ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS. Keywords: Dialectic materialism, Karl Marx, Marx-Engels, Proudhon, Comte, Positivism,

The Manifest of the Communist Party
In print since 1848 in most languages

 

ILLUSIONS, HALF-TRUTHS AND MASKS

A meditation about the new rise of communism in America

By Xuan Quen Santos

PART  III

“Positivism is a theory of knowledge according to which the only kind of sound knowledge available to humankind is that of science grounded in observation”

Auguste Comte

Marxists and their mutations call themselves “scientific socialists”, setting themselves above other currents of cults that preach communism. The implication is they have a solid, science-based theory that supports their idea and thus, they are beyond debate and any questioning. This pretense is nothing but another mask that conceals the weaknesses of their propositions.

The term "scientific socialism" came paired with the phrase “property is theft” in the chaos that followed the sequels of the French Revolution. It first appeared in 1840 in the book “What Is Property?” by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He is considered to be the first one to call himself “anarchist” as a political position. The adjective was appropriated by Engels in the publication written jointly with Marx in 1880 titled “Socialism, Utopian and Scientific”. By this time, Engels was the one filling the blanks in their system, clarifying and expanding Marx’s obscure ideas, and answering to their critics. The use of the term was clearly a ploy, a mask, to separate themselves from other socialist groups they labeled religious, romantic, or utopian.

In previous pages I have already shown that Marx’s interpretation of the “data and evidence” of the Industrial Revolution he had by 1848 was incomplete and biased with a Eurocentric lens. He was looking at a transitional period of the feudal system. As it turns out, it still exists in the UK in the form of a socialist-monarchy. What was happening in America with an emerging middle-class was different and was never considered.  I called this “The first wave is a look at reality from a more distant historic perspective.”

The second wave of arguments exposed Marxism as flawed reasoning. Borrowing Hegel’s dialectic system oversimplified the factors that could be labeled the “forces of history”. Deficient as it is, this ploy turned out to be an effective model for “scientific analysis” with which the mis-educated college idiots can fill the blanks of oppressed and oppressor and then feel qualified to join the mobs and burn the town.

Any real scientific theory is an instrument with predictability. Not a single one of the predictions of the Marxist model came true. Capitalism never died, and perhaps more people will start calling it the market economy, the free enterprise system, or just the free economy. I did not suggest this; Saint John Paul II did as he oriented the people that had freed themselves from the Soviet orbit. The armies of alienated angry workers taking over the means of production never happened in the West, unless they were just riots and strikes, always sponsored from Moscow through their local underground cells.

A third wave of arguments that counter the Marx-Engels’s propositions is simply expressed by the lack of analytic instruments they had available to them before the 1840s. Judging their ideas today with the knowledge that modern economic theory provides would be an error in itself. By accepting key errors of Adam Smith, David Ricardo and the French Physiocrats, they inevitably ended in bigger errors. It would seem that this conclusion should have been enough to do away with Marxism, but it did not happen. This should point to their effective method of propagation, a quasi-religious cult, intolerant, aimed at the mis-educated college idiots, with claims that are not academic, but strictly political. They use the mask of a false morality filled with inflammatory appeals to emotion; empathy leads to “social” justice that validates breaking down the notion of justice.

The search for validation to what we now call the “social sciences” was not unique to Marxists. While the German scholars were busy looking for a theory of human history, other academic centers were working to elevate “The Humanities” to scientific respectability. During this period, most universities were taken over by the states. Theology and philosophy were out; scientific research was in. With the rise of The Enlightenment, the introduction of the scientific method and the use of applied mathematics such as statistics, what had been called The Humanities were relegated to relics of the past, inferior to “true sciences”.

Auguste Comte (1798-1857)
Founder of Positivism

The French Positivists led by Auguste Comte, another group of socialists, were attempting to transform several traditional academic disciplines into what we now call the “social sciences”, among them history. The term social science is somewhat a proof of their success. The Positivists attempted to correct that by focusing on a new object of study. Instead of making human, individual actions their objective, they aimed at understanding “society” as a beehive, where individuals are not agents of their actions. This idea is illustrated by Comte with the following words, “The only real life is the collective life of the race; individual life has no existence except as an abstraction”. This gave Comte the title of Father of Sociology. Since then, The Humanities were obliterated by sociology and everything with the adjective “social”. Positivism was equated to French Liberalism; it later morphed into Progressivism and currently resides in the same bucket of generic socialisms with many masks and names. Napoleon’s conquests and policies of modernization were the perfect vehicle for the Positivists to spread their influence. Hegel admired Napoleon as a modernizing force. Berlin University, now Humboldt University, followed as a science-base/research new school much of the model of Napoleon’s famous Ecole Polytechnique, initially a military academy, became the equivalent to MIT, a new American college that copied the model. Soon West Point and the many A&M colleges followed.

