Patrice Ayme's Thoughts

Abstract: Little, yet maximally pernicious philosopher Karl Marx was born two centuries ago. He has to be taken seriously, because of the gigantic, awful and awesome consequences that his musing had. Marx claimed that “Hitherto, philosophers have sought to understand the world; the point, however, is to change it“. Yet his angry philosophy changed it largely for the worst: the 40% of humanity who lived under Marxist regimes for a lot of the 20th century endured famines, gulags,  dictatorships, and even holocausts (under Marxist dictators Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot).

Marx claimed that his “dialectical” “science” predicted a rosy “communism”. Wrong, nothing of the sort happened. Instead, the sort of welfare his enemy Proudhon promoted won the Twentieth Century, while fascism, red and black, can be directly raced back to Marx’s hysteria.

Marx’s influence keeps on going. By misunderstanding capital, Marx condemned civilization itself. By wishing for “dictatorship”, under a pseudo-scientific varnish, Marx endowed the worst plutocratic horrors with respectability, including all variants of fascism.  By recommending “terror”, Marx paved the “left” tolerance for all tyrannical fun and games, including the worst Jihadism.

Arguably, civilization has been handicapped in its necessary fight against plutocracy, by the omnipresence of vengeful, tyranny and terror friendly “Marxism” and its ilk, as an object of reverence. Actually, one can argue that the collapse of the Roman Republic under the “Second Triumvirate” of Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus (Caesar Augustus), Marcus Antonius (“Mark Antony“), and Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, formed on 27 November 43 BCE, that this Second Triumvirate was the mother of all “Marxist” like revolutions, yes, revolutions, with the usual consequence: tyranny, increased plutocracy. A Marxist revolution more than 20 centuries ago: who would have thought (you read it here first!) The collapse of the Roman Republic inspired Marx (whether he realized it, or not) And if not Marx directly, certainly the French lawyers who engineered the “Terror” of 1793-1704 (nearly 16,000 executed)… And that sure inspired Marx in turn.

Marxism is so bad for the “left” that it is no wonder that, during World War One, the fascists and German financiers around the Kaiser, and not only around the Kaiser, got the smart idea to help Lenin, and his entourage, be all they could be, ferrying them, under German military escort, from Switzerland to Russia in a special train…. Spending even a night in Frankfurt! The top fascists in Germany knew very well they were spiritual brothers (the alliance went all the way until June 1941, when Hitler treacherously attacked his colleague Stalin… (Lenin made numerous allusions that he was funded by top “capitalists”… )

The so-called “left” will stay a toy of plutocracy, as long as it does not free itself of the poisonous ideas of plutocrat Engels, and his bushy beard employee, Karl Marx…

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Garbage In, Marxist garbage out:

“Capital”, “Bourgeois”, “Class Struggle”, these are terms all know and all use, yet, those basic concepts of Marx are ill-defined, self-contradictory, outrageous, or hypocritical . Worse, in the end, those terms, because they bring in very deep contradictions weakened considerably the discourse of progress (that is rather ironical as Marx himself was keen to point out the “contradictions” of “Capitalism”).

There are many problems with Marx’s basic thesis — that capitalism is driven by a deeply divisive class struggle in which the ruling-class minority appropriates the surplus labor of the working-class majority as profit.

It is not that the Marxist thesis is completely absurd. But close to it. Marx sometimes makes any sense… but then he is not original.

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Karl Marx: “My object in life is to dethrone God and destroy capitalism.” Really? Whereas God Doesn’t exist, Capital is everywhere:

First, Marx talks of “capitalism” all the time… like I talk about “plutocracy” all the time. However, “plutocracy”, the power of evil, in my book, is a well-defined concept. Evil can be objectively defined: atom-bombing Hiroshima was evil…. Yet, if not necessary, given the initial conditions, optimal. “Evil” can be defined by acts… or neurohormones, and other brain activities. 

I use “plutocracy” in a maximally broadened sense (broadest sense often enables mathematicians to go to the essence of a logic… where the logic is the simplest!) 

