Karl Marx: The Greatest Intellectual Fraud of the 19th and 20th Centuries

de bene esse: literally, of well-being, morally acceptable but subject to future validation or exception

An impressive new biography looks at the original Jewish leftist—and shines light on the appeal of radical politics for Jews

By David Mikics|

(Clockwise from top left: La Laetti/Flickr, urbanartcore.eu/Flickr, frischundsauber/Flickr, Christian Dalager/Flickr, ms.akr/Flickr, Xurxo Martínez/Flickr, svennevenn/Flickr, and Sr. X/Flickr.)

 

Cold Case

Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union on March 29, 1951. Sixty years later, the case still crackles with controversy. Why is it so hard to put to rest?

By Ronald Radosh

The Plot Against England

Man Booker winner Howard Jacobson talks about English anti-Semitism, ping-pong, and the seriousness of Jewish jokes

By Howard Jacobson

 

At 15, sitting in the public library in suburban Atlanta, I eagerly drank in every word of Isaac Deutscher’s monumental three-volume biography of Leon Trotsky. Glossing over Trotsky’s ruthlessness, Deutscher extolled instead his unmatched courage and humane feeling for the masses. A few years later, back in the Northeast for college at NYU, I kibitzed with the Sparticists who hawked their crude newspaper outside Bobst Library. It was 1979, close to the tail end of the old radical Left, when the Rosenbergs were still innocent. My college girlfriend was a red-diaper baby, the daughter of communists. Soon I learned all there was to know about the battles between Alcove One (Trotskyist) and Alcove Two (Stalinist) at the CCNY cafeteria in the 1930s. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were my favorite power couple. I got a work-study job at the People’s Coffee Counter at NYU Law School and even invented its motto: “You have nothing to lose but your change.”
In short, I was a teenage Red. I was no idiot: I didn’t believe a revolution was coming to the shores of America. But I basked nostalgically in what I foolishly thought was the glorious past of Trotskyite Bolshevism.

It took only a few more years before I became disillusioned with the radical slogans. Maybe it was Jesse Jackson announcing at a rally in the early 1980s that he had been to Cuba and knew that it was a true democracy. Or Edward Said, whose hostility to Israel troubled me, writing that the Marxist state of South Yemen was a model for the Middle East. But I also learned something else about Trotsky: During the Bolsheviks’ war on the peasantry, he was responsible for the deaths of millions of human beings. In the end, that was all that mattered.

Thoughts of my youthful enthusiasm for Marxism came back to me recently after seeing the U.K. Telegraph headline “I Want to Save the Capitalism my Father Hated.” The story concerned the clean-cut, rapidly rising Ed Miliband, who won the struggle with his brother David to become the head of Britain’s Labour Party and who might well become the country’s first Jewish Prime Minister since Disraeli. The brothers’ father, Ralph Miliband, was a renowned Marxist and Jewish refugee from the Nazis; he is buried a stone’s throw from Karl Marx in London’s Highgate Cemetery. Ed Miliband practices a mellower approach to capitalism. “The free market working properly” was Miliband’s version of what is to be done in his interview with the Telegraph. But, Miliband added, socialism will never die: It is “a tale that never ends.”

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