And what other organisations do you think are being clobbered by the same system? Why do you think Politicians are so keen to disarm the Population? It is time to re-examine the principles set out by Anti-Parliamentarians, and terminate the corruptions of democratic Politicians.

As an ex-SWP member from my younger days, I have to say that this is one of the most spot on, funny pieces of writing I've ever read.

You come into a movement full of vitality, thirsty for change, and they make you believe there's is the best and effective channel for it. Within a year, even the most idealistic young person is essentially neutered - I never lost passion for the causes I believe in, but it totally skewed my sense of "action". Those who "acted up" on demonstrations just became "adventurists", because I was selling papers and "building the mass movement" and supposedly doing the "real" work. Years later, I can look back and think of the years I sadly missed out on.

"Left wing, right wing, you can stuff the lot. Anarchy and freedom is what I want."

nice one Johnny. Well timed article, 4 days b4 stwc(swp-led) march against Bush. Oh, what's that ... no police authorisation for the march this Sunday, so we're having a 'George Bush Not Welcome Here' demonstration in Parliament Square at 5.00pm? Arrh, I see, that must mean Bush & his entourage will be well out of the way by then!

(this is probably a gross exaggeration/not true, but as a story, I hope I've illustrated a typical scenario in which the SWP work their duplicitous magic!!!!)

Great article, I am not sure if it is necessary for them to actually be agents of the state though, there are plenty of careerists who are willing to kid themselves they aren't stifling a mass movement for their own ends.

I have an analysis which certainly compliments this one. I don't like to divulge in discussions of party politics, but some people might find this of interest. In 2005, Respect, a political party who are yet another wing of the SWP challenged Labour in electoral seats across the country. The main focus of the campaign was the "antiwar vote". Ignoring the fact that standing as a political party gives credence to the idea that the system can be reformed, and that voting can actually change anything, something else of a conspiratorial note happened.

Labour were set to lose a huge number of seats as a result of the huge unpopularity of the war, particularly in constituencies with a high proportion of Muslims. The mass anti-war protests had been a failure and people needed some outlet, Labour were set to be punished, a potentially huge embarassment for them. Respect tactically stood in areas where the antiwar sentiment was strongest, and guess what, in every area where they stood par one (George Galloway in Bethnall Green), Labour won. Looking closely at the results, it can be seen that without Respect's candidacy, Labour would have lost more seats. Was Respect simply a Labour strategy for managing antiwar dissent?

Results:-

 http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=6437

I've talked to lots of refromed Swappies and they all said that the SWP did more to contain and curtail their political activism, rather than provide a channel for it. I always asked if they thought it was deliberate or just the product of an anachronistic beuracracy, without exeption they all thought there was a deliberate drive to break their spirits. As for the upper echelons being infiltrated by the security services, can anyone really argue they're the exception? The fact is that any authoritarian organisation who's apparent aims are to effect the status quo will be riddled with spooks (Sinn Fein,GreenPeace, TUC,CND, CP even the BNP have all been and probably are infiltrated).

starting with lenin steaming into Russia with money &"deal" with kaiser to give him poland,ukraine etc, after unnamed anarchists inspired the people with the amazingly inspiring Battleship Potemkim uprising.Mutiny on the bounty times 1000!;). After we defended poland,Ukraine & even Moscow, defeating massive battalions of fascist,capitalist&white armies led by Denekin, Lenin,Lenin ordered Trotsky to reveal their shiny new armoured vehicles to destroy us after we saved them. They allowed Stalin to be their general secretary,slaughtering the true soviets who didnt yeild to central power, what genuises!
At best now SWP are good at taking people for an a to b ride, they are more easy to infiltrate & manipulate with their undemocratic, "dictatorship of proles" structure.
Stalin was a MARXIST!yes Bakunin could be abit antisemtic, so was Marx,Bakunin though was not a bloodthirsty dicktator!.Following Marx Stalin even invaded Poland together with Hitler for the glory of "communism"

Many SWP rank & file are really good people obviously& they sometimes have done good in unions& they look well organised media image in public. THough best organised demo I went on was our vwell organised J18, 1000s of colour group coded party bird mask were given out & the people loved it with timed absailing down bridges & skyscrapers.

I'd enjoy this if there was even a sentence or two outlining an alternative. Whilst you rain on the parade - literally, in the case of Sunday! - you provide no suggestions whatsoever on the best way forward for radicals. Rightly or wrongly there is no widespread appetite for violent confrontation with the police over the war - although SmashEDO and Raytheon 9 may change that - but there is plenty enough antiwar sentiment to make StWC marches and grassroots efforts feasible, as we have seen from the last few years.

Anarchy has its place as a system to oppose war, but where is the mass movement for that? Who is building it (in a non-hierarchical and non-authoritarian way, of course)? Will you be there on Sunday to tell Bush to fuck off - regardless of whether he is in London at that exact time - or will you be writing more clever essays on your blog?

(Incidentally I am not a member of SWP and never have been.)

The anarchist who wrote this bile is obviously very frustrated with his own poxy organisation and the lack of influence they hold within the movement.

