Dr. Crankley's Children

International

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When Clio, the Muse of History, gets her diary up to date, whom will she write down as the Man of the 20th Century? Barring the unlikely appearance, before 2000, of an extraordinarily effective saint or major prophet, the Man of the Century will be a German intellectual, devoted to children, caviar and Aeschylus.

He does not look the part. His scholarly forehead, his small, sparkling eyes, his massive and majestic beard set him apart from other 20th Century heroes. The black-rimmed eyeglass, which he carries on a thin ribbon around his neck, is a gentle anachronism. Above all, his dates seem wrong. For it was at the height of the Victorian era, when the atom appeared almost as indestructible as Britain's dominion of the waves, that Karl Heinrich Marx died.

But that was a technicality. In the historic sense (as distinguished from the merely biological), Karl Marx has only just begun to live.

Happy Birthday. This month marks an anniversary for Karl Marx. Just 100 years ago his Communist Manifesto, a slender pamphlet bound in green, was first presented to a deeply uninterested public. Since then, public interest has increased. Karl Marx this week is everywhere.

"Marxist" is the word that divides the world. In the lands drained by the Sava, the Bug, the Moskva, the Dnieper, the Don, the Volga, the Yenisei and the Amur, a man who wishes to express approval--of a painting, a factory production record or a military operation--is likely to call it "Marxist." In the lands drained by the St. Lawrence, the Mississippi, the Orinoco, the Amazon, the Tagus, the Thames and the Clyde, a man who wishes to express disapproval--of a painting, a production record or a military operation--is likely to call it "Marxist." In the lands drained by the Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Mekong, the Tiber, the Po, the Rhone, the Scheldt, the Rhine, men are divided--in some cases bloodily;--over whether "Marxist" should express approval or disapproval.

In the lands drained by the Shannon, the Niger, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Ganges, the Indus and the Irrawaddy, Marxism is not the paramount issue. These lands are regarded by both Marxists and anti-Marxists as somewhat backward.

Marxism last week made men fight in the ragged mountains of Greece. It inspired strikes in Seoul, Korea, and San Ferdinando di Puglia, Italy. A Shanghai girl student asked a boy to write in her autograph book. Instead of an affectionate personal sentiment, he wrote: "What is the reason for the existence of people who reap wealth without laboring?" Marx, who guided the Chinese boy's hand, was also last week the most important man in the world's two great centers of power, the U.S. Congress and Moscow's Politburo.

Quite a birthday for a manifesto. Quite a ripple for an unsociable old refugee who had sat, day after day, year after year, under the high glass dome of the British Museum's reading room, his clothes untidy, a sarcastic line edging his mouth.

The Idea Market. Marx got into the center of all this commotion by making a statement about The Machine. It was not a clear statement, and every year more evidence piles up that it was wrong. In the market place of ideas, however, it did not have very effective competition. Among its competitors were:

1) The idea (still popular) that The Machine doesn't matter, that human society is not deeply affected by it.

2) The idea that The Machine is pure evil, and should be destroyed. (This idea was first expressed by a village idiot, Ned Ludd, who stalked around Nottingham, England, in the late 18th Century, smashing stocking frames.)*

3) The idea that The Machine is pure good, the center of a new evolution towards greater & greater prosperity.

In Marx's day, Europe was divided between these three attitudes towards The Machine. The old aristocracy tended to ignore The Machine, or to agree with Ned Ludd. The new aristocracy of trade committed itself to a philosophy of materialist progress. Some of the workers believed the promise; some believed Ned Ludd.

Marx accepted The Machine. He accepted and further glorified the materialism of the capitalists, but rejected the idea of progress and said that The Machine would lead the workers where Ned Ludd said it would, unless the workers took control of The Machine away from the capitalists.

The idea of class struggle was certainly not original with Marx. What he did was rewrite history with class struggle in the center. Superficially, it might seem that the abundance of goods The Machine could produce would soften the class struggle; Marx said that this very possibility of abundance would sharpen class struggle, that the capitalists would use the state's police power, its war-making power and all other means to prevent glutted markets, i.e., abundance. It followed that the workers had to seize the state by revolution (they would never get it any other way) and use the state's powers to control The Machine. This would lead to the world's first classless society; its goal: unlimited material prosperity.

