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Was just reading about him the other day. How Lord Palmerston Used His Karl Marx
The chief source of the problem caused by Marxism, on that account, is that most European economists, like the famous Karl Marx, were utterly duped into childish blind faith in the "scientific verity" of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal dogma, as set forth at the British East India Company's Haileybury School. While Marx did, in fact, wander pretty much all over the lot on the subject of economics, prior to the time he was taken in hand at the British Library by the British intelligence service's Urquhart, and Marx's reading list arranged accordingly, his views as set forth in Volume I of his _Capital_ do represent an attempt to set forth a systematic representation of the core of the combined essentials of sundry Venetian, Physiocratic, British, and other reductionists' (e.g., empiricists') contributions to the hot pot of British doctrines on the subject of political-economy.
The later two-plus volumes of that work, produced by editor Frederick Engels, are a subject in themselves. which need not burden our detailed attention here. The essential thing about such later matters is, that under the controlling influence of Britain's Frederick Engels, Marx was repeatedly steered away from the American System of political-economy, first in an attack, foisted by Engels, against Friedrich List, and, later, again by Engels, against the world's leading economist of that time, Henry C. Carey, and, broadly, against the work of U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. With aid of Engels' ideological sheep-herding of Marx in that way, Marx's own product was never anything but an alternate brand-name variety of the British system. Karl Marx never had any comprehension of real modern physical science or economics outside the bounds of what the Marxists had been duped into insisting-often, even mindlessly chanting-were the only scientific economics prior to the work of Marx himself, the philosophical pig-sty often identified as the empiricist "Enlightenment." Usually, self-styled "Marxists" simply denied the existence of anything in the world outside the bounds of their rather cultish selection of canonically certifiable readings. Marx's own pitiable ignorance of physical science, and also of the pre-history and history of the American System in particular, are typical of this enormous ration of scientific illiteracy which dominates the tradition of Marx and of most of his self-styled followers to the present day.<8>
Much can be said about Marx's background. A few of the most relevant highlights are sufficient for our purposes here.<9>
The most essential thing, at the beginning, was that Marx was born into a circle, in this case, one centered on the ancient Roman capital known today as Trier, in which the leaders of the community had been, in the relevant time, sympathizers of the American Revolution, as typified by the leading intellectual figure of that time, who happened to be Marx's most important teacher, and an authority on the celebrated order of the Brothers of the Common Life, Hugo Wyttenbach, at the Gymnasium from which Marx matriculated.
However, young Karl Marx fell, with many of his demoralized generation, into the effects of a moral decadence of his times, as typified by the such effects as the combined aftermath of the French Terror, the Napoleonic Wars, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Metternich's fascist-like decrees, and the vile G.W.F. Hegel's influence as a correspondent and prot?g? of Prince Metternich. In fact, in all his published works, and I have been obliged to deal with most of them in past times, Karl Marx, while sometimes brilliant within the bounds of that fallacy of composition which is identified by his literary output and known personal associations, never took into account any scientifically competent source, but working as a credulous ideologue, confined his attention to preferred sources which amounted to steeping himself in the methodological ideology of the Anglo-Dutch Liberal Enlightenment of the followers of Venice's Paolo Sarpi.
When his father, Heinrich, pulled young Karl Marx out of university at Bonn, for reason of Marx's corrupt personal life there, Marx was sent to Berlin, to study law under the infamous, right-wing ideologue Savigny, the Savigny who was the accomplice, in the maladministration of that university, of the wretched designer of the future fascist state, Hegel. There, Marx was drawn into a left-Hegelian British intelligence operation known as "Young Germany," a branch of the Lord Palmerston-controlled Mazzini's Young Europe association of that time. Despite friendly personal warnings to him by Heinrich Heine about the reality of the inside of the Young Europe organization, Marx ended up in London, where he remained, in fact, an asset of Lord Palmerston until Palmerston's death, and directly a sub-agent, for Palmerston, of the Giuseppe Mazzini who personally, publicly appointed Marx to head up what became known as the First International.<10>
A lot of different things may be said about Marxism, things which differ according to the hands into which that legacy happened to fall at sundry places and times; but, on the theoretical side, Marxian economics and its political implications are essentially, in all axiomatic features, a subsumed offshoot, and rationalization of the definitions, axioms, and postulates of the mechanistic, Anglo-Dutch Liberal system. *Thus, the popular rant which seeks to locate modern history between the bookends of Adam Smith and Marx, is, under today's world conditions, pretty much one giant hoax of no presently redeeming virtues for current practice, especially under present world-crisis conditions.*
On the subject of the theory of prices, Marx's mechanistic notion of economic value is either as bad, or sometimes worse, than the putative alternatives. The significance of Marx's work and influence, is historic: that unless one understands both Marxian economics' influence, and that of the other version of the same British system which Marx expressed, in depth, as I ploughed in those fields during nearly a quarter-century, and, one also knows the American System of political-economy, which is contrary to them both, one has very poor comprehension of the processes which prepared the way for what is actually happening to the world at large today.