Yes there are faults with the SWP but to claim they are part of the state is pushing it way beyond anything, they accused Lenin of being a government spy just before the 1917 revolution. Besides on 21st June the proposed protest against George Bush's visist is banned. Stop the War are asking people to defy the ban.

In the past the STwC defined a ban at parliment square, Tony Benn dared the authorities to arrest him, when we have a broad coalition the police are much less likely to arrest and imprison people. The anarchist do not believe in broad movements, if they had influence in the movement all opposition would have been quelled, locked up.


This 21st Demo would be a great opportunity to show how hard the anarchists, so go on defy the police/state go on I dare you defy the ban, wankers

Grow Up you dicks.

I believe what you mean is that when you havve a broad coalition which do nothing to threaten the status quo, it becomes a lot more difficult(pointless?) for the police to arrest anyone.

P.S if the swp is not in bed with labour then why do they keep asking voters to vote them??

So this article basically skips the critique of Trotskyist entryism and instead goes straight to the ultra left dogma that reformism is always directed by the state. The underlying reality you've failed to address is that trots don't see entryism as reformism. They would argue that it is advancing class struggle. You've provided a theory of how entryism failed and became reformism, but the allegation that the SWP is an MI5 front is without evidence. I'm sure they are infiltrated, but that in itself proves nothing.

Also, its premised on the basic anarchist view that the party form is autocratic, with the conclusion that the trostkyist parties are natural fronts for the state.

Well I mean, I don't know personally if the SWP is autocratic, MI5 or whatever. But I do know that an old school, solidly Marxist party seems pretty attractive to me right now, as opposed to the anarcho-activist scene with its pathetic, immature identity politics and overtones of religious puritanism and martyrdom. In fact I'm strongly inclined to view the traditional anarchist movement as a continuity of peasant religion because of all the insane bullshit I read on Indymedia daily. Unfortunately the SWP seems to have made overtures to this "movement" by emphasizing the contradictions in its own anti-imperialist ideas to permit "idealism" and "championing the powerless" (uncritically supporting Muslims etc.)

"I'd enjoy this if there was even a sentence or two outlining an alternative. Whilst you rain on the parade - literally, in the case of Sunday! - you provide no suggestions whatsoever on the best way forward for radicals. Rightly or wrongly there is no widespread appetite for violent confrontation with the police over the war - although SmashEDO and Raytheon 9 may change that - but there is plenty enough antiwar sentiment to make StWC marches and grassroots efforts feasible, as we have seen from the last few years."

With regards the war and resistance to it, I would say that the kind of resistance to it from an anarchist perpsective, isn't about "violent confrontation with the police" but civil disobedience in the form of. occupations, strikes, refusal to pay taxes, die ins, sit downs, blokades, etc. Engaging in these brings about heavy state repression, so as a result, there would be violent clashes with the police. none of which STwC are willing to even think about, with STwC it is about protesting within the law - which means a march from A - B then home for supper. This just has not had any effect, so there are a few alternatives. Imagine if you will at the early protests in London, a sit down blokade had been called, 1 million people sat down in defiance of law and the war. it would have been a small step in the right direction, people would have come away with the seed of resistance planted, not powerless, but able to act.

"So this article basically skips the critique of Trotskyist entryism and instead goes straight to the ultra left dogma that reformism is always directed by the state. The underlying reality you've failed to address is that trots don't see entryism as reformism. They would argue that it is advancing class struggle. You've provided a theory of how entryism failed and became reformism, but the allegation that the SWP is an MI5 front is without evidence. I'm sure they are infiltrated, but that in itself proves nothing.

Also, its premised on the basic anarchist view that the party form is autocratic, with the conclusion that the trostkyist parties are natural fronts for the state.

Well I mean, I don't know personally if the SWP is autocratic, MI5 or whatever. But I do know that an old school, solidly Marxist party seems pretty attractive to me right now, as opposed to the anarcho-activist scene with its pathetic, immature identity politics and overtones of religious puritanism and martyrdom. In fact I'm strongly inclined to view the traditional anarchist movement as a continuity of peasant religion because of all the insane bullshit I read on Indymedia daily. Unfortunately the SWP seems to have made overtures to this "movement" by emphasizing the contradictions in its own anti-imperialist ideas to permit "idealism" and "championing the powerless" (uncritically supporting Muslims etc.)"

Well, I have been in the SWP, and I now consider myself an anarchist, you talk about religious puritansism and martydom within the anarchist movement, sure it goes on (read give up activism.  http://www.eco-action.org/dod/no9/activism.htm), have to say goes on massively in the SWP, as does identity politics as well as personality cults. In fact the SWP shares a lot in common with a cult. So go ahead and join if you want to ( I suspect you are already a member tho). I left for my own reasons, i felt my dissent, creativity and potential were all stifled, I was expected to attend a paper sale every weekend, and sell a paper containing articles I had no hand in writing, bored and cold or hot. fuck that shit.

The SWP membership is in decline, It's time for anarchists to organise!

MI5 can get all the info they need by reading the Swap’s paper, journals and internal bulletins. If they are spending lots of money infiltrating and controlling the SWP, it would indicate that they are not a partial but a complete joke, which is what the post is all about I am sure. But seriously, lots of activists have received an excellent political education in the SWP, and moved on to do other stuff.