The Secret of Success. These ideas were set forth in the 1848 Manifesto and developed in Das Kapital and other children of Karl Marx's mind. The most interesting thing about these ideas is their success in the teeth of developments proving that Marx's main assumptions were wrong. He assumed, for example, that the spectacular poverty of industrial workers of his day would spread and deepen. The capitalist philosophers, who predicted rising living standards, were right. A hundred years after the Manifesto, however, the class struggle is sharper in spite of the fact that the living standard of the "exploited classes" is almost everywhere higher than it has ever been.

The other day a keen U.S. observer, back from a year in Italy, was warning of the danger of a Marxist political victory there. A listener asked: "But when the Marshall Plan gets going, won't rising living standards greatly reduce the unrest?" The observer replied: "Not necessarily. The discrepancy between the rich and the poor will still be there, and that is what counts."

Why? For over 2,000 years, a deep gulf between rich and poor had existed in Italy. Why had class conflict now hardened into its present menacing aspect? The answer, for Italy and everywhere, was that before The Machine poverty was suffered as inevitable; since The Machine's promise of prosperity, poverty is regarded (with Marx's prompting) as the result of a conspiracy.

That is the secret of Marx's success. The results may not be what Marx intended. In many countries, notably Britain, the consciousness of poverty results in a drive toward leveling, rather than toward revolution. The Machine is controlled in the interest of reducing the prosperity and power of the "exploiting classes," rather than in the interest of abundance. Economic initiative, instead of being restricted by capitalist greed, is in danger of being fettered by proletarian envy.

The Supremacy of the Cop. In countries truer to Marx, where control of The Machine has actually been taken away from the capitalist, the most extraordinary growth occurred in the meaning of "control." Control of production by "the state," in place of ownership by private people, turned out to need bolstering up. It meant control of speech, thought and personal life. It was not the freed worker who replaced the capitalist; it was the cop, the spy, the bureaucrat.

Old Prince Otto von Bismarck saw what was implicit in Marx more clearly than Marx himself did. He noted the reluctance of Marxists to discuss the nature of the society for which they struggled. Said Bismarck in 1878: "If only I could find out what the future [Marxist] state . . . is like. We can only catch glimpses of it through the cracks. . . . If every man has to have his share allotted to him from above, we arrive at a kind of prison existence where everyone is at the mercy of the warders. And in our modern prisons the warder is at any rate a recognized official, against whom one can lodge a complaint. But who will be the warders in the general socialist prison? There will be no question of lodging complaints against them; they will be the most merciless tyrants ever seen, and the rest will be the slaves of these tyrants."

Yearnings of a Creator. Despite the fear of the warders (and in Marxist countries, because of this fear), Marxism persists. It offers far more than a critique of capitalism; in addition, its converts get the only fully developed materialist religion, complete with creed, church, directions for salvation, answers to every question, saints, doctors and devils.

The ingredients in Marxism's emotional force are 1) pity, 2) hate, 3) desire for power. All three were conspicuously present in the life and character of Karl Marx.

He was born (1818) in the ancient archbishopric of Trier. From his ancestry (which included generations of rabbis and Talmudic scholars) he undoubtedly inherited his gift for subtle and untiring disputation. When Karl was six Father Hirschel Marx, a lawyer, took the family to be baptized in the Protestant Church. Karl became an evangelical atheist.

He wrote poetry for his beautiful neighbor, Fraulein Jenny von Westphalen, who, whenever she read one of his poems, "burst into tears of joy and melancholy." Sample: "If we can but weld our souls together, then with contempt I shall fling my glove in the world's face; then I, a creator, shall stride through the wreckage!"

He fell under the influence of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and learned from him two persistent tendencies: a respect for the state (very rare in 19th Century radicals), and the dialectical method.

The conventional way of thinking about causes and effects imagines them as a chain, one link leading to the next. Hegel's dialectic presented a more turbulent picture: every idea (thesis) has its opposite (antithesis) with which it struggles until they produce a third idea (synthesis); this in turn has its antithesis, and so on. Marx expressed history by putting class conflicts in the place of thesis and antithesis. The culminating conflict was that called forth by The Machine. The last synthesis, which would be unique because it would not contain its own negation, would be the classless society.

