It is now completely clear to me, that, as proven by the shape of his head and the growth of his hair, he [Lassalle] stems from the Negroes who joined the march of Moses out of Egypt (if his mother or grandmother on his father’s side did not mate with a nigger). Now this combination of Jewry and Germanism with the negroid basic substance must bring forth a peculiar product. The pushiness of this lad is also nigger-like.
John Gray, writing in the New York Review of Books, quotes the infamous outburst in his review of Jonathan Sperber’s new biography of Marx, Karl Marx: A Nineteenth Century Life. Sperber’s book represents yet another attempt to prove that Marx wasn’t all that bad:
The view of Marx as a contemporary whose ideas are shaping the modern world has run its course and it is time for a new understanding of him as a figure of a past historical epoch, one increasingly distant from our own: the age of the French Revolution, of Hegel’s philosophy, of the early years of English industrialization and the political economy stemming from it.
There is no reason to withdraw the claim, advanced by Kołakowski and others, that the deadly mix of metaphysical certainty and pseudoscience that Lenin imbibed from Marx had a vital part in producing Communist totalitarianism. Pursuing an unrealizable vision of a harmonious future after capitalism had collapsed, Marx’s Leninist followers created a repressive and inhuman society that itself collapsed, whereas capitalism—despite all its problems—continues to expand.
For Hegel, this knowledge led to absolute acceptance of the past, with all its tragedies—“the struggle of right against right.” For Marx, it led to absolute rejection of the past, a tale told, not by an idiot but a monster. Absolute knowledge granted an absolute right to overturn the past, a right to be exercised with absolute freedom and absolute ruthlessness.
Hegel, in his scarcely intelligible (to me, at least) masterpiece, The Phenomenology of Spirit, discussed the French Revolution in a chapter titled “Absolute Freedom and Terror.” Such freedom, of course, he rejected, but Marx embraced it, for the ultimate fuel for Marx’s spirit was not metaphysics—that was only a tool—but hatred, a passionate hatred of the past, and of the present, and of any restriction on the will of the hater, and of any restriction on that will to command and to oppress, and even to annihilate, the wills of others. That was why Marx so detested parliaments—just a set of rules for you to follow, an endless web of compromise and kow-tow, of having to ask, or rather to beg, someone’s permission to do one one hundredth of what one dreams of doing! Throat-cutting yes, hand-kissing, no!
As a source of information about Marx’s life, I expect that Sperber’s book is well worth reading. But as for understanding Marx, only his own blood-curdling prose will do.
Afterwords
Marx’s own breathtaking racism is a reminder of just how deeply racist Western Civilization was back in the day. But it is not only the Germans who need to be reminded of their racist past. It’s not unusual to read, in biographies of Adolf Hitler, that his favorite reading as a boy were the “Wild West” novels of Karl May, the Zane Grey of Germany, who wrote endlessly of cowboys and Indians without ever having visited the U.S. It’s less common to read that Hitler saw the early American West as a template for Germany. After all, the “Aryan” settlers had made their destiny by exterminating or enslaving “inferior” races, hadn’t they? Germany should to the same in its own “Wild East”! For Hitler, it was that fool Lincoln who started the U.S. down the road to racial decadence by freeing the slaves, a massive error compounded by the willingness of later generations to allow the unlimited immigration of Slavs and Jews into the U.S. Germany would profit from America’s sad example.
