Marx was a racist oppressor. Now what?
The poster boy of the SJW Cancel Culture should be, ironically, cancelled.
One might think it would be appropriate to make the rational assumption that after an entire century and more of evidence on the horrifying outcomes of philosophical leftism, the people of the next age would’ve learned their lesson — to guard against egalitarianism, or at least NOT actively repeat it. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong. And here’s why. As explained by Richard Pipes:
Intellectuals, by the very nature of their professions, grant enormous attention to words and ideas. And they are attracted by socialist ideas. They find that the ideas of communism are praiseworthy and attractive; that, to them, is more important than the practice of communism. Now, Nazi ideas, on the other hand, were pure barbarism; nothing could be said in favor of them.
People not familiar with Marx or his ideology in the first place might ask — “But how is this associated with a 19th century scholar?” And the answer lies in what he promised would be an end product if his ideas were implemented: Common goodness, Zero Inequality and International Oneness.
People having a superficial idea about Marx, via crash courses in history classes or by being brainwashed by leftist professors, think that these ideas were great but unfortunately the world wasn’t ready. And finally, people examining Marx — be that academically or compulsively as a result of dying in a communist utopia — know very well, that every last word written by the monster was inconceivably evil. The only problem… his works were shrouded in so much righteousness, that it was impossible to see their true color until they were put in practice.
The new world of today is saturated with little kids as young as 10 reading how Marx was a revolutionary thinker, college kids voting to turn their campuses into “safe spaces” with controlled speech, fresh humanities grads sitting next to hiring teams to make sure inclusivity and diversity are ushered even if at the cost of merit and performance, and marxist professors on the podiums cheering them on. The ghosts of Marx have returned indeed — this time in a new form: Cultural Marxism, or as Jordan Peterson calls it, Postmodernist neo-marxism.
This strain of the movement, having mutated — much by intention rather than chance — focuses on pushing its old, flawed axiom of Bourgeoisie vs Proletariat (rich vs poor), now culturally instead of economically. What it means essentially, at least in the modern left’s actions if not in their explicit words, is that in order to usher a marxist utopia, a narrative of “Cultural Oppression” has to be carved out of thin air. In this narrative, the Bourgeoisie or the Rich → become the Cultural / Religious / Racial / Sexual majority, and the Proletariat or the Poor → become the minority. This undertaking, in the misused name of social justice and equality, has been happening across all countries since the last few years. The movement and its outcomes are so rapid that one might call 2010 “a different time” altogether.
Among the many tactics used by modern day marxists — both textbook ones and new — the most widely used one is Cancel Culture. “Cancelling” someone or something works like this —
Find someone famous that you hold a grudge against > Find other people who hate that person equally > Scan the said person every minute trying to look for a tiny misbehaviour > When you fail to do that, go hunt down their their decade-old tweets, statuses and interviews and when you find that one error in their life > Cancel them. Make them lose their job, ruin their career and smear their public image with black paint.
[Bonus points: If you’re Antifa, you can play jury and executioner and assault them too]
There’s a deep fundamental flaw with cancel culture though — like there is one with almost everything springing out of marxism — it’s that most times such judgement rests on subjectivity and internalized bias. It’s heavily ironic — like marxism itself is — because internalized bias is the very thing that SJW’s claim to work against. The most temporally accurate proof of this is found in the fact that till date, nobody has cancelled a black rapper for saying crap about whites, no woman from a radical muslim country has been attacked for her overtly misandristic comments, no person of the precious LGBTQ+ community has been asked for a solid proof of how exactly they were discriminated against. Pointing this out is not at all a justification of previously mentioned behaviours, but an attempt to demonstrate how grandly political the social justice movement is.
But this is not where it comes to a halt, no, the hypervigilant scholars of gender studies and feminism go two steps and at times a hundred miles further. Now, it’s not enough to be the good guy, no. Now, if you don’t leave your personal agreements, personal outlooks and your own damn life work behind, to come out — both with hashtags and literally — in order to bash the perceived wrongdoers, then guess what… Bam! You’re a wrongdoer too, or an “enabler”, as they will label you. For a moment you might think it makes sense. What’s wrong with condemning or bashing someone who has been engaging in racist, fascist or oppressive behaviour, right? Well, the problem lies a tad deeper, you see, and THAT TOO on 2 different levels —
- Many a times, the said person or their actions aren’t objectively proven as wrong, but instead the people wanting to cancel them have found something personally or politically offensive, and have extended their felt offence upto a point where it can be labelled as a moral crime.
- Most times, the finger-pointing doesn’t stop at the individual, but extends upto defaming an entire demographic, which in itself, is morally wrong.
Hence, if you join in their self-righteous fight and condemn a wrongdoer, chances are — pretty grave ones — that you’ll be raging against someone or something that’s possibly innocent, AND, you might be expected or sometimes ordered, to blackface and condemn an entire race / nationality / color / sex, sometimes your own too.
All of this, unless irrefutably proven otherwise, is a sly attempt to bring back marxist class warfare and overthrow the majority by snatching from them, not the economic means of production, but this time the moral high ground.
So how bad exactly is this cancel culture? It’s as bad as the evils it pretends to fight against, if not worse.
It’s as bad as age-old fans of one most beloved fantasy fiction series abandoning its author, books, movies and wizard characters overnight as a result of Rowling saying how one can’t change a gender by wishful thinking (which is actually scientifically true). It’s as bad as singing sensations like Ed Sheeran and Dua Lipa facing backlashes because they chose to discuss “triggering” stuff in public. It’s as bad as Travis Scott and Kanye West getting boycotted, despite being people of color, because they chose not to buy into the victim mentality.
