![]() His mother bitterly complained that she wished that her son would “accumulate capital instead of just writing about it.” Even as he extolled the evils of capitalist industry, there is no evidence he ever visited a factory at any point in his miserable life. (And today, Black Lives Matter, a Marxist organization, has received almost $2 billion in corporate contributions.) Marx was allergic to work, it seems, and never held a steady job. Lazy and like socialists of any era, Marx did not mind accepting monetary handouts from wealthy capitalists while criticizing the means by which they had acquired the wealth. (So it is today with Black Lives Matter, where one once found all of this restated in oblique terms on their website.) No one could justly say he was not forewarned. Much as Mein Kampf (1925) would be a bald statement of Hitler’s intentions should he ever attain power, The Communist Manifesto is likewise clear in stating the objectives of communists (i.e., socialists) should they ever attain power. The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour. In another passage of that dangerous little book, he writes,Ībolish the family!… The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital…. Marx had sought the overthrow of governments throughout Europe, and in the ensuing turmoil of 1848, he was forced to flee the continent. Of course, revolution had always been on his mind. The man with a beard so wild that it might have landed him on a Kansas album cover were he born a century later had revolution on his mind when he moved from Paris to London in 1849. It was into this combustible atmosphere that Karl Marx stepped. Black factory smoke choked the air, and coal dust filled lungs. The urban poor crowded the slums and populated the novels of Charles Dickens. The island nation was in the throes of the bare-knuckled phase of the Industrial Revolution, which brought with it a special kind of human degradation. ![]() Whether it was David Livingstone searching for the source of the Nile or Charles Darwin writing On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, Britain was at the forefront of all that was considered progress.īut the Britain of this era convulsed with the problems endemic to massive social change - so much so that an air of revolution lingered like some ominous storm gathering on the horizon, threatening to engulf this peaceful kingdom as it had intermittently done on the continent since the French Revolution in 1789. With Queen Victoria’s missionaries to civilize it and her ministers, armies, and navy to rule it, the British Empire was at its zenith so that the sun literally never set upon it. The London of Marx and Spurgeon was the center of world governance and epoch-defining ideas. While Marx was preaching salvation through bloody revolution, Spurgeon, on the other side of the city, was preaching salvation through the blood and grace of Jesus Christ. Moreover, they were at the height of their powers at the same time. Both were, in a sense, evangelists contending for the souls of men with their competing visions of humanity. It is extraordinary to me that Karl Marx (1818–83) and Charles Spurgeon (1834–92) lived and worked in the same city at the same time.
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