocher, there was Marx the Moocher.
As anyone knows, the host in such a relationship eventually has no recourse but to cut off the parasite—to the parasite’s writhing displeasure and lasting fury. And sure enough Marx was enraged when his parents finally quit bankrolling his irresponsibility and laziness. When his parents could give no more and finally insisted on some tough love for their selfish son, Marx refused to see them thenceforth, ultimately refusing to attend his father’s funeral out of spite.
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
The Unknown Karl Marx, edited by Robert Payne (New York: New York University Press, 1971).
But Marx’s parents were only his first go-to source. Now that he needed a new host to draw financial nutrients from, he turned to Friedrich Engels, his partner in the communist ideology business. Engels, too, had sucked from the teat of his parents’ wealth, which was larger than the Marxes’. But Engels too, eventually, tired of Marx using him for money. And as Engels slowed the spigot, Marx lashed out at him as well.
But naturally, the chief victims of Marx’s refusal to work were his wife and children, who were made destitute by his laziness. His wife and kids lacked money, food, and life-saving medical attention. They couldn’t even depend on having a roof over their heads. In November 1849, a year after he published his The Communist Manifesto, Marx’s landlord evicted the Marxes. The landlord naturally wanted to be paid the rent, but he was also fed up with Marx’s filthy personal habits. The communist ideologue exhibited a stubborn resistance to grooming and bathing. He stank. Karl drank too much, smoked too much, never exercised, and suffered from warts and boils from his refusal to bathe. “The boils varied in numbers, size and intensity,” says Paul Johnson, “but at one time or another they appeared on all parts of his body, including his cheeks, the bridge of his nose, his bottom—preventing him from sitting to write—and his penis. In 1873 they brought on a nervous collapse marked by trembling and bursts of rage.”20
Marx was lazy not only in his personal habits and when it came to supporting his family. He also took the easy way out in his research. He avoided the factories and farms on which he professed to be an expert and did his research exclusively in the library. No wonder there’s a vast separation between his economic ideas and reality. He was typical of the Ivory Tower intellectuals who never bother intermingling with the rubes that they profess to speak for from their perch of expertise in the faculty lounge.
Tragically, We Do
Marx suffered from boils for nearly twenty-five years—including the period when he was writing Das Kapital, something that may possibly explain the sense of oozing pain that one feels when reading his magnum opus. “Whatever happens,” he groaned to Engels, “I hope the bourgeoisie as long as they exist will have cause to remember my carbuncles.”21
Even sympathetic sources on the ideological Left agree on Marx’s failure to provide for his family. “He and Jenny, his wife, spent the majority of their life together in considerable and frequently miserable poverty, relying on contributions from supportive friends (most reliably Friedrich Engels),” says a writer at the left-wing Salon. “If this was hard on Marx, it was surely harder still on Jenny.” Marx’s wife had been raised as what we today would call a “limousine leftist,” brought up in an aristocratic family in Prussia. She gave up her life of privilege for a life of poverty and squalor with Karl. The two of them lived in the expectation that Karl’s masterwork, Das Kapital, might actually earn them some capital. But Marx, who was notorious for not completing assignments and for ignoring agreed-upon word limits, missed his deadline by sixteen years. The first royalty check for the book arrived sixteen years later still, at which point both Karl and Jenny had died; only their surviving children got some royalties.22
Their surving children. Four of Marx’s six children died before he did. In the wretched winter of 1849–1850, the Marx family sought refuge in a dilapidated German boarding-house where their baby Guido succumbed to the elements. He perished a victim of his father’s irresponsibility. As Paul Johnson writes of Marx’s wife, “Jenny left a despairing account of these days, from which her spirits, and her affection for Marx, never really recovered.”23
Then in 1855 Marx’s eight-year-old son Edgar died of intestinal tuberculosis “exacerbated,” as Mary Gabriel, author of a sympathetic biography of Karl and Jenny, explains, “by. . . unhealthy living conditions. . . . the revolutionary path [his parents] had chosen had killed him.” Marx lamented to Friedrich Engels, “Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable.”24
Then at least two of his daughters committed suicide,25 one of them in a suicide pact with her husband, whom Marx had ridiculed. Marx detested his sons-in-law, seeing them both as idiots. But he particularly disliked Paul Lafargue, his daughter Laura’s husband. Because Lafargue was Cuban, Marx denigrated him as “Negrillo” or “The Gorilla” on account of the “Negro blood” in his veins.
Marx’s attitude towards women was not much more enlightened than his treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. To the devastation of his devoted wife, he had a sexual relationship with the family’s longtime nursemaid, whom he apparently impregnated, though he refused to concede that the unfortunate child was his—or to provide a penny of child support.
