Matthew Remsky (17:45)
Now you heard Kengor reference the Marx biographer Robert Paine, who he credits with unearthing the deep, dark secrets of Marx's demonic poetry in his 1971 biography. But I think Kengor should also credit Paine for his one dimensional reading of these works. Here are some choice quotes from Paine. There were times when Marx seemed to be possessed by demons, when rage overflowed in him and became poison, and he seemed to enter into a nightmare quote. He had the devil's view of the world and the devil's malignity. Sometimes he seemed to know that he was accomplishing works of evil. This is kind of incredible for a biographer who's working from, you know, even primary, but mostly secondary sources. 100, you know, 10 years after the guy's death. Amazing insights into the guy's personality and psychology. So what's the point though? Like, what does this poetry criticism have to do with Marx's philosophy? Paine alludes to it with the sentence, sometimes the same words seem to burn through the interminable pages of Marx's work on economic theory. So all the fire and passion and destructiveness of his Faustian poetry was later reflected In Capital, a book in which, quote, one by one the perversities of capitalism were described, but it did not offer any workable alternative. It attempted to destroy, but not to build. Now, to Paine's credit, he does make some begrudging effort to faithfully record Marx's actual thoughts on capitalism and its fatal problems. But Kengor makes no such effort because for him, Karl Marx is a pervert whose ideology stemmed from personal misery and a fatal spiritual flaw. So he offers a religious critique in which Marx's ultimate objective is not to undermine capitalism, but rather the evil or demonic transformation of society as a whole. Kengor calls him a remarkable monster possessed by spirits of wickedness. But how demonic was Marx really? Kengor is a Christian poli sci wonk who thinks Ronald Reagan was a genius and is super happy that Michael Knowles of the Daily Wire wrote the foreword to his book. So I don't expect more than a grade school understanding of these little poems from him. But Peterson cites Goethe in his writing and he built his early career on Jungian psychology with its archetypes and myths and symbols of self transformation through the conflict of opposites. And here, somehow, I wonder why Peterson is missing the clues that one would think he would most easily pick up on, given all his concern for angry and frustrated young men, that these poems are written by a 19 year old who cannot wait to have sex with his lifelong crush. Marx is pumping out bars about illicit desire, demonic temptation, guilt, self loathing and religious dread. The beloved is both muse and victim. He has a fear that his own passion might poison her. And all of these themes so obviously align with the social pressures surrounding the illegal engagement between Marx and Jenny, which crossed class lines and angered both families. Marx was sublimating this tension into Gothic and melodramatic imagery. But Peterson and Kengor's freshman level academic malpractice serves a very important purpose to show that Marx's youthful engagement with Gothic imagery was proof of his literal alignment with demons. So the more they yammer about how demonic Marx was as a teenager, the less they have to talk about what the actual grown up Marxist theory is that they say is destroying the world. So as I mentioned in Kengor's book and his conversation with Peterson, there's no attempt to even summarize what Marxism says. So there's this blend of conspirituality and ad hominem attack in which exactly nothing is said about basic and crucial concepts like surplus value, socialized labor versus privatized profit, what capital actually is, or what commodity fetishism is. And that's really important because the omission of this last issue is just high irony. They are accusing Marx of theological perversion, but they don't realize that this is what Marx is accusing them and all apologists for capitalism of. He's saying that they're all duped by a larger magic. And the big blind spot here is the notion of the fetish, which Dussel says allows Marx to point out that Peterson and Kengor are the real idolaters. Now, the fetish is not an easy idea, so I think it's best to approach it from a common misunderstanding of Marx that's easier to pick apart. Now, this misunderstanding is everywhere now, but it got its first enormous bump from Pope pius IX in 1846, Chapter 3, the Private Property of the Universal Church. In 1846, Pope Pius IX put out an encyclical called Qui Pluribus. The encyclical is one of Pius IX shots over the bow of modernity. And in it he rails against the dangers of rationalism, pantheism, and communism. Now, the Pope doesn't say much about communism directly, except that it is an unspeakable doctrine most opposed to the very natural law. For if this doctrine were accepted, the complete destruction of everyone's laws, government property, and even of human society itself would follow. You know, big if true. But put a pin in property and how it's proximal to natural law in this statement, because together these are doing a lot of work. Now, about the year 1846. This is two years before the manifesto was published, but Pius IX can smell it in the air. In fact, the opening of the manifesto flags this hypervigilance that's ready to strangle socialism in the cradle. At Christmas time, a specter is haunting Europe. Marx and Engels wrote, the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this specter. Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French radicals and German police spies. So these are all of the people who are scared of communism, but but don't really know what it's about. So they go on to say that since there are so many misconceptions out there about the ideology, it's time for a manifesto. So here it is. Now, sure enough, the manifesto contains this sentence. In the second chapter, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. Sounds scary. And so the next year, 1849, Pius IX digs in a little deeper in his encyclical called Gnostis et nobiscum. As regards this teaching and these theories, it is now generally known that the special goal of their proponents is to introduce to the people the pernicious fictions of socialism and communism by misapplying the terms liberty and equality. The final goal shared by these teachings, whether of communism or socialism, even if approached differently, is to excite by continuous disturbances workers and others, especially those of the lower class, whom they have deceived by their lies and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. They are preparing them for plundering, stealing and usurping first the churches and then everyone's property. After this, they will profane all law, human and divine, to destroy divine worship and to subvert the entire ordering of civil societies. Now, there's an irony here I have to point out, but then I want to move on to a key misunderstanding of property. Now, the irony is, you know, Pius IX writing, that somehow the people are deceived by the lies of the Communists and deluded by the promise of a happier condition. And this is quite an accusation coming from the head of a church that promises eternal life to those who fulfill its sacraments and keep up with tithing. I mean, after all, this was one of Marx's most famous ambivalent statements. Quote, religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. That's from an essay called Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, and that was published in 1844, but only available in German until the 1920s when it appeared in French, and then it didn't make it to the broader English world until the 1950s. I'll come back to this on Monday in the Patreon Bonus. Now, here's the key line going back up to Pius IX encyclical. Marx and Engels are preparing the working class for plundering, stealing and usurping first the Church's and then everyone's property. So here the Pope manages to blend and conflate two orders of property, the private and the personal, as a function of conflating the Church with everyone. Because if he had read the Communist Manifesto passage, he would have found the crucial distinction that every reactionary after him has ignored as well and had to ignore in order to dodge the moral challenge it poses. The distinguishing feature of communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few. In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence, abolition of private property. We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as a fruit of a man's own labor, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence. Hard one Self acquired, self earned property. Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? No, there's no need to abolish that. The development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it and is still destroying it daily. I hope that lands because there's been about 150 years of bullshit about what property means in socialism based on cherry picking. That paragraph, the distinction between personal property and private property Marx makes relates to the fact that any commodity, any object, can have a double nature. It can be something you make or trade for use yourself, so that's the use value. Or it can be something you sell for profit or extract rent from another person. You contract to use it, so that's the exchange value. So let me give an example. There's a huge difference between baking bread for yourself and your neighbour to eat versus baking bread to dominate the bread market. Your relationship with bread completely changes in a way that begins to dehumanize you and everyone you are selling it to. If the purpose of baking bread is to dominate the bread market, Marx's argument is that a commodity made for personal or communal use has direct and intimate human meaning. It's connected to the needs, skill, care and material life of the person who holds it. But if that same object enters the market, its meaning shifts. Its primary purpose becomes its value in exchange, not the satisfaction of human needs. And this has a number of really bad downstream effects. So first of all, that commodity becomes independent of its creator. Now, maybe you already hear the theological argument revving up here. The social relation of I bake bread and you eat bread becomes a relation between things. In other words, I own a bread factory to bake bread that competes with other loaves of bread for the purpose of earning me a private profit on the labor of my bakers. The next thing it does is that it makes the bakery owner no longer responsible for thinking of people's needs. The bakery owner is thinking about what the market can yield next. The bread is no longer just the sensuous reality of bread. It sits on the rack with a price tag on it, and that price tag turns it into an idea, something magical that can produce wealth. And this is where the bread becomes in image of itself. The word Marx uses is fetish. And we'll see on Monday how Dussel compares this to idolatry in religious thought. The bakers hired by the bakery owner also lose contact with the product and joy of their work. That's called alienation. All of those are downstream effects of private property. When the baker keeps the bread market, profit that can become capital that he reinvests in another bakery. So he makes money not from the instances of his own labor, but because he appropriates what's called surplus value for