A left wing socialist looks at Marx’s personal narcissism, and makes a good case that his personal psychological problems drove his politics and his philosophy:
…Marx’s psyche was a volatile mixture of grandiose illusions, anger, and self-hatred. Born a Jew but baptized a Lutheran at age four, the atheistic Marx denied and rejected his Jewish heritage, filling his writings with vicious denunciations of Jews and “Jewishness” that would make any anti-Semite proud. A man without a religion–and later without a country–Marx looked for spiritual sustenance in his grand mythology of the proletarian revolution. “The festering wounds of Marx’s self-loathing might have destroyed him,” Manuel writes, “had he not found salvation in the fantasy of an arena of combat in which he could lead the forces of the proletariat to victory.” In other words, the proletarians would not only save the world–they would save Marx from himself.
Since revolutionism for Marx was as much a psychological as a political necessity, it comes as no surprise that he inspired generations of similarly narcissistic revolutionaries. The failure of Marxism should provide us with lessons not only about the complexities of class and identity, but about the inadequacy of any political system based as much on psychological projection as on social realities.
In short, the personality problems of one unhappy man managed to resonate with and inspire the murderers of millions.
Too bad there’s no way to head such viral thinking off at the pass.
Comments
5 responses to “Deconstructing Marx”
Kierkegaard said the masses will be far more violent then the kings who run things. The lower classes have seen nothing but violence think its normal as they witness what happened to those who held the paris commune Marx tried to come up with a better system and we thank him for trying as it helped restrain some of the worse aspects of capitalism. Marx had many helpers who have stoop to vicious capitalism to try and make it less vicious!
The worst aspects of capitalism? Communism has it beat – by a very large majority.
I applaud vicious capitalism – if the capitalist are competing. It is when we have “capitalism” in cahoots with government that things go south – quickly.
Adam smith in wealth of nations I never went into a room of capitalist where they didn’t conspire to fix prices. Thomas maulthas the iron law of wages. Wages tend to fall just above starvation level for if they fall below it to many workers starve to death and you have a labor shortage! The right has no anwser to predatory capitalism ;but the left does! Capitalism must be controlled not destroyed government ownership of business has its failings too! China is finding out about that now. Non exploitive capitalism seems to have the leest abuses. Libertarians don’t beleive in force because they would lose! It wasn’t libertarians at lexington green firing the shot heard round the world! They were the ones telling the patriots things aren’t so bad I can still make money selling tea! Fight the nazis why? I can still make money selling food to any of the jews who still have money besides I think force is theft I can find other ways like paying pennies on the dollar for jews stuff as they are resettled in the east.
[…] of malignant Marxist narcissism, I stumbled across a nice little cache of Che Guevara quotes, and I found one that suits our […]
Quoting that fraud Malthus?
Go take your meds