And he vetoed careers for his daughters. Mary Gabriel writes that Marx’s daughters “adored their father.” They relished being born into Marx’s “revolutionary household, with all the complications that entailed.” They were educated according to “the values of Victorian society—music, art, literature, and languages” and were also were taught “a heavy dose of radical politics.” And as soon as they were able, they became their father’s assistants. Not until they were grown women, says Gabriel, did Marx’s daughters fully grasp “the high price of being born a Marx.” She notes that one daughter lost all three of her young children while devoting herself “to further her father’s agenda.” Another daughter gave up a cherished life as a journalist for a “miserable marriage” to one of her father’s young French followers. And the third became “ensnared by a man whom she believed to be worthy of her father,” but who, in the end, drove her to suicide.30
All People Are Equal, but Some People Are More Equal Than Others
It’s hard to argue with Walter Williams, the leading economist and well-known black conservative, when he states flatly that “Marx was an out and out racist and anti-Semite.”26 The founding father of communism freely dispensed choice epithets aimed at blacks and Jews (despite the fact that Marx himself was an ethnic Jew).27 Marx referred to the labor organizer Ferdinand Lassalle as a “greasy Jew,” “the little kike,” “water-polack Jew,” “Jew Braun,” and “the Jewish Nigger” and wrote to Engels, “It is now perfectly clear to me that, as the shape of his head and the growth of his hair indicates, he is descended from the Negroes who joined in Moses’ flight from Egypt.” Lassalle’s “cranial formation,” said Marx, a proud Darwinist, was the giveaway—or perhaps “his mother or grandmother on the father’s side was crossed with a nigger.” Marx concluded, “This union of Jew and German on a Negro base was bound to produce an extraordinary hybrid.”28 And Engels wasn’t much better; he deduced with scientific accuracy that Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue possessed “one-eighth or one-twelfth nigger blood.” In 1887, Lafargue was a political candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. In an April 1887 letter to Paul’s wife, Laura, Engels opined, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”29 No doubt Engels and Marx had a good chortle over that one.
Engels shared not only Marx’s racism but his exploitative attitude toward women, callously juggling a number of mistresses, who pleaded with him to make honest women out of them, to take them to the altar rather than merely to bed. At one point in the 1850s, Engels seems to have begun referring to one of these women as his wife, though he would not legally marry her. When she died, he may have married another sexual partner—the sister of his late “wife”—but only on her deathbed.31
It’s really no wonder that communism promotes pre-marital sex, non-committed relationships, and easy divorce. The ideological preferences of Marx and Engels were extensions of their personal preferences, as was apparent with the publication of Engels’s The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State in 1884. That was the year after Marx’s death, but Engels explained in the preface that the book also represented Marx’s views on family. Marx, said Engels, had eagerly wanted to undertake this crucial work and right up until his death had been writing materials that Engels had reproduced in the book “as far as possible.” Indeed, Professor H. Kent Geiger, in his seminal Harvard University Press book on the subject, notes that “many of the ideas” in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State can be found in the first joint work by Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, which was not published during their lifetimes.
I Don’t Remember That from the Bible
In a letter to Engels, Marx said, “Blessed is he who has no family.”32 It’s a curious take on the Beatitudes; Jesus seemed to have left that one out.
According to Geiger, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State was a “joint work” by the two founders of Marxism, based on an “impressive unity and continuity” across four decades of their mutual thoughts.33 In that book Engels reiterated what both he and Marx had previously argued, namely that housework was yet another private thing that the communist state should seize control of, replacing it with collective labor managed by the state. Under communism, Engels explained, “The single family ceases to be the economic unit of society.”34 Mothers would be corralled into the fields and factories to do more meaningful work. Housework, from cooking to cleaning, would become a government industry, as would child care, which would become a communal affair. Mothers and wives would be liberated from the “economic bondage” of the traditional family.40 “Private housekeeping is transformed into a social industry,” Engels envisioned excitedly. “The care and education of the children becomes a public affair; society looks after all children alike, whether they are legitimate or not.”41
The Devil Is in the Details
According to Robert Payne—a respected and thoughtful British professor of English literature and drama, biographer, linguist, and absolutely no right-winger, Karl Marx “could recite long passages of Goethe’s Faust with gusto, with a special preference for the speeches of Mephistopheles”35—the devil who tempts Faust to sell his soul. Marx also wrote Satan-themed poetry as a young man, including a ballad in which a pure Christian maiden succumbs to the love of a dark figure who “takes[s] her heart by storm,” and persuades her that her “soul, once true to God / Is chosen for Hell,”36 and another poem in which “hellish vapors rise and fill the brain”37 and a character says, “See this sword? The Prince of Darkness sold it to me.”38 Engels, who also wrote poetry, described Marx as
A black man from Trier, a remarkable monster,
He neither walks nor hops, but springs upon his heels
And stretches high his arms into the air in anger
As though his wrath would seize at once
The mighty canopy of Heaven and tear it to the earth,
With clenched and threatening fist he rages without rest,
As though ten thousand devils had seized him by the hair.39
“This removes all the anxiety about the consequences which today is the most essential social-moral as well as economic factor that prevents a girl from giving herself completely to the man she loves,” wrote Engels. “Will not that suffice to bring about the gradual growth of unconstrained sexual intercourse and with it a more tolerant public opinion in regard to a maiden’s honor and a woman’s shame?”42 You can see exactly why Friedrich Engels hoped it would.
Professor Geiger notes that Engels and Marx appeared to have “little to say” about the relationships between parents and children beyond the crucial recommendation that “they would not continue to live together, because society was to rear and educate” them. This collective rearing of children by the communist state would bring “real freedom” to all members of the family. Parenting would become the responsibility of the state.43 This was all in aid of the “abolition of the family” that Marx and Engels had already written about in The Communist Manifesto.44