The Origins of Communism and Socialism

Communism and socialism still cause incredible damage and have cost the lives of more than 100 million people. Here are little-known crucial facts about these nefarious doctrines that explain much.

He, who knows evil, knows goodness.

Serious seekers are probably often asking themselves about the current state of our civilisation. The 20th century witnessed incredible societal tragedies and unimaginable human suffering caused by many seemingly nicely sounding slogans and promises. Numerous justifications have been given for these gruesome acts of inhumanity and cruelty. Communists seized power and caused destruction in countries such as Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Cuba, Mongolia, Afghanistan, North Korea and Ethiopia. Socialists have damaged many societies in various parts of the world, including under the national socialist regime in Germany.

Yet today, one-fifth of the world’s population (almost two billion people) live under single-party communist regimes in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam, which also impact several African countries and Russia. Despite the tens of millions of victims and atrocities committed around the world, communism and socialism still attract followers from younger generations, who are deceived by false promises of 'equality, comradeship and power to the people'.

Skulls of the communist victims in Cambodia, who were tortured and killed at the Tuol Sleng concentration camp in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge's rule

But where does such an inhumane ideology originate? Karl Marx (and Friedrich Engels) are conventionally considered to be the creators of the concept of international communism, as Marx was tasked with writing the manifesto for the secret revolutionary organisation the League of the Just (later renamed the Communist League) in 1848. Much less is known about the people behind Marx and Engels, who played significant roles in designing the destructive communist doctrine. The origins of communist and socialist ideologies lie in many other places besides the minds of those two men. However, we will start with the main frontman.

Moses Mordecai Levi Marx

Moses Mordecai Levi Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in Trier, Germany. He was a son of lawyer Hirschel ha-Levi Marx, his grandfather was a chief rabbi in Cologne. Moses Mordecai was officially baptized on 1824, and given the name Karl Heinrich Marx. He attended a former Jesuit school and Berlin University. Marx studied economics in Paris in 1843, then lived some years in Brussels and after the failed revolution of 1848 in Germany, he escaped to London, where he resided for the rest of his life.

Marx makes a special gesture, known in the circles of the secret societies.

From his early years, he expressed a lot of hatred against the world and was attracted to dark forces and destruction. He put these feelings also on paper, producing almost 40 poems. One of his favorite themes was a demonic rebellion against God. For example in a poem “The Fiddler” (“Des Spielmann”) he declared e.g.:

Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab
Unerringly within thy soul.
God neither knows nor honors art.
The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,

Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See this sword - the Prince of Darkness sold it to me.
For he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.

In “Oulanem” Marx writes¹:

If there is something which devours,
I'll leap within it, though I bring the world in ruins -
The world which bulks between me and the Abyss
I will smash to pieces my enduring curses.

In his letter, Karl Marx’s father expressed concerns about his son’s character and his relation with demonic forces.²

The following description about Marx is telling:

Who is chasing wild endeavor? A black man from Trier, a remarkable monster. He does not walk or run, he jumps on his heels and rages full of anger as if he would like to catch the wide tent of the sky and throw it to the earth. He stretches his arms far away in the air; the wicked fist is clenched, he rages without ceasing, as if 10,000 devils had caught him by the hair.³

The character and behaviour of that revolutionary communist describe all too well his real motives. According to his assistant Karl Heinzen, Marx was an unreliable egoist and a lying intriguer who only wished to exploit others. The editorial staff of Neue Rheinische Zeitung (where Marx was an editor) was, according to Engels, organized so that Marx became its dictator. Karl Marx had a habit of saying⁴:

I will annihilate you.

