The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

England was another case in point. It is true that the French Revolution had frightened the governing classes, so that they banned Paine’s Rights of Man and tried to repress radicalism. But they were sensible and moderate about it. In fact, after Napoleon had been beaten, young Tories took the lead in abolishing some of the horribly repressive laws which had been enacted to deal with the great crime wave of the previous century, and to allow greater political freedom. While Charles X was trying to take away the vote from the French middle classes, English reformers were doing their best to extend it to anybody who paid a rent of ten pounds a year; in 1832 they succeeded, and the first Reform Bill was passed. In 1867, a nee reform bill gave workers in the cities a right to vote. By 1884, every male had a right to vote. So although there were agitations and riots in Britain, there was no explosion. By 1800, Robert Owen had set up his own socialist community at New Lanark and demonstrated that co-operative principles actually work. And in the second half of the century, upper class socialists such as John Ruskin, William Morris and H. M. Hyndman had turned socialism into something almost as respectable as Methodism or Quakerism.

Unfortunately, for better or for worse, society in Russia, France, Prussia and Austria was far more polarised. It was divided into the aristocracy and the people in rather the same way that society on a farm is divided into people and animals. This, unfortunately, was a fact. Socialists, out of the goodness of their hearts, stood for the working man. But they then went on to make rather silly assertions, such as Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s dictum that ‘Property is theft’, which made the ruling classes grind their teeth. No zoologist had yet observed that all living creatures have their own ‘territory’, and that therefore property, far from being theft, is deeply embedded in animal instinct. But the non-socialists felt in their bones that these arguments about a past Golden Age, when Adam delved and Eve span and everybody loved one another, were woolly-minded nonsense. And meanwhile these socialists – or, as they were now calling themselves, revolutionaries – were asserting that society would never be peaceful and stable until all the rich had been robbed of their wealth and all the land was held in common. It was impossible to take them seriously. All that could be done was to banish them or shoot them. But that only made things worse. In 1825, a group of Russian officers known as the Decembrists – because that was the month of their revolt – tried to overthrow the new tsar, Nicholas I, and obtain a constitution; Nicholas was forced to shoot the ringleaders and exile the rest. Russia had been drifting in the direction of liberalism, but after the Decembrist revolt, she became more reactionary than Prussia or Austria. Nicholas’s successor, Alexander II, actually took the tremendous step of abolishing serfdom (1861), and was assassinated by a revolutionary for his pains.

So it would be an oversimplification to regard Metternich, Talleyrand and the rest as reactionaries who wanted to suppress all freedom of speech. They wanted what everyone else wanted: peace and prosperity. And they honestly regarded the socialists as criminals who were using a specious false logic to justify their attempts at robbery. They recalled what had happened during the French Revolution, when the power had simply fallen into the hands of a new set of tyrants, and assumed that what the socialists wanted was to seize the power for themselves.

They were by no means entirely wrong. A case in point was the German agitator Karl Marx, whom the tolerant English had allowed to settle in London. He was the son of a wealthy Jewish lawyer (who in turn was the son of a rabbi), and had spent his childhood in pleasant and elegant surroundings in Trier, in the Rhineland. He also became engaged to the girl next door, Jenny, the daughter of Baron von Westphalen. His father wanted him to be a lawyer; Marx believed he was destined to be a great poet, a second Goethe. He studied first at the University of Bonn, then at Berlin. Here there was great intellectual ferment, and Marx plunged into it with delight. The philosopher who interested the younger generation more than any other was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel had studied world history, and had reached the conclusion that, in spite of the cruelty and misery, mankind was slowly evolving towards a deeper sense of freedom. That is, history shows the struggles of ‘spirit’ to impose itself on a world of matter. Marx, who was never one to accept second place, tried to carry Hegel’s philosophy one stage farther. The problem was that he was profoundly and savagely pessimistic, and believed that the soul had no existence. So his own version of Hegel’s evolutionism was totally materialistic.

What Marx hoped, was to become a professor of philosophy and to play a leading role in the intellectual ferment of his time – like his friend Bruno Bauer, whose ‘rational theology’ was causing intense controversy. Unfortunately, most of central Europe at the time was in the grip of the ‘Metternich system’ – police spies, rigid supervision of anyone in government service or education, and suppression of ‘new’ ideas. Bauer soon lost his job as a professor, and Marx’s hopes of a comfortable academic career faded. He became the editor of a liberal newspaper, and soon had the circulation soaring with his articles attacking various injustices – such as the punishment of peasants who picked up dead wood in the forest. When Marx attacked the government of Tsar Nicholas of Russia, the newspaper was banned.