Capital though, is a much broader concept than evil. Basically, all social animals have capital, namely their own society. A worker bee is not evil, yet it contributes to the capital of the hive, which is not restricted to the honey, but also includes the beehive, the honeycomb structure and even the queen bee herself! If capital happens pretty much in all societies, why should we focus on “Capitalism” alone? If “capitalism” is the ideology enabling the possession of “capital”, “capitalism” pretty much identifies with civilization: no capital, no civilization. Think of it: cities, agricultural systems, constitute capital. No capital, not even a society is to be had, because all and any society requires a territory.

The other day, I followed, for a very long time, two magnificent sea otters, payfully swimming along the Californian shore. All sorts of sea birds got very alarmed, screamed shrilly, and faked dive bombing when the otters came up on various rocks. Even crows joined in, flying over the sea, something they are not known to do, to help various sea birds try to bother the otters (who ignored superbly that impromptu air force, apparently playing dumb, in the hope of suddenly grabbing one of the insolent volatiles). So even the sea and recifes are viewed as vital territory. (I have seen many documentaries about otters; they omitted the undeniable fact those long and sinuous sea mammals  obviously raid birds’ nests…)

Land, a territory, a volume of sea, or air, constitute capital… do they make us wealthy? Or do they just enable us to survive, as thousands of invertebrate and vertebrate species more or less instinctively believe, when they defend their territory? If property theft, as Proudhon said, all social animals are thieves… And that is why tribes of social animals are so prone to fight each other to death(Proudhon later said he didn’t really mean it.)

Marx’s superficial little theory. However, the robots are coming. Thus, not only will common people be deprived of profits, capital, but even of… work. Just as happened in Rome.

Indeed what is “capital”? Property we own which makes us wealthy? Caves, houses, cities, dams, roads, sewers… Roman roads and sewers ,built more than 2,000 years ago are still, properly modernized, still in use? That’s capital! Even entire landscapes have been manufactured, and not just in the bocage of Normandy. A lot of the steppe was engineered, worldwide, for herding… thus the steppe itself is capital. Africans burn entire landscapes to cultivate on them…

Astute observers will argue that what Marx MEANT was “excess capital”. Yes, maybe Karl Marx meant that, making him as smart as that Fourth Century Italian, Saint Jerome (see notes). However, that’s not what he said. And Marx is not interpreted to be a sort of excited poet, like Sade, Nietzsche or Victor Hugo. Instead he is viewed by his admirers as a kind of dead serious “scientist” of sort, because, as Freud would later do he pretends to speak “scientifically”. The fact Marx used self-contradictory concepts

Can Marx please define wealthy? Wealthy like his friend Engels, who made Karl Marx possible? Engels, a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, eldest son of his textile manufacturing father, provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books… On the face of it, that’s rather suspicious. Engels was severely multinational, preferring “Irish stew” to all other meals. Nowadays, Engels would have been a member of the global plutocracy, jet setting in Davos.

If we restrict property to human artefacts, or the know-how to make them, and define capital that way, then, pretty much there would be no civilization without capital, and reciprocally.

Marx has a tendency to speak a lot, to say nothing intelligent. He claimed: “capitalism has an inbuilt tendency to destroy itself”. Where is an example?

In the “Communist Manifesto,” Marx and Engels wrote: “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.”

Karl Marx and company, would you please define “Bourgeois”? The concept and word “bourgeois” arose in the Eleventh Century in the wealthiest parts of France, such as Normandy. It comes from the Frankish word “burg”, meaning a city. “Bourgeois” were free of the staus of serf (30 days did it!) The word “bourgeois” came into general usage around 1700 CE to designate the city dwelling middle class (whose descendants, typically lawyers, and doctors, engineered the Revolution of 1789).

Marx and Engels mumbo-jumbo above is erroneous: those professions above were not “converted”. How do Marx and Engels thought they earned a living earlier? Nor did they become despised. 

Proudhon was the first (and self-declared) “anarchist. Marx and Engels appropriated to themselves Proudhon’s intellectual capital, and, to make sure naive readers would not suspect their theft, insulted Proudhon in the process for good measure. However, the influence of Proudhon’s writing on events in the mid-Nineteenth Century, and its drift towards “socialism” was enormous.

The problem with inequality is not “Capital”, or “Capitalism”, per se (except for the fact capital tends to grow exponentially, as I have explained so many times, so those who have more capital grows it ever faster than those who have less). All civilizations knew this, except for the ridiculous tyranny Lenin imposed on Russia. However, that doesn’t mean the distribution of Capital shouldn’t be controlled. Quite the opposite. All societies redistributed capital, as needed; even Neolithic societies did this: when a great Plains Indian chief died, his thousands of horses would be redistributed. Vikings and Indians too did redistribution, including sending girlfriends of the chief, up in smoke.