The list goes on: Emma Watson (because she didn’t consider self-diagnosed trans men as biological women), Kevin Hart (2 seemingly anti-semitic jokes), Vivek Agnihotri (exploring INC’s shenanigans in Russia through a documentary) etc etc.
And, now ironically, it’s as bad as Karl Marx himself! With more and more people realizing the urgency to address the return of the most horrifying philosophy in history, evidences have surfaced on how deeply flawed and morally corrupt the torchbearers of equity and justice were. Here:
“The Jewish ni****, Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and capital were guaranteed. In this he bases himself on the view that he ought to live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron (no doubt by the countess). Just imagine!…” — Letter from Marx to Engels, 30/7, 1862
Marx had a racist vision (1), and by vision I mean he saw people’s skull shapes and hair textures before proceeding to mock their lineage:
“It is now completely clear to me that he, as is proved by his cranial formation and his hair, descends from the Negroes who had joined Moses’ exodus from Egypt, assuming that his mother or grandmother on the paternal side had not interbred with a n — –. Now this union of Judaism and Germanism with a basic Negro substance must produce a peculiar product.” — Letters by Karl Marx, 1862
In his subtly narrow Euro-centric worldview, the so-called egalitarian went as far as justifying East India Company’s manipulation of India’s culture, the subsequent divide and the colonization (2):
“England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfill its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution.” — Karl Marx, NY Tribune, 1853
His biographer, Saul Padover too points out (3):
In his ‘Theses on Feuerbach’ (1845), a brief compilation of pithy sayings, he thought it necessary to drag in his bias, referring to the ‘dirty Jewish’ aspect of Christianity. His private letters are replete with anti-Semitic remarks, caricature and crude epithets: “Levy’s Jewish nose,” “usurers,” “Jew-boy,” “nigger-Jew,” etc. For reasons perhaps explainable by the German concept Selbsthass [self-hate], Marx’s hatred of Jews was a canker which neither time nor experience ever eradicated from his soul.
In a way, Marx theoretically and ideologically accomplished what Hitler practically couldn’t: Equating Jews with all perceived evils of his time, portraying Judaism as the personification of capitalist evils and hence justifying its erasure from Europe.
Furthermore, he opposed the prevalence of slavery in North America but explicitly encouraged it in context of Africa (4):
Without slavery you have no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance.
Slavery. Anti-Semitism. Anti-Black racism. Euro-centric Supremacist worldview. (5) One can clearly see why Nazi Germany and Communist USSR came so close to resembling each other. There’s only one difference here: The victims in communist concentration camps weren’t exclusively Jews, but had more variety.
Indeed, the hypocrisy of the left has been pointed out countless times in numerous domains, but this is the largest and the most laughable of them all. But beyond the humorous dismissal of the egalitarian left lies a more profound fundamental truth — That the human mind, at least at this stage, cannot successfully detach the art from the artist, the painting from the flawed hands that move the brush and the work of a person from the pathos of their character. And hence the only possible way to teach people better values, if at all it is found necessary to do that, is to give them another chance to learn it on their own.
And if at all the left (both philosophical and political) wants to argue otherwise in a bid to save their hero, then the new level of their hypocrisy will be, well, astronomical.
Coming back to cultural marxsim — It’s not putting population majorities in concentration camps, yet, but is playing the card of ideological and social isolation. That is the realm where along with Cancel Culture, a textbook tactic of COUNTER CULTURE too creeps in. (Stay tuned for an essay on that)
Cancelling and Countering people doesn’t just occur in the public sphere. There’s a rising trend of common people too shutting out friends and family, abandoning interdependant relations and engaging in implicit “reverse bias” techniques in their daily lives too. This is seen in the veins of “Believe all Women”, the rising misandry in Asia and America, the BLM quickly turning into Anti-white movement, Intersectional Trans Inclusive Femisism, Reverse Casteism in India etc etc. These social waves of counter attack do absolutely nothing to help the victims or eradicate the evil itself, but uses the idea of it existing so as to attack particular sets of people.
But there’s one central assumption far more unsettling than the act itself, an a priori axiom, which the leftist youth of today proceeds with — That they’re always right, morally and logically. It’s the EXACT same axiom that Karl Marx lived with, and the fact that he was SO wrong gives us an idea about the integrity of his followers too.
This, in itself, must serve as a self-evident testimony which has reasserted itself through more than a century now —
Extreme left ideologies serve as nothing more than a long and pretentious virtue-signalling session screamed from undeserved moral high grounds, and behind this pretentious cry of social justice lies a deeper visceral prejudice and hatred towards multiple demographic groups.
References:
(1) MECW Volume 41 Page 388; first published: Abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen, 1913.
(2) Karl Marx, The Future Results of British Rule in India, New-York Semi-Weekly Tribune, №856, August 9, 1853
(3) Saul Kussiel Padover, Karl Marx, an intimate biography, McGraw-Hill, 1978, p.17
(4) Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, Cosimo, Inc., 2008, pp.121–2
(5) Moore, Carlos. “WERE MARX AND ENGELS WHITE RACISTS?: THE PROLET-ARYAN OUTLOOK OF MARXISM.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology, vol. 19, 1974, pp. 125–156. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41035216.
