A classic is a book which people praise and don’t read. – Mark Twain
I have… no idea why so many people who call themselves “Marxist” have no clue what Karl Marx actually wrote. As if my comparisons between evolution-deniers on both the “far-left” and “far-right” weren’t enough, Marxists are just like evangelical Christians holding up a book they’ve never read while they scream at gay people. I would thus refer to not only the actual Bible, but also the various bibles of secular ideologies as “Twainian Classics.” Now, I have not cracked open Marx’s magnum opus, Das Kapital, in over a decade, and I don’t even have a copy anymore, so depending on how much research I need to do for this article, it might behoove me to pop on over to the local library. I hope my memory serves me well enough, because the rest of this article is going to contrast what Marx actually wrote with what Marxists believe. Mind you, Marx’s work, like almost all Hegelian drivel, is damn near incomprehensible and contradicts itself constantly… just like the actual Bible! Won’t this be fun?
First off, the wooly mammoth in the room: Karl Marx was born into a Jewish family that was never particularly religious, and Karl himself appears to have been a lifelong atheist. Despite being totally irreligious, Marx has been nonetheless labelled as “ethnically Jewish” by Nazis and other anti-Semites, and as a “self-hating Jew” by secular and religious Jews alike. Marx was inescapably anti-Semitic, and in his 1843 book titled On the Jewish Question, makes in abundantly clear in his belief that capitalism and the banking industry were both products of the Jews. Marx believed that the bourgeoisie and the Jews were one and the same. The reason for this is fairly straightforward, and it goes back to a centuries-old… tradition… of European law.
By decree of the Roman Catholic Church, Jews were forbidden from owning property, whereas Christians were forbidden from lending money. This meant that travelling entertainers, merchants, and of course, bankers, were almost all Jewish. While the entertainers and merchants were wanderers, the bankers had to remain largely confined to the cities (the classical word for city is “burg” in German and “borough” in French and English) in order to conduct business. These affluent urban apartment-dwellers were called “burgers” in German and “bourgeoisie” in French. Karl Marx apparently believed that to live this way was to practise the Jewish religion. Marx certainly wasn’t the first person to blame everything on the Jews, but was probably the first person to explain in a sesquipedalian fashion why the entire class struggle was the fault of the Jews. His thought process seems to have gone something like this:
Marx was a revolutionary (an armchair revolutionary, but hey, details), not a reactionary. He wasn’t a luddite, and acknowledged that industrial society and “capitalism” had actually built something beneficial, but he claimed that the proletariat were being preventing from sharing in the benefits of that which they had helped to build, instead all of the benefits were sucked up by the “vampire class” of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Marx considered Judaism to be the religion of the upper class, as he did not appear to even believe in race (it’s a bit hard to if you’re a Lamarckist).
On that same token, Marx held the exact same revolutionary views as the Founding Fathers of the United States, at least in the context of the First and Second Amendments:
You cannot enjoy the advantages of a free press without putting up with its inconveniences.
Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers should be frustrated, by force if necessary.
If my memory serves me correctly, both of these quotes come from Marx’s private correspondence, and not from any of his books, though there is something quite similar to the second one in The Communist Manifesto. Note that I’m not saying whether or not Marx is right about anything, for example, he was dead wrong about the proletariat being a revolutionary class. The proletariat is, if anything, deeply conservative and therefore a reactionary class, or in the Soviet vernacular, “counter-revolutionary.” Under normal conditions, the proletariat will adapt itself to pre-existing conditions, and will not demand progress of its own volition unless labour conditions are utterly atrocious. Marx, of course, never worked in a factory a day in his life, and probably never even saw the inside of one, hence being totally ignorant of the nature of the people he attempted to advocate for. This is one of the few things that Marxists have in common with Marx himself, and considering my own bias, I jump at every opportunity to point this out.
One important thing to keep in mind is that Marxism and socialism are not the same thing. Marxism can be said to be a type of socialism, but the broader category got its start during the French Revolution roughly fifty years earlier, though the earliest use of the word “socialism” that I know of comes from 1840, a year before Karl Marx’s earliest known published writing, and eight years before the publication of The Communist Manifesto. Socialism, in its original French form, is purely an economic theory, rather than a totalising philosophy like Marxism. A “totalising” philosophy is one that concerns itself with the totality of human existence, much in the way that religious doctrines have rules for everything, and any question not explicitly answered can have its answer discovered by applying an over-arching principle in the text to something that the writers of the original doctrine never thought of. Marx believed that the totality of human history was the history of class struggle, which is ludicrously reductive in my opinion, but he’s not actually wrong. In fact, he argued, as I still do, that governments only make concessions for their subjects purely out of self-interest, keeping the majority of the proletariat placated and thus forestalling the revolution in perpetuity… very Machiavellian. Marx was, in his day, a radical. However, as Marxism has become more mainstream in the decades since, its proponents are no longer the fringe radicals, but instead they have become the cathedral, hence abandoning radical, revolutionary rhetoric and tactics that defined Karl Marx. These days, Marxists have removed themselves so far from the philosophy of their namesake that they now denounce Marx’s own viewpoints as “Orthodox Marxism,” and I wish I was making that up!