himself. And that is the one and only type of private property that Marx and Engel are targeting. Now, why do you suppose it was in the interest of Pius IX to steamroll over this distinction and conflate the Church's private property with everyone else's personal property? I bet you can't guess. Prior to the 1870 reunification of Italy, the Vatican was one of the major territorial landholders in central Italy, presiding over approximately 44,000km square of something called the Patrimony of St Peter, which was established after the decline of Byzantine rule in the 8th century. So this was a vast network of churches, monasteries, convents, agricultural estates, forests and villages that generated rental income and other revenues through taxes on produce, leases, tithes and tenant farming in daily on the ground relations. In the feudal period, this often meant that entire towns in Italy were basically PA papal company towns. Papal delegates appointed governors, oversaw budgets, roads, schools and utilities while imposing tributes and overriding local authorities in tax policy. Now, nailing down financials, solid financials for what this meant in 1848. Looks like it's a lifelong academic project, but what I did find is that in the late 17th century, yearly papal revenues were on the order of 2 to 2.5 million scudi. That was the denomination of the time. It's hard to translate this into USD, but this is somewhere around US$50 million. And that was going on while public debt had ballooned to many times that, well over 10 times the annual income. So what does that mean? It means that at that time, the Catholic Church was a religious institution that was also an emergent modern capitalist state. The Church relied on rents to survive, but it was also ensnared in debt to the extent that it was ultimately dwarfed. By Europe's emerging empires. And this is why Church political history of the 19th and early 20th century involves a lot of popes attempting to hold on to capital assets by striking one deal after another with larger powers. Pius IX tried to energize papal state economy by granting papal prizes to domestic producers of wool, silk and other export materials. And he also improved transportation via roads, viaducts, bridges, seaports and new railways linking to northern Italy, which facilitated the movement of industrial goods. But the Papal states never engaged in the heavy industry that came to shape modern political power. So the bottom line is it's impossible to imagine any 19th century pope accepting the Marxist assessment of private property being immoral. The Papal States were nothing without their power to extract rents. Now today, Pope Leo faces the same sticky contradiction. Recent budgets under Leo XIV show annual income in the hundreds of millions of euros for the Vatican. And roughly one quarter to one third comes from donations and other spiritual contributions. But the rest comes from return on investments, real estate and church run services such as museums, universities and hospitals. When we look at financial reports from 2023 to 2025, we see the Vatican's income is just under a billion per year, and it consists of 30% spiritual contributions and 65% capital asset returns. So this is real estate investment revenue from universities, hospitals and media, and tourism such as the Vatican museums. The Vatican's asset management arm currently oversees more than 5,400 properties worldwide. This includes commercial buildings, shops, offices and residences. No one knows the total income of the global Church. Serious estimates suggest that annual spending by Catholic entities worldwide runs well into the hundreds of billions of dollars. But precise global figures are unavailable. But in relation to Vatican income streams, the global streams are reversed by proportion, with 70% coming in on the donation plate and 30% generated by capital assets. So given this financial reality and the Church's continued existential dependence on privatized capital that generates rents, Pope Leo's fondness for liberation theology, in which that Marxist distinction between private property and personal property is actually appreciated and elevated, now runs in conflict with the reality of the Church that he adds up to really stand against the dictatorship of an economy that kills, as he put it in his first major writing, dilexitei. Leo would have to begin the process of divesting the Catholic Church from its rent seeking assets so that it could exist a little bit more like, well, the historical Jesus. But history will struggle against Leo, As Marx quipped in the 1867 German preface to volume one of the English established Church will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1 39th of its income. Nowadays, atheism is culpa levis, a relatively slight sin as compared with criticism of existing property relations. Okay, Peterson and Kengor think Marx is demonic. The old timey Catholic Church thinks that socialism is coming for church assets. In the Monday bonus on Patreon, I'll spend more time diving into how Enrique du Seles that Marx is not inimical to religion in the ways that these goobers imagine. In fact, Dussel shows that Marx uses religious themes throughout his work to create what we might call a negative theology. In brief, Marx's theological use of metaphor is negative and anti fetishistic, and its primary emphasis is identifying that which is not God. And he finds evidence of the not God in forms of religion that sanctify capitalism. So this method of negative theology aligns with the ancient Hebrew theological tradition, which focuses more on the absence on what is not God than on affirming what God might be. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Monday on Patreon. Take care of each other.
