Petty: The Plot Against Civilization pp. 181-186

 Webster imagines a strange alliance between Bismark and the Jewish conspiracy. We have to remember that an alliance between a German leader and a Jewish group only looks really strange because we are living post WWII; otherwise, we might just have a case of Bismark reaching out to a banker who happens to be Jewish. Luckily (?) we get some actual details from her.

The person that Bismark found was Ferdinand Lasalle. She introduces Lasalle as, “the son of a rich Hebrew Merchant…” who was “tormented from his youth by hatred of the Christian races, whose blood even as a schoolboy he hoped to shed.” This information comes from a biography of Lasalle by Georg Brandes. If you were a student of mine, you should know the name of Brandes. Brandes is the person that wrote an influential biography of William Shakespeare. It was so influential that it forced Sigmund Freud to become a Shakespeare denier since Brandes puts the date of Hamlet’s writing before John Shakespeare died thus throwing Freud’s analysis of Hamlet in “On the Interpretation of Dreams” into the garbage fire.

Brandes has chops as a biographer so I’m willing to trust the source. I am not however, willing to trust Webster’s ability to quote accurately. Lasalle is a revolutionary in Germany that much is true, he’s also Jewish, and from a merchant family. The other details are suspect. Webster gives us this confusingly punctuated sentence, “Lasalle early embarked on a revolutionary career. ‘Congenitally idle,’ dishonest, revengeful, an avowed atheist, Lasalle declared himself a ‘revolutionary by principle, who ‘would not hesitate at a Reign of Terror as a means to secure his ends.’”

You have to pay attention because Webster tosses the quotation marks around so that it seems like all of this comes from the Brandes book, but it doesn’t. The ‘dishonest, revengeful, and atheist’ comments all come outside the quotation marks. She’s added them. The Brandes book, doesn’t fix him as this character. He was a Revolutionary and he seemed to be pretty into his cultural heritage but there’s nothing that would indicate a special hatred of Christians. In fact, toward the end of his life, he would write, “two things in the world are my special objects of hatred—journalists and Jews, and I am both.”

Lasalle becomes a revolutionary, pins himself to Bismark and tries to introduce universal suffrage to the Prussian leader. Lasalle would then meet two men: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

This is some proper socialism now. No more of this weird French proto-Socialist thought, we’ve got the originals right here. It’s too good of a coincidence for Webster to pass up so she spends some time trying to make us fear the trio. She calls Engels, Lasalle’s “German Friend;” but Engels hated Lasalle because he thought Lasalle was a pompous ass. Now, if you know, two die-hard socialist one of those people is a pompous ass. It’s just part of the deal.

Here’s what I don’t quite understand: why is any of this in the book? Lasalle was a Socialist agitator who wanted German unification. But we have not been told why this is a bad thing, or how this is proof of a conspiracy. I have said this in a few posts before and I’ll repeat it now: if Webster wants to write a book which says Socialism is bad, fine. I’ll disagree and probably get to the point where I figure out that she doesn’t know what “socialism” actually is; but it’s a position to take. She wants to make everything about a conspiracy because she’s got no ammunition to fire. Marx was Jewish (sort of) and a Socialist, Lasalle was the same, therefore it’s part of a plan.

She makes a good point when she says that no one reads Das Kapital rather they read the Communist Manifesto. This is not only true, but it was the intention. The manifesto was written for the common person. Das Kapital is the intellectual underpinning for the Manifesto. In much the same way that Thomas Paine’s writings for the American revolution are not the intellectual arguments, they’re for the popular crowd.

It gets silly when she tries to explain why it’s bad, “here in plain language are set forth the doctrines laid down in the code of Weishaupt—the abolition of inheritance, of marriage and the family, of patriotism, of all religion, the institution of the community of women, and the communal education of children by the state.”

So, this is in “plain language”, but she never quotes it. If it is so obvious then show us the parallels between Weishaupt and Marx. Let’s look at what she’s saying is so terrible—the last two are equal rights for women and public education. She’s against those. Weishaupt was against theocratic governments and Marx would agree, but the destruction of the family? That’s not in either.

It’s also weird that she says “Marxian” and not “Marxist.”

Then she gets petty and stupid, “In neither work had Marx originated anything.”

Her argument is that the ideas that Marx publishes actually have precursors to writers in the French revolution. Those ideas were picked up by people like Babeuf, Blanc, and Cabet. The Marxist idea that labour is the source of all wealth wasn’t even Marx’s either, it was an idea generated by English Philosophers like John Locke, Scottish Philosopher Adam Smith, and Welsh Philosopher Robert Owen. She points out that Marx probably got all of these ideas when he worked in the reading room at the British Museum, in fact one could easily find all of these authors in that reading room. She writes, “Posing as the prophet of a new gospel, he was in reality nothing but a plagiarist, and plagiarist without the common honesty to pay tribute to the sources when he drew his material.”

So Webster doesn’t understand how research works. Marx isn’t a plagiarist he’s an academic. His dissertation was on the atomic theory of Democritus and Epicurus; Marx would have been very familiar with all of the people Webster just mentioned because he was inspired by them. This isn’t a mystery, and Marx directly addresses some of Adam Smith’s positions. Claiming that Marx hasn’t contributed to anything because he stood on the shoulders of those who came before doesn’t make a person a plagiarist. If it did, then Webster is a plagiarist herself.

She is claiming that he doesn’t attribute other thoughts in his writing; this is a baseless claim. A person plagiarizes when they try and pass off someone else’s writings as their own—either directly copying the text or paraphrasing it in such a way that the reader would think it was their own novel writing. There is nothing in Marx like this. Yes, the labor theory of value originates in Locke, but Marx doesn’t pretend that the idea is his.

Her final critique on Marx is that he took money from Engels. When Marx left Germany and lived in England, he was in poverty. Engels, the son of a wealthy textile factory owner, would be his partner and benefactor. What’s Webster’s point? That a true Socialist must be poor? This is a silly argument that I’ve heard over and over again by people that fail to understand how to make an argument. I know plenty of Christians who haven’t sold all their possessions and live in poverty, does that make Christianity false? No. It’s an ad hominem. Webster has nothing to attack Marxism with, so she has to resort to these kinds of attacks. Even during her lifetime there were plenty of academic criticism of socialism and of Marxism. Maybe she should have hit up the British Museum’s reading room to find some.