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Merker: Marx Stole His Ideas From Stein
In the last episode of Bjorn Merker’s Perishing Promise, we learned how Marx & Co. brilliantly assembled a secular ideology that copied all the facets of Christianity, but without God.
But guess what. Marx stole the ideas for proletarian revolution without attribution from a guy called Lorenz Stein, who wrote a book in German published in 1842, titled Socialism and Communism in today’s France. A contribution to contemporary history. Today we would regard Stein’s analysis as economically flawed. But Marx just took it and made it the foundation of Marxism.
In the first chapter, Das Proletariat, Stein describes the new working class as a threat to society
through its numbers and its frequently demonstrated courage… through its consciousness of its unity… finally through its feeling that it can arrive at the realization of its plans only through revolution… Because all that the proletarian wants can in the end by achieved only through the toppling of two of the absolute pillars of all societal life, through the destruction of the sacredness of law and that of property.
Why is the proletariat going to topple the world? It’s complicated, but Stein argues that the proletarian has only one resource, his labor.
[U]nder modern conditions of industrial production… the interaction of labor and property in the production of wealth is said to permanently debar proletarians from raising themselves into the ranks of the propertied.
“The absolute victory of capital over labor power” presented the proletarians with no hope of rising into the ranks of the propertied, except by revolution. The classes were bound “to confront one another in enmity” and this provided the ground for a solution in socialism and communism.
In theory and history, it turned out that Stein was wrong. But in 1840, who knew? Meanwhile the coffee-house intellectuals in Berlin had developed a way for activists to help the poor to make “things by right how they ought to be.”
Marx had left Berlin in 1841 because he had to get a job — ending up as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne in 1842 — and had not kept up with the intellectual fashion of coffee-house intellectuals and the moral argument for socialism, and rejected their articles.
He stole Stein’s analysis and used it as the basis of his prophecy of revolution. He rejected the intellectuals’ “class-less ‘True socialism’ in favor of Stein’s ‘proletarian’ socialism-communism” that prophesied revolution on the basis of “‘objective’ economic mechanisms” taken from Stein’s book.
But the one central theme was “the necessity of societal overthrow.” As Engels said at Marx’s grave,
Marx was before else a revolutionist. His real mission in life was to contribute, in one way or another, to the overthrow of capitalist society[.]
But when it came to Russia, a pre-industrial society, Marx imagined that revolution could skip the capitalist phase.
By 1872 the economic progress in America and England suggested that the proletariat could thrive through “peaceful progress”, and Marx admitted it in a speech in Amsterdam. But for the rest of the Continent “the lever of our revolution must be force.” Never mind peaceful progress: revolution forever!
Could it be that Marx, after carousing at the university on an allowance from his father, couldn’t deal with the removal of support after his father died and he had to get a job? Yet, as a journalist he felt that journalism degraded itself by being a trade.
The fact is that Marx resented having to earn a living. Thus the slogan “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!”, the “decoupling of productive endeavor from consumption”. We can see that this resentment continues to our own day with resentful college graduates, condemned to lower status than they surely deserve, the backbone of the Democratic Socialists of America.
Marx’s revolution fitted “with the myth of the ‘unfinished revolution’” in France. The revolution could not be complete until a proletarian revolution completed the “final revolutionary transition to communism… and a world of prosperity in which all would be equal, happy, and free”.
There has been no shortage of withering economic critique of Marxism, starting with Eugen von Bohm-Bawerk in 1896, an economist of the Austrian school who critiqued Marx on the ground of his own theory after the publication of Volume 3 of Das Kapital. But Bohm-Bawerk understood that Marxism owed its strength not in its argument, but in the hearts of its disciples, “in their hearts, their wishes and their desires.”
Merker summarizes the commanding heights of Marxism. It
(a) enthrones the destruction of the prevailing order as the necessary prerequisite for human felicity, (b) buttresses activist hope and patience by a teleological construal of history, (c) absolves its believers of personal responsibility for both the condition they find themselves in and their acts, (d) receives unearned moral credit from a culture wedded to other-regarding ethics, and (e) appears to stake out a path to what is but an unspoken promise implicit in the ambience of modernity, namely a condition in which everyone is equal, happy, and free.
A vital point is that the secularization of the world has created a demand to fill the religious space with something, and Marxism is “religion in the guise of politics.”
