The Diabolical Imagination of Karl Marx: II

For anyone wanting to know the mind of the man who unleashed communism on the world.

Karl Marx and his wife Jenny (née) von Westphalen. Jenny, in love with Marx and the poetry he would write her, grew up wealthy but was eventually forced to sell even the silver and linens she had received as wedding gifts. Despite Jenny’s pleadings, Marx never worked any job except as a professional revolutionary.

The little-known essay that Marx wrote for his high school exit examination is worth more than entire biographies written on the man. If you’d like to put your finger on the heartbeat of modernity, read this little gem. In it, Marx waxes poetical about the entire field of human conduct. It is in response to the question, “How should a young man choose his profession?”

What do young people agonize over more than the thought of choosing the noblest, most “meaningful” profession? This is the reason why we can’t find a plumber or an electrician and also why the federal government is (or, was) canceling the student loan debt for unemployed Gender Studies majors. It is because, like Marx, these young romantics believe that the fate of the entire world hangs in the balance until they make a career choice.

The wrong choice, Marx avers, will “destroy [a man’s] whole life.” But if he chooses right, if he is driven by the desire for “the well-being of mankind,” then he has the potential to change the world. Is this not what so many high-school and college students are deluded to believe today?

“History regards as great men,” writes young Marx, “only those who have ennobled themselves for the common good. Experience demonstrates that the happiest are those who make most men happy.”

We can perceive the deep irony of this statement. Marx’s sentimental humanitarianism that shuns the particular in favor of the abstract is what led him to his theory of communism—the theory that was supposed to “make most men happy,” and yet justified the slaughter of millions.

In my previous essay in this series, I brought to light some of the deeply Romantic themes in his poetry and the connection between Romantic love and the desire for annihilation. Here, we can see the connection between sentimental-humanitarianism and the libido dominandi, the will to dominate.

Among the humanitarians, there seems always to be a connection between “loving humanity” and hating flesh-and-blood neighbors. Rousseau was perhaps the first outspoken humanitarian misanthrope who loved humanity and yet detested actual people. Marx seems to have inherited this Romantic defect.

Interestingly, Marx admits that a man may, in fact, be deluded. He may think that he is doing God’s will, but in reality he is only doing his own will. “But how can we recognize it when we ourselves are the source of the enthusiasm?” Marx asks. Here is another clear echo of the vagabondage of the imagination that is so characteristic of Romanticism. For Marx, having discarded traditional Christianity and given in to a Romantic ethic of pure emotionalism, it is not at all clear how we could be certain “whether what we regarded as a divine summons was not really self-deception.” To distinguish between the two would require a humanistic, Christian imagination that Marx lacks.

This essay and Marx’s poetry, which most Marx scholars dismiss as youthful excesses, reveal a defining part of Marx’s imagination. They are perfectly in keeping with his political writings, where these sentiments find systematic expression.

There is a significant connection between the Romantic mind that spurns all control, longing abstractly for the infinite and that same mind tending toward madness and megalomania. We see this combination almost undiluted in Marx.

Marx himself seemed to understand the danger of men “without chests,” to borrow the apt expression of C. S. Lewis. “[I]f the fury of ambition takes hold of us,” Marx writes in this essay, “then reason may no longer be able to hold it in check, and then ambition hurls us wherever our turbulent instincts call us. A man can then no longer decide his position—only chance and illusion can decide for him.”

Marx is correct. A man that rejects traditional notions of morality and restraint, at the mercy of his own ever-shifting “enthusiasm,” is indeed the plaything of ambition. He is dangerously prone to the übermensche mentality. The shifting sands of feeling and emotionalism are no foundation for sound ethical character.

He concludes,

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.”

Some of the most romantic, sentimental-humanitarian lines ever penned belong to history’s foremost philosophical exponent of political terror. But one need not be a mass murderer to be tempted by sentimental humanitarianism. It can be comforting to think that control over one’s impulses is not necessary for sound moral character. The romantic would have us believe that self-expression, not self-restraint, is all that is really needed for world peace. And yet this romantic ethic is behind much of the culture’s degeneration, and arguably many modern wars.

