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We have the receipts to prove it.

I was recently taken aback by a lengthy piece that I read (very oddly) in the Wall Street Journal. Jacob Berger is a professor of philosophy at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. He authored an article in the WSJ on January 23 entitled “Why MAGA Folks Should Read Marx,” in which he wrote:

[G]iven the history of murderous communist regimes like Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, it is tempting to infer that Marx encouraged tyranny. But Marx did not advocate violence or political repression, and he would be appalled by the atrocities committed in his name. He pressed for revolution, but he envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic, like the Velvet Revolution that freed Czechoslovakia from Soviet rule in 1989.

The Marx to whom Professor Berger was referring was Karl, not Groucho. So, I read that paragraph again, thinking perhaps my eyes were playing tricks on me. Karl Marx “did not advocate violence or political repression”? That is not my recollection, and I think I’ve read everything the bohemian scribbler ever wrote, whether with pens or crayons. He “envisioned that the ideal transition from capitalism to communism would be peaceful and democratic”? Did I miss something in all that Marxist stuff I read? Marx called for a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” Can dictatorship ever be consensual and serene?

My good friend and Spectator editor Paul Kengor urges people to read The Communist Manifesto. That’s where Marx and his sugar daddy collaborator Friedrich Engels attacked capitalism and sketched their vision for a socialist/communist future. Paul echoes a famous quip from Ronald Reagan: “How do you tell if someone is a communist? He’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. How do you tell an anti-communist? He’s one who understands Marx and Lenin.”

What seemed to be unadulterated revisionism in Professor Berger’s article prompted me to take up Paul’s suggestion. I read The Communist Manifesto again for probably the third or fourth painful time. I arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Professor Berger does not understand it.

Despite left-wing academia’s frequent embrace of Marx, The Manifesto comes across to a reasonable and thoughtful person as mindboggling nonsense. It’s gobbledygook writ large as if cooked up by nincompoops. It’s the sort of thing one would expect from a witch doctor who misdiagnoses the problem and then prescribes all the wrong medications, who thinks the patient who suffers from a toothache needs his feet removed.

The Manifesto consists of one oversimplification after another: Everything, including what and how a person thinks, reduces to the rigid economic “class” into which he was born. Everybody is either an oppressor or a helpless lump of the oppressed. Life is all about conflict.

The book’s generalizations are so sweeping and unsupported as to be ridiculous and meaningless, such as the claim that if you are a male capitalist employer (a “bourgeois” in Marx’s pejorative terminology), you see your wife as nothing more than “a mere instrument of production.” At the same time, you and your fellow male capitalist employers “take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives.” People are thus reduced to caricatures and homogenized in the Marxian blender so that no exceptions can corrupt the preconceived stereotypes that serve the Marxian narrative.

At one point, Marx and Engels sputter this fatuous bunk: “But does wage labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit.” That’s right. “Not a bit,” the two pseudo-intellectuals proclaim. Nobody anywhere knows of anybody working for wages who owns a thing after they get their paycheck. Nobody has ever seen or heard of a worker who saves and invests, starts a business, or improves his economic condition by accumulating property.

Oh, I thought, I’m sure Marx and Engels have footnoted this. I’ll look at the bottom of the page to discover the source of this absurdity… Oops, no footnotes. None! The authors of this spleen-venting screed labeled a “manifesto” expect you to take their word for it. And you’d better not disagree because, they assert in shameless arrogance, “The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint are not deserving of serious examination.”

Let’s return to the paragraph I cited from Professor Berger’s article. He wants us to believe that Marx was a peaceful fellow. In re-reading The Communist Manifesto, I looked for anything indicating Marx opposed violence. I found otherwise—on page after page.

Marx despised religion but postured as a prophet. History is marching inevitably toward a communist future in which all government would magically “wither away” after a period of a socialist “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He never explained what would prompt anybody with total power to suddenly proclaim of his own volition, “See you later, I’m outta here.” Did Marx know this by using tarot cards, palm reading, or a Ouija board? Did he read animal entrails? From where did his super-confident knowledge of the future come?

Don’t ask me. I don’t believe in witchcraft or soothsaying folderol. But it’s obvious from The Manifesto that Marx (and his pal Engels) saw violence to achieve the communist objective as a given. Consider this paragraph:

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Can centralizing all instruments of production in the hands of the State be achieved peacefully? Professor Berger may think so, but Marx did not. Read on:

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.

That’s word salad for “We’ll have to kick the s— out of a lot of people.”

The Manifesto claims that “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Perhaps Marx somehow saw a future Professor Berger skipping over that, so he reinforced it with this assurance: “[Y]ou reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so: that is just what we intend.”

Marx criticizes socialists who do not understand the necessity of revolutionary violence. They naively “wish to attain their ends by peaceful means” that he says are “necessarily doomed to failure.” Does this paragraph from The Manifesto make you think of the non-violent Mahatma Gandhi or a maniac with violent proclivities?

In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.…They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.

The “forcible overthrow” of not some but “all existing social conditions.” How could Professor Berger get away with claiming that a man who put his name to such a chilling statement was a peacenik?

Perhaps the most famous part of The Manifesto is the list of pithy declarations of what the communists want done—known as the “Ten Planks” of the document. Are they mere helpful tips for better living, or are they prescriptions for the violence that Professor Berger denies? Let’s look at just a few of them:

Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. How is this “abolition” supposed to happen? Either everybody voluntarily hands over their belongings to the government, or the government shows up with guns and seizes them. The former is children’s fairy tale stuff; the latter is the only realistic option, and it is hardly non-violent.

A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. Don’t pay your taxes. You’ll find out whether taxes are voluntary contributions or not. You won’t even have to read The Communist Manifesto to discover what Marx intended here.

Abolition of all rights of inheritance. How do you keep Mom and Dad from passing stuff on to their kids? Give them a pamphlet explaining why they shouldn’t? Good luck with that. I think you’d better bring guns.

Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. Nothing to see here. Surely Marx intended for such confiscations to be “mostly peaceful” at the least.

Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. Once the government takes over radio, television, the newspapers, the Internet, and every other method by which we convey our thoughts or our bodies, it will allow us to say anything and go anywhere we want. Wake up, Professor Berger.

Equal liability of all to work. The establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. When Marxists are in charge, you’re damn well gonna work. It might even be as a peon in some big, conscripted farm army.

Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. Remember the scene in the 1985 film The Killing Fields, in which Cambodian communists forced city dwellers into the rice patties? They took Marx seriously. He wanted the state to decide where you live and work. Can that possibly be a non-violent exercise?

Alas, methinks I belabor the point. Read Paul Kengor’s The Devil and Karl Marx if you need more evidence that Karl Marx was not just a Red Mr. Rogers.

Will someone at Lycoming College call out Professor Berger for intellectual malpractice? Maybe some of his fellow academics? I’m not holding my breath.

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This article was published by FEE, the Foundation For Economic Education, and is reproduced with permission.