The Communist who imagines history as moving in a spiral toward his goal will have no compunction in allying himself first with Hitler, then with Churchill, in the belief that the struggle between them will produce a "synthesis" of benefit to Communism. When a Communist wrecks a labor union or helps a reactionary to power, he is not being cynical but "systematic."

Fronts & Purges. Marx did not absorb the morals of the dialectic immediately. When, at 24, he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (a paper owned by bourgeois and written by their radical sons), he promptly ordered contributors to stop smuggling socialist propaganda into casual drama reviews; he said the practice was downright "immoral."

His atheism got the Rheinische Zeitung into censorship trouble and King Frederick William himself ordered the "Whore on the Rhine" to cease publication. Marx married Jenny, against the opposition of her aristocratic family, and went to Paris. By the time he wrote the Manifesto, he had ironed out the basic tenets of his faith.

One day, Marx and his new friend Friedrich Engels (a young man of good bourgeois family) began calling themselves "The Communist Party." It soon grew to include 17 members, all of whom were bourgeois intellectuals, bearing in true dialectical fashion the seeds of the destruction of the middle class and of intellectual freedom.

Marx created the first Communist front organization. When the revolutions of 1848 swept Europe, he organized a workers' club in Paris whose agitators had instructions not to mention Communism, but to emphasize democracy. Later, Marx sent 300 agents into Germany with instructions to organize Communist cells but to appear as good, hard-working liberals. In 1848 Marx himself revived the old Rheinische Zeitung; its masthead now proclaimed it an "organ of democracy." Admitted Marx: "It was in reality nothing but a plan of war against democracy."

Marx also conducted the first Party purges. He denounced anyone who disagreed with him as an "unscientific socialist." The usual instrument of execution was slander, from stories that the accused had embezzled workers' funds to rumors that he had gonorrhea.

It was Mikhail Bakunin, the legendary Russian anarchist, who was the first to spot Karl Marx as a tyrant. Cried he: "I hate Communism. . . . It is the negation of liberty." Marx drove him from the First International by accusing him (falsely) of being a blackmailer and a Czarist agent. (In the process, Marx helped wreck the International).

"Baring his teeth and grinning," an acquaintance once said, "Marx will slaughter anybody who blocks his way."

Marx hated "sentimental socialism," was bitterly impatient of efforts to better the lot of the workers by gradual progress. As the years went on, he spoke more & more of the necessity of "capturing" the state (with its police power) rather than of "destroying" the state, as other socialists hoped to do. Toward the end of his life he wrote the words "dictatorship of the proletariat" to describe the post-revolutionary period which was to precede the classless society. That phrase had always been buried in Marx's thought; he had in fact used it in conversation. Written down, it was to become an extension of his own tyrannical political methods, the excuse for the most pitiless tyranny the world has ever seen.

Father Marx. Yet the man was certainly not without pity and warm humanity. The children of his neighborhood in London (where he spent most of his life), as well as the members of his party, called him "Father Marx." With children, he lost all the hatred and suspicion he constantly harbored toward grownups. On Sunday nights, he would read fairy tales to his children (Bluebeard, Snow White, Rumpelstilschen) or build paper boats for them (which he usually set on fire like Zeus destroying a mortal fleet). He took the children for picnics on Hampstead Heath, where he rode the donkeys with them or led them to the year's first forget-me-nots in defiance of bourgeois "no trespassing" signs. Once he answered a dinner invitation for his daughter:

Dear Miss Lilliput,

. . . Having ascertained your respectability and the high tone of your transactions with your tradespeople, I shall feel happy to seize this rather strange opportunity of getting at your eatables and drinkables. . . . Being somewhat deaf in the right ear, please put a dull fellow, of whom I daresay your company will not be in want, at my right side. . . . Having [through] former intercourse with Yankees taken to the habitude of spitting, I hope spittoons will not be missing. Being rather easy in my manners and disgusted at the hot and close English atmosphere, you must prepare for seeing me in a dress rather adamatic. I hope your female guests are somewhat in the same line.