The Roman republic, for centuries, had found an elegant way to insure capital was not just in a few hands:

https://patriceayme  .wordpress.com/2017/09/28/no-limit-on-wealth-no-democracy-roman-limit-22-million-why-rome-collapsed-part-iii/

Relative to the subtleties of authors such as Sade, Saint Ambrose, etc (see note)…  Karl Marx is just a brute. Therein his influence.

Marx, 1948, wrote in a newspaper: “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.”. (Soon after, shirking destructive terror, the much more famous Proudhon was constructively elected to the National Assembly of France… Thus earning Marx’s hatred…) 

A (justly, but all too irritated) Karl Marx in the final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung reacting to the suppression of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (18 May 1849)”Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, Vol. VI, p. 503. Background: Yosemite.

Another example: …”Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction.”

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League”, 1850. This sort of writing in Marx is ubiquitous:

“Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was (1) to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT; [and] (3) that this dictatorship, itself, constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society.”

— Karl Marx, 1852

(At the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev declared an end to the “dictatorship of the proletariat” and the establishment of the “all people’s government“…)

[To tell the entire truth, Dr. Karl Marx’s republican writings were violently opposed by the Prussian Dictatorship (which had been in hoc with the Czarist government, and established a racist, anti-Jewish, anti-Slav government, after the defeat of France…]

Marx’s advocacy of violence, even “terror“, made him popular with tyrants like Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ceausescu… & that’s why we are stuck with Marx: he is an echo of horror, a muddy thinking, which, by saying nothing clear, enabled everything murky… the power of the Dark Side.

Marx has polluted, not just social leaning individuals, worldwide, but the left, the “progressive” ideology. It’s not just that Marxism-Leninism brought us the USSR, and its ilk, and the thirty million dead or so, that, a drunk Stalin, chuckling, attributed to himself to a stunned Churchill. And Mao did the same.

Karl Marx taught first, in the widest, most ethereal way: ideologies promoting “terror” are good. Thus fascism, ultra-violent, terrifying fascism is good. Actually Marxism is a form of fascism in a generalization of the original, Romans, sense of the term: all We The People, united like fragile reeds in a bundle, a fasces, around the axe of justice.  

Hence the mood of Marxism was conducive to the mood of all other fascisms…. Because he had broken the ultimate official taboo: terror, yes terror, is good, “terror is the way”. Mussolini was, first, a professional Socialist. Hitler deliberately came out with a number of tricks to attract Marxists and “Communists”, from the red in the flag he invented, to the term “Socialist” in National-Socialism, to his party’s name, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP, to, of course, the entire basic ideology of Marx, serving the “German Workers”, including raging against… “plutocrats”. Nazism was all about “the People” (Volk; from mass paid vacations, people car (“Volkswagen”), to mass public works, to the suppression of luxury clubs, etc,)

ADOLF HITLER said: “From the camp of bourgeois tradition, [Nazism] takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism“… Including the Marxist idea of imposing terror, massively: more than 10,000 enemies of Nazism assassinated in the streets of Germany in 1932 (just before the elections the NSDAP won, enabling Hitler to become Chancellor)

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And the poverty Marxism brought was not accidental, but deliberate:

In Marx, one finds plenty of quotes such as this:

“Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when we directly possess, eat, drink, wear, inhabit it, etc., in short, when we use it. Although private property conceives all these immediate realizations of possession only as means of life; and the life they serve is the life of private property, labor, and capitalization. Therefore all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by the simple estrangement of all these senses – the sense of having. So that it might give birth to its inner wealth, human nature had to be reduced to this absolute poverty.” Yes, poverty. Stalin would implement that for dozens of millions in the USSR.

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Why We should be fighting plutocracy, not just “classes” and “means of production”, and especially not “capital”; the example of Russia, Macedonia, Athens, Rome:

To discern what to do, one should look at history. Greco-Roman antiquity originated, and collapsed, in tyranny. Marx believed, stupidly, that tyranny was the solution, whereas it was the problem. Marx wanted to cure appendicitis with tyranny.

