Did Karl Marx openly advocate violence? (or against it?)

Upvote:-1

Marx believed, even in democracies, that violent revolutionary terror was required. This due to the fact that Marxist revolutionaries would never achieve a majority thru democratic means, thus effecting change toward a utopian communist paradise.

Upvote:2

There's a trivial part and an unanswerable part to the question. The trivial part - did Marx think that a violent revolution was the only way to bring a better society into being? Yep, he did. It's been pointed out correctly that the American revolutionaries also believed this. No American politician in the 19th century was saying that letter-writing or civil disobedience would have dislodged Lord North back in 1776.

Less obviously, but just as inescapably, this was also true in Britain, where Marx spent most of his life. The political system there was the product of the Revolution of 1688 - this established parliamentary supremacy, which from about 1760 virtually all of the ruling class and most of the commoners believed in (that is, Jacobites went from a sizable minority to a tiny fringe).

Like the American war of independence, the post-1688 settlement in Britain was achieved violently and illegally. We could say that the rulers of both countries 'believed in violence' as a way to achieve positive change. And both they and their predecessors also believed in violence as a way to prevent changes which they did not want.

Despite being in some respects the least despotic of the wealthy countries during Marx's life, Britain, France and the United States were not yet liberal democracies. In modern times it is possible in these countries to effect major political change without killing people. Nobody thought that this was remotely feasible in Marx's time.

The first part, above, is trite.

The second part, whether Marx would have approved of the murderous rule of Lenin and his imitators, is unanswerable. Marx died in 1883, Lenin came to power in 1917.

Intellectual honesty demands I point out that Lenin 'believed in violence' as a way of maintaining power to a far greater extent than Thiers or Gladstone or Cleveland did. There's no doubt Lenin 'believed in violence', and not the 19th century kid glove version where numbers of political executions are measured in the dozens or hundreds. Under Lenin they numbered thousands.

Asking whether Marx would have approved of the Cheka is like asking if Edmund Burke would have approved of General Franco (150,000 victims). Undoubtedly many of Burke's heirs did, and many didn't. Burke was not there to ask.

Likewise, there are many political parties today that claim to follow some version of Marx's ideas. Many of those operate in democracies and have participated in coalition governments - such as the current government of Spain. No gulags yet.

Undoubtedly many political parties accurately track Lenin's interpretation of Marx, which means that, yes, they believe in violence.

Which interpretation of Marx's beliefs is right? That's a question for discussing, not answering. You certainly can't divine it by what Marx said or didn't say about revolutions.

More post

Search Posts

Related post