My Speech on "The Marx Nobody Knows": How the Founder of Communism Squandered Two Fortunes and Sponged Off His Rich Partner
Jan. 16, 2010.
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Today is Saturday. Maybe you can spare an hour and a half. Here is a 1988 speech I gave on "The Marx Nobody Knows." That year was the 1,000th anniversary of the founding of the Russian Orthodox Church. It was also the year that the USSR went bankrupt. A year later, the Berlin Wall went down. In 1991, the Soviet Union self-destructed.
Red China was nine years into its market reform plan in 1988. Its economy was growing, but few analysts recognized this at the time.
The empires that invoked the names of Marx and Engels were about to depart.
I gave this lecture at a conference of scholars that was sponsored by the Mises Institute. I spoke after Murray Rothbard's speech on Karl Marx as a Christian heretic. My position is that he was an apostate from Christianity. For his youthful paper on Christianity, click here. He rejected that paper within a few months, when he went off to the University of Berlin, from which never earrned his degree. He earned a doctorate in philosophy from Jena after he dropped out of Berlin.
Lion Philips was Marx's uncle by marriage to his mother's sister. Philips was a banker, who thought his nephew was a bum. He was the executor of Marx's mother's estate after her death. He paid Marx his first windfall. Philips' grandsons founded the N. V. Philips company (Norelco in the USA), one of the largest manufacturing organizations in the world. This speech was recorded on an audiocassette, which the Philips company invented.