Marx has been characterized by habitual anger, dictatorial habits, bitterness and egoism.⁵

During his lifetime, Marx exploited many of the people around him. Work was the last thing Marx wanted. He showed little consideration for the work of others either. Many of the craftsmen he hired had to wait a long time for their pay. His housekeeper, Helen Demuth, worked tirelessly in his household for 40 year with very little reward.⁶

Marx fought all those whom he could not subdue. He could not accept criticism and became infuriated if anyone tried to criticise him. He also spent a lot of time collecting information about his political rivals and opponents. He delivered the notes containing this information to the police.⁷ He was a paid informant for the Austrian police, spying on his fellow revolutionaries and receiving cash for his efforts.⁸

Moritz Moses Hess

In 1841, when Marx was 23, he met Moritz Moses Hess (1812-1875), who from that day on had a profound influence on Marx’s views.⁹

Hess was a founder of the radical newpaper Rheinische Zeitung and he hired Marx to be its editor. Moses Hess has been considered a communist rabbi and the father of modern socialism.¹⁰ By virtue of his unremitting activity in behalf of revolutionary ideals, he won the title of the “father of German communism”.¹¹ Hess also advocated for a doctrine of Jewish nationalism that would later be called Zionism.¹²

Moritz Moses Hess

In 1844 Hess facilitated the meeting of Marx with Friedrich Engels, which started a life-long collaboration. Hess introduced Engels, the future famous communist, to communism in the early 1840s.

Hess wrote after meeting Engels in Cologne:

He parted from me as an overzealous Communist. This is how I produce ravages…¹³

Many of the statements made by the Marxists, even in their Manifesto, closely resemble those of Moses Hess. Hess advocated the elimination of matrimonial bondage [Ehezwang], so that the bonds of marriage would no longer be enslaving chains.

For Hess it was crucial that:

“… the state will replace the family and conduct the education of the young.”¹⁴

Marx and Engels contributed mightly to the anti-family trend among socialists, writing usually about the destruction, dissolution and abolition of the family.¹⁵ We can observe how these communist ideas surface again among present-day leftist forces, feminists, gender theories and others.

It is suggested that Moses Hess might have been the one who injected the thought of abolition of private property into the minds of Marx and Engels.¹⁶ This is crucial as abolition of property was established to be a cornerstone of communism in the Communist Manifesto:

… the theory of the communists may be summed up in the single sentence – the abolition of private property.

In 1847 Hess published an essay Die Folgen des Revolution des Proletariat, which contained much, which in 1848 was formulated into The Communist Manifesto. Hess wrote:

A revolution of the proletariat presupposes before all things the existence of a proletariat, presupposes a struggle, not merely about abstract principles but about concrete and tangible interests, presupposes that the very existence of the great majority of the workers is threatened, that these workers know who the enemy is they have to fight, and that they have the means in their own hands to achieve victory…

Also he wrote:

I will use the sword against all citizens who resist the endeavors of the proletariat.¹⁷

Origins in Masonic secret societies

It has been claimed that Moses Hess was also the one who introduced both Marx and Engels into freemasonry. In 1845, Marx became the member of the Le Socialiste lodge in Brussels.¹⁸ Marx and Engels became eventually freemasons of the 31^st degree.¹⁹

Notably, the Masonic lodge Le Socialiste in Brussels, which initiated Marx into freemasonry, had, two years before, formulated a socialist revolutionary plan for overthrowing ruling regimes under the leadership of Jean-Marie Ragon. On 5 July 1843, the lodge submitted a draft of this revolutionary plan of action, which bore a striking resemblance to The Communist Manifesto, published five years later in 1848. The Bulletin du Grand Orient (June 1843) stated that this programme had been accepted by Belgium's largest Masonic authority, the Supreme Council of Belgium, and that “it corresponded to the Masonic doctrine concerning the social question”. It also stated that the world, united in Grand Orient, “should aim to realise it by all conceivable means”.

In her profound piece World Revolution, historian Nesta Webster has explained that the origins of Marxist communism lie in those sinister forces, which have for a long time worked for overthrowing ruling regimes and demolishing the core values of the European societies. She argues:

In the Communist Manifesto … are set forth the doctrines laid down in the code of Weishaupt²⁰ – 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. This, divested of its trappings, is the real plan of Marxian Socialism…²¹

Winston Churchill (1874–1965) praised the ability of Mrs Webster for important revelations and claimed that there is a world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality – from the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States).²²

The close similarities between the aims of the secret society Illuminati²³, founded on the 1st of May, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria and the Communist Manifesto can be compared in the following formula:

In 1847, Marx and Engels joined the secret, radical organisation the Bund der Gerechten (League of the Just), which was founded by revolutionary socialists in 1836. Several of its leading members were involved in a failed coup d'état in Paris on 12 May 1839. At the end of 1847, Marx and Engels helped to reorganise the League of the Just as the Communist League. The new group tasked Marx and Engels with writing a programme for it. This resulted in The Communist Manifesto.