The German Historicist Tradition was developing in a different direction. Its roots can be found in the works of earlier philosophers such as Herder and Vico. Hegel further developed their work, proposing that history is a dialectical process of ideas leading to human freedom. While the Positivists looked at a collective of people, the Idealists remained centered on the human person. There is no such thing as “group thinking”. Only individuals can think to become agents of their actions. Hegel was discussing the evolution of ideas as a source of the changes made by persons that are recorded as history. Like the Positivists, Marx and other radical Hegelians committed the fallacy of personification by attributing to the abstract concept they designated with the name of society, the attributes of a human person, such as thinking and acting. Personification is an error in logic that assigns human qualities or actions to non-human entities. This error plagued the social sciences that left no room for the individual as an agent responsible for his actions. Have you heard these expressions? Unjust society, social Justice, racist society, racial injustice, inclusive society, bourgeois society, classist society, etc. What mechanism does “society” use to act? The state through the government. What is the state? The individual or group of individuals that have the power to coerce and direct others. The connection between society and the power of the state is inevitable once the free decisions of individual persons are out of consideration. Hegel never went that far, but his followers did.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) represents the generation that followed, already influenced by Hegel’s dialectic ideas and the chaotic economic and political conditions of the post-Napoleonic Europe. He was also interested in the philosophy of history and was impacted by the backlash that followed the French Revolution. He was an agitator in Paris during the Second French Revolution that led to the events of 1848. At the time, competing visions of socialism spread. The Paris mobs were re-created in all major capitals and unleashed to clash with the autocratic monarchies hidden behind the new half-truth masks of “constitutionalism”. Industrialization and urbanization were transforming the systems of production and altering the traditional forms of labor and employment. The medieval guilds were vanishing, losing their monopolies, privileges, and controlled prices. This led the way to the creation of “armies of factory workers”, known today as labor unions. Factory jobs were elevating the wages of the lowest levels of laborers. New types of jobs for women appeared. Nobody ever mentions it, but the lowest earners suffered the most during this time, but not from exploitation by the rich landowners or owners of businesses. Monetary hyperinflation of the French assignats reached 50% per month. The British pound suffered the same process during the Napoleonic wars and abandoned the gold standard. The economy and public financing were a shambles in all the European countries involved. Price controls led to scarcity, starvation of the urban masses and panic. The mobs were easy to organize, but not because of the abuse of capitalists. Police repression grew in parallel. Marx never developed an explanation off what we now call money and banking theory beyond what the limited knowledge of the time had proposed. This made it easy for the socialists of all colors to call these recurring periods of boom and bust as “the business cycle” and made it inherent in the failures of capitalism. In fact, it is now generally accepted that these historic economic catastrophes are caused by the abusive control of the currency and the banking industry by government.

If in 2025 the thousands of Ph. D.s in economics and finance that work for the Federal Government, the Federal Reserve, the stuffy old colleges, and the gurus of Wall Street cannot properly define what inflation is, what causes it, why prices rise, and how to stop it, how can we expect that philosopher-agitator Marx and his other socialist comrades could do it two hundred years ago when the science of economics was just beginning to be formulated? That would be an error in formal logic called “presentism”.

The fact is that some of Marx’s ideas in 1848 were innovative and did not encounter a solid theoretical opposition, mainly because what approaches to a Marxist system was not formulated as a theoretical proposition until 1867. His ideas festered in the dark alleys of the mobs, not in the academic classrooms. Some of his key errors were really elaborations of errors accepted as theories at the time, such as the “labor theory of value”.  Marx does not get credit for what he correctly described about the economic process, even if it fell short of a theoretical contribution. He showed the dynamics of the economic activity as something more than the busy exchanges of the market; more like a process of transformation instead of a complex contraption of spinning wheels that do not go anywhere. He showed the power of economic forces as they affect the political foundations of any society. He also described the forces of resistance to the changes those forces unleash. These may be labeled as contributions to the interface between the political and economic systems of the social order of any human community, but not an economic theory.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