Let’s be even more serious now. MI5 and MI6 need to be further infiltrated.
So, if any school or university students are reading: get a 2:1 or first, learn a language, don’t join any political parties (although joining he industrial society is a good bum steer), and do stuff like sports. There are excellent careers for IT heads. (They also accept older people from other careers.)


Keep your head down for a few years to gain a promotion or two and then pass or leek as much as you can. Or just make up rubbish to confuse them.

Use the code word "Bollocks for brains".


Yours

Harold Hamlet


This is an extract from Harold Hamlets novel in progress tittled: The Bloomington Notes

"I'd enjoy this if there was even a sentence or two outlining an alternative. "

Here's one: The ultimate passive resistance. Ignore the opressor. Don't contribute to their system if you don't agree with it; just do the minimum needed to survive. This isn't a big sacrifice if you are really anti-system, as your needs and desires will be very different from those of a systemite. You won't WANT a car, a mortgage, and all the bullcrap if you're really building a new world.

Materially, you can make your own stuff, and I'm not talking about going "back to the land" or any such pseudo-agrarian nonsense either. I've just built my own power station out of Maplins panels, and I am about to upgrade an electric moped which does most of the things a car does at a fraction of the price. I build my own computers cheap out of bits. I don't need a load of expensive junk to live, I can make my own junk cheap.

According to ace theorist Dmitri Orlov, politicians are best ignored. Soviet resistors in the 80s got crap jobs and wrote crank literature. The loss of all that talent seriously screwed the system up.

Along with a whole generation of hippie dropouts, Philip K Dick got himself kicked out of college (for refusing military training) and went out and became a sci fi writer and dope fiend. This is the future of resistance: Go out and become a welfare sponger. Create your own world and live in it with your friends. Make it a challenge to live outside of the system as much as possibel, for fun not for a self-sacrificial guilt trip or middle class greenballs. They can't do a damn thing, and in twenty years, who will be laughing? As yourself this question: How is Nixon remembered, now? And how about Philip K Dick? Which man won, in the end? Who would you emulate?

NEW WORLD ORDER CHIEF APPRECIATED MARX

Hearsay evidence that Karl Marx collaborated with the super-rich and power-hungry New World Order is presented in a mainstream biography of him.

The evidence is not conclusive but means that claims that Marxism was part of an Illuminati plot cannot be dismissed.

Evidence appears in the 1999 book, 'Karl Marx', by writer, broadcaster and journalist, Francis Wheen. The most important hearsay evidence in the 2000 paperback edition, is a rabidly anti-Jewish note by Marx's anarchist rival and probable Tsarist agent, Michael Bakunin.

It relates an anomaly concerning a connection between Marx and the super-rich bankers who are lynchpins of the New World Order, the Rothschilds. It appears on page 340:

'This whole Jewish world which constitutes a single exploiting sect, a sort of bloodsucker people, a collective parasite voracious, organised in itself, not only across the frontiers of states but even across all the differences of political opinion - this world is presently, at least in great part, at the disposal of Marx on the one hand and of the Rothschilds on the other. I know that the Rothschilds reactionaries as they are and should be, highly appreciate the merits of the communist Marx; and that in his turn the communist Marx feels irresistibly drawn, by instinctive attraction and respectful admiration, to the financial genius of Rothschild, Jewish solidarity, that powerful solidarity that has maintained itself through all history, united them.'

Wheen does not elaborate at all on any association between Marx and Rothschild. He expects readers to dismiss this because Bakunin is rabidly anti-Semitic. Nonetheless, it alleges that Marx decided to collaborate with Rothschild.

Yet, a Marxist reading the book would strongly believe that Marx was sometimes eccentric but sincerely held his belief. Wheen's book is a sympathetic portrayal of Marx and Engels and is not intended to debunk the Communist.

Wheen presents Marx as a brilliant thinker, brave, actively radical and domineering. He wrote and edited campaigning journals as well as the New York Times. But it does present anomalies about his life.

It, though, is not straightforwardly the case that the evidence for Marx as a NWO agent is there to see for all with the right perspective. Some of Marx's views contradicted those of the NWO. He was, for instance, fiercely anti-Malthusian.

Marx seemed to give up pursuing any sort of well-paid career in order to live most of his life in relative poverty. He also risked imprisonment due to his revolutionary activities. The book does not present any hard evidence of Marx being a Mason, for instance.

A source other than Wheen's book points out that in his letters Marx wrote about his own contempt for financiers, particularly Jewish ones. He also attacked Rothschilds.

Yet, outlining Marx's life gleaned from letters, reports and other documentation, Wheen presents evidence that a truth seeker could interpret as prima facie evidence of the New World Order.

The book quotes a person who had a drunken meeting with Marx and claims he was a charlatan. On p239 Wheen quotes a letter from Gustav Techow, an ex-lieutenant describing a meeting of the Communist League soon after his arrival in London in 1850:

'...In view of our aims, I regret that this man (Marx), with his fine intellect, is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that the most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away at all the good in him. He laughs at the fools who parrot his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs over the communists a la Willich and over the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the genuine ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from government, he needs a source of strength, which he can find only in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. In spite of all his assurances to the contrary, and perhaps because of them, I took away with me the impression that the acquisition of personal power was the aim of all his endeavours.'