The International Workingmen's Association (also known as the First International) was founded in 1864 by mainly English and French people with the aim of uniting various socialist, communist, and anarchist groups, as well as trade unions, based on class struggle. Although Marx was not involved in the creation of the International, he began to increase his influence after its foundation. He infiltrated the organisation with the intention of making it the instrument of his personal views from the outset.²⁴ His aim was to establish the spirit and main principles of The Communist Manifesto as the core of the association because, at its inception, the International was far from revolutionary, seeking disturbances in the streets and embracing insurrection for its own sake. The Marxists' aim was mostly realised at the Fourth Congress in Basel in 1869, when the association's policy veered further towards communism with the abolition of private property in land and inheritance.

The International was quickly embraced by freemasons, who provided it with support, especially through the Grand Orient lodges. According to journalist Louis Énault, many secret societies in Europe and North America merged with the First International in March 1865. The secret societies of Russia and Poland, as well as the remnants of the Carbonari, joined the new society. This fusion was formed.²⁵

Nesta Webster concludes:

All talk of conditions of labour, all discussion of the practical problems of industry had been abandoned and the Internationale became simply an engine of warfare against civilization. By its absorption of the secret societies and of the doctrines of Illuminism all the machinery of revolution passed into its keeping. Every move in the game devised by Weishaupt, every method for engineering disturbances and for spreading inflammatory propaganda, became part of its programme.²⁶

Marx, the plagiarist

Socialism, marxism, communism, were presented by its formulators as scientific theories that “proved” the inevitability of the destruction of the capitalistic organization of society. Those theories were allegedly based on “social evolution laws discovered by Marx”. The advent of the state without private property and without nuclear family²⁷ was unavoidable according to them.

However, as e.g. historian Richard Pipes concluded, Marxism was a dogma masquerading as a science. The pretension to a 'scientific method' was a mask designed to increase its appeal according to fashionable trends of the time. Marxism violated one of the main principles of this method: the readiness to adapt theory to new evidence.²⁸

Nesta Webster researched Marx’s ideas and concluded:

In neither work The Communist Manifesto nor “Das Kapital” had Marx originated anything. … When have traced these ideas to their original sources, what then is left of Marx’s system? Absolutely nothing but the form in which it was conveyed. … Marx collected all the materials for his book on Capital in the reading-room of the British Museum. It was there that he found his whole system ready to hand. … Marx then was an impostor from the beginning. Posing as the prophet of a new gospel, he was in reality nothing but a plagiarist and a plagiarist without the common honesty to pay tribute to the sources whence he drew his material. For after pillaging freely from all the earlier socialists, Marx dismisses them with a sneer. …²⁹

Marx stole and piled together ideas from Marat, Hebert, Vidal, Pecqueur, Babeuf, Blanc, Cabet, Clootz, Owen, also John Locke and Adam Smith on the importance of labour.

And most notably, his economic theory was largely plagiarized from Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865), whom, of course, he treated with bitterest animosity.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Marx’s plagiarism was even admitted by his admirer, the syndicalist Georges Sorel, who wrote that … pretended inventions had been put down to the account of the master which originated with his predecessors or were even common places at the time when The Communist Manifesto was drawn up. He brings the example of accumulation of capital in the hands of a few individuals, which was one of the discoveries Marx was the proudest of. But this thesis was known even to the man in the street and had become a dogma in the socialist circles before Marx ever wrote anything. There are a quantity of Marxian theses of the same kind, Sorel concludes.³⁰

Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), the Russian anarchist and one of Marx’s comrades in the socialist movement, characterized Marx in the following:

His vanity… has no bounds, a veritable Jew’s vanity… This vanity, already very great, has been considerably increased by the adulation of his friends and disciples. Very personal, very jealous, very touchy and very vindicative, like Jehovah the God of his people, Marx will not suffer that one should recognize any other God but himself; what do I say? That one should even render justice to another socialist writer or worker in his presence…³¹

