Paul Kengor’s The Devil and Karl Marx

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Robert Vienneau
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Paul Kengor's The Devil and Karl Marx: Communism's Long March of Death, Deception, and Infiltration is a stupid and ignorant book. Kengor is particularly keen to chronicle atheist attacks from Marx and communists on religion.

Kengor starts with a poem that Marx wrote when he was 19. Marx envisions himself, I guess, as a ferocious violin player, inspired by the devil. Apparently, Marx was a fan of Goethe. Kengor never uses the phrase 'sturm und drang'. He goes on about some other poems and a play of Marx's. Kengor thinks that Marxists unjustly ignore these early works. They are in the first volume, though, of the Marx-Engels Collected Works.

The second section, after this prelude, is about Marx and Engels. It has little to say about Marx's ideas. He calls Marxism utopian, seeking a heaven on earth. He says nothing about distinction between scientific and utopian socialism.

Kengor, in this part of the book has a lot to say about Marx's life. When discussing his movement among countries, he does not even mention that nations kept on kicking him out. Kengor hops around in chronology. He is big on Marx not earning a living while studying and agitating. Also, Marx had poor bathing habits.

He brings up Bruno Bauer several times. But he does not mention that The Holy Family mocks Bauer. When bringing up Mikhail Bakunin, Kengor does mention the later falling out of Bakunin and Marx. Does Marx's intolerance in splits in the First International have something to do with Lenin's behavior? With Stalin?

Inasmuch as Kengor even discusses Marx's work, he stops at 1848, with the Communist Manifesto. The quotation about religion as the "opiate of the people" is from Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, from 1944. Marx's argument is for changing material conditions so that religion will no longer be needed as "the sigh of the oppressed creature". This idea is not inconsistent with arguments for atheism. Such idealist, superstructural arguments are beside the point, though. The context of this well-known phrase from Marx is over Kengor's head.

Here is all Kengor has to say about Capital:

"Marx had wasted over two decades writing Das Kapital, a long, ridiculous tome, a waste of money as well as time. He had initially received a three hundred dollar advance for the book, but extended over twenty-three years of drawn-out writing, it equated to a little over a dozen dollars a year.

Kengor does not connect the ideas of Marx to Lenin and events in the Soviet Union. At a more personal level, I do not know that Marx was responsible for what happened to his children after his death, including the suicides of two daughters. I had not known Lenin spoke at Paul Lafarge's funeral. Kengor brings up Bukharin several times, but does not mention that he was a victim of Stalin's show trials. I do not think Engels not getting married to the women that he slept with is on the same moral plane as the tortures in communist prisons in eastern and central Europe.

I do not know why I should care about testimony in the 1940s and 1950s to the House Unamerican Activities Committee. I was under the impression that a united front and a popular front are different concepts. The former is all non-facist forces, while the latter is all leftist forces. Anyways, Kengor does not discuss this distinction or even why it is a proplem for the Communist Party to work with Christians, and specifically Catholics, for specific reasons. Yes, the Communist Party was atheist. Kengor barely mentions the relationship of Catholics to Franco, and only in the context of what communists say. He only mentions Hitler in the context of turns in the communist party line with the Hitler-Stalin pact and then the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He has nothing to say about how this has anything to do with Marx's ideas. And he doesn't really discuss communist sectarian activities in taking over front groups. I am not surprised that communists were sometimes deceitful.

The fifth part consists of two chapters. Kengor writes a bit about the life of the occulist Aleister Crowley, the New York Times's reporter Walter Duranty (who believed what the Soviets told him in the 1930s), the gay activist Harry Hay, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin, and Kate Millett. Why this selection? Perhaps because snippets of their lives are suitable for ad hominem. Kengor is fairly candid that Crowley does not have much to do with Marxism or communism, for example.

We have another time Kengor says he does not know what he is talking about:

"Trying to discern the inane and impentrable ideas of the men of the Frankfurt School is a soul-crushing exercise in futility. One must spend years scouring pages and footnotes of thick volumes (mostly in untranslated German) trying to arrive at a vague flickering of understanding at what in the devil's name these madmen were thinking about. It would be bad enough if this venture was simple a waste of one's time - especially given the sacrifice of more edifying reading - but what is worse is the strain and toxicity to the intellect and the soul. One is struck again and again at how some Godless intellectuals (especially German ones) can descend into such rank intellectual vacuity, ambiguity, and downright stupidity..."

If I thought Kengor was a person of good-will, I might emphasize here.

The single chapter in the conclusion section neither summarizes the book nor follows from what comes before. We get complaints about Obama's totalitarianism, gay marriage, the Frankfurt school, critical theory, Gramsci, relativism, and cultural Marxism. We also get echos of Fulton Sheen and Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical on modernism. Apparently, Kengor has never heard of post-modernism. Kengor does not even know what he has covered in the book:

"In this book, we have looked at key figures of the Frankfurt School, including Georg Lukacs, Walter Benjamin, The Sexual Revolution's Wilhelm Reich, and (among others) Herbert Marcuse..."

No, he has not discussed Lukacs or Marcuse, even to the extent of saying something about some moments in their lives.

The book has lots of redundancy. Kengor distinguishes between socialism and communism. I do not see why the book should go through the same quotations from the same papal encyclicals again to see that the Catholic Church opposed both communism and socialism.

The references are odd. For example, if I see a discussion of Darkness at Noon, I expect a reference to Koestler's novel, not a book by a historian. I would hope for more than extracts from Wikipedia and from the "About" section from certain web sites.

It fails at the level of the individual sentence. Consider, "Sheen noted that whereas Karl Marx called religion 'the sigh of the oppressed creature, Sheen saw communism as the sigh of the oppressed creature." Is Sheen noting how Sheen saw communism? At one point, Kengor has Manning Johnson testifying to the HUAC that "this was 'the extension of the hand of friendship and cooperation to the church, while in the other hand holding a dagger to drive through the heart of the church.'" But then, "the outstretched hand concealed a knife." Which metaphor do you want?