Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Karl Marx: The Greatest Intellectual Fraud of the 19th and 20th Centuries

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/135073/marx-sperber-mikics?all=1
 
 
At 15, sitting in the public library in suburban Atlanta, I eagerly
drank in every word of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental three-volume
biography of Leon Trotsky. Glossing over Trotsky’s ruthlessness,
Deutscher extolled instead his unmatched courage and humane feeling
for the masses. A few years later, back in the Northeast for college
at NYU, I kibitzed with the Sparticists who hawked their crude
newspaper outside Bobst Library. It was 1979, close to the tail end of
the old radical Left, when the Rosenbergs were still innocent. My
college girlfriend was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of communists.
Soon I learned all there was to know about the battles between Alcove
One (Trotskyist) and Alcove Two (Stalinist) at the CCNY cafeteria in
the 1930s. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were my favorite power
couple. I got a work-study job at the People’s Coffee Counter at NYU
Law School and even invented its motto: “You have nothing to lose but
your change.”
 
In short, I was a teenage Red. I was no idiot: I didn’t believe a
revolution was coming to the shores of America. But I basked
nostalgically in what I foolishly thought was the glorious past of
Trotskyite Bolshevism.
 
It took only a few more years before I became disillusioned with the
radical slogans. Maybe it was Jesse Jackson announcing at a rally in
the early 1980s that he had been to Cuba and knew that it was a true
democracy. Or Edward Said, whose hostility to Israel troubled me,
writing that the Marxist state of South Yemen was a model for the
Middle East. But I also learned something else about Trotsky: During
the Bolsheviks’ war on the peasantry, he was responsible for the
deaths of millions of human beings. In the end, that was all that
mattered.
 
Thoughts of my youthful enthusiasm for Marxism came back to me
recently after seeing the U.K. Telegraph headline “I Want to Save the
Capitalism my Father Hated.” The story concerned the clean-cut,
rapidly rising Ed Miliband, who won the struggle with his brother
David to become the head of Britain’s Labour Party and who might well
become the country’s first Jewish Prime Minister since Disraeli. The
brothers’ father, Ralph Miliband, was a renowned Marxist and Jewish
refugee from the Nazis; he is buried a stone’s throw from Karl Marx in
London’s Highgate Cemetery. Ed Miliband practices a mellower approach
to capitalism. “The free market working properly” was Miliband’s
version of what is to be done in his interview with the Telegraph.
But, Miliband added, socialism will never die: It is “a tale that
never ends.”
 
Miliband’s wish to cling to the vestiges of Marxism even as he extolls
the free market is not unusual in our recession-plagued moment.
Nicolas Sarkozy had himself been photographed reading Capital in the
aftermath of the crash, and countless professors in the humanities and
social sciences (though not, of course, countless economists) fly
their Marxist colors proudly, even if they would never dream of
abolishing private ownership or markets. In the rarified world of
academic jargon, Marxism plays its role in an intellectual picnic that
includes poststructuralist thinkers of every stripe. Being a classroom
Marxist means talking about the uncanny character of the commodity
form or the phantomlike digital age, tossing in a few scattered lines
from Badiou and Žižek, and suggesting that our recent, world-shaking
financial crisis proves the “relevance” of Marx—without explaining
what makes Marx’s outdated economic theories and their accompanying
intellectual apparatus relevant to the tremors of 21st-century
capitalism. We might do better, instead, to begin at the beginning.
 
***
 
While anti-communist socialists far outnumbered communists among
American Jews in the first half of the 20th century, it is also true
that Jews embraced communism like no other ethnic or religious group
in the country. The CUNY political scientist Jack Jacobs, who is
editing a volume for Cambridge University Press based on last year’s
YIVO conference on Jews and the Left, told me, “After the war, in
1949, the American Communist Party”—which probably numbered less than
50,000 members—“may have been as much as 50 percent Jewish.” What
better way is there to understand the appeal of radical politics for
Jews than to go back to the original Jewish leftist, Karl Marx? In an
impressive new biography, the historian Jonathan Sperber focuses on
Marx as a 19th-century thinker, a man of his time and place; and one
of Sperber’s concerns is necessarily Marx’s Jewishness.
 
Strictly speaking, of course, Marx was not a Jew: His parents were
converts to Protestantism, and he declared his atheism from an early
age. In the infamous essay he wrote when he was 25, “On the Jewish
Question,” Marx declared that society must be freed from Judaism,
which he identified with capitalism: a huckstering entrepreneurial
worship of the false god, money. At the same time, Marx advocated that
Jews be granted civil rights—so that they could then be divested of
their Jewishness and become fully assimilated. Marx’s letters are
strewn with derogatory references to Jews; though Sperber tries to
make the case that Marx “took a certain perverse pride” in his Jewish
ancestry, he can’t muster much supporting evidence. What we see
instead are a series of slurs that today would certainly be called
anti-Semitic.
 
