This and the following page is a rejoinder to the "Despicable" Marx site. You can click to that site by scrolling to the links section below. Daffy Duck in a recently taped interview was asked to summarize the 'argument' of that site his reply can be heard in the background.
You give Marx too exclusive an ownership of, & responsibility for CAPITAL. CAPITAL, a towering work if ever there was one, would never have been possible without G.W.F. Hegel, Aristotle, David Ricardo, Adam Smith, Ludwig Feurerbach, Fredrick Engels, Robert Owen, Saint-Simon, Auguste Comte, etc. etc. Indeed this book is the result of a whole history and condenses a culture's own attempt at self-understanding and self-emancipation. The historical importance of CAPITAL transcends that of any single person, even it's author. Only because of CAPITAL is Marx even known, had he not written this GREAT WORK, with its voluminous prepatory studies, he would have been historically marginal. CAPITAL is an achievement, though realized in the person of Marx, of Western Civilization and not of any single man. In seeking to disparage or strip us of such cultural attainments you are a threat to freedom of thought and its expression. Impeded by antiquated and ideological conceptions of individualism, conceptions persuasively rebutted by both Hegel and Marx, you can only see one name on the book you dismiss in your crusading zealotry. By denigrating CAPITAL because of sins that YOU ATTACH to its author you have unwittingly become a perpetuator of the myths of society. A book you condemn which you yourself have NOT even bothered to read!!! Though that is hardly surprising. Book banners seldom feel any need to read or view what they dismiss. Marx's ALLEGED personal failings give you gleeful license to never read that MASTERPIECE of social understanding called 'CAPITAL', unless, that is, it can be of further service in your rage against Marx. The only "argument" you seem able to muster: Marx claims X, but Marx is immoral, therefore X is false (or if you prefer: therefore X raises red flags -- let us hope Marx's writings raise RED flags!). This is the tiresome tactic of apologists for capitalism whom attack the person who criticizes rather than provide any substantive discussion of their critique. Hence it is not surprising that there is absolutely no substantive criticism of views advanced by Marx on your Web page, indeed there is scant indication that you even know any of Marx's views. The laziness of your "criticisms" is appalling. You have yet to move beyond repetition of knee jerk suspicions and to articulate any relevant connection between your hypotheses about Marx's family life and the scientific assessment of his theories, let alone demonstrating how those theories are erroneous! You have not because you cannot since there is no such connection, none that is, which would be relevant in evaluating a work in political economy as a work of political economy. You speak of the ambiguity of human life with its complexity and richness yet you fall back on simplistic either/or thinking and this with vehement certainty. "If Marx perpetrated some evil then he and his works are entirely evil". Perhaps this is your pretext for ignoring the complexity of Marx. Not Marx the theorist, not Marx the political activist, nor even Marx's private life, but Marx the "sinner" is your sole preoccupation. With an axe to grind you hack through biographies of Marx finding a few slivers of sin and haven't the slightest interest in looking at the mountain of other chips from the man whose life you've just fragmented. Whatever doesn't support your indictment is simply ignored. An odd approach for one whom claims to adhere to a holist philosophy of human experience! Your use of Marx's answer to a parlor game about liking women "weak" is an example of your narrow agenda, and is a hypocritical criticism coming from one who has such antipathy toward feminists. Had a friend said the same you would think nothing of it. Since "weak" in this context is synonymous with "feminine", Marx is 'guilty' of liking women feminine rather than 'butch'. You've discovered the 'shocking' ANACHRONISM that Marx, and every other male of the nineteenth century, was not 'politically correct' by the standards of the twentieth! "How despicable!" Moreover this is an opinion shared today by ALL OF US who like to see women in pumps, nylons and tight skirts. Your ploy is the seeking of any dirt that can be utilized in fomenting hatred of Marx. Your inflammatory and derogatory language as well as the slanted presentation betrays that inciting hatred and NOT the dispelling of myths is your primary objective. Those aren't red flags going up but your own distorting veil of ideas that you have failed to divest. Not satisfied with veiling your own eyes you crusade to obstruct everyone's by condemnation of UNREAD books and mummifying human understanding in the copious shreds of your own veil. These shortcomings lead to your failure to recognize the objectivity of the matters at issue. It is quite irrelevant as to whether this analysis was authored by Marx, Engels, or some other. The moral credentials of the originator are irrelevant. The assessment of social theory takes place by an analysis of that theory not by snooping in closets. Even your closet snooping is outrageously skewed. There is no interest in the whole truth and nothing but the truth, rather you engage in a one sided quest with a predetermined outcome. Only 'facts' supporting your rage are presented. Not surprising from one whose only interest is closets