In informal logic, it’s generally considered poor form to criticise a person personally, rather than tackling their arguments. Usually, for good reason.
But the ad hominem fallacy, as it’s called, is as often as misunderstood as it is near-ubiquitous. Some have dubbed this the ‘ad hominem fallacy fallacy’. For instance, ‘Bernie Sanders is a lazy grifter and socialism is a bad idea because it’s never worked in practice’, is an ad hominem (it attacks Sanders’s character), but it’s not a fallacy, because it also directly attacks his argument (‘socialism will work this time’). An actual ad hominem fallacy would be, ‘Bernie Sanders is a lazy grifter, therefore socialism is a bad idea.’
It’s also not a fallacy to attack the character of the person if their character directly contradicts their own arguments. For instance, the 1960’s Melbourne priest whose sermons thundered against modern ‘immorality’, yet he was rogering altar boys right afterward. Yes, that really happened, almost cartoonishly horrific as it sounds.
Another man whose character directly contradicted his own arguments was the granddaddy of bad ideas himself, Karl Marx.
Behind the manifesto there was a man – an envious, deceitful and lazy one – constitutionally averse to productive work. The theory is just a result of that. It is the man, elevated into a system.
Marx’s father Heinrich, a hardworking Trier lawyer, wrote letters of exhausted despair. “Is your heart in accord with your head? Will you ever be capable of truly human, domestic happiness?” Heinrich died without seeing the full scope of just how little his idle son was capable of. But his own words indicate that he clearly foresaw the manifesto made manifest in his ungrateful child.
Communism in practice has been, coincidentally or not, entirely in keeping with Marx’s character. He was a bully whose preferred method of debate was shouting opponents down and vowing to “destroy” them. He was Stalin without the firing squads: the same intolerance and the same taste for factional annihilation, merely lacking the state apparatus.
Bernie Sanders is surely the only man in history kicked out of a hippy commune for being too lazy. Marx never needed a commune. He had Engels. He never finished his own magnum opus in part because he frittered vast stretches of time pouring written invective on anyone with even the most minor doctrinal difference. A keyboard warrior limited to a nib pen.
He never worked. The foundational fact about the man who devoted his life to the theory of labor.
Marx’s knowledge of the actual proletariat was limited to the view from the Reading Room of the British Museum – and the slave-labour maid he was exploiting in the worst way possible.
Helene Demuth – cooked, cleaned, raised the Marx children, and managed the household through decades of poverty that was chronic not because of capitalism but because Marx could not hold a job and would not try. Her specific working-class life was spent in unpaid service to the man theorizing about her liberation. He did not liberate her. He did not pay her. He fathered her child, denied it, and let Engels take the blame.
Marx’s poverty was entirely self-inflicted, and not just by his chronic aversion to paid work: as Francis Wheen has shown, the income Marx sponged off his family and friends was plenty to fund a respectable middle-class existence, but instead of paying his rent and food bills, Marx squandered it on aping the indulgences of the rich: riding lessons, seaside holidays and the like. All while thundering hatred against the bourgeoisie he so clearly envied.
The envy is the key to everything. A brilliantly clever man who felt the world had not given him his due – who watched others succeed and experienced their success as an offense requiring theoretical explanation. The result: the most sophisticated intellectual expression of resentment ever produced. A complete systematic account of why the successful are guilty, why their success is stolen, and why the man who has not succeeded is the true repository of value. A theory of envy with footnotes. Nietzsche called this ressentiment. He was describing the same type, from a different angle, at roughly the same time.
Eleven people attended Marx’s funeral in 1883. His wife died exhausted two years earlier. The maid remained unpaid, her illegitimate son unacknowledged by the man who fathered him.
The Communist Manifesto was already on its way to inspiring experiments that would kill approximately a hundred million people.
Thomas Sowell wrote that Marx and Engels “were two bright and articulate young men without responsibility even for their own livelihoods – much less for the social consequences of their vision. [Who have] had a special appeal for successive generations of the same kinds of people.”
Look around. The envious intellectual who has never built anything but knows exactly what is wrong with everything others have built. The man of the people who cannot manage his own affairs. The revolutionary kept by the class he condemns.
The character was the argument all along.