Sperber provides an affecting portrait of Marx the man, who was a
devoted and enthusiastic father: With one of his daughters on his
shoulders, he would play “cavalry” on Hampstead Heath, running to and
fro. He was devastated for years by the death of his son Edgar at age
8. But Marx’s habits as polemicist and political organizer have
decidedly less appeal. His writing style was a calamity: full of
sometimes puerile vehemence, he heaped scorn on his opponents,
inaugurating the long Marxist tradition of mercilessly deriding anyone
with incorrect opinions. Marx displayed particular contempt for the
high-living, dandyish Ferdinand Lassalle, a fellow socialist also of
Jewish origin. In a letter to Engels, Marx mocked Lassalle, who
supposedly had African ancestry, as a repulsive “combination of Jewry
and Germanism with the negroid basic substance”; “the pushiness of
this lad is also nigger-like,” he added. In Marx’s pamphlets,
mudslinging abounds: His opponents are generally idiots, traitors, and
scoundrels, but these heavy-handed insults tend to make us doubt Marx
himself, since he relies so much on vituperation instead of reasoned
argument.
 
Marx failed as a theorist too. As Sperber argues, Marx’s effort to
derive the market price of goods from their value, the labor that went
into them, was a vestige of the 19th-century economic theories of
David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill (both of them arch-capitalists). By
the time Marx died, economists had already given up trying to relate
price to value and were beginning to understand that value was a
chimera. With the growing dominance of technology, it had become
impossible to locate value in the time required to produce goods, as
Marx, following Ricardo and Mill, had tried to do. Machines can make
products incredibly fast; but these products aren’t worth any less
than if workers had spent days toiling at them, as Marx’s theory
suggests.
 
Finally, Marx was a failure as a prophet, in spite of the fact that he
inspired revolutions that changed the course of history. His essential
idea, influenced by Ricardo, was that capitalism would become less and
less profitable and that its downward spiral toward the abyss of
deflation—lower prices, lower profits—would be followed by worldwide
revolution. Instead, capitalism has become vastly more profitable.
 
It’s important to remember that American communism was hardly a
classroom sport. Like today’s al-Qaida agents, communists were sworn
to overthrow the government on behalf of a foreign enemy in order to
usher in a millennial moment of radical social transformation. Yet
memories of Jewish communism in America usually come wrapped in the
warm, rosy glow of the good old days, when passionate solidarity
reigned. In The Romance of American Communism, Vivian Gornick
interviewed a hundred veterans of the party, many of them Jews. She
quotes Sarah Gordon, who describes communist politics as “rich, warm,
energetic, an exciting thickness in which our lives were wrapped. … in
us and in all like us lay the exciting, changing world.” “The Party
was everything,” garment worker Ben Saltzman told Gornick. “If I died
I would have willed everything I had to the Party. I would have left
my wife if necessary.” One hears the hard edge of fanaticism in such
statements, combined with the softness of a towering naïveté, the
sentimental and dangerous belief that if one wills something like the
greatness of the Soviet Union to be true, then it must be true.
Gornick discounts the insidiousness of all of this, intent on seeing
only good will and suffering in the impoverished, aging men and women
she interviewed. Suffer they did, but they were nevertheless blind.
 
American communists did some good, particularly when they fought for
racial justice. But they did much more bad: David Greenglass and the
Rosenbergs helped bring the world close to atomic Armageddon and gave
the Soviet Union, as a nuclear-armed power, the might to subject
millions to its tyranny. It’s hard to reconcile the Rosenbergs’
treacherous deeds with the tributes to comradeship and humanity that
Gornick gleaned from her interviews. A large majority of Jews chose
socialism or liberalism over communism, and they ought to be praised
for the suspicion that is a necessary part of democratic
responsibility, their refusal to give in to Soviet propaganda.
Sperber, for his part, is unable to explain why Marx was so appealing
to Lenin and Trotsky, Stalin and Mao—and why his ideas became the
basis for a terrifying new social order.
 
***
 
In his biography of Marx, Isaiah Berlin singled out one of this
radical thinker’s central ideas: that the inner convictions we take to
be the ground of moral and religious truth are in fact illusions,
myths that need to be demolished so that humanity can be freed from
its chains. Our beliefs about right and wrong cannot be taken at face
value, Marx argued, because we have been duped into them by our
historical circumstances. So, Marx in his March 1850 Address to the
Communist League exhorted his followers to “force the democrats to
carry out their current terrorist phrases.” Speaking of “so-called
excesses” like “the people’s revenge on hated individuals,” he
proclaimed that the workers “must not just tolerate such excesses but
take over the leadership of them.”
 