 It was Engels who edited with great input the first three manuscript volumes of “Das Kapital”. He may have actually written the last volume from notes and incomplete drafts left by Marx, with a lot of personal input. Most of the descriptions of the conditions of the factory workers were from Engels personal experience in the industry he was very much a part of. Since the appearance of the final volume in 1867, it was Engels who responded to critics until his own death in 1895, by filling the blanks after Marx’s health declined and ultimately died in 1883. Engels does not get the credit he deserves for the original double-speak and half-truths he elaborated as Marxism, once the serious criticisms and key questions began to be asked and published. Engels was the main economic and organizational support of their cooperative work, which is a paradox since he was a capitalist. His family was co-owner of a cotton cloth industry, with factories in Prussia and Manchester. He was largely in charge of the Manchester operation. In the decades he lived in England, he kept two addresses; an elegant one was for his family and his bourgeois lifestyle, and the other for a secret life where he entertained revolutionaries and gave Marx the opportunity to meet them.

What did Marx accomplish as an academic and as a person? He came from a studious Jewish rabbinic family that had converted to Lutheranism in order to make life easier in autocratic Prussia. In 1835, his father sent him to the University of Bonn to study theology and ancient philosophy. While at school he spent time in jail for drunkenness and fought a duel with another student. He developed extreme views on religion and politics and had no career path defined. After wasting a year and getting mediocre grades, he was transferred by his father to the University of Berlin to study law. There he joined the Young Hegelians, a radical group interested in using Hegel’s ideas to promote political reforms. He did not complete his studies and moved again to the University in Jena, known for its more lenient standards. His academic progress was slow, and he did not finish his dissertation until 1841. Using Hegel’s dialectics and Feuerbach’s materialism, he analyzed the differences between the philosophies of Democritus and Epicurus.

After leaving university, Marx became a journalist, more like a pamphleteer because his activities and views prevented him from having an academic career in the Prussian regime. Fearing persecution, he moved to Paris in 1843, where he came to identify as a revolutionary and a communist. At that time, France had restored the monarchy and public unrest continued until 1848, when the Second French Revolution reverted to a republic. His lifetime association with Engels also started during this period. In 1846, Marx and Friedrich Engels established the Communist League, a coalition of trade unions from different countries, Paris was the center of socialist thought of all sects, from anarchists, romantics, utopians, positivists to communists. Marx began to associate with workers groups. As a dangerous agitator, he was expelled to Brussels and finally went into self-exile to London, where he stayed until his death. In 1847, the first congress of the League took place in London, adopting as its motto the famous phrase "Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"  In 1848, a coordinated firestorm swept over the capitals of western Europe. “The Communist Manifesto” was commissioned to Marx and Engels by the Communist League as a launching platform for their ideas, and a call to revolution. It was never meant to be a theory of anything, but just the right amount of spin to cause agitation and confrontation in the political arena.

Original Manifesto of the

Communist League Convention in London

Marx lived the rest of his life as a recluse in the library of the British Museum. He never held a job; he lived at the expense of his friends and followers and was a failed husband and father. The Marx’s lived in poverty and always in debt to the extreme that his wife had to pawn his pants on one occasion to feed the children. They lived in a two-room flat in Soho in squalid conditions. Several famous visitors coincided describing their lifestyle as filthy and a pigsty. Of his six children, only three survived. He never joined a picket line, or a revolt, and never formally confronted his ideas in public with his opponents and critics. He always insulted them. His favorite fallacy when arguing in writing is known as “ad hominem” attacks, of no logical value.

Vintage Soviet poster: Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin

If there is an explanation as to his current fame, I suggest a review of everything that Lenin and his communist party did to elevate him in the XX century as the founder of the regime of terror he was creating. The Soviets flooded the world book market with Marx’s and Engels’ works.  The Soviet press, and its cohorts around the world, created the “persona”, the spin, the half-truth and the mask of the imaginary young intellectual student revolutionary that awakened the minds of the idiots around the world. A recent survey by the online publication Market Watch found that Karl Marx's books are popular in American colleges. He is the most assigned author in economics courses in U. S. colleges, with his works appearing in more than 3,000 syllabi. “The Communist Manifesto” is required reading among the top ten lists of courses in the Ivy League institutions and top-ranked public colleges.

May Day Parade 2024 in an American College 

Marxist doctrine, since it is not a scientific theory in economics or political science, is in reality the most effective creation of double-speak. Built upon half-truths, it has the mask of science that pretends empathy and good intentions by concealing the brutal reality of the terror it requires to get it in place.