Marx's Legacy of Hatred
By Jim Peron
It seemed like a plausible thesis: the value of a product is determined by the amount of labour needed to produce it. Yet the idea may well have contributed to the appeal of Nazism and lead directly to the Holocaust.
Marx was the best known of the proponents of the labour theory of value. In fact much of his economic system is built on this premise. But Marx didn't originate the idea. Before him David Ricardo proposed it and before Ricardo there was Adam Smith. And if Prof. Murray Rothbard is right then Smith probably adopted the idea from the teachings of John Calvin.
But Marx and his followers certainly were the main propagandists for the idea that labour produce value. And until the rise of the Austrian school of economics this was the dominant theory of value in Europe.
To follow this idea to it's culmination in the Nazi campaign against the Jews we must go back to Marx and his ideas. One hundred years before the Nationalist Socialist regime of Adolph Hitler Marx was writing on what was called the "Jewish Question." Marx's anti-Semitism, now well documented, was derived from his economic theories. And his anti Jewish tract makes the connection quite clear.
For Marx the Jews were not so much a religion, or a race, but a cultural phenomenon. What created Judaism, said Marx, was a desire to seek monetary profits. His polemic stated:
"Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew."
"What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest."
"What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money."
For Marx profit seeking was Judaism and the Jew was the personification of capitalism. They personified evil because they tended to work in finance, retail merchandising, or as entrepreneurs. And in the Marxist theory these professions did not produce value but stole it from the source of real wealth: the manual labourers. The Jewish financier produced nothing in Marx's view and thus only lived off the exploitation of others. Moreover this, in Marx's view, was the essence of capitalism. "Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may exist. Money degrades all the gods of man—and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal self established value of all things. It has, therefore robbed the whole world—both the world of men and nature—of its specific value. ... The god of the Jews has become secularised and has become the god of the world."
This Judaic concept of profit seeking, said Marx, had corrupted the Christian world as well through what he called the "Judaism of civil society" that is the transformation of civil society in a Judaic culture of profit seeking.
Marx's tract was a reply to another book dealing with the emancipation of Jews from feudalist laws which restricted their civil and economic freedom. Marx argued that to talk about emancipating Jews was absurd since everyone was a slave to capitalism which was fundamentally the culture of Judaism. The only true emancipation possible was the destruction of profit seeking Judaism and it's step-child, liberal capitalism. As he wrote: "The social emancipation of the Jew is the emancipation of society from Judaism."
Under the feudal structures social mobility was restricted. Jewish merchants and entrepreneurs didn't exist because laws restricted their ability to trade. But with the rise of Liberal capitalism such laws were disregarded. And those non-Jewish businessman who didn't succeed resented the success of Jews. Professor Peter Pulzer wrote:
"Dissatisfaction with the practical consequences of Liberalism was even stronger in economic than in political matters; anti capitalism was, after all, one of the oldest and most natural forms of anti-Semitism. Liberal society was characterised by a high degree of social mobility with a premium on individual worth and ability. Perhaps this pill was the hardest to swallow. All those who had an assured place in an ordered hierarchy, even if it was a comparatively low one, looked with distaste on an order which allowed others to rise to positions of eminence and influence..."
He also said that "anti-Semitism is anti capitalist since capitalism is one of the causes of social mobility."
Building on Marx's theory the socialists of the late 1800s clearly saw Jews as their prime enemy. And almost without exception the anti-Semitic movements of the era were all variants of socialism. Wilhelm Marr, who some attribute as the man who coined the term anti-Semitic, bragged: "anti-Semitism is a Socialist movement, only in nobler and purer forms than Social Democracy."
The ability of the Jews to succeed in business ventures was despised by many in the lower middle classes who themselves had failed at similar ventures. Marx argued that such success was indicative of exploitation and these would-be merchants were all too happy to accept that theory. It certainly was more palatable than the one that said they failed because they didn't have the necessary abilities.
Marx said capitalism was Judaic in nature. Later anti-Semites weren't sure this was true but if it wasn't the alternative was that Jews had the ability to twist Liberal economic systems to their advantage. As "Die Judenfrage", an ant--Semite publication, stated: "The doctrine of egalitarian free economics and of corresponding human rights in economics, as they were formulated in a humanely well-meaning way the Scotsman Hume and Smith, were used by the Jews in order to derive from them their monopoly." The anti-Semite mayor of Vienna, Karl Lueger, said that "only fat Jews can survive the murderous competition of economic freedom. Christian people must be protected from insatiable capitalism.". The Nazi Adolf Stocker put it this way: "the Jewish questions—always and everywhere—has to do with economic exploitation."
