Was Marx a British Agent?

How Britain Utilized Communism to Defeat Its Competitors for World Hegemony

Under the party dictatorship of the Marxists, Russia disappeared under a bell jar; as also later China, politically isolated from Germany and France and not very attractive and efficient. Any criticism of capitalism in the US or Western Europe could easily be stifled by comparison with the situation in Russia under Stalin and China under Mao.

It is almost as if it had been planned to turn out this way from the beginning — ever since David Urquhart (agent of the British Crown) and Karl Marx worked together as allies to write against the dangers posed by Russia. David Urquhart is almost exclusively remembered as the man who introduced Turkish baths to England; but until the death of Prince Regent Albert in 1861, he was closely linked with the political machinations of the British Crown.

—Karl Marx, Prussian government agent by Wolfgang Waldne

Have you ever wondered why Karl Marx focuses almost exclusively on two classes of people, pitting the proletariat (or industrial workers) against the bourgeoisie (the middle class) and giving little attention to the people on either side? Why it is that Marx doesn’t rail against the prerogatives of aristocrats or show much sympathy towards peasants and artisans? Isn’t there something just a little strange about this situation?

What if I were to tell you Marx was in the pay of Prussian nobility and American financiers? What if I were to tell you, as I’ve noted before in another place, Karl’s father had been a prominent Prussian judge?

Karl’s grandfather, Rabbi Meir Levi, was Chief Rabbi of Trier. However … Karl’s father Heinrich had been targeted by the Sabbataens because of strong opposition to Sabbataen heresy among his forbearers. Heinrich succumbed and “converted to Christianity” before Karl’s birth, and was helped by the Sabbateans to the position of Supreme Court Judge.

Marx had connections in high places…

Who is this elegantly dressed lady at Karl’s side? Why, it’s none other than his wife, Jenny Westphalen—the little sister of Prussian Minister of the Interior, Ferdinand von Westphalen.

“Starting out his spying career as the closest friend of theologian Bruno Bauer,” writes Walne,

…Marx suddenly became the editorial director of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, funded by the prime minister Ludolf Camphausen, who later promoted him to work in his ministry. Marx’s theories were directed against well-known targets among the early socialists. Marx and his cronies began by infiltrating Weitling’s Confederation of Craftsmen, and later undermined the First International. Spokesmen of the labor movement found his theories useless, and only Bismarck’s adoption of the Socialist Law allowed Marx to win influence over the social democracy. Upon his arrival in England, Karl Marx joined a partnership with David Urquhart, an agent of the British crown, and they became involved in agitation against Russia, which was threatening the global interests of the British.

An article by Richard Poe goes into much greater detail:

Karl Marx’s career followed a trajectory similar to that of the French revolutionaries. Like them, Marx was influenced by British mentors, at least some of whom are known to have been intelligence operatives. In addition, Marx had family connections to the British aristocracy. He married Jenny von Westphalen, whose father was a Prussian baron, descended, on his mother’s side, from the Scottish Earls of Argyll.

How the British Invented Communism (And Blamed It on the Jews)

Marx’s father in law, then, was not only Prussian Minister of the Interior but, as Poe notes again later, was “a Prussian baron, whose Scottish mother, Jeanie Wishart, descended from the Earls of Argyll.”

In a footnote to the above, one finds that,

“Jeanie Wishart of Pitarrow came of the family of the Earls of Argyll who played such a big role in the history of Scotland…

and that,

William Wishart, Jenny’s great-grandfather, accompanied the Prince of Orange to England…

among other details of this notable lineage.

Now, those who are not familiar with the history of House of Orange may not see the significance of all this. In future articles I may explore how all the nobility of Europe appear to be related. But at this point it should already be obvious that Marx was in deep with the Prusso-British nobilty—does one really just marry a noble’s daughter by matter of coincidence?

Poe also goes into great detail about Marx’s association, beginning in 1854, with the aforementioned Scottish nobleman David Urquhart whom he notes was “apparently a distant relative of Marx’s wife, through her Scottish grandmother.”

The alliance between Marx and Scottish aristocrat David Urquhart has confounded historians for generations. Marx was a communist, and Urquhart an arch-reactionary, who openly called for a restoration of the feudal system. What bound them together? What could they possibly have had in common? I believe what bonded Marx and Urquhart was their mutual hatred of the middle class (the “bourgeoisie”).

Urquhart “had a fanatical hatred against Russia” as well, and had a colorful history in which he served as British diplomat in Constantinople and a “sometime secret agent,” even instigating a rebellion against Russia in 1834.

