Karl Marx in his own words at 200: Nothing to celebrate, much to remember and condemn

Anti-Semite, racist, advocate of terrorism, and genocide honored in Germany.

Bronze statue of Karl Marx given to German town by Communist regime in China.

On April 13, 2018 an 18-foot bronze statue of Karl Marx was erected in his hometown of Trier, Germany. The statue was a gift from the Communist dictatorship in China to honor the 200th anniversary of the birth of German communist theoretician on May 5th. Communist China has the largest death toll in absolute numbers of any communist regime.

Karl Marx's writings demonstrate that the German philosopher is the father of the Communist ideology that has cost over a 100 million lives, and other endemic problems found in Marxist regimes.  Marx's early formulation of communism is antisemitic and offers a "solution" to the "Jewish Problem."

"Money is the Jealous God of Israel, beside which no other God may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities.  The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of the world. In emancipating itself from hucksterism and money, and thus from real and practical Judaism, our age would emancipate itself...by destroying the empirical essence of Judaism, the Jew will become impossible." Source Karl Marx-Engels Collected Works (London 1975ff),vol. iii,pp146-74

His early defense of using terror, one of the key elements of Totalitarianism is also problematic.

"We are ruthless and ask no quarter from you.  When our turn comes we shall not disguise our terrorism." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-5

"Far from opposing the so-called excesses, those examples of popular vengeance against hated individuals or public buildings which have acquired hateful memories, we must not only condone these examples but lend them a helping hand." Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vii p 239

Karl Marx in the essay “Forced Emigration,” in the New York Daily Tribune, 22 March 1853 seems to view the elimination of classes and races as a necessary part of revolution:

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way. 

In a July 30, 1862 letter to Frederick Engels, his chief benefactor, Marx described nineteenth-century German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, in a racist manner:

The Jewish Nigger Lassalle . . .fortunately departs at the end of this week . . . It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows – he descends from the Negros who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a nigger). Now this combination of Germanness and Jewishness with a primarily Negro substance creates a strange product. The pushiness of the fellow is also nigger-like.

This may explain why the Soviet Union, the first communist regime, allied with Nazi, Germany in 1939 to divide Poland and plunge the world into World War II. It also might explain why 23 years later Fidel Castro would contract former Nazi SS Waffen members to train Cuban troops in 1962.

There is much to remember and condemn on the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx. There is nothing to celebrate.