Throughout Europe Marx-inspired anti-Semites jumped on the bandwagon. Taking their clue from their mentor they announced that capitalism allowed the Jews to dominate others and that capitalism itself was the manifestation of the Judaising of civil society. Some anti-Semites turned things slightly. For them capitalism, in the form of industrial production, was good while "financial" capitalism was evil. The Marxists denounced the entire system. They both agreed that the Jews were capitalists it was only on the specific details that they disagreed.
The Marxists even admitted that they had problems keeping their followers away from the neo-Marxist anti-Semites. Karl Kautsky wrote to Friedrich Engels lamenting this fact: "We are having great trouble in stopping our people from fraternising with the anti-Semite." Later he complained again: "anti-Semitism here, which has recruited a good part of the petter bourgeois—including some very radical elements who had hitherto been with us." This trend certainly continued right up to, and including, the rise of Nazism. A 1932 Nazi tract for party speakers stated: "We have certainly succeeded in fragmenting the Marxist front and in winning a large number of former Marxists for our world view." The author noted that since the "German worker absorbed Marxism in his parents home" these "former Marxists are already National Socialists" who need only abandon Marxist materialism for the spiritual values of Nazism. "They need to be persuaded of German idealism, of the principle that 'the common good goes before the individual good.'"
The National Socialism of Hitler fit in quite well with the dominant views of Marxist thinking on the "Jewish Question". For the Nazis the Jews were also the personification of Liberal Capitalism. They were also seen as exploiters who lived off of the labour of real workers. In 1932 Joseph Goebbels wrote a propaganda tract for the National Socialists that played up all of these themes.
His booklet made it clear that the Nazis had no interest in "maintaining a rotten economic system that has nothing to do with nationalism, which is an affirmation of the Fatherland. I can love German and hate capitalism. Not only can I, I must. Only the annihilation of a system of exploitation carries with it the rebirth of our people" He argued that the National Socialists "had to make clear to the man of the left that nationalism and capitalism, that is the affirmation of the Fatherland and the misuse of its resources, have nothing to do with each other, indeed that they go together like fire and water, then even as a socialist he will come to affirm the nation... Socialism will become reality when the Fatherland was free." He stated: "The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism."
The Nazis adopted Marx's view of capitalism and they accepted the socialist belief that the Jews were the personification of capitalism. Add to their anti-Semitism and socialism the ingredient of nationalism and you have the essence of the Nazi movement. Hitler's nationalism was a response to the burdensome and unfair mandates imposed on Germany by the Versailles Treaty. With Germany being intentionally humiliated by the Allies the German people were ready for a nationalist movement. But Hitler's secret of success was that he built his nationalism on a foundation of Marxist economics and socialist anti-Semitism both of which were widely accepted by the German people.
The Nazis played up the concept of value being created by labour. Goebbels wrote: "A man becomes a man through labour. It elevates him, makes him great and aware, raises him above all other creatures. It is in the deepest sense creative, productive and culture-producing. Without labour, no food. Without food, no life." The Nazis said the Jews could not produce a culture but only exploit one created by others through labour. Marx said something similar: "Judaism could not create a new world: it could only draw the new creations and conditions of the world into the sphere of its activity, because practical need, the rationale of which is self-interest, is passive and does not expand at will but finds itself enlarged as a result of the continuous development of social conditions." The socialist Pierre Proudhon agreed: "The Jew is by temperament an anti producer, neither farmer nor an industrialist... He is an intermediary, always fraudulent and parasitic."
The Nazis, like the Socialists before them, looked at the success of the Jews as proof of their evil intentions. The fact that Jews were successful was a constant note in Hitler's symphony. But it wasn't unique to them as shown by these remarks from Mark Twain, almost 60 years earlier:
"In Berlin a few years ago, I read a speech which frankly urged the expulsion of the Jews from Germany, and the agitator's reason was... that eighty-five percent of the successful lawyers in Berlin were Jews, and about the same percentage of the great and lucrative business of all sorts in Germany were in the hands of the Jewish race! Isn't it an amazing confession? It is was but another way of saying that in a population of 48,000,000 of whom only 500,000 were ...Jews, eighty-five percent of the brains were lodged in the Jews... The man claimed that in Berlin, the banks, the newspapers, the theatres, the great mercantile shipping, mining and manufacturing interests... were in the hands of the Jews. Here in Vienna last summer, an agitator said that all these disastrous results were true of Austria-Hungary also; and in fierce language he demanded the expulsion of the Jews. When politicians come out without a blush... in this frank manner, unrebuked, it is a very good indication that they... know where to fish for votes. ...His [the Jew's] success has made the whole human race his enemy."