Marx moved to Paris in 1843, became a friend of the poet Heine, and continued writing about socialism – or, as he preferred to call it, communism. He was undoubtedly a man of powerful intellect, and impressed everyone with whom he came into contact. He was also a bully, a tremendously dominant man who felt that he deserved to be famous and was already deeply embittered about the oppression that was forcing him into poverty. (His father by now was dead and Marx soon spent his inheritance.) Like Voltaire, he was determined to teach his own country a lesson. It was in Paris that he evolved one of his most fundamental concepts – alienation, the worker’s total sense of non-participation in society. Alienation, says Marx in a manuscript of 1844, is the inevitable lot of man because of the institution of private property; only when this has been abolished will he feel free and happy. This was, of course, an absurdly unrealistic assessment of the human condition, combining Rousseau’s fallacy about the past ‘golden age’ with Proudhon’s zoologically inaccurate notion that property is somehow ‘unnatural’. But then, Marx’s philosophy was an expression of his violently emotional temperament; he was not interested in philosophical truth, but in achieving results. In his Theses on Feuerbach of 1845, he stated: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world in different ways; the point is to change it.’ It was the kind of statement that appeals to every young man who has not yet found his natural place in the world. Marx also defined what he meant by man. ‘The essence of man is not an abstraction inherent in each particular individual [i.e. a soul]. His real nature is the ensemble of social relations.’ This is to say, man is not just a social animal – as Aristotle had stated; he is nothing more than a part of a vast web of social relations. He has no existence apart from other men. And what of other men? They have no existence apart from him. Society is like a house of cards, all leaning against one another. But if men have no free will, if they are no more than twigs floating on a stream, then what is the stream? Marx’s answer – which certainly had the merit of originality – was: economic forces. Throughout history, men have imagined they are driven by ideals of truth and justice and religion; in fact, the philosophy of Plato was merely an expression of the economic forces in the Mediterranean in 500 B.C.; Christianity was an expression of the economic forces in the Roman Empire in 100 A.D.; Luther’s revolt was an expression of the economic forces of 1500 A.D. – the proof being that Luther was enraged by the Church’s financial skulduggery, and that the peasants used Lutheranism as an excuse to revolt against the landowners… Marx’s new friend Friedrich Engels, son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, later admitted wryly that Marx had gone too far in his emphasis on economic factors, but by that time it was too late.

Marx’s mainspring was hatred; in a book called The German Ideology he wrote gleefully about the coming revolution, ‘when the reflection of burning cities is seen in the heavens… and the guillotine beats time, and the maddened crowd screams “It’s going, it’s going”, and “self-consciousness” is hanged on lamp-posts.’ Oddly enough, he hated many of his fellow revolutionaries almost as much as he hated the bourgeoisie. Their love of mankind filled him with rage. In 1846, Marx conducted his first ‘purge’. The victim was an idealistic socialist called George Weitling, son of a laundress who had spent some time in prison and lived among workmen in slums. At a meeting of the revolutionaries in Brussels, Marx launched a violent attack on Weitling, saying that his idealism had only caused workers to lose their jobs, and that his socialism was sentimental and woolly-minded. Weitling retorted that he had nothing to learn about socialism from a man who spent all his time theorising in his study. The barb went home. Marx rushed up and down the room roaring with rage – he was never noted for self-control – and Weitling became aware that the rest of the comrades were looking at him with grave disapproval. Marx never afterwards lost an opportunity to denounce Weitling as ‘an abject fraud’. Soon afterwards Marx turned all the force of his invective against a friend of Weitling’s, Hermann Kriege, who favoured brotherly love and women’s rights. Kriege also regarded private property as natural. Marx thundered against Kriege in a pamphlet which had the desired effect of making many socialists feel Kriege was a traitor to the movement. If not, why should Marx denounce a fellow-socialist? The answer was that Marx was cast in the same mould as Savonarola and Calvin; anyone who preached socialism without accepting his ‘scientific’ doctrines was obstructing the course of progress.