Somewhat surprisingly, Marx joined Urquhart’s cause, becoming one of the most prominent anti-Russian journalists of his day. Marx wrote blistering anti-Russian screeds for The New York Tribune—then the highest-circulation newspaper in the world—as well as for Urquhart’s own publications in Britain.

…

In his attacks on Russia, Marx wrote not as a revolutionary, but as a propagandist for British imperial interests.

There is a lot more to be said about Marx and Urquhart, but for brevity’s sake I will not try to reproduce that here. Basically, the British elite despised the middle class that had emerged as a result of the industrial revolution, threatening their long held position of financial and political power. Urquhart, like others, saw an alliance between the lower classes and the elite against the middle class as “only natural.”

The elite of 19th century Britain had in fact long foreseen the possibility of revolution arising from the harsh circumstances of the proletariat in the newly factory-dominated cities and had implemented policies to forestall revolution in Britain—at the same time fomenting it elsewhere. Poe traces both the French revolution and the beginnings of communism in Europe under Babeuf precisely to British meddling and intrigue. Thus one sees unfolding a long term British strategy for its own supremacy beginning in the 18th century and continuing into the 20th (though British machinations against Russia was really a centuries-long policy). As evidence of this process, Poe turns to the late 19th century and the words of Toybee and Alfred (Lord) Milner.

In 1882—the last year of Marx’s life—two up-and-coming Oxford intellectuals, Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Milner, gave lectures on socialism. Both praised Marx as a genius. Both argued that socialism was Britain’s secret weapon for containing and heading off revolution. Of all countries, England was least likely to experience a revolution, said Toynbee, because she had implemented “socialist programmes” early on. “Some of the things the Socialists of Germany and France are now working for, we have had since 1834,” Toynbee boasted.

Toynbee and Milner were best of friends. Though Toynbee died in 1883, Milner would later become colonial governor of southern Africa. Together with British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, they would instigate the Boer war—evidence of their hatred of Dutch and French competition in Africa.

British aristocratic pinings for a return to feudalism were epitomized in the “Young England” movement of the early 19th century, and their socialist proclivities reflected the age old aristcratic notion of nobless oblige—that the upper classes should act with generosity and philanthropy towards their subjects, thus portraying themselves as benevolent—whether in sincerity or of necessity—and, incidentally, preventing revolt.

[Young England] survived through the strange, symbiotic relationship between Urquhart and Marx.

It lingered, through the 1880s, in the teachings of Oxford professor John Ruskin, and two of his young disciples, Arnold Toynbee and Alfred Milner.

The Ruskinites embraced a philosophy that would one day come to be known as “liberal imperialism”—the notion that the best way to spread enlightened social policies across the world was by conquest and colonization, that is, through expansion of the British Empire.

Milner would go on to become one of Britain’s leading statesmen. He served as colonial governor of southern Africa during the Boer Wars, and as War Secretary for Lloyd George during World War I.

All this might seem fine and dandy if you are a British aristocrat, but what if you are a negro subject in Britain’s southern African colonies or under the brunt of their ruthless oppression in India? Or a victim of any of the other endless machinations of the British Crown—-such as the French of Russian revolutions?

I recommend reading Poe’s article in full, which I will be cross-posting in the next couple days or so. In the meantime, you may want to watch this interview to get a sense of the author, whom I find to be a very credible and humble scholar.

I’d like to now to turn to Professor Anthony Sutton, who reveals four distinct sources of funding for Marx¹:

1. “The conduit for financing the printing of the Manifesto was none other than Louisiana pirate Jean Laffite, who was, among his later occupations, a spy for Spain and a courier for a group of American bankers.”²

2. “The second source of American financing for Karl Marx came from Charles Anderson Dana, Editor of the New York Tribune owned by Horace Greeley. Both Dana and Greeley were fraternally associated with … Clinton Roosevelt … and with his Roosevelt Manifesto [sic] for dictatorial government [see below]. Dana hired Marx to write for the New York Tribune. This Marx did, in over 500 articles spread over ten years from 1851 to 1861.”³

3. “Marx's prime source of German funds came from his associate Frederic Engels, son of a wealthy Bremen cotton manufacturer and subsidy provider to Marx for many years.”

4. “More surprising is the subsidy to Marx from the Prussian elite. Karl Marx married Jenny von Westphalen. Jenny’s brother Baron Ferdinand von Westphalen was Minister