Other anomalies in Marx's life includes that he:
- and Engels destroyed the Communist League by winning a vote that transfer its HQ to New York
- was accused of being a British spy,
- was congratulated on the publication of his famous attack on capitalism, Das Capital, by Bismark,
- improved his fortunes after he published Das Capital,
- was anti-Russian at a time when the Rothschilds were,
- worked in a limited way with a Tory MP, who posed as a friend of working people,
- had limited experience of the proletariat before becoming a Communist, and
- started his political and journalist life advancing the interests of capitalists.

The book states that Marx lived in a world populated by secret societies, conspiracies and government agents.

Evidence of intrigue was a letter written by Marx and Engels to The Spectator denouncing Prussian government agents' attempts to recruit them into phoney plots to kill one Royal or other.

But the book also demonstrates that governments used for their own ends radical political movements that were anti-government. Anarchism wanted the abolition of government yet the book suggests that the movement was set up to undermine national enemies.

Whereas, a leading socialist, Lasselle, formed a radical workers association in Germany but was was working for Bismarck. (Lasselle believed that he was using Bismarck and another revolutionary, Mazzini, so that he would emerge as the leader of Germany.)

In fact, when many would think that the British bourgeoisie would be horrified by the 1848 revolutionaries, the opposite was true. On p193, Wheen writes:

'After the failure of the 1848 revolutions many of the heroes of that glorious defeat had come to London garlanded with campaign medals and romantic glamour - men such as Mazzini from Italy, Louis Blanc from France, Kossuth from Hungary, Kinkel from Germany. Society hostesses vied for their attention; lavish banquets were held in their honour; portraits were commissioned. Gottfried Kinkel, who had fled to England after a daring escape from Spandau jail, was eulogised by Dickens in Household Words.'

In his November 5 2007 lecture in London, alternative Left, historian, Webster Tarpley welcomed Marxists but argued that Marxism was a 'millstone around our necks'. He made a brilliant observation: while Britain was rampaging around the world in imperial fashion, Marx told people that class was the big problem. He suggested that later in his life Marx became a British agent run by the Tory MP, David Urquart. Marx wrote for Urquart's 'Weekly Worker'. Tarpley argued that the British Foreign Office used Marxism to destabilise their rival countries. He, though, did not know whether Marx was a dupe or power mad.

Another alternative writer and lecturer Terry Boardman,  http://www.monju.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/NWO4.htm, has argued that Marx was a French Mason. French Masons took ideas like liberty, equality and fraternity seriously. The Rhodes-Milner group were fearful of them but decided to co-opt French Masonry into their NWO. This might explain why Lord Milner claimed he was a socialist.

Lasselle provides a clue as to how the Illuminati may have sought to use Communism. On page 207, Wheen writes:
'A few years later they (Marx and Engels) passed the same sentence on Ferdinand Lassalle (an opportunist) for his proposal that Prussian workers and noblemen should gang up against the industrial bourgeoisie. While railing against these cynical marriages of convenience, however, Marx himself was forming opportunistic partnerships with some pretty rum coves.'

It could be argued that the Illuminati used the capitalists when they were becoming a growing influence to destabilise the aristocracy's and royalty's grip on power. When the capitalists were too powerful, they used revolution to destabilise them. It could be that Communism was the anti-thesis to the capitalist thesis that would produce the synthesis of the New World Order.

So, the thesis the book could support is:
- Marx and Engels started out as 'French Masons' but were later co-opted by the Illuminati,
- the Illuminati wanted to eliminate rival power centres among either the aristocracy and capitalists,
- the Illuminati believed they could manipulate the working-class by using their genuine grievances,
- Marx worked for Illuminati when they and leading capitalists targeted Monarchist government,
- Marx shifted his alliance from capitalists to aristocracy when the Illuminati felt capitalists were not under their control,
- he concluded that Das Capital could lead to financial rewards from the Illuminati.

Interesting is the Rothschilds' own website that points out that when Nathan Rothschild moved to England, he first went to Manchester to set up a textile factory. Engel's father also had a factory that was near Manchester. Were they in contact with one another? Did Rothschild provide finance for his father's factory?

While, although Marx expressed hostility to financiers like the Rothschilds, he did not analyse their role in economics and society as he could have done. In fact, Marx tells us that the ruling class are those who own the means of production rather than those who finance them.

But some critics of the NWO regard Marx as a Satanist who used Marxism as an anti-Christian and anti-Western civilisation tool. Others regard the NWO order as essentially a Communist conspiracy and the apparently right-wing fascism of the NWO is just another type of Communism.

NWO as communist comes from right-wing Christians. They can point to:
- NWO covert financing and support of the Bolsheviks and China's communist revolution
- the socialist Fabian Society as the centre of the NWO conspiracy
- Lord Milner, of the Rhodes-Milner group, declaring himself a socialist
- the US Senate's Reece Committee uncovering how NWO foundations and charities finances Left movements
- NWO supports 'big government' which is similar to socialism

They do not argue that:
- capitalism and free enterprise contributes significantly to the power and wealth of the NWO
- capitalism and free enterprise was created by the NWO
- the NWO have sponsored free markets, public private partnerships and privatisation,
- Rockefeller sponsored monetarism,
- Wall Street financiers control the globalist, capitalist, free market IMF and World Bank
- the NWO control and support of capitalism,
- their leadership of big business and capitalism is argued as some sort of Communist conspiracy.