The point is that violence has enormous inertia, including mental inertia, precisely because it is the employment of force, including not just physical, but mental force.

[Force, F = ma means acceleration a which leads to high-speed v, and energy, E = 1/2 mvv. That energy E can in turn only be brought to zero by another force f exerted on a length l; that’s pure physics, but it translates into mental force and mental inertia, because, after all, neurology is all physics.]

Thus, once violence is launched, more violence is not necessarily the solution, as Marx believed, but can make the problem worse. A perfect example was the Czar’s regime: it was bad, violent, disgusting… however, it was also getting better, more democratic, and was making the Russian empire wealthier, and more modern at an accelerating pace (urged and financed by France, and her little investors and savers). Lenin and Stalin, clearly, made an improving country into something way worse (the details are complex as World War One was a crucial factor).

Another example is the Roman Republic: in its last 120 years, it became a plutocracy. After their leader, Caesar, got killed, the gigantic, best trained army Rome ever had, turned against that plutocracy, and imposed terror under the triumvirs, Antonius, Octavius and Lepidus. The Roman soldiers, led by their centurions imposed the sort of terror Marx dreamed of. Ultimately, though, this led to the stupidity of military dictatorship, thus mental dictatorship, thus collapse of intelligence and imagination, and, in turn, the collapse of the Roman State, in the West, five centuries later, and near collapse in the East, 650 years later.

It would have been better if Caesar’s army had not turned against Roman plutocracy, unleashing further, and more extravagant evil ways… But it went “Marxist”, and exerted terror (OK, it’s the other way around: Karl Marx duplicated the mindset of Caesar’s soldiers… although he posed it as the example to follow, whereas, what happened with Caesar’s army was mostly an accident, the unforeseen consequence of Caesar’s treacherous assassination!)

Macedonia, especially the dictatorship of Antipater, launched the Hellenistic regimes, all about tyrannies and terror… All sorts of progress faltered: in the Late Empire, stupidity was exploding, intellectual imagination, collapsing. What came to be the essence of the Soviet Union. In the end, looking at Russia nowadays, we see a dearth of intellectual capability, relative what could, and should have been… just like what happened with Greco-Roman antiquity, as tyrannies progressed.

We have seen Marxism before.

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Understanding plutocracy enough to steer it:

Musk and Bezos, are both engineers and multibillonaires (Bezos’s personal wealth, 16% of Amazon, is greater than the yearly GDP of 130 countries already, and growing). They are total plutocrats according to the usual definition of the word (and I have complained about the support SpaceX got from NASA). However they both believe that the conquest of space is vital…. And they are doing an excellent job, because they had the imagination to realize that re-usability was the key to space conquest, and the knowhow to implement it. So plutocracy can be a good thing, if steered well (yes they don’t treat their employees super… but don’t insist on that too much, because robots are in the wings…)

And the fact is, under all Marxist inspired regimes much more tyrants and mini-tyrants, without checks and balances did way worse, from having way more power. At least Musk and Bezos have to abide by Labor Laws…

So if Marxism is so bad, a self-defeating, lethal distraction, advertising against civilizational progress,  what to replace it with?

The theory of plutocracy, and how to limit the latter.

The theory of limiting plutocracy is not restricted to capital and its means of production, or pre-existing social classes. It aims at limiting all abuses of power that a combination of the Dark Side and civilization can bring. Including abuses from the judicial system. 

This is not new: already, more than 25 centuries ago, the semi-informal constitutions of Rome and Athens tried to limit the powers of magistrates in crushing citizens… Roman tribunes, who were sacrosanct, sometimes interposed themselves between citizen and magistrate! However, in Marxism, the magistrate, namely Marx, is supposed to exert “dictatorship”… as Stalin demonstrated!

For a better and more advanced revolutionary spirit we should get rid of the terror and mass murdering credo found in Marxism, which keeps haunting the minds of all too many “progressives”. Second, we should get rid of the tyrannical credo (no more dictatorship of the proletariat). Third, having observed that capitalism, or, at least, capital, is unavoidable, one should focus on preventing its excesses: prevent the accumulation of wealth, when it becomes tyrannical, per se, by concentrating too much power within too few hands.

There again the Roman Res Publica had found the way!