Addio, my dear unknown little minx,

Yours forever, Dr. Crankley

But Dr. Crankley was unhappy even as a father. Of his seven children, one was born dead, four others died before him. When Marx's daughter Franziska died of bronchitis, there was no money to buy a coffin. "Her little lifeless body rested in the small back room," related Jenny Marx. "We all moved together into the front room and when night came we made up beds on the floor." (A fellow refugee finally lent the Marxes -L-2 for the coffin.)

The Ordeal of a Communist. Marx's life was veined by the ordeal of his own poverty. With the egotism of genius, he refused to be turned "into a [bourgeois] money-making machine." He never had a regular job, and only once tried to get one; a railroad company turned him down as a clerk because of his bad handwriting. Once he reported to Engels: "I can no longer leave the house, because my clothes are in pawn." Another time he was arrested on suspicion of theft when he tried to pawn his wife's family silver (it bore the crest of the Dukes of Argyll, from whom she was descended through her paternal grandmother). Guiltily, he wrote to Engels: "My wife cried all night and that infuriates me."

The Prussian government, which kept a close watch on him in London, received the following report, probably unique in the literature of espionage, on Marx's apartment at 28 Dean Street, Soho:

"In the middle of the living room there is a big table covered with oilcloth. On it are piled his manuscripts, books and papers; the children's toys; his wife's sewing, chipped teacups; dirty spoons, knives and forks; lamps, an inkwell, glasses, clay pipes, tobacco ash; in a word, it is the most indescribable muddle. . . . One's eyes are so blinded by coal and tobacco smoke that it is like walking around in a cave until one becomes accustomed to it and objects begin to loom up through the fog. . . . Sitting down is a dangerous business. One of the chairs has only three legs; and the children are playing at cooking on another one which happens to be whole, and which they offer to the guest; so if you sit down it is at the risk of ruining your trousers."

The End & the Beginning. His book, Das Kapital, was a disappointment to Marx. When it finally appeared (after some 18 years of work), Engels was pressed into service to write reviews, both pro & con, in a vain attempt to attract some attention to it. Marx said: "Das Kapital will not bring in enough money to pay for the cigars I smoked while I wrote it." Marx's contemporaries scarcely knew that he was alive, much less what he stood for. He did acquire a brief notoriety during the Paris Commune of 1871, which was regarded as his handiwork. Said he: "Newspaper men and all kinds of people dog my steps for a glimpse of 'The Monster.' It does one's heart good."

Because of his intrigues and his intolerance, he lost most of his friends; the only people outside his family whose affections he kept were Lenchen Demuth, the Marxes' lifelong, devoted servant (who could handle Marx even in his blackest moods) and Friedrich Engels, whom one acquaintance described as "the little Pomeranian." Engels, first with his father's money, then with his own profits as a textile manufacturer, paid Marx's bills. (In a letter to Engels Marx wrote: "I have worked out a sure scheme for getting some money out of your Old Man.")

Marx's only lasting comforts were algebra (his favorite form of escape) and Jenny. Protectively, she used to call him "my big child." Once, when he briefly returned to Trier, he wrote: "I have been making a daily pilgrimage to the old Westphalen house . . . which used to shelter my sweetheart. And every day people ask me right and left about the quondam 'most beautiful girl' in Trier, the 'Queen of the ball.' It's damned agreeable for a man to find that his wife lives on as an 'enchanted princess' in the imagination of a whole town."

Then Jenny died. Her last words were: "Karl, my strength is broken." So was his. On March 14, 1883, death came quietly to Karl Marx as he sat in his easy chair. He was buried in Highgate Cemetery under a flat stone. At the grave, Friedrich Engels said: "The greatest of living thinkers ceased to think. . . . He discovered the simple fact . . . that mankind must first of all eat and drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, religion, art. . . ."

Marx himself had unwittingly composed an even better obituary. Once, tortured by boils as he often was, Marx wrote: "I hope as long as they live, the bourgeois will remember my carbuncles."

The Heritage. It was perhaps a tragic accident--though its symbolism can scarcely escape a death-ridden world--that none of Father Marx's beloved children lived happily; the two daughters who survived him committed suicide. But he was to have other children. They came to him by the thousands. Dr. Crankley's spiritual children inherited in varying degree his three outstanding characteristics: pity, hatred and love of power.