In fact, a guru for the right is Professor Carroll Quigley who had access to the Rhodes-Milner Group and wrote about them. His book, Tragedy and Hope, outlines how a cabal of international bankers sought to rule the economies of the world in feudal fashion through secret meetings. Yet, he scoffed at the idea that this was a Communist conspiracy.

The right group reflects the thinking of white, conservative, middle-class fathers. They regard themselves as supporting free enterprise, as nationalist, as anti-government, anti-welfare, anti-Left and suspicious of racial minorities.

They often argue that black people's campaigns against racism are all a NWO plot, but hardly ever argue that racism itself is a NWO tool. This is despite the fact that the NWO were behind the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism and NWO leader, Albert Pike, created the Klu Klux Klan. Indeed, no white NWO researcher has written or lectured about the NWO and racism.

Marx himself had racist attitudes toward black people. He seemed uninterested in the plight of people who had been enslaved by the Illuminati. He was also anti-semitic as pointed out by Wheen on page p55:
'Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either - unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers from the East End of London that she was 'a Jewess'. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lasselle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. "It is now quite plain to me - as the shape of this head and the way his hair grows also testify - that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses' flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger," Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Laselle's ancestry.'

What is probably happening is that the right are fundamentally mistaken and take a symptom as the disease. That is, because the NWO is heavily involved in Left movements, the NWO is therefore a Left movement. What is more likely is that the NWO know that people will oppose injustice and recognises that they must control oppositional, radical and Left movements. The solution to this problem is to create their own opposition that derails a genuine opposition.

What they recognise is that they do not have to be as controlling towards the right. They can afford to let the right do what it does because it is far less likely to form an opposition that the Left could produce. So, infiltrating the Democratic Party or the Labour Party is a more strategic goal than doing so in the Republican Party or the Conservative Party. Therefore, the Republican Party has produced an opposition among Ron Paul's movement but currently, it is in no position to be influential in the Republican Party.

Conservatives has pointed out the dangers of the New World Order that the Left remains ignorant and blind about. Indeed, Marxist analysis helps to bring about this blindness and allows people to dismiss any other analysis because what they have is superior. But also, the conservatives tend to dismiss issues that are vital to millions such as social and economic justice. So, their view of the NWO will conitune to alienate millions of people who will dismiss the idea of a NWO.

Quotes from Marx by Francis Wheen.

p35
'...Cologne was the wealthiest and largest city in the Rhineland, which was itself the most politically and industrially advanced province in the whole of Prussia, and local bankers and businessmen had lately begun to agitate for a form of government more suited to a modern economy than the wheezing, ancient apparatus of absolute monarchy and bureaucratic oppression under which they laboured. As Marx himself pointed out often enough in later years, the nature of society is dictated by its forms of production; now that industrial capitalism had established itself, the talk in the bars of Cologne was that democracy, a free press and a unified Germany would have to follow. It was no surprise, then, that the city acted as a magnet for heretical thinkers and Bohemian malcontents who offered their wealth of knowledge in exchange for the tycoons' knowledge of wealth. The child of this union was the Rheinische Zeitung, a liberal newspaper founded in the autumn of 1841 by a group of wealthy manufacturers and financiers (including the President of the Cologne Chamber of Commerce) to challenge the dreary, conservative Kolnische Zeitung.
'With hindsight, it was sublimely inevitable that Marx would write for the paper and quickly install himself as its presiding genius.'

p55
'Was Marx a self-hating Jew? Although he never denied his Jewish origins, he never drew attention to them either - unlike his daughter Eleanor, who proudly informed a group of workers form the East End of London that she was 'a Jewess'. In his later correspondence with Engels, he sprayed anti-Semitic insults at his enemies with savage glee: the German socialist Ferdinand Lasselle, a frequent victim, was described variously as the Yid, Wily Ephraim, Izzy and the Jewish Nigger. “It is now quite plain to me - as the shape of this head and the way his hair grows also testify - that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses' flight from Egypt, unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger,” Marx wrote in 1862, discussing the ever-fascinating subject of Laselle's ancestry.'

p61
'The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 had made the French capital a natural rallying point. It was a city of plotters and poets, sects, salons and secret societies - the nerve-centre of European history, sending out electric shocks at intervals which galvanised the whole world.'

p68
'The twenty-six-year-old Marx was already well versed in German philosophy and French socialism; now he set about educating himself in the dismal science. During the summer of 1884 he read his way systematically through the main corpus of British political economy - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, James Mill - and scribbling his commentary as he went along.'

p76
'Friedrich Engel's ancestors had lived in Wuppertal for more than two centuries, earning their living in agriculture and then - rather more lucratively - in the textile trade. His father, also Friedrich Engels, had diversified and expanded the enterprise by founding cotton mills in Manchester (1837) and Barmen and Engelskirchen (1841) in partnership with two brothers named Ermen.

