WOULD MARX BE PROUD OF MARXISM'S ACHIEVEMENTS?

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP85T00153R000300040008-7
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 20, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 24, 2008
• Sequence Number: 8
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Approved For Release 2008/01/24: CIA-RDP85TO0153R000300040008-7
Would Marx be proud of Marxism's achievements?
J n a few weeks it will be the centenary of the death
of a 6S-year-old man whose writings and name
alone have done such vast injury to the modern
world. Were this man alive today he would
undoubtedly repudiate his successors, those who justify
lying, cruelty, genocide and anti-democratic revolutions
in the name of the proletariat.
It was on a Wednesday, at 2:45 in the afternoon of
March 14,1883, that Karl Marx died peacefully in his
easy chair at his home in Highgate, a London suburb. I
say he would have repudiated today's Marxists - from
Lenin to Stalin to Andropov, from Mao to Deng, from
Fidel to Jaruzelski - because toward the end of his
?, Marx, wearied by controversies carried on in his
,ie, reportedly told a French follower, Mais, moi, je
ne suis pas Marxiste - "But I am not a Marxist:"
It is the irony of Marx's existence that had there
been no Lenin to reinterpret the Master's prose and
prescriptions; Marx would today be one of dozens of
Utopian philosophers whose names are listed in
intellectual histories and are as quickly forgotten, except,
by; academics. And it is even greater irony that it was a,
Russianwho ensured his fame, because both Marx and
his co'-worker Friedrich Engels, despised not only the
Czarist regime but also Russian revolutionaries like
Bakunm
:Marx was a,fortunate man, especially in havmg'a,.
surname,that could so easily,b~.transfqrmed into,a
pfiilosophyayad'ding the suffix ism Imagine had his
name been l;ngels or:l?lekhanov or Bernstein; the' ism"'.
would'n'thave.worked. We have Leninism; Stalinism,;
most important and original pieces of critical writing
about Marx to have been published in years. He
demonstrates how Marx's prophecies have been over-
run by events to a degree which should have weakened
the hold of Marxism in the western world. Instead
Marxism and its infinite varieties has a greater hold on
the American academy than ever before. It is Marxolatry
run wild.
Feuer cites the "Communist Manifesto," the joint
effort of Marx and Engels, which predicted that as
countries become communist, the "hostility of one nation
to another will come to an end" Feuer writes:
"The fact of the matter,
however, is that communist
countries within a few years
Elie /vas aiso ,fortunate' in that.he was,living 1n the; ; :
-iod when sciencoliati become a blessed and popular.-,`t ,?..
response to Victorian reli giosity Marx and Engels stuck :a, ~ ?' ? .
been 4 collection of declamatory stateiiients`and "i
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in any case, has always been
their unconscious goal,"
Feuer says. Trotsky actually
went further and said that
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other far more than present-day capitalistic ones do,
and that imperialism, far from being the last stage of
capitalism, turns out to be the contemporary stage of
communism."
Marx predicted that the working class would fulfill
its historical mission by bringing about the overthrow
of capitalism - the working-class would be its grave-
diggers, he said - and the reign of communism. Instead
neo-Marxists from C. Wright Mills to Herbert Marcuse,
like Leon Trotsky before them, repudiated Marx's idea
of the working-class as the liberating force "and
demanded outright the rule of the intellectuals, which,
the unopposed existence of Stalin's "bureaucratic state,"
(unopposed, that is, by the proletariat) demonstrated
"the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become
a ruling class."
The most significant change in Marxism, as its tenets
have proven helpless either as analysis or prophecy,
has been the rise of what is popularly called "Neo-
Marxism," which Feuer defines "as the ideology of the
intellectual class conceiving itself as the bearer of the
Socialist mission." The "essential traits of Neo-Marxism"
are its preference for philosophy rather than econom-
ics and the establishment of its base in the universities,
not in the trade unions. Says Feuer:
"If one makes a survey of Marxist journals, one
finds almost none that are directed to workingmen. By
contrast, it is a mark of intellectual ferment for a given
university department to house a Marxist journal for
'its field. Neo-Marxist journals have thus proliferated
in departments of history, sociology, German, economics,
philosophy and anthropology...-.The bourgeois
unlversitiesare the ecological niches for overground.
t18iyMarxis n is the continuing repression by military
POW lo t.'communist states of the rights ofworke'rs
ito:bglifree;of government Control. The crushing' of.
^,worst evolution s in modem times has taken place
'in Communist-ruled countries, in East"Germany, 30
ago on June 17 t953; in Hungary; Czechoslovakia:
bitXtlli'ee occasions;'ii~~Poland And, of-courser'
Soviet rk?ers are among the most`le'nslaved -16fe `of Chin
ufany working d ass,along with the workers
ietnam, Cuba and'other Socialist regimes.
he `nt
` eking class''etos?of the neo Marxis't`
uiritelfec
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