that all they can PRODUCE are skeletons! The prematurity of your condemnation is glaring being based on such brief and superficial perusal of biographical materials. Your RESENTMENT towards sociologists and those who write theoretical tracts I find both hypocritical & frightening, and perhaps explains the poverty of substance in your 'critique'. Apparently you haven't had the time to burn the theoretical and academic works on your own bookshelf! Who is worthy of ridicule sociologists who esteem Marx's social theory or those who believe that the cold war was a conspiracy between an allied USSR & USA and that aliens gave Roosevelt the plans for the atom bomb? Who is the victim of myths here? Your own beliefs disqualify you for the task of dispelling the myths of others. The continued irrelevance of your droning on and on about Marx's alleged sins, which I have not YET bothered to dispute, demonstrates an intransigent unwillingness to deal with the substance of Marxism. I see no interest on your part to understand capitalism, one value of Marxism, but rather a pointless and complacent latching on to the alleged sins of a long ago dead man. Apparently this satisfies some great need! But can you say anything of substance about Marxism? Am I to get your ad hominem catalogue of accusations yet again as reply? I don't see how discussion can commence until you have read CAPITAL. But I can't imagine even in my wildest reveries of your reading this GREAT BOOK without your raging agenda gnashing its way through each page proudly displaying each and every gnat of sin in your teeth as you foam victorious. Clearly, you would only read CAPITAL so as to twist the meaning to suit your agenda, as done in your superficial biographical inquisition, which lead to your misguided judgement. A judgement repudiated by Marx's own daughter, whose knowledge and opinion in this matter is vastly more reliable than yours! WHY ARE HER VIEWS NOT MENTIONED ON YOUR WEB PAGE? Are you afraid of the FACTS? Myths are dispelled by impartial presentation of ALL the facts. Your omission of this fact seeks to DISTORT the inherent AMBIGUITY of real life and put in its stead a black & white caricature. Like all propagandists and myth peddlers you carefully cloak those facts which would lead the public to anywhere but YOUR predetermined and DISTORTED conclusion. In your conceit you seek to IMPOSE your opinion on the public rather than encourage their OWN investigation, thought, AND conclusion. Marx's daughter's opinion alone undermines any biography that leads to any conflicting conclusion! Any conceivable and credible contrary assessment would require an EXHAUSTIVE & IMPARTIAL examination of a mass of first hand material, which would entail competence in the German language. Further biographies written by Soviet & other Communist authors would be obligatory, not merely Anglo-American bourgeois writers, for any OBJECTIVE evaluation. Your web page has the objectivity & depth of a BUMPER STICKER. Your biased rush to condemnation, and FAILURE to READ CAPITAL shows serious scholarship on Marx is beyond your ken. Even the British & American authors whom you SKIMMED failed to draw your reckless conclusions. Your "research" smacks of the hermeneutics of heidegger where only the "exalted" one can discern the "truth" in texts. heideggerian's are beyond the "mundane" standards of scholarship required of the "das man" for their eccentric & erratic 'readings' are "ontological". This aberration in heidegger's 'thought' "ontologizes" the capitalist ideology of individualism and sees the observance of SOCIAL standards of inquiry or the concession to the valid criticism of others as "inauthentic" falling into the mode of the "das man". In so doing heidegger has vitiated his own philosophy by succumbing to the "das man" ideology of capitalism. In spite of lip service to "authentic being-with" heidegger's tendency is to submerge the social in the concept of the "das man" leading to his failure to grasp the sociality of truth, the grasping of which might have spared him not only from scholarly blunders but from becoming a NAZI. Your web page based on so shallow an inquiry highlights how the Internet leads to erosion of scholarship. It is no accident that the World Wide Web is so well suited to pornography! The Internet is geared to instant gratification not in-depth scholarship; 'surfing' and a concomitant shortening of an already impaired attention span are what it bequeaths to the majority. Few people read complete articles, let alone whole books on the Internet; rather it is a mindless dash to the next interesting site ad infinitum. Of course relatively few books and articles are available free on the Internet since under capitalism they are a source of revenue only if they are sold. Libraries are a vastly superior resource for knowledge & learning than the Internet under capitalism's sway. The World Wide Web is tailored to business transactions or advertisements such as your flashy full-page ad denouncing Marx. Your malicious revel celebrating Marx's death on your web site is macabre. You bring to the Internet the methods of yellow journalism applied to intellectual matters! Odd that a self-proclaimed 'dispeller of myths' is so comfortable with, and full of enthusiasm for, a medium of distraction and distortion! Even were there a 'Marx myth' it would be insignificant for most people in America. So what is your real motive? Your endeavor to dispel a hypothetical myth about Marx held by few will only lead to perpetuating actual myths about capitalism held by