And it matters not that events have denied the assertion of the immiseration of the workers. People, especially educated people, need a saving faith, and Marxism has delivered, especially for the secularized that still resonate to an “other-regarding” morality.
More to come.
| Thu, 20 Aug 2026 03:43:50 GMT |
Merker: Getting from Enlightenment Reason to Secular Salvation
The educated youth of the mid-19th century were traumatized by the aftereffects of the twin revolutions that convulsed Europe around 1800: the French Revolution with its 30 years of war and upheaval; and the Industrial Revolution in the economy.
Everything was changing, and Merker proposes “Romanticism in art and intellectual fashions” as, at least in part, a reaction against the merciless change issuing from the French and Industrial Revolutions. And this Romanticism included Nationalism, an effort to create meaning in national myths for the various peoples of Europe.
The point is that we live in a time of momentous change.
[We have] the French and Industrial Revolutions, the abolition of slavery, Romanticism, Nationalism, science, and beyond[.]
And everyone is trying to understand the present, to divine the future, and also make their divination happen.
What’s it all about, Alfie? One thing is clear. In the two and a half centuries since the convulsions centering around the year 1800, we still have not agreed upon what to do. We have been unable to stabilize our Enlightenment heritage as divided between the competing French and English interpretations.
So Merker proposes to investigate the “superordinate ideals and values” that are directing traffic. And he suggests that Romanticism, especially as it helped birth Marxism, is the key to understanding what ails us. A key to the birth of Marxism in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, except that they were not really philosophers but literary figures creating modern myths.
These three failed to be bound by Kant’s dictum that we cannot know things in themselves, and pretended that they could know everything by conducting speculative exercises in “German Philosophical Romanticism.”
But there was a problem. Hegel’s philosophy proposed an “end of history” culminating in the “glorification of the Prussian state” and did not provide a secular version of Christianity that looked towards the future and provided an engine of “hope, purpose, and activism directed at a ‘promised’ future state of felicity.”
No problem. David Friedrich Strauss wrote The Life of Jesus and Ludwig Feuerbach wrote The Essence of Christianity. Feuerbach proposed that the notion of God is a projection of positive human attributes “such as understanding, strength and love” into a divine being that is really just a projection of ideal human nature.
According to Feuerbach, in our conception of God we have divested ourselves of our own nature in an act of self-alienation that leaves us estranged from ourselves and divided from our fellow humans.
Suppose there were other, non-religious alienations “whose abolition would complete the liberative restoration of an imagined human state of perfection”. Moses Hess came out with On the Essence of Money that experienced humans as subjects “under the ‘worship of money’” as a secular equivalent to Feuerbach’s religious alienation.
Obviously, this secular alienation could be “ended by a restoration, under a future system of socialism or communism, of the cooperation which Hess held to be characteristic of human productivity in the unalienated state”.
Marx and Engels converted this restoration into their “materialist conception of history” where human history is driven by “changes in the material means of production.” Thus the Industrial Revolution changed the means of production and the bourgeois revolutions would be followed by proletarian revolution, and “the cataclysm would issue in a world of conflictless cooperation”, for, following Feuerbach, it would release the
cooperative, unselfish, communal species-being [that] constitutes the real nature of the individual awaiting liberation from its occlusion by “alienated labor”[.]
The genius of Marxism is to copy the Christian arc of history into secular form.
By its assumption of an inevitable passage from capitalism to revolution Marxism recaptured, in purely secular terms, … the psychology of hope and purpose that is inherent in Christian sacred history[.]
And it equips the followers with patience, for if the revolution doesn’t succeed today it just means that “material conditions are not sufficiently ‘ripe’ for the passage to the final apocalyptic transformation.” Meanwhile the faithful can keep busy with “the proselytizing, organizing, and agitation that will inevitably… be rewarded with success in the end by ‘the iron laws of history’”, never mind the “defeats along the way to the shimmering goal.”
More to come.
| Wed, 19 Aug 2026 03:31:51 GMT |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Socialism promises equality but delivers scarcity.
The economic is the distinction between useful and harmful — Carl Schmitt
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
And the trouble with politics is that it reduces human society to a war against the enemy, as determined by Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: How The Dutch Taught Us about Government Finance