The children of pity accepted Marx's indictment of capitalism's evils, but they did not want to substitute the greater evil of his proletarian dictatorship. They were the backbone (if backbone it had) of Social Democracy. They were perhaps best epitomized by Sidney Webb, later Lord Passfield. He and his wife Beatrice loved the bicycle, and untiringly cycled about the business of their Fabian Society; once they pedaled 40 miles to Cardiff to attend a trade union congress. They believed not in the inevitability of revolution but in the "inevitability of gradualness," i.e., in a steady bicycle ride toward socialism.

One of the Webbs' best works was the English Poor Law History. Gradually, the semi-Marxist influence of the Webbs might make Britain the most efficiently, equitably, and humanely operated poorhouse the world had ever seen. But there was always the possibility that it would turn back from socialism. As Engels put it despairingly: "The English have all the material conditions necessary for . . . revolution. What they lack is the spirit of generalization. . . ."

Then there were the children of hate. Their archetype is Benito Mussolini. As a young Socialist, he was poor, sickly and beset by strange anguish. "I am afraid of trees, of dogs, of the sky and my own shadow." He was always hungry and he despised the rich. Once, in a Lausanne park, he saw two elderly Englishwomen on a bench, lunching on hard-boiled eggs; he pounced on the women and snatched their lunch.

Mussolini seized the state as he had grabbed the eggs, and out of hatred and hunger men followed him. He never tried seriously to control The Machine or resolve the basis of class conflict. He put the machines and the classes to work for war.

The most important and the most terrible in the Marxist brood are those who inherited the cold, disciplined logic necessary for the serious pursuit of power. Their leader is the late Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. When the Russian people, without his help, snatched at democracy, he snatched it away from them. Like Father Marx, he knew what was best. He organized riots (see cut) that weakened and, finally, a coup that overpowered the Kerensky government. He organized, as Marx had taught, a dictatorship of the proletariat (i.e., a disciplined little gang of power monopolists). In 1917, in the assembly hall of a swank girls' school in Petrograd, behind unwashed windows that excluded the sky, Lenin stood up. His ill-fitting, overlong trousers flapped about his feet. Gripping the rostrum, he said quietly: "We shall now proceed to construct the proletarian socialist order in Russia."

In the process of reconstructing humanity to fit The Machine, Lenin's followers smashed men as freely as the idiot boy of Nottingham had smashed machines.

"Yours Forever." Today, the children of pity are largely ineffectual; the children of hate are at bay. The West faces the children of power who rule Russia and all Communist parties throughout the world. Against them stands capitalist democracy, which has certainly not fulfilled the shiny, steam-driven dreams of some of its early prophets. There is no need, however, for capitalism to cringe silently beneath the Marxist indictment. The Communist Manifesto made better reading before Marxism had been tried. Capitalism, for all the regimentation and degradation that occasionally went with it, has made a compromise with The Machine which is, on the record, superior to the Marxist compromise with human nature. Capitalism does not get all it can out of The Machine, or give men all they should have. But it has left man essentially free, while it gets more out of The Machine than Marxism does. But capitalism has failed to proclaim, so that the world can hear--and that is not to capitalism's credit--the victory it has won over the argument of the Manifesto.

They were telling a story in Europe this week. In a Bulgarian classroom, a Communist teacher asked her hungry pupils to recite the Lord's Prayer. When they had finished, they were still hungry. Then the teacher led them in a new prayer which began "Our Father Stalin. . . ." Suddenly, through a hole in the ceiling, straight from the Marxist heaven, tumbled loaf after loaf of bread.

That story summarized Marxism's challenge. For Marxism offered both reason and faith, both bread and miracles. Sharp ears this week could hear Karl Marx laugh quietly to himself on the Manifesto's birthday. The bourgeois, forgetting their own accomplishments, were remembering his carbuncles. "Yours forever," the old man seemed to say, "Yours forever, Dr. Crankley."

* A few decades later his followers were an organized force, called Luddites. They would converge on an industrial village at dusk, post guards, and smash and burn machinery while the villagers cowered in their cottages. Their counterparts existed in many continental countries.

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