All of this to dispel the dangerous, and, ultimately, ineffective spirit Marx wrought, and embrace a more sustainable, and fairer way.

Fairness is something all social primates understand. Marxism does not. And that makes it an ideology too primitive for primates. And an intoxication for civilization: Jihadism, without God. Fifty years ago exactly, the best thinkers of May 1968 in France understood this, that Marxism had been a delicious, yet lethal poison, for progress, fairness and civilization. But that deep mindfulness was driven underground by arrivistes and opportunists, let alone Thatcher, Reagan and their spiritual children…

Now the “market” rules, in other words, how much we can sell you, or. at least your soul, since those who have all the money & power know everything about it. The stupid crime of believing that Marxism was clever came fully around, injecting poison in the tail that wags the dog.

Marx, prodigiously financed by hereditary plutocrat Engels, did socioeconomics and politics the way Ptolemy did astronomy: a fake, stupid theory to please his simplistic and cruel masters… which sets understanding back for 14 centuries (in the case of Ptolemy)…

Patrice Aymé  

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Notes: 0) Make no mistake, I am not saying Marx is bad all over. He believed that the way people lived made up their minds. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. [Es ist nicht das Bewußtsein der Menschen, das ihr Sein, sondern umgekehrt ihr gesellschaftliches Sein, das ihr Bewusstsein bestimmt… Physiocrats, for example Adam Smith had a more general, thus more correct, notion of “mode of production”]

1) Marx condemned inequality, rightly so, but that doesn’t exculpate him from his grotesque, criminal, deviant and hopelessly distracting excesses, those very excesses which made his fame, his uses, and, besides, hundreds of millions, including most prominently the Roman Republic, Buddha and Christ had done so before: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.”

2) Marx had no deep understanding of banking (he complained just of the monopoly of “banks”). Arguably less than his contemporary, president Jackson of the USA, who did his utmost to keep European style financial plutocracy out of the US. He said it was his proudest achievement. Jackson hated Rothschild, who boasted publicly that he was the power behind the throne.

2)  In 1797 the Marquis de Sade’s in his novel L’Histoire de Juliette: “Tracing the right of property back to its source, one infallibly arrives at usurpation. However, theft is only punished because it violates the right of property; but this right is itself nothing in origin but theft”. (That was famously parroted by Proudhon:”Property is theft!”. Later Proudhon tried to explain: “I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion… Property is freedom. … In respect of property, as for all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself….”

To appreciate Marx as one appreciates Sade, or Nietzsche, or Rabelais, or Machiavelli, is fine: but most “Marxists” appreciated Marx as if he were Muhammad, and there were Wahhabis… And that’s not OK. Actually serious Marxism proved much deadly than Jihadism, in the last few centuries (and includes the Armenian Holocaust).

Interestingly, Saint Ambrose (circa 400 CE) taught that superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen).… (Yes, we see everything in these writings of mine, even Saint Ambrose, usually reviled, quoted with deep approbation! That Saint Ambrose got it right, and Karl Marx didn’t is telling…)

The point here, that inequality is the problem, not capital itself, was well-known in the Roman Republic: wealth of families was capped absolutely. Such laws were passed in the Fourth Century Before Common Era, that is 24 centuries ago. (Why can’t we do it, now?)

I have written about this many times before; the so-called Roman sumptuary laws failed because of (Roman) globalization: see the link I gave above.

Globalization? … One of the exact same problem we are afflicted with.

However we have several advantages now: first the sorry example of Rome collapsing from Republic to Tyranny (“Principate” then “Dominate”). This example has been increasingly explored by recent historians… And lessons can be drawn. Those lessons were already drawn, to some extent many times before, by the Franks, the Normands, the Middle Ages… But now we have a much more detailed and thorough picture of what it takes to collapse civilization. Not to say the risks are not higher than ever: they are, especially from nukes. 

Second we pretty much have a world empire now (the UN, led by the Security Council), so we don’t have to worry about the wars which distracted Rome and served as a pretext to be led by generals, thus military and political fascism, facilitating economic fascism (the 1%!), and then all sorts of fascisms all over.  

3) Thomas Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of the United States, said “I hope we shall crush […] in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country” Notice Jefferson’s precision: he is not attacking “capital” in general, but wealthy corporations. So were the early founders of the USA. Times have changed…