Berlin emphasized an aspect of Marx that Sperber largely overlooks:
his endorsement of revolutionary violence as a way to push history
forward. In Marx’s view, history is an inexorable process that cannot
be resisted or denied; but it also must be helped along. In its full-
fledged version, the Marxist dialectic is a powerful intellectual
toolkit for justifying oppression, since whatever the party leaders
decide to do expresses the will of history itself.
For communist Jews, being Red was a way of asserting their radical
difference, rather than their right to belong in American society.
 
It is striking that popular culture and the universities alike are
fixated on Jewish communism instead of Jewish socialism, reversing the
actual historical record, in which socialists early on triumphed over
their communist rivals. New York’s most influential Yiddish daily, the
Forward, was at the heart of the storm. “At the very beginning the
Forward was reluctant to criticize the Soviet government, even though
they were at war with the local Communists in New York,” commented
historian Daniel Soyer, co-author of The Emerging Metropolis: New York
Jews in the Age of Immigration, in an interview. “They saw the Red
Army and the Soviets as a bulwark against anti-Semitism.” But by 1922
the split between the socialist Forward and the Communist Party was
complete. Jewish communists even tried, without success, to prevent
Abraham Cahan, the Forward’s anti-Bolshevist editor, from being
allowed to visit the Soviet Union in 1927. A Russian Yiddish paper,
Emes, lambasted the Forward as a “strikebreaking daily”: They called
Cahan’s paper a brothel with a mezuzah on its door, the mezuzah being
its hollow professions of leftist faith. “One thing Cahan said was
that the Soviets had gotten it backwards,” Soyer remarked to me.
“Socialism was supposed to abolish poverty, but the Russians had
abolished wealth instead.”
 
As the ’20s went on, the prestige of the communist movement declined
drastically among American Jews. “In 1929 the Communists just looked
ridiculous,” Tony Michels, author of A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish
Socialists in New York, told me in an interview, “when they first
condemned the Arab riots in Palestine, and then basically supported
them, all on orders from Moscow. They were thoroughly discredited, and
there was so much hostility to the Communists, it almost put the
Communist paper, the Frayhayt, out of business.”
 
During the Popular Front period of the 1930s, the Communist Party USA
famously adopted as its slogan “Communism is twentieth-century
Americanism.” But for communist Jews, being Red was a way of asserting
their radical difference, rather than their right to belong in
American society. The party card they carried signaled their
disagreement with American racism and American conformity, with the
white picket fences that excluded the downtrodden, the ethnic others.
Tragically, such a statement of protest meant loyalty to a
totalitarian foreign power and to a leadership that manipulated and
abused them as a matter of course.
 
In the 21st century, with communism long dead, Jews still want to
express their difference from mainstream America. But they rarely
choose revolutionary politics as their means of expression. Instead,
religious observance, commitment to Israel, and work for social
justice are the main ways that Jews proclaim their identity. Rather
than looking backward with yearning toward a true Red past, Jews
should rejoice that most of us were free from the illusion that warped
so many minds and lives and that America was spared what so many other
countries had to endure: the coming to pass of Marx’s vision.
 
***

 In short, I was a teenage Red. I was no idiot:
 
infatti non lo eri. Lo sei. :D


l'autore dell'articolo soffrira' tremendamente per questa tua
stroncatura


lo fa già da solo, come tutti i rinnegati che essendo incapaci di fare
pace col loro passato spendono quel che resta della loro vita a
maledirlo. Fategli l'eutanasia..

 pace col loro passato spendono
 
riesci a fare almeno tre esempi di ex marxisti che hanno fatto pace
col loro passato? Oppure sei comicamente convinto che solo i marxisti
siano persone razionali ed equilibrate?
 

 col loro passato?
 
tra i millantatori, milioni, tra quelli che ci credevano davvero,
zero. Perchè chi rinnega il meglio, è per forza una persona che ha
subito un trauma
 

 chi rinnega il meglio
 
anche se Bombacci non si intende di marxismo.
 

On Tuesday, June 18, 2013 6:13:47 PM UTC+4, giovanni wrote:
 Perchè chi rinnega il meglio, è per forza una persona che 
 
tecnicamente si chiama "apostasia".
 
e' tipico dei fanatici religiosi accusare di questa colpa chi abbandona la setta.


Ecco, qui hai ragione ("rinnegare" è un verbo che ho sempre rinnegato :).
-- 
Namib
.....
αἱ ψυχαὶ ὀσμῶνται καθ᾽ Ἅιδην (Eraclito)