p81
'By day he was a quietly diligent younger manager at the Cotton Exchange; after hours he changed his sides, exploring the terra incognita of proletarian Lancashire to gather facts and impressions for his early manuscript, The Condition of the Working-class in England (1845). Often accompanied by his new lover, a redheaded Irish factory girl called Mary Burns, he ventured into slum districts which few other men of his class had ever seen.'

p98
'The earliest organisation of exiled German communists, the League of the Outlaws, had been founded in Paris in 1834. Its members were mostly middle-class intellectuals - the most “sleepy-headed elements”, as Engels called them - who soon dozed off altogether. The clandestine League of the Just, which split away from it in 1836, was an altogether livelier outfit run by self-educated artisans who spent many a happy evening plotting putsches and conspiracies.'

p101
'Although he proclaimed in 1844, with patriotic hyperbole, that “the German proletariat is the theoretician of the European proletariat”, the truth was that until the mid-1840s he had met very few German workers.'

p103
'Since the committee was the original Adam from which all the many Communist parties were descended, it may be worth listing the eighteen founding signatories: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Jenny Marx, Edgar von Westphalen, Ferdinand Freilgrath, Joseph Weydemeyer, Moses Hess, Hermann Kriege, Wilhelm Weitling, Ernest Dronke, Louis Heilberg, Georg Weerth, Sebastian Seiler, Philippe Gigot, Wilhelm Wolff, Ferdinand Wolff, Karl Wallau, Stephan Born.'

p106
'With Marx's growing reputation as a 'democratic dictator', new recruits for his letter-writing circle were hard to find. In May, while seeing off Weitling and Kreige, he invited Pierre-Joseph Proudhon to join the club.'

p108
'To Marx's unforgiving eye, Proudhon's socialist manifesto looked suspiciously like the reluctant acceptance of the status quo. Workers shouldn't organise to demand higher wages, Proudhon warned, since they would have to pay their own bill in the form of higher prices.'

p111
'As the sole provider for an effete wife, three small children and a housemaid. Marx could ill afford to go off on a bachelor's bender in gay Paree. Unemployed and virtually unemployable, he couldn't even raise the fare for a rather more important excursion to London, where the League of the Just summoned a conference in June to discuss a merger with the Brussels correspondence circle.'

p121
Communist Manifesto: 'The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all the instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian nations into civilisation.'

p127
“The German workers (in Brussels) decided to arm themselves”, she (Jenny Marx) admitted. “Daggers, revolvers were procured. Karl willing provided money for he had just come into an inheritance. In all this the government saw conspiracy and criminal plans: Marx received money and buys weapons, he therefore must be got rid of....When Jenny appeared in court the next day, an examining magistrate expressed sarcastic surprise that the police hadn't arrested her babies while they were about it. She and Karl were release without charge at three o'clock in the afternoon...”

p129
'As soon as Engels joined him in Paris, on 21 March, they produced a handbill headed 'Demands of the Communist Party in Germany', which was swiftly reprinted by democratic newspapers in Berlin, Trier and Dusseldorf...By his standards, the 'demands' were therefore surprisingly modest. They included four out of ten points from the Communist Manifesto - progressive income tax, free schooling, state ownership of all means of transport and the creation of a national bank.'

p150
'In the marvels and monstrosity of Victorian London which so astonished many foreign visitors were invisible to Marx. For all his talents as a reporter and social analyst, he was often curiously oblivious to his own immediate surroundings: unlike Dickens who plunged into the grime to bring back vivid firsthand observations, he preferred to rely on newspapers or the Royal Commission for information.'

p162
On 15 June 1850, shortly before Engels began his long Northern exile, the London Spectator printer a letter Messers Charles Marx and Friedc. Engels of 64 Dean Street, Soho. “Really, sir, we should never have thought that there existed in this country so many police spies as we have had the good fortune of making the acquaintance of in the short space of a week,” they wrote.

p163
In the 'Spectator' letter, Marx alleged that a fortnight before the shooting of King Frederick William “persons whom we have every reason to consider as agents either of the Prussian government or the Ultra-Royalists presented themselves to us, and almost directly engaged us to enter into conspiracies for organising regicide in Berlin and elsewhere. We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us.” Their aim, as he explained, was to persuade the British authorities to “remove from this country the pretended chiefs of the pretended conspiracy”. One of these unidentified agents was Wilhein Stieber, later the chief of Bismarck's secret service, who came to London during the spring of 1850 masquerading as a journalist called Schmidt. Stieber had been instructed to keep a close eye on Karl Marx, and after infiltrating the communist HQ at 20 Great Windmill Street he sent back an urgent cable confirming all von Westphalen's suspicious about his nefarious brother-in-law. 'The murder of Princes is formally taught and discussed, he reported...Although the Prussian Minister of the Interior forwarded the dispatch to London, Lord Palmerston consigned it to the Foreign Office files where it remains to this day. As far as one can tell, he did not even bother to alert Scotland Yard.'

p180
'These 'few pounds' added up to a fairly lavish subsidy. Even in 1851, one of Marx's most poverty-stricken years, he received at least £150 from Engels and other supporters - a sum on which a lower-middle-class family could live in some comfort. That autumn he was appointed European correspondent of the New York Daily Tribune, the world's best-selling newspaper, for which he regularly submitted two articles a week at £2 apiece.'

