We have the receipts to prove it.
Commentary
I was recently taken aback by a lengthy piece that I read (very oddly) in the Wall Street Journal. Jacob Berger is a professor of philosophy at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He authored an article in the WSJ on Jan. 23 entitled “Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” in which he wrote:
“[G]iven the history of murderous communist regimes like Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it is tempting to infer that Marx encouraged tyranny. But Marx did not advocate violence or political repression, and he would be appalled by the atrocities committed in his name. He pressed for revolution, but he envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic, like the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet rule in 1989.”
The Marx to whom Professor Berger was referring was Karl, not Groucho. So, I read that paragraph again, thinking perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me. Karl Marx “did not advocate violence or political repression”? That is not my recollection, and I think I’ve read everything the bohemian scribbler ever wrote, whether with pens or crayons. He “envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic”? Did I miss something in all that Marxist stuff I read? Marx called for a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Can dictatorship ever be consensual and serene?
My good friend and Spectator editor Paul Kengor urges people to read “The Communist Manifesto.” That’s where Marx and his sugar daddy collaborator Friedrich Engels attacked capitalism and sketched their vision for a socialist/communist future. Paul echoes a famous quip from Ronald Reagan: “How do you tell if someone is a communist? He’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-communist? He’s one who understands Marx and Lenin.”
What seemed to be unadulterated revisionism in Professor Berger’s article prompted me to take up Paul’s suggestion. I read “The Communist Manifesto” again for probably the third or fourth painful time. I arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Professor Berger does not understand it.
Despite left-wing academia’s frequent embrace of Marx, “The Manifesto” comes across to a reasonable and thoughtful person as mindboggling nonsense. It’s gobbledygook writ large as if cooked up by nincompoops. It’s the sort of thing one would expect from a witch doctor who misdiagnoses the problem and then prescribes all the wrong medications, who thinks the patient who suffers from a toothache needs his feet removed.
“The Manifesto” consists of one oversimplification after another: Everything, including what and how a person thinks, reduces to the rigid economic “class” into which he was born. Everybody is either an oppressor or a helpless lump of the oppressed. Life is all about conflict.