Marx became notable for the life of the late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, because of his association, chiefly from a distance, with the so-called Second (socialist) International. His work on economics continued to be known chiefly through the role of the Engels who was close to the British Empire's left-wing intelligence circles, which deployed the notorious gun-runner and organizer of other people's revolutions, Parvus, the Engels who had functioned as the editor of the posthumously published works of Marx on economics.
However, it would be a grave mistake to think of the mass-based forms of the socialist movement as a product of "Marxism" as such. As we can see from the case of the U.S.A. during the 1930s, and again during the period of what came to be called "McCarthyism," the socialist movement repeatedly gained justified importance during periods of so-called "right-wing reaction." Typical is
<1> the way in which President Franklin Roosevelt kept both his connections to, and distance from, the socialist parties of the U.S. 1930s through such arrangements as those provided by CIO leader John L. Lewis, and in
<2> the indispensable role of the socialists, who had the courage to resist, during the resistance against the wave of so-called "McCarthyism" during the late 1940s and early 1950s.
In general, the principal, more durable importance of socialist movements in modern European history, has been that, together with other movements, they have shared a tendency to promote that principle of the general welfare which was established as a policy of modern governments with Louis XI's France and Henry VII's England, as also by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. This is an aspect of the socialist movements contrary to the Hobbesian, "class conflict" doctrine of history, which Marx shares with Henry A. Kissinger,<11> that in opposition to the principle of the general welfare as affirmed in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. Inevitably, the defense of the principle of the general welfare was usually centered on the rights of the laborer and his or her family. When forces behind governments tended toward repressive practices against that relevant section of the population, the conditions for the role of labor and related social-political movements existed as a needed part of the instruments for defense of the universal natural-law principle of the general welfare on which all civilized forms of modern life depend.
To a certain degree, the resistance against the 1964-1972 U.S. Indo-China war drew more upon the sons and daughters of former socialists than on any nominally Marxist political party organization. This was lawful. Unfortunately, by the early 1960s, the Congress for Cultural Freedom had done its evil work on the minds of the Baby-Boomer generation, in the U.S.A. as in western Europe and beyond. Despite the degeneracy of the former left-wing groups during that time, the resistance against a foolish war illustrated a principle. History will tend to seize processes available to it, to deal with a threat to a decent order of things, and it has often selected movements more because they are available, than because they are actually qualified for service to the mission into which they are drawn.
It was because of the sometimes important part which those movements played in late Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century history in various parts of the world, that it was necessary for governments and others to recognize the sometimes important part these movements contributed, without oneself being drawn into the regrettable accumulation of anti-scientific ideological baggage which the sundry parts of those movements carried with them. In the end, the useful, sometimes heroic mission those movements had performed, passed, and only the decaying ideological baggage remained. Their tired bodies sagged along the line of march, but the eyes of the hoarsely chanting marchers were empty; the spark was gone.
So, Marxism may be dead, on that account today, because there is probably no foreseeable constructive role for it to play in the present world crisis, unless China, perhaps, were inclined to bring it back to serve what China might perceive to be its interests. The crucial failure of Marx's economics, and his method otherwise, is that he was a thorough reductionist in method, for whom, as for Frederick Engels, as for the Thomas Huxley with whom Engels shared much in common, actual human individual creativity did not exist. Today, the dwindling number of unrepentant Marxists taken into account, Marx as an economist has become chiefly a subject of special interest for certain appropriate specialists in a period of history which is now dead and most unlikely to be reborn. Some have argued wrongly, since the 1970s, that I killed it; actually, I simply reported, accurately, on its killing of itself.
from
Greenspan, Seneca, And Their Baths
by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
July 25, 2005
http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/writings_files/2005/050725_greenspan_seneca.htm
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