Again, much as religious folks have a persecution complex, Marxists also have a persecution complex, hence constantly whining about the “counter-revolutionary” establishment… which they control. No academic need fear being silenced for being a self-professed Marxist, just as no politician need fear losing the next election for being a self-professed Christian, at least in the western world. By necessity, this means that the “revolutionary” ideology has been bastardised. The reason that Marxism is so open to bastardisation because it is self-contradictory and damn near incomprehensible, but certain points are consistent, and yet I can’t help but notice that, ironically, it is these most consistent of points that modern-day Marxists most consistently reject. For example:
Karl Marx was not an anarchist; he believed in a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” On that note, the word “dictator” is Latin for “speaker,” and this is the actual title held by Gaius Julius Caesar. Caesar was the “speaker for the Roman people,” so the idea of a Marxist dictatorship is not one bit contradictory; on the contrary, Marx held that dictatorship is the highest form of democracy, a view that is held by none other than Xi Jinping. Benito Mussolini held a similar view, i.e. that fascism is the highest form of democracy. Can you see the implications of this?
Karl Marx was not in favour of dissolving the nuclear family, except for the Jews. Marx believed that tearing apart Jewish families was necessary to overthrow the tyranny of the Jewish bourgeoisie. Being a staunch collectivist, however, Marx saw the nuclear family as paramount to the success of the proletariat, and that trade unions were basically big families.
Karl Marx never argued for the total elimination of the bourgeoisie, but instead for an inversion of the traditional order, placing the paper-pushers on a lower rung in society than the producers. This inversion, rather than total equality, went from theory to praxis in the Soviet Union under Lenin.
Karl Marx was a philosopher, not an economist, in fact, he was economically illiterate, and as such, neither Capital nor Das Kapital should be interpreted as economic treatises. The entirety of Das Kapital is written in code, or “dog-whistles” in the modern leftist vernacular. On the Jewish Question is the key to deciphering the damn near incomprehensible tome.
Karl Marx was a Hegelian, which combined with his tendency to write in code, was one of the main reason that his work is utterly nonsensical at times. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was an anti-empiricist, rejected methodological naturalism, and instead believed that the universe was nothing but a collection of contradictions… because he was nothing more than a loquacious idiot, and the living embodiment of the quote “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.” No wonder postmodernists love him.
I can cherry-pick a handful of things that Marx said that I actually agree with, but if I’m being perfectly honest, that fact is just an instance of the adage “even a broken clock is right twice a day.” Neo-Marxists basically do the same thing, and I honestly don’t know why they even bother clinging to the Marxist label.
Neo-Marxism actually has a very specific definition, but for my purposes, I will apply this label to anyone who calls themselves “Marxist” while rejecting about as much of Marx’s actual philosophy as I do. By this criterion, Mussolini and Hitler were actually better Marxists than neo-Marxists, despite explicitly rejecting Marxism. Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin were near-perfect Marxists, though Stalin gets unfairly maligned by neo-Marxists simply because of the Holodomor and Great Purge. In reality, the murderous policies that saw 30 million Ukrainians die were implemented by Lenin, Stalin simply oversaw much more of it. Stalin’s body count is ten times higher than Lenin’s for the simple reason that Stalin was in power for ten times as long. In other words, when I say that Stalin is “unfairly maligned,” I mean that Lenin and Trotsky were just as evil. In particular, I maintain that Trotsky would have likely killed more people than even Stalin if he got into power. The reason for this is because the genocide-in-all-but-name called the Holodomor was not an aberration, but instead perfectly in line with Marxist collectivism. Bear in mind, the people killed during the Holodomor were mostly peasants, not urban workers, and therefore not actual members of the proletariat according to Marx, since they owned means of production, i.e. farmland. The Soviets distinguished between the two from word go, and initially saw the peasants as an additional class aggrieved by the bourgeoisie, hence the name Рабоче-крестьянская Красная армия, or the “Workers’ and peasants’ Red Army,” and the additional symbolism; the original symbol of Marxism is a hammer and gear, a reference to urban industrial workers, the Bolsheviks changed the gear to a sickle to show solidarity with the peasants. However, since the redistribution of farmland to the peasants’ ownership had begun under the Tsar, some peasants already owned their land and their agricultural equipment, thus making them “bourgeois” according to Marxist ideology. The Soviets classified peasants into multiple categories, the wealthiest of them being the “kulaks,” who owned at least 8 acres of land and a tractor (I fall into this category, and I unironically call myself a kulak as such). Alan Rosenbaum goes into greater detail in his book titled Is the Holocaust Unique?, in which he compares multiple genocides throughout history, and Robert Conquest writes about the Holodomor specifically in his book titled The Harvest of Sorrow, both of which I recommend you read if you want to know more, because otherwise we’ll be here all week. Since history repeats itself and Marxists always make the same mistakes, another book you should read if you are a glutton for punishment is Mao’s Great Famine by Frank Dikötter.
