Rembrandt Clancy has translated another essay by Wolfgang Ockenfels (previously: June 8, 2016, Oct. 10 2017, April 30, 2018). He includes and introduction as well as endnotes to provide context.

Marxist Monument Preservation

Introduction

by Rembrandt Clancy

On 5 May 2018 an eighteen-foot-high bronze statue of a book-toting, forward-striding Karl Marx, donated by the Communist Chinese government, was erected in Marx’s birthplace of Trier in honour of his 200th birthday. Gates of Vienna has already posted a video on this subject, a speech by Václav Klaus, former President of the Czech Republic.

The present translation is of an editorial opinion called Marxist Monument Preservation by Prof. Wolfgang Ockenfels, who likens the Marx statue in Trier to Brutalism in architecture. Prof Ockenfels’ most recent contribution at Gates of Vienna was The Yearning for and the Right to a Homeland wherein he dealt with the threat to German “cosmo-politicians” of an increasingly urgent “longing for one’s ‘homeland’“ in the face of rising “identity movements” and “alternative parties” which “can no longer be suppressed”.

Forming the background to Prof. Ockenfels’ remarks are speeches by two European politicians who use disclaimers to sanitise Marx and distance him from “these colossal crimes against humanity” which “Karl Marx himself had already announced” (Ockenfels). The two main speakers were the Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate, Frau Malu Dreyer (SPD), and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission.

Frau Dreyer made this disclaimer:

The crimes against millions of people, which were committed in the 20th century in his [Marx’s] name, cannot be blamed on him. (Phoenix, 0:58)

The following excerpts from Jean-Claude Juncker’s speech were taken from two separate videos, which were themselves excerpts. The speaker shows his consciousness of a continuity with post-war socialism going back to socialist Chancellor Willy Brandt, who was in office from 1964 to 1987 (see also endnote 3). Noteworthy also is Mr. Juncker’s choice of quotation from Karl Marx, as well as his comment on Marx’s works, which together emphasise social engineering as the matter-of-fact vehicle of social change as opposed to an unconscious, organic cultural unfolding.

Marx is not responsible for all the horror for which his alleged heirs are responsible (applause). Willy Brandt recognised that very well, because Willy Brandt said: Whatever one has made of Marx, striving for freedom, the liberation of men from servitude and ignoble dependence constituted the motive for his actions”… One must understand Marx from the standpoint of his times… (0:36 min.)… Marx, a politically active philosopher, once wrote: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” That which he left behind by way of interpretation and demonstration, Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto, has contributed to the changing of the world… Karl Marx cannot be held responsible for the fact that some of his later disciples used the values he formulated, and the words he used to describe these values, as a weapon against others (2:02 min.). (cf. RT video in German)

[…]

Karl Marx was a philosopher who thought into the future with a claim to creativity, and today he represents things for which he is neither responsible nor culpable, because much of what he formulated was virtually reformulated into its opposite. But I would nevertheless like to draw attention to the fact that the state of Rhineland-Palatinate and the city [of Trier] are correct to remember Marx, because remembering and understanding has to do with securing the future… (cf. Phoenix video, 2:29 min.)

There are some referenced endnotes available which provide some literary or historical context.

About the Author

Rev. Prof. Wolfgang Ockenfels OP was born in Bad Honnef am Rhein in 1947. Having entered the Dominican Order in 1967, he studied Philosophy and Theology and was ordained in 1973. From 1974 to 1978 he read Social Ethics and Economics in Freiburg, Switzerland. His doctoral thesis was on the theme of Unions and the State. In 1984 he completed his habilitation in the field of Christian Social Doctrine at the University of Augsburg on the subject of faith and politics. Since 1985 Prof. Ockenfels has been a (full) professor for Christian Social Science in the theological faculty in Trier. He has published a very long list of monographs, articles and contributions. Since 1985 he has been Chief Editor of Die Neue Ordnung, a Christian journal founded in 1946 by opponents of National Socialism.

The original source appeared in Die Neue Ordnung, Nr. 3/2018 June

by Wolfgang Ockenfels
June 2018

Marxist Monument Preservation

Translation by Rembrandt Clancy

A spectre is moving about the world, and on its 200th birthday it alights in the centre of Trier as a monstrous bronze Brocken, as a rocher de bronze belonging to the antiquated Left-progressives from an eternal yesterday,^[1] all to the sheer delight of the home-tourist-industry and the Chinese guests, who are able to feel at home now that they are in the homeland of the homeless^[2] Karl Marx. On aesthetic grounds alone, out of revulsion at this Chinese state-art, the more sensitive contemporaries avoid looking at the monument, which is nothing but grotesque supremacy-art, monumental and imperial. This Brutalism characterises, sure enough, the entire Marxist-Leninist art style, which was not much better than the propaganda art of the Third Reich. Hence now as then, the politico-ideological client is to be taken into account: Marx is still regarded in the political dictatorship of China as the great prophet. And China can easily afford such gifts.

Karl Marx, upon whose “shoulders we stand” — as Oswald von Nell-Breuning SJ^[3] all too naively expressed it — can “not be blamed”, of course, for the millions of crimes which were committed in his name, as Malu Dreyer or Jean-Claude Juncker credulously maintained at the ceremony in Trier.

In fact, Karl Marx himself had already announced these colossal crimes against humanity. In Marx, many extremist justifications for revolutionary violence are to be found. Marx legitimised the bloody “anti-capitalist class warfare”, to which more than a hundred million people fell victim. Of course one cannot attribute every single one of these crimes committed by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot and Fidel Castro to Marx. Unfortunately, however, most of these mass murderers, their accomplices and the leftist armchair perpetrators have to this day not been brought before a court of law. And the Marxist intellectuals, journalists and politicians have continued to be spared a Vergangenheitsbewältigung [an overcoming of a (holocaust) past].^[4] The victims’ associations, who have now also made themselves known in Trier, are unfortunately not heard.

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