One of History's Greats

A Paragon of Mendacity and Hypocrisy

Paul Johnson demonstrates repeatedly that the rise of "intellectuals" to be an influential caste in the West has been characterised by their general veneration.  In life, however, their  actual practice belies their principles.  [Paul Johnson, Intellectuals (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988)]  Many of them lived repugnant family lives.  Many practised a very different ethic from the one they advocated for the rest of mankind.

Karl Marx typifies the kind of perversity so common amongst those who regard themselves as too smart for the ordinary pleb.   Marx had numerous children with his wife, Jenny.  He lived as an intellectual in London, in poverty and squalor, choosing not to support his family.  He insisted that his high calling as a seer and revolutionary justified the suffering and deprivation of his wife and children by his hand.  Johnson reproduces a description of Marx's family life as observed by visitors, written around 1850:

[Marx] leads the existence of a Bohemian intellectual.  Washing, grooming and changing his linen are things he does rarely, and he is often drunk.  Though he is frequently idle for days on end, he will work day and night with tireless endurance when he has much work to do. . . .

There is not one clean and solid piece of furniture.  Everything is broken, tattered and torn, with half an inch of dust over everything and the greatest disorder everywhere.  In the middle of the [living room] there is a large, old-fashioned table covered with oilcloth and on it lie manuscripts, books and newspapers, as well as the children's toys, rags and tatters of his wife's sewing basket, several cups with chipped rims, knives, forks, lamps, and inkpot, tumblers, Dutch clay pipes, tobacco, ash . . . . When you enter Marx's room smoke and tobacco fumes make your eyes water. . . . Everything is dirty and covered with dust so that to sit down becomes a hazardous business.  [Cited in Intellectuals, p.77.]

Marx refused to go out and get a job to support his family.  He was far too self-important to lower himself to such familial obligations.  Three of his children died, not just because medical science was not as advanced as today, but because of the squalid and impoverished conditions Marx forced upon his family.  Three daughters remained, and Marx kept them house bound.  He did not ensure their education.  He refused to let them train for any career whatsoever.  Marx died early in 1883.  He was pre-deceased by his daughter, Jenny by a few weeks.  Eleanor died from an overdose of opium five years later.  His last remaining daughter committed suicide.

But the grossest hypocrisy was his

most bizarre act of personal exploitation.  In all his researches into the iniquities of  British capitalists, he came across  many instances of low-paid workers but he never succeeded in unearthing one who was paid literally no wages at all.  Yet such a worker did exist, in his own household.  When Marx took his family on their formal Sunday walks, bringing up the rear . . . was a stumpy female figure.  This was Helen Demuth [who] remained in the Marx family until her death in 1890. . . . She was a ferociously hard worker, not only cooking and scrubbing but managing the family budget, which [Marx's wife] Jenny was incapable of handling.  Marx never paid her a penny.  [Ibid., p. 79.]

Eventually, Marx had a child, Freddy, by her whilst still married to Jenny.  It was a boy and Marx refused to accept any responsibility for the child and flatly denied that he was the father.  Marx fostered Freddy to a working class family called Lewis, but was allowed to visit the Marx household from time to time to see his mother.

He was, however, forbidden to use the front door and obliged to see his mother only in the kitchen.  Marx was terrified that Freddy's paternity would be discovered and that this would do him fatal damage as a revolutionary leader and seer.  [Ibid., p. 80]

Engels revealed the secret to Marx's remaining daughter, Eleanor when he was himself on his deathbed.  Marx had revealed the truth to him, and his conscience forbade him taking the secret to the grave.  Here lies the great hypocritical irony: Marx, the champion of the working classes (in the abstraction) was in person a gross exploiter of Helen Demuth and his own son, Freddy, who grew up to become an engineer--that is, a member of Marx's much lionised and vaunted proletariat. 

Helen and Freddy had to be sacrificed to the cause.  Marx's cruel, deceptive mendacity displayed towards them demonstrate that he was not just the intellectual father, but the spiritual father of those who came after him--the Lenins, Stalins, Molotovs, Maos, Pol Pots, and the rest of the long train of ruthless despots acting in the name of the "working class".

The old saw has it, "To love the whole world for me is no chore; my only problem is my neighbour next door."  Marx championed the proletariat in the abstract, and hated and despised them in the concrete.  Yet he is held to this day as one of the great fathers of Western materialism and Western secularism by the Commentariat and by intellectuals.  And so he is--but not for the reasons his devotees adduce.  He remains one of history's great snake-oilers.