Marx Must Fall! Highgate statue to racist must be torn down
Statues are coming down across the country. Oriel College, Oxford, is readying to remove a statue to colonialist Cecil Rhodes. In Bristol, a statue to slave trader Edward Colston was rolled into Bristol Harbour. A statue to slaveholder Robert Milligan has been removed from view in London. Statue of racists are coming down all across America. So is it time to get rid of Karl Marx statues, including the huge headstone that sits atop his grave in London’s Highgate cemetery?
In 2019, the words “doctrine of hate” and “architect of genocide” were painted on the Marx Highgate cemetery memorial. One onlooker was quoted in the Guardian: ““I wouldn’t like to say who or why someone did it but it was clearly someone very critical of Marx and that part of history. I am just surprised that somebody in 2019 feels they need to and do something like that.” No contrary view was quoted.
Spoof news website Babylon Bee quips: “Looking to protect their statues and other municipal monuments, cities and towns across the country have begun disguising their statues as Karl Marx. City councils all over are ordering Karl Marx wigs and putting them on Teddy Roosevelt, George Washington, Christopher Columbus, and other statues.”
Marx was a champion of the masses and the oppressed, say some. Other says he was a hardcore anti-semite who called for “the emancipation of mankind from Judaism” and fed the 2,000-year-old prejudice that Jews were all about the money and behind every ill, writing, “Money is the jealous god of Israel.” As Jonathan Freedland notes:
The historical explanation for this enduring linking of Jews and money is that Jews were pushed into financial roles by a church that barred Christians from, say, lending money for interest, and barred Jews from doing much else, such as owning and farming land. As Anthony Julius – whose Trials of the Diaspora is the definitive history of English antisemitism – puts it, in a feudal society in which Jews could be neither peasants nor lords, there was “no other niche” available. But psychological explanations also suggest themselves, starting with the notion that Christian society was able to split off that aspect of itself it regarded as sinful – its pursuit of wealth and profit – and project it instead on to a hated other: the Jew.
Bob Seely adds:
…Karl Marx’s conspiratorial view of the world is at the rotten root of both hard Left and Right. Marx helped provide the intellectual base for both the Holocaust of the Jews…
In his 1843 essay, The Jewish Question, Marx, whose father converted from Judaism to Protestantism, equated emancipation from capitalism and Judaism as being one and the same. “Money is the jealous god of Israel” Marx wrote. “The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the god of the world.” He jumbled together hostility to private property and capitalism, and his personal hatred of Jews as self-interested, rootless and enablers of secret control, updating miserable medieval tropes for the modern world. Once society succeeded in the preconditions of Capital, “the Jew will have become impossible [Marx’s italics],” perhaps the most profound example of bastardised pseudo-science in modern political history.
Frederick Engels addressed Marx’s racism in a letter date April 19, 1890:
…you might not be doing more harm than good with your anti-Semitism is something I would ask you to consider. For anti-Semitism betokens a retarded culture…
In North America not a single Jew is to be found among the millionaires whose wealth can, in some cases, scarcely be expressed in terms of our paltry marks, gulden or francs and, by comparison with these Americans, the Rothschilds are veritable paupers. And even in England, Rothschild is a man of modest means when set, for example, against the Duke of Westminster. Even in our own Rhineland from which, with the help of the French, we drove the aristocracy 95 years ago and where we have established modern industry, one may look in vain for Jews.
Hence anti-Semitism is merely the reaction of declining medieval social strata against a modern society consisting essentially of capitalists and wage-labourers, so that all it serves are reactionary ends under a purportedly socialist cloak; it is a degenerate form of feudal socialism and we can have nothing to do with that. The very fact of its existence in a region is proof that there is not yet enough capital there. Capital and wage-labour are today indivisible. The stronger capital and hence the wage-earning class becomes, the closer will be the demise of capitalist domination. So what I would wish for us Germans, amongst whom I also count the Viennese, is that the capitalist economy should develop at a truly spanking pace rather than slowly decline into stagnation.
In addition, the anti-Semite presents the facts in an entirely false light. He doesn’t even know the Jews he decries, otherwise he would be aware that, thanks to anti-Semitism in eastern Europe, and to the Spanish Inquisition in Turkey, there are here in England and in America thousands upon thousands of Jewish proletarians; and it is precisely, these Jewish workers who are the worst exploited and the most poverty-stricken. In England during the past twelve months we have had three strikes by Jewish workers. Are we then expected to engage in anti-Semitism in our struggle against capital?
Nietzsche noted that anti-Semitism was used by people hoping “someone must be to blame for the fact that I do not feel well”. Jews were “scapegoats for every possible public and private misfortune”.
Let’s get the racists and chop down statues to them. Marx must fall! Right?
Posted: 25th, June 2020 | In: Key Posts, News Comment | TrackBack | Permalink