Neo-Marxists, unlike the Soviets, appear to be mostly a bunch of lily-livered ninnies who won’t accept that Marxism is an inherently violent ideology, and thus brand Stalin and Mao as “fascist” if they are aware of the massive death toll of their regimes. Given my interactions with them, however, I would say that the squeamishness is just an act that will be dropped the moment that they get any pushback. I have been told that I “don’t deserve to live” for turning away from Marxism, which I don’t take personally, because I know that it extends to all Russians, not just kulaks like me. For the neo-Marxists, however, the class struggle takes a back seat to other issues, such as gender, race, and religion. To them, I represent the Great Enemy not because I am a capitalist, but because I am a straight white Jewish male (never mind the fact that I’m actually a bisexual atheist with gender dysphoria whose family hasn’t practised Judaism in who knows how many generations), and even more importantly, a former Soviet. I’m not sure which is worse: to have left Marxism, or to have been the wrong type of Marxist. In the Soviet Union, either one would get you shot.
The best exposé of neo-Marxism that I can think of is James Lindsay’s book titled Race Marxism, though if you consider Lindsay to be a needlessly biased source, you can get all the relevant information straight from the horse’s mouth: Kimberlé Crenshaw’s book titled Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Crenshaw is reported to have coined the term “intersectionality,” and also wrote a book titled Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Remember, the Critical Race Theorists are, in their own words, “trained Marxists,” despite the fact that I just mentioned that Karl Marx supported freedom of speech and didn’t believe in race. The Soviets didn’t believe in race either (and nor do I), but they were notoriously censorious, and to this day, I have no idea what happened to my maternal grandfather; he either died of colon cancer or “fell off a train” (“sure, comrade trashca- I mean, commissar, was that before or after you shot him in the back of the head?”), but if it’s the latter, then perhaps being a political dissident is in my blood. Neo-Marxists, on the other hand, maintain that “denying the existence of race” is racist. This idea, while about as dumb as the stereotypical Yankee academic, is strangely not Amerikos nonsense. Rather, this idea comes from an early Marxist revolutionary named Lev Bronstein, who adopted the name of his prison guard after being arrested for taking part in the failed 1905 Revolution. The name of this guard, you ask? Trotsky.
Leon Trotsky rather infamously coined the term “racist” in 1927 purely as a way to brow-beat anti-socialist Slavs who didn’t want their wealth re-distributed to ethnic minorities who were historically oppressed by the Russian Empire. Vladimir Lenin initially made an effort to “de-Russify” the non-Russian areas, encouraging Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Kazakhs, etc. to speak their own mother tongues, rather than Russian. However, he quickly reneged on this policy, because cultural distinction is not at all conducive to international collectivism, implemented the same tsarist policy of strict Russification, and the Bolsheviks went much farther than the tsars ever did to standardise the Russian language (an effort that I’m happy to report was mostly a failure, as even the Vologda Oblast in the heart of the country has its own distinct dialect).
The term “racism” has three different definitions, two of which have effectively been fused, meanwhile the third is the definition used by modern racial activists. This is classic gnostic doubletalk, by the way, but I wasn’t able to fully explain this when I originally wrote this particular article. Prior to writing those two articles I just linked to, at least, you would know where race Marxism originally comes from; it is a product of Trotskiism, not Maoism, Stalinism, Leninism, or any earlier form of Marxism. By this logic, Trotsky was the original neo-Marxist, and this bizarre deviation from Soviet orthodoxy is the main reason he was exiled, deported, and eventually assassinated.
To prevent this article from turning into an entire book, I’ll wrap it up here. Perhaps the various iterations of neo-Marxism, including stakeholder capitalism, will get their own articles. Assuming that you actually read all ten of the books I’ve referenced, then I think I’ve provided you with enough reading material for the next month. Nonetheless, the lies surrounding Marxism are much more prolific than the truth, which is why diatribes like this one keep having to be written. Right, now bugger off and go educate yourself.
Sasha V's Sesquipedalian Soliloquies 
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