Karl Marx is alive and well in 2024 America

May 29, 2024 by Vince Coyner

Marxism was easily the most destructive political theory ever to be put into practice. Over the course of the 20th century, it was responsible for purposefully killing well over 100 million people. To put that evil into context, the slave trade into the United States was 400,000 people, the number of Congolese dead during the reign of King Leopold II of Belgium is estimated as high as 10 million, and the total number of deaths during WWII was 73 million. But communism beats them all combined. And most of those numbers came from governments killing their own citizens! I mention all of this because the father of Communism, Karl Marx, has been on my mind lately.

Marx was a despicable human being. It’s often said that he never had a job in his life. That’s not technically true. Although he had a doctorate, his radicalism kept most universities from hiring him. He was a writer and editor for several publications, most of which went bankrupt because no one was reading them or were shuttered by governments seeking to quell what they saw as sedition. He wrote for the New York Daily Tribune for a decade and later for the New York Sun. None of these jobs paid particularly well or consistently (other than the Tribune), and what they did pay Marx often spent on alcohol and tobacco.

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Marx’s family lived in poverty and debt his entire life and, often, they went hungry and were evicted several times. This was despite Marx having received substantial inheritances from his parents and taking numerous “loans” from friends. He fathered at least seven children with his wife, but only three survived to adulthood, in part due to the family’s poverty and its consequent malnutrition. But Marx never once took a job that would economically support his family and give them sufficient sustenance. In reality, Marx spent most of his adult life supported by his friend, co-author and de facto vassal, Friedrich Engels, the son of a textile manufacturer.

Aside from being a hypocrite, arrogant, condescending, and violent with words and sometimes deeds, Marx was also a slovenly man. He drank to excess, smoked, and almost never bathed. A German spy, after visiting Marx, reported, “[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual. Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk.” He was a racist and an antisemite as well, despite his Jewish heritage (his father converted to Christianity for political and economic reasons).

Marx spent virtually his entire adult life decrying the inequality and “failures” of capitalism and proffering communism as the replacement for capitalism and democracy, a theory he and Engels outlined in The Communist Manifesto. But the thing is, Marx had no direct connection to actual capitalism other than taking the money it produced to support him and his family. He had no experience starting a business, building a business, managing payroll, insurance, suppliers, customers, employees, unions, or anything else. No, he learned everything he knew about business and economics from reading.

It’s not impossible to learn about economics from reading. I’ve read Thomas Sowell’s books and feel better informed for having done so. But unlike Marx, Sowell actually worked in the government and observed the real consequences of government programs. In addition, he directly ties his work to specific data from a wide variety of real-world sources. He cites specific companies, government programs, economic measures, and studies when he writes.

Marx does none of that. Most of the information Marx gathered during his career was that of various philosophers, political, economic, and otherwise. These included, among others, Adam Smith, James Mill, Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, and, of course, Friedrich Hegel. But he never visited a factory, a mill, or a mine, nor did he interact with the proletariat he championed. He did interact with one virtual slave, however—his lifelong family maid, whom he never paid and with whom he fathered a child he refused to acknowledge.

Engels, on the other hand did have experience in his family’s manufacturing business. In 1842, his German father sent him to Manchester, England, to get the impressionable lad away from the radical politics infecting Prussia. It was too late, however, as Engels was already radicalized and headed on the path that would define his legacy.

Engels would visit the most downtrodden slums of England and would share his observations with Marx. He left his family company in 1844 and would not return until 1850, two years after the publication of The Communist Manifesto. Much of what Engels would write however was either embellished, taken out of context or an outright lie, a characteristic he and Marx shared.

Although Engels had limited experience with the proletariat, Marx had none and wanted none. He demurred when Engels invited him to visit factories with him, nor would he query his merchant uncle about business other than on a single family matter. However, the lack of actual evidence or experience with anything outside of reading didn’t stop Marx from writing about the destruction of the entirety of Western civilization.

Individual liberty and private property would be gone, while the government would control the means of communication, transportation, and production. It would simultaneously undermine the family and dictate where citizens would live. Marx proffered a communist world with no understanding of how the world actually works. In doing so, he ignored the lessons from New Harmony, Indiana, Robert Owen’s failed attempt to build a socialist nirvana in America, a topic about which Marx would most certainly have known.

Marx understood that, to achieve his preferred goals, democracy wouldn’t work, but violence would. In 1848, he wrote, “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”

That commitment to violence brings me to why Marx has been on my mind. Does any of the above sound familiar? A vile, self-centered, and arrogant individual with poor hygiene, highly educated, with little or no experience doing anything resembling productive work, while spending his time railing against society and advocating for its violent overthrow?

It should, because we’re seeing thousands of individuals—many highly educated (including lawyers!) and most with no experience in producing anything in the real world—violently demonstrating for the overthrow of the United States as we know it. From Portland to New York to Atlanta to Tampa every time we get the mugshots and reports from the police of the arrestees, they look exactly like you would expect: unkempt, modern-day wannabe Karl Marxes. A majority are professional agitators, going from place to place causing trouble.

While Marx had a vision (albeit an absurd and impossible one) with which he wanted to replace democracy and capitalism, today’s agitators are nihilists with no plan beyond destroying America. They, like Marx, are parasites who do nothing productive for society. They don’t know how the world actually works or  how to build anything productive. All they know how to do is throw fists, stones, and Molotov cocktails while complaining about the society that nourishes them.

But then, that’s the beauty of the left: There never needs to be a connection between ideas and reality. It’s enough to criticize, theorize, and legislate, with no proof necessary, and then let the chips fall where they may.

With Marx humanity paid a terrible toll for such folly. You’d think Americans would have learned something from that history. Sadly, however, looking at the support the Democrat party maintains—and make no mistake, the Democrat party of today is a modern incarnation of Marx’s theory—many apparently haven’t.

Follow Vince on Twitter at ImperfectUSA, or you can visit his new website Gratitude for America.