p188
“Marx lives a very retired life,” Wilhelm Pieper reported, “his only friends being John Stuart Mill and Loyd (the economist Samuel Jones Loyd), and whenever one goes to see him one is welcomed with economic categories in lieu of greetings.”

p193
'After the failure of the 1848 revolutions many of the heroes of that glorious defeat had come to London garlanded with campaign medals and romantic glamour - men such as Mazzini from Italy, Louis Blanc from France, Kossuth from Hungary, Kinkel from Germany. Society hostesses vied for their attention; lavish banquets were held in their honour; portraits were commissioned. Gottfried Kinkel, who had fled to England after a daring escape from Spandau jail, was eulogised by Dickens in Household Words.'

p207
'A few years later they passed the same sentence on Ferdinand Lassalle (an opportunist) for his proposal that Prussian workers and noblemen should gang up against the industrial bourgeoisie. While railing against these cynical marriages of convenience, however, Marx himself was forming opportunistic partnerships with some pretty rum coves.'

'The rummiest of them all was David Urquhart, an eccentric Scottish aristocrat and sometime Tory MP who is now remembered, if at all, as the man who introduced Turkish baths to England....'

p209
'Though the more revolutionary Chartists dismissed him as a Tory spy whose populist crusade against Lord Palmerston was a 'red herring', others praised his exposure of 'the injury done to labour and capital of this country by the exercise of the Russian Empire, and the almost universal exercise of Russian influence, all directed to the destruction of British commerce.' This all chimed in most harmoniously with Karl Marx's own hatred and mistrust of Tsarist Russia.'

p239
'There it might have ended, had not Vogt decided to gloat over Zeitung ('My Lawsuit Against the Allegemeine Zeitung') which denounced Marx as a revolutionary charlatan who sponged off the workers while consorting with the aristocracy...The many pages of evidence included a particularly damning letter from Gustav Techow, an ex-lieutenant in the Baden campaign, describing a meeting of the Communist League soon after his arrival in London in 1850:

“...In view of our aims, I regret that this man, with his fine intellect, is lacking in nobility of soul. I am convinced that the most dangerous personal ambition has eaten away at all the good in him. He laughs at the fools who parrot his proletarian catechism, just as he laughs over the communists a la Willich and over the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are the aristocrats, the genuine ones who are well aware of it. In order to drive them from government, he needs a source of strength, which he can find only in the proletariat. Accordingly, he has tailored his system to them. In spite of all his assurances to the contrary, and perhaps because of them, I took away with me the impression that the acquisition of personal power was the aim of all his endeavours.”

p250
'One day Lassalle disclosed the 'profound secret' that the Italian liberators Mazzini and Garibaldi, like the government of Prussia, were pawns directed by his guiding hand. Unable to contain themselves, Karl and Jenny began teasing him about these Napoleonic fantasies - whereupon the German messiah lost his temper, screaming that Marx was too 'abstract' to comprehend the realities of politics.'

p251
'In June 1863, two weeks after founding the General German Workers' Association, Lasalle wrote to the Iron Chancellor, bragging about the absolute power he had over his members, 'which perhaps you'd have to envy me!' But this miniature picture will plainly convince you how true it is that the working class feels instinctively inclined to dictatorship if it can first be rightfully convinced that such will be exercised in its interests, and how very much it would therefore be inclined, as I recently told you, in spite of all republican sentiments - or perhaps on those very grounds - to see in the Crown the natural bearer of the social dictatorship, in contrast to the egoism of bourgeois society.' What the workers required was not a monarchy created by the bourgeoisie, like that of Louis Philippe in France, but 'a monarchy that still stands as kneaded out of its original dough, leaning upon the hilt of the sword...'

'Probably not in spite of this gushing allegiance, Lasalle actually envisaged a ruling triumvirate of King Wilhelm, Bismarck and himself, and once the middle classes had been forcibly cut down to size he would have no further use for his two partners. His dictatorial scheme, which has been well described as 'social Caesarism', was anathema to Marx - and all the more annoying because its rhetoric included much 'brazen plagiarism' from the Communist Manifesto to which Lasalle had added his own reactionary, self-serving embellishments.'

p268
'He (Marx) certainly kept a close eye on share prices, and while badgering Engels for the next payment from Lupus's estate he mentioned that 'had I had the money during the past ten days, I'd have made a killing on the Stock Exchange here.'