Marx’s short ballads, “Savage Songs,” were reason enough for calling his imagination ‘diabolical,’ but Marx’s poetic tragedy Oulanem reveals the extent of the man’s embrace of evil. Marx is no run-of-the-mill atheist, boring and lacking in imagination. Marx flaunts God’s creation and the order of the world, which helps to explain his theory of communism, which is nothing other than an attempt to reconstruct reality.

In Oulanem, which is an anagram of “Emmanuel,” Marx tells the story of of two male lovers, one younger and one older, who are traveling in the Alps. The two men find no room at an inn and accept the invitation of an Italian, Pertini, to stay with him. Pertini realizes that Oulanem is an old enemy of his, and so he desires to corrupt his companion, Lucindo, in order to exact his revenge.

The tale is written with some skill and a degree of psychological insight. One biographer notes that “Marx evidently knew a good deal about corrupting boys, or else he had watched the process closely.” All of the characters in the drama are dominated by evil. One soliloquy by Oulanem stands out:

Ruined! Ruined! My time has clean run out!

The clock has stopped, the pygmy house has crumbled,

Soon I shall embrace eternity to my breast, and soon

I shall howl gigantic curses at mankind.

Ha! Eternity! She is our eternal grief,

An indescribably and immeasurable Death,

Vile artificiality conceived to scorn us,

Ourselves being clockwork, blindly mechanical,

Made to be the fool-calendars of Time and Space,

Having no purpose save to happen, to be ruined,

So that there shall be something to ruin.

Marx reveals the darkest side of romanticism, the aspect of the romantic imagination that, upon realizing that our idealism cannot bring happiness “to millions,” despairs utterly. This is the bipolar romantic imagination. It is one of the most pernicious forces that our children will encounter in this era. We are surrounded by nihilism in large part because of this type of romantic thinking. The despair that is evident in depressed college-students and 20-somethings is partly because, with Karl Marx, they believe that they have been put on this earth not to bring greater glory to God, but to elicit the “hot tears of noble people” through their emotive services to mankind.

Oulanem concludes his lengthy soliloquy, of which I have given only a taste, by saying,

We roar our melancholy hymns to the Creator

With scorn on our brows! Shall the sun ever burn it away?

Presumptuous curses from excommunicate souls!

Eyes that annihilate with poisoned glances

Gleam exultantly, the leaden world holds us fast.

And we are chained, shattered, empty, frightened,

Eternally chained to this marble block of Being,

Chained, eternally chained, eternally.

And the worlds drag us with them on their rounds,

Howling their songs of death, and we—

We are the apes of a cold God.

Was Marx a conduit for demonic activity, not in a symbolic sense, but in a literal sense? He seems to have opened his soul to the forces of the underworld. This is the argument of Richard Wurmbrand, a man tortured in prison for years by the Romanian communists, in his book Marx and Satan.

Marx’s writings on communism are often bland, tedious, and poorly written. But here, in his literary works, we see the disposition of Marx’s soul and his affinity for evil and the diabolical. We see where his heart was. As his biographer Robert Payne concludes about Oulanem, “The annihilating judgment, visited on the world and on men, was never far from Marx’s thought.”

The question, then, that many might ask is, how could someone whose imagination dwelt in such hellish places claim to be the champion of mankind, the savior of the world? But therein lies the answer. Rejecting God and His Creation, Marx puts himself forth as the messiah who will correct the work of a “cold God.” There is no way to be a sentimental humanitarian without also being a megalomaniac. The very nature of this romantic ideal—proposing to alter the conditions of reality according to one’s own private ideas—presupposes an arrogance that knows no bounds.

I will conclude with a thought that I had when reading “The Player” for the first time. It struck me that the wild violinist, who scorns God for not appreciating his musical genius (“God neither knows nor honors art”) and rebels against Him, concludes with a line strikingly similar to the declaration of Paul VI. “The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,” Marx’s narrator says. “Satan’s smoke has made its way into the temple of God through some crack,” declared the Pope who oversaw the Council that sliced and diced the ancient liturgy with wild abandon. Marx, despite his clouded and perverted imagination, aesthetically connects rebellion against God with Hell. Did Paul VI make this connection, too?