SINCE Stalin's death it has become necessary
to find a new focus for our hostility to the unscrupulous and
inhuman behavior of the Communists. I wish it might be
focused on the real cause of the trouble: Marxism. Much
force of argument is wasted among Western intellectuals
through a wish to exempt Marx from responsibility for this re--
tum to barbarism. Realpolitik in the evil sense was certainly
not born with Marx. But the peculiar thing we are up against,
the casting aside of moral standards by people specializ-
ing in the quest of ideal human relations, was born with
Marx. He is the fountain source of the mores as well as the
economics of the Russian Bolsheviks, and is the godfather of
the delinquent liberals in all lands.
The notion of Marx as a benign and noble brooder over
man's hopes and sorrows, who would be "horrified" at the'
tricks and duplicities of present-day Communists, is as false
as it is widespread. Marx had a bad character. His best
eulogists can hardly think up a virtue to ascribe to him-ex-
cept, indeed, tenacity and moral courage. If he ever per-
formed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He
was a totally undisciplined, vain, slovenly, and egotistical
spoiled child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spite-
ful hate. He could be devious, disloyal, snobbish, anti-
democratic, anti-Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a
sponge, an intriguer, a tyrannical bigot who would rather
wreck his party than see it succeed under another leader.
All these traits are clear in the records of his life, and above
all in his private correspondence with his alter ego and in-
exhaustible sugar-daddy, Friedrich Engels. There are bits in
this correspondence so revolting to a person of democratic
sensibility that they had to be suppressed to keep the myth
of the great-hearted Karl Marx, champion of the downtrod-
den and of human brotherhood, alive at all. To give one
example: Ferdinand Lassalle, who was eclipsing Marx as
leader of a genuine working class movement in Germany,
they discovered to be not only a Jew whom they called
"Baron Izzy," "oi-oi, the great Lassalle," "the little Jew,"
'''the little kike," "Jew Braun," "Izzy the bounder," etc., but
also "a Jewish ******." "It is perfectly obvious," Marx wrote,
"from the shape of his head and the way his hair grows that
he is descended from the Negroes who joined Moses on the
journey out of Egypt, unless perhaps his mother or his grand-
mother had relations with a ******." Only the Russian Bol-
sheviks, who went in for the religion of immoralism with a
barbaric candor impossible to an urbane European, had the
hardihood to publish these letters unexpurgated.
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Marx was so sure that the world was going to be redeemed
by its own dialectic evolution that he would not permit his
disciples to invoke the guidance of moral ideals. He really
meant it when he said the workers have "no ideal to realize,"
they have only to participate in the contemporary struggle.
He expelled people from his 'Communist party for mention-
ing programmatically such things as "love," "justice," "hu-
manity," even "morality" itself. "Soulful ravings," "sloppy
sentimentality," he called such expressions, and purged the
astonished authors as though they had committed the most
dastardly crimes.
Later in life, when Marx founded the First International,
he felt compelled for the sake of a big membership to soft-
pedal his highbrow insight into the purposes of the universe.
He wrote privately to Engels: "I was obliged to insert in the
preamble two phrases about 'duty and right,' ditto 'truth,
morality, and justice.'" But these lamentable phrases-he as-
sured his friend- 'are placed in such a way that they can do
no harm."