Marx made no secret of his attitude toward those who disagreed with him: criticism, he once wrote, is not a scalpel but a weapon. Its object is the enemy, [whom] it wishes not to refute but to destroy.³²

Influence of the violent Communist Manifesto on the 20^th century

Some scholars have claimed that the Communist Manifesto and Marxist communist doctrine were not correctly “comprehended” or “interpreted” by 20th-century communist tyrants. This is either naive ignorance or a deliberate distortion of the facts. The authors of the comprehensive study the Black Book of Communism³³ associate communism with criminality, stating³⁴:

Communist regimes… turned mass crime into a full-blown system of government /…/ This criminality lies at the level of ideology rather than state practice.

It is clear from the writings of Marx and Engels that their proposed solution has always been violent revolution, terroristic destruction of the societies and dictatorship.

After the failure of the 1848 revolution in Germany, Marx wrote that,

… there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.³⁵

In 1849 Marx wrote:

We are merciless and do not demand any clemency. When it is our turn, we will not hide our terrorism.³⁶

In Das Kapital (1867), Marx argued that violence is a necessity in socialist actions:

Violence is the midwife who helps a new society struggle out from the womb of the old.

Together with Engels he spread the idea of revolutionary terrorism as a way to end the traditional society.³⁷ This is also evident from the Communist Manifesto, which ends with a clear statement:

The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. …

And how can it be that only “misinterpreters” seized power and sowed destruction as Marxist communists in Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Cuba, Mongolia, Afganisthan, North-Korea, Ethiopia, etc?

Moreover, from an early age, Marx in a fanatically fixated his gaze to an end-aim – destruction of the traditional human society and its elements (nation, family, private ownership) – and constructed the whole of his delusional theory around this aim. British historian Paul Johnson concludes that:

Marx’s concept of a Doomsday … was always in Marx’s mind, and as a political economist he worked backwards from it, seeking the evidence that made it inevitable, rather than forward to it, from objectively examined data.³⁸

Basing their violence and destruction on the idiological works of Marx and Engels, communist dictators and tyrants have inflicted unimaginable misery on humanity. Modest estimation on the number of victims was presented in the The Black Book of Communism³⁹ in 1997 – approximately 95-100 million people in many countries through genocide, mass killings, executions, deportations, imprisonment, forced labor, man-made famines etc. However, some researchers (Rudolph Joseph Rummel, Dimitri Panin), estimate the total number of victims to be much higher. As the Chinese archives are still closed, the figure could be as high as 150 million and even more.⁴⁰ The number of victims is increasing year by year, as one fifth of the world’s population still lives under single-party communist regimes in China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea and Vietnam.

Jean-Claude Juncker at the opening of the Karl Marx statue in Trier, Germany in 2018

Moreover, in may 2018, the former highest politician of the EU, president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, went personally to open a 4.4-meter statue of Marx in Trier, Germany and claimed that Marx shouldn’t be judged for the crimes committed by his followers after his death.⁴¹ The statue was presented by the Communist Party of China to commemorate “200^th anniversary of Marx’s birth”. Juncker also stated that Marx was a philosopher, who thought ahead and had creative aspirations. This gruesome intervention by the EU’s highest political figure reveals the EU’s value chart and illustrates the state of affairs inside the Union.

Conclusion

Karl Marx can hardly be called "father of communism", merely a figurehead for the movement. Rather, the fatherly figure in the rise of communism has been Moses Hess, who guided Marx and Engels into the world of red revolution and destruction. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels merely publicised ideas that had already been expressed in the previous century by the influential secret revolutionary organisation the Illuminati, founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776. Freemasonry was also notably active in spreading and supporting the Illuminati's principles and communist and socialist ideas in the 19th century and beyond.

Marx can be called 'the father of revolutionary terror and violence' because he clearly stated that this was the way to tear down existing societies. His slogans were adopted as instructions by red dictators and tyrants whose aim was to overthrow existing regimes and rule with ruthless despotism. In any case, communism is the most destructive doctrine created by humans in many centuries, and it still rules over a large part of humanity in the 21st century.