The Nazis rode on the coat tails of Marx and anti-Semite socialists. They only changed the appeal by adding some coarse nationalism to the brew. The proof that the Jews were exploiting workers was shown in their success. The Left-wing lexicon today still assumes a stagnant pie where the increase in the wealth of some comes at the expense of others. Under socialism there is no wealth creation just wealth redistribution. This idea is still found in the current anti-globalisation movement.
The fact that a tiny number of Jews dominated certain profession was proof that they, in fact, controlled the arms of government. It was assumed only government intervention can allow people to succeed so the Jews, by succeeding, proved they controlled government. Any disproportionate representation of Jews in a profession was proof of the Jewish conspiracy. And the Nazis had the statistics to prove disproportional representation. The Nazi propaganda brochure "Why Aryanisation?" stated: "The motto of this work is: Let the numbers speak." The numbers were the percentage of Jews in various professions. In 1935 the Nazi Institute for the Study of the Jewish Problem published a book "The Jews in German" which was a catalogue of how Jews were more successful than Gentiles. Thus when the Nuremberg laws were passed Hitler could justify them by claiming that the "legislation is not anti Jewish, but pro-German."
The academic success of Jews was the reason that Nazism dominated the universities before it worked its way into society in general. Since a disproportionately large number of Jews qualified for university the Nazis demanded that quotas be imposed and that Jews be excluded from university to make room for students with lower academic standards. The British ambassador to Germany wrote at the time: "It is only natural that the academic youth of this country should bitterly resent the success of the Jews... The anti-Semitic Nazi party comprises in its rank most of the academic youth of this country for that very reason."
The Jews could never be good Socialists, said Hitler, since socialism "is entirely alien to the Jew. The Jew will always be the born champion of private capital". Hitler said the basic drive in the Jew was toward "Manchester liberalism" or laissez faire capitalism. The African-American Marxist W.E.B. DeBuois wrote a series of newspaper articles on Nazi Germany during a visit there. He wrote: "Germany today is next to Russia the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world..."
The Nazis never tired of lamenting the success of Jewish entrepreneurs. And they bolstered their case by returning over and over to the Marxist concept of manual labour.
The labour theory of value was regurgitated by the National Socialist repeatedly to justify their attacks on Jews. Hitler in a speech to the Reichstag warned in 1939: "The Jewish race will have to adapt itself to productive work as other nations do, or sooner or later it will succumb to a crisis of inconceivable magnitude."(187) When the Nazis unleashed thugs to attack Jews the idea of labour again reared its ugly head. Historian Alan Bullock quoted a description of one such incident: "SA men dragged an elderly Jewish worker and his wife through the applauding crowd. Tears rolled down the cheeks of the old woman... I could see how the old man... tired to stroke her hand. 'Work for the Jews. At last, work for the Jews,' howled the crowd. 'We thank our Fuhrer, he has made work for the Jews!'."
But this hearkens right back to the Socialists of the previous century. As Pierre Prodhoun said: "The Jew has remained a Jew, a parasitic race, enemy of work, devoted to financial speculation and bank usury."
The Nazi house of horrors was built with bricks manufactured by Marxists. The entire anti-Semitic movement of Europe of that era was built on Marx's labour theory of value and its derivative: that entrepreneurs, speculators, bankers, etc. exploit the workers and steal a portion of the value they create for themselves. Hitler was always an opportunists and like most opportunists he used what was provided to him by others. He never really manufactured his own ideology at all. His socialism came from Marx. And he took his anti-Semitism from a large collection of varied socialists whose vicious anti Jewish rhetoric would later make Hitler look like a moderate. He adapted this Left-wing agenda with a dose of nationalist fervour which became popular as a response to the humiliation forced on the German people by the Allies after World War I.
Hitler's nationalism was a reaction to the times and circumstances of Germany after World War I. But the heart and soul of his movement was forged in the previous century and the blacksmith was Karl Marx.
Jim Peron is the Executive Director of the Institute for Liberal Values, the editor of the book The Liberal Tide, and the author of the forthcoming book 'The Road Not Taken: Resolving the Crisis on the Roads.'
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Institute for Liberal Values, Friday September 10th 2010. |
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