There’s No Such Thing as Moderate Marxism
From the outset, violence and totalitarianism were hard-wired into Marx’s political project
By Clive Crook
Unveiling a statue of Karl Marx in Trier, Germany — a gift from China to celebrate the bicentennial of the philosopher’s birth — European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said the prophet of communism has been misjudged. He “stands for things which he is not responsible for and which he didn’t cause because many of the things he wrote down were redrafted into the opposite,” the BBC reported Juncker as saying.
Detaching Marx from the consequences of his ideas is an ever-popular endeavor. In European politics — and universities everywhere — the left can’t bring itself to disown him. Sure, communism in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia and elsewhere killed tens of millions, blighted the lives of hundreds of millions, and turned entire countries into prisons — but that’s apparently of little account beside Marx’s discovery of certain tensions in capitalism and his belief (after a fashion) in equality. I mean, some of his followers tended to get carried away, but the man was smart and he meant well.
It’s true that Marx was a great intellect, saw things in capitalism that others did not (most notably its phenomenal productive…