1. Robert Payne The Unknown Karl Marx (1971), pp 59, 61

2. Letter from Heinrich Marx to his son Karl, written in Trier, March 2, 1837

3. Franz Mehring Karl Marx – Geschichte seines Lebens (1964), pp 99-100

4. Karl Heinzen Erlebtes (1864)

5. Paul Johnson Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1990), chapter 3, 214/1069 (epub)

6. Fritz Joachim Raddatz Karl Marx: Eine Politische Biographie (1975)

7. Paul Johnson Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1990), chapter 3, 207.7/1069 (epub)

8. Karl Marx letter published in the German newspaper Reichsruf, January 9, 1960; Richard Wurmbrand Marx: Prophet of Darkness (1986), p 28

9. Theodor Zlocist Moses Hess: der Vorkämpfer des Sozialismus und Zionismus (1921); Sydney Hook Karl Marx and Moses Hess in New International, Vol 1 Nr 5 (1934)

10. Jüdische Lexicon (Berlin, 1928), pp 1577-1578

11. Sydney Hook Karl Marx and Moses Hess in New International, Vol 1 Nr 5 (1934)

12. Theodor Zlocist Moses Hess: der Vorkämpfer des Sozialismus und Zionismus (1921)

13. A. Melskii Evangelist Nenavisti (in Russian The Evangelist of Hate) (1933), p 48; Richard Wurmbrand “Marx and Satan” (1986), p 37

14. Moses Hess The Holy History of Mankind and Other Writings (1837), p 87

15. Richard Weikart Marx, Engels and the Abolition of the Family

16. Asael Abelman How A Founding Socialist Inspired Karl Marx and Then Went on to Herald the State of Israel; Juri Lina Under the Sign of the Scorpio (2014), p 100

17. Moses Hess Briefu/echsel (Correspondence), letter of December 9, 1863 to Lassalle (1959), p 459

18. Juri Lina Under the Sign of the Scorpio (2014), pp 108-109

19. Vladimir Istarkhov The Battle of the Russian Gods (2000), p 154

20. Adam Weishaupt (1748-1830), a freemason and the founder of the secret society Illuminati, which was established on the 1st of May, 1776 in Ingolstadt, Bavaria. One of the aims executed by the order was to infiltrate masonic lodges and enlarge its influence through them.

21. Nesta Webster “World Revolution” (1921), p 169

22. Rt. Hon. Winston S. Churchill Zionism versus Bolshevism, published in Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 8, 1920, page 5

23. Einige Originalschriften des Illuminaten-Ordens, Nachtrag von weitern Originalschriften (1786)

24. The principle chronicler of the International: James Guillaume Karl Marx, Pan-Germaniste (1915), p 11

25. Louis Énault Paris brûlé par la Commune (1871), p 24

26. Nesta Webster World Revolution (1921), p 196

27. Abolition [Aufhebung] of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. But this state of things finds its complement in the practical absence of the family among the proletarians, and in public prostitution. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital. (From the Communist Manifesto)

28. Richard Pipes Communism. A History (2001), 22.7/300 (epub)

29. Nesta Webster World Revolution (1921), p 169-170

30. Georges Sorel Reflexions sur la violence (1908), pp 173-174

31. Max Nettlau Michael Bakunin, eine Biographie, p 69 (a letter from Bakunin to the Freres de l’Alliance en Espagne in 1873)

32. Richard Pipes Communism. A History (2001), 22.7/300 (epub)

33. Stéphane Courtois, Nicolas Werth, Andrzej Paczkowski and others

34. The Black Book of Communism (1997), pp 2,4

35. Neue Rheinische Zeitung (nr 136), November 6, 1848

36. Arnold Kunzli Karl Marx: Eine Psychographie (1966)

37. Marx and Engels Works, volume 5, p 494

38. Paul Johnson Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky (1990), chapter 3, 161.9/1069 (epub)

39. English edition published by Harvard University in 1999

40. E.g. Rudolph Joseph Rummel (Reevaluating China’s Democide to 73 million in Democratic Peace Blog, Dec 1, 2012) and (Stalin Exceeded Hitler in Monstrous Evil, Mao Beat Out Stalin in “Hawaii Reporter”, Sept 17, 2009); Dimitri Panin The Notebooks of Sologdin (1976)

41. Don’t judge Karl Marx for his followers’ crimes