'Playing the markets, hosting dinner-dances, walking his dogs in the park: Marx was in severe danger of becoming respectable. One day a curious document arrived, announcing that he had been elected, without his knowledge, to the municipal sinecure of 'constable of the Vestry of St Pancras.'

p297
'It was not only the Kugelmanns who lionised Marx while he was in Hanover. "The standing of the two of us in Germany,' he wrote to Engels, "particularly among the 'educated officials is of an altogether different order from what we imagined. Thus e.g. the director of the statistical bureau here, Merkel, visited me and told me that he had been studying the questions of money for years to no avail, and I had immediately clarified the matter once and for all." He was invited to dinner by the head of the local railway company, who thanked Dr Marx profusely for "doing me such an honour". More flattering still was the arrival of an emissary from Bismarck, who announced that the Chancellor wished "to make use of you and your great talents in the interests of the German people." Rudolf von Bennigsen, chairman of the right-wing national Liberal Party, turned up in person to pay his respects.'

p298
'Where once he had struggled to find a few pence for bread and newspapers, now his domestic necessities were those of a suburbanite anxious to keep up appearances.'

p310
'"But just as I was working at the first volume of Capital, the ill-humoured, arrogant and mediocre epigones who now talk large in educated German circles began to take pleasure in treating Hegel...as a "dead dog". I therefore openly avowed myself the pupil of that mighty thinker, and even, here and there in the chapter on the theory of coquetted with the mode of expression peculiar to him."'

p332
'Marx was happy to co-operate: on the 12 July he sent the Home Office a panel of papers that included the Inaugural Address, the Provisional Rules and a copy of the Civil War in France. When news of this reached Bakunin, he denounced Marx as a 'sneaky and a culminiatory police spy' - a libel that has been repeated periodically ever since. One of Marx's most recent biographers, Robert Payne, 'concludes there is some truth in the charge'.

p337
'Once the Commune had been crushed, the International itself soon began to disintegrate. The French section was outlawed, its members either killed or transported to the distant colony of New Caledonia; the English trade-union leaders fell into the embrace of Gladstone's Liberal Party; and many of the American branches were hijacked by the middle-class disciples of the weird sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, who advocated spiritualism, necromancy, free love, teetotalism and a Universal Language. (Woodhull, who used her undoubted seductive charms to con large sums of money from the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt...)'

p361
'In 1879 no less a figure than Crown Princess Victoria, daughter of the English Queen and wife of the future German Emperor Friedrich Wilhelm, asked a senior Liberal politician what he knew of this Marx fellow. The MP, Sir Mountstuart Elphinestone Grant Duff, had to plead ignorance but promised to invite the 'Red Terrorist Doctor' to lunch and report back.'

p364
'Marx's loathing of Malthus led him to take refuge in an even wackier theory, proposed by the French naturalist Pierre Tremaux in 1865.'


p317
‘That summer Marx’s Neue Rheinische Zeitung published a gossip item from Paris, attributed to George Sand, alleging that Bakunin was a secret agent of the Tsar: Marx’s willingness to spread this rumour can probably be attributed to his mistrust of Russia and the Russians. Nevertheless, he happily published a letter from George Sand denying that she ever said anything of the sort, and appended a brief editorial note apologising for the mistake.’

p318
'During their (Marx’s and Bakunin’s) conversation in London, Bakunin said that he had now abandoned his juvenile obsession with furtive plots and secret societies: from now on, he vowed, he would involve himself only in the wider socialist movement, i.e. the International. But after arriving in Italy he soon reverted to his old conspiratorial capers - aided and abetted by a rich new Russian patron, the Princess Obolensky, who apparently found this fat, toothless giant irresistible.'

p319
'In 1867 the Princess and her pet anarchist moved to Switzerland, where Bakunin soon noticed that the International was establishing itself as a significant force. Making up for lost time, he determined to hijack the organisation for himself and devised what his biographer E. H. Carr calls a "bold plan".'

Matrix re Wheen -

The best Capitalists have read their Marx. They use his analysis to rip off the population and get Rich. That is what Capitalism is all about. Capitalists who do so are working according to Marx's plan to achieve Higher Communism. Capitalism creates the wealth that enables / necessitates Higher Communism to be achieved.

The reason for not being a Capitalist can be seen in China where there are horrendous threats to the Environment. Marx was rather short sighted, he did not see that the wealth to population ratio necessasy for Higher Communism could be achieved by reducing the population.

God knows all that, and had policies built into the Created World that effectively limited the human population. Scientist have wrecked Gods plan for balance, and now we see Mass extinction approaching. Piped water and antbiotics are the prime tools Satan uses to bring about mass extrinction. In that he is supported by all the Religions, though there was once one Religion that was on God's side. Only one!

Avhieveing God and Marx's objective is increasingly improbable. The diseases God evolves are just not good enough to break through into the Cities, Scientists invent remedies and vaccines to ensure there is a full Mass Extinction.

Anarchists need to look at themselves, and their own ineffectiveness, as much as others.

We all know anarchists suffer from the delusion that the only thing preventing an anarchist revolution is the SWP, but that's part of the problem of Anarchism.

It seems to have been reduced to nothing more than an anti-SWP pressure group.

All very interestingly amusing stuff! However, Communist, I am pretty sure George Bush junior or Senior has "read his Marx", or any book for grown ups for that matter.

I found wheeny´s book such a delicous read that I returned to it for second helping. I´d say it is Marx without the Marxism.

If you want the Marxism Perhaps Engel´s and Marx´s best seller, I believe most of it is in "The communist Manefesto", which is shorter than Marix´s comment.

By the way, if you want another good read, try Naomi Klein´s "Shock Doctrine", which I am reading at bedtime, hiding behind the pillow because it´s so scary. I am surprised I am not having nightmares about capitalist spectres.

Sweet dreams