MANY. Reactionaries and conservatives everywhere will embrace the "Great Dispeller of Myths" with open arms. A rather disappointing beginning for one with such a promising, albeit pretentious, title! You have approached this whole matter not as a sympathizer of Marx, but rather as a prosecutor seeking a conviction. I repeat again what motive is here closeted? I see jealous resentment of a man who produced one of the GREATEST & MOST IMPORTANT works of the modern era. The contrast with your approach to that NAZI heidegger is telling, here there is not only no rush to judgement but oddly, NOT EVEN THE SLIGHTEST INVESTIGATION! It is clear your approach to Herr heidegger, in contrast, is as a sympathizer. I suggest the reason for this contrast is that heidegger's philosophy in its complete neglect of the historically specific social relations of capitalism (Stemming from heidegger's condescending & conceited disdain of the 'mere ontical' social sciences leading to his glaring ignorance and neglect of that which is culturally & historically specific. Indeed these very failings coupled with his narcissistic belief in his own infallibility [Traits rampant among his devotees as well!] led him in his complete worldly naivete to embrace the crudest, most spiteful, most primitive racist and terrorist political ideology of this century. What a 'towering intellect'!) represents no conflict, unlike Marxism, with the course of life to which you aspire. A life seeking winnings with the Lottery, becoming an entrepreneur selling absolutions on the Web, or the peddling of Monopoly$oft wares. heidegger presents a philosophy with which any bourgeois person can be comfortable! One can be an authentic NAZI & racist (for this we have heidegger's own resolute example), an authentic entrepreneur (Herr heidegger the producer of books is our shrewd example), an authentic & mute bystander to the NAZI stripping of Husserl's teaching post (Fearless heidegger again!), or an authentic evader of responsibility for complicity in WW II and death camps (here too we have heidegger's tireless example). His philosophy in ignoring concrete & historically specific social relations thereby challenges none; hence we have here a bourgeois ideology that demands nothing. BEING & TIME challenges no status quo, hence it is readily embraced from NAZI's to conservative Catholic clergy. (Remember the NAZI's burned CAPITAL and freely sold BEING & TIME [i.e. SEIN UND ZEIT]. Apparently there is nothing either the NAZIS or heidegger found in BEING & TIME which is incompatible with being a NAZI!). Moreover in this blindness we see heidegger's blindness to the reality of the NAZI regime, a blindness removable only by attending to the "ontical" (factual) and the "das man" (i.e. the social), spheres whose import is extensively demoted in BEING & TIME, and which betray the idealist & individualist errors of this work. Even heidegger's dismissal of modern technology is mute to the technology his beloved NAZI regime deployed to help murder & enslave hundreds of millions. Unruffled by these 'mere "ontical" details' our megalomaniac heidegger dwells only in the metaphysician's 'Pure Realm' of "BEING"--the "ontological", never deigning to 'descend' and graze with the 'herd' in the "ontic". Perhaps the war dead were just a 'herd' to heidegger undeserving of any apology or atonement from such a 'giant thinker'! heidegger's apparent incapacity for remorse is characteristic of the narcissistic personality disorder, as are his egomania and contempt for others. It was Marxists and communists, not heidegger, who had the courage to oppose the NAZI regime, many of whom suffered a gruesome death for their HEROIC efforts! I find your difference in treatment has mistakenly reversed the priority of whom to investigate. heidegger's embracing of NAZIISM/Fascism, a political ideology, is prima facie relevant to assessing a philosophy of human existence such as BEING & TIME in a way that Marx's family life is not in evaluating a work of political economy like CAPITAL. Even so the NAZI element in BEING & TIME must be demonstrated by a thorough reading not by lazy repetition of heidegger's well-documented allegiance to the furher and his NAZI party membership. Clearly the same applies to CAPITAL. Any errors in this GREAT BOOK will be discerned by a thorough reading, by comparison with European history and with what is known about capitalist economies. You have confused Marx's alleged personal errors with actual errors in his analysis of capitalism. Do you need reminding that a hypothetical sin in ones family life is not a mistake of theory in political economy? In your new found suspicion about Marx's theories when are you going to actually ADDRESS ONE?!?! Your vague remarks about 'moral platforms' and 'unfulfilled theories' demonstrates COMPLETE IGNORANCE of the contents of volume I of CAPITAL. Despite denials that this is your objective you are content to dismiss this GREAT book by an incomplete and biased looking in closets. It is clear from your site that it is Marx's theories that are the target you are attempting to strike via character assassination. Too lazy to read and study CAPITAL you instead take cheap shots at the author. The elementary school level of your research could never support your accusations. You have failed to go back and check original sources in German, check infant mortality & unemployment levels of London in the 1850's, the difficulty or barriers for German émigré's in securing jobs, or the possibilities for POLITICAL FUGITIVES such as Marx. Could Marx even legally work in England? Furthermore what was the state of Marx's health during this period? How many times did he go to the pub, and at what time periods? Did he buy his own ale or did his cronies? Who was/were the source(s) for these claims? Despite what he told Engels, how do you know that it wasn't Jenny who made Karl give up his illegitimate child to which pressure he reluctantly acceded to maintain domestic peace, which out of pride he neglected to tell Engels? Additionally because they could barely provide for their own children giving up the child would appear prudent and humane. Since they had a maid how did Jenny Marx (or Engels for that matter) simply stand by if the children were, as you imagine, starving? (You weren't even curious about that question for your interest goes no further than Marx's conviction. I don't mention this to in any way impugn Jenny Marx {or Engels} but rather do so to highlight the inadequacy and improbability of your "judgements", and to show that the WHOLE TRUTH is not part of your agenda. By the way when are you going to read the 500 plus pages of published correspondence of just Marx and Engels?) What were the specific causes of death of the Marx children? Were there coroner reports, if so what were the listed causes of death? Given the limited diagnostic knowledge of the times how are you able to rule out infectious disease as a cause of death? Finally, were the actions you ascribe to Marx, if accurate, the cause or the result (Hence the importance of knowing the precise time frame for the events in question.) of his children's death? Marx's expression of regret over having had a family lend themselves more plausibly to the opposite conclusion than the one you have tried to wrench out. Etc. Etc. Any competent prosecutor would have availed themselves of ALL the facts if only to cover their ass. Without answers to the basic questions above, at the very least, your 'moral' conjectures are wildly irresponsible & quite unsubstantiated! Perhaps you need to learn how to conduct scholarly research from the sociologists and theorists whom you scorn. All you have shown warrants only compassion and sorrow for the suffering of the Marx family. Nineteenth century capitalism in England did not provide essential and free social services such as YOU enjoy today. Neither food stamps, housing assistance, nor free medical care were available, consequently poverty was a death sentence ('capital['s] punishment') for many under capitalism's tyranny. With right-wing zeal you seek to blame the victims of poverty rather than the capitalist society which creates, perpetuates, and requires poverty. I am shocked by the hasty 'conclusions' that you derive which betray pettiness and a scary vindictiveness. Your hyper-moralism has allowed one man's alleged hypocrisy to blind you to the WORLD HISTORICAL significance of CAPITAL. Had you ever taken the trouble to read CAPITAL you would have seen it's about the very thing you recommended that we study -- human relationships! In peevish obsession over one man's human relation over a century ago you have permanently veiled yourself from appreciating the FOREMOST ANALYSIS of an oppressive social system that has for two centuries imposed stunting human relations ACROSS THE ENTIRE PLANET! Your failure in repeated e-mails to even articulate a single view of Marx's, let alone refute one, shows your only interest is venting your rage upon Marx, not in understanding capitalism. Don't repeat your suspicions, accusations, or outrage rather make a substantive claim about Marx's views. I have no interest in your 'moral' platform or unsubstantiated theories about Marx's family life. Seek another audience for your fulminations on Marx. Rather than spewing out tirades against Marx or sociologists why don't you produce something positive for people? Let us return to the theories themselves. If you have a better theory of capitalism let's see it! At this point it is no longer possible for any discussion between us about Marxist theory. To reiterate, I see no inclination on your part to further understanding of capitalism but merely one to parrot accusations. For some reason you seek to mount a 'moral' high horse. Discussion in the spirit of intellectual purge trials is one from which I will choose to be absent. Marx may indeed be a "despicable human being" but that you have not shown by your lazy peeping through several secondary sources. But even had you demonstrated that it would have NO bearing whatsoever on the evaluation of CAPITAL's analysis of capitalism! In thinking you can in any way dispute the contents of CAPITAL without reading and mastering its contents it is you who are the creator & victim of DESPICABLE MYTHS!
CANIS LATRANS
"Ad Hominem (Latin, argument against the man) arguments divert attention from the validity claim. This involves arguing against the person, or rejecting a person's views by attacking or abusing their personality, character, motives, intentions, qualifications, et cetera instead of providing evidence why the views are invalid." RICHARD BURNS
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"despicable" Marx
I am Canis Latrans and am interested in people dispelling their own myths. Jesus said: "How can I remove the sliver in my neighbor's eye before I have removed the mote in thine own?" Let this site inspire you to read CAPITAL and biographies about Marx and decide these issues for youself!
Email me at: snowleopard@cheerful.com
THE MYTH OF A MARX MYTH (p.2)
USA vs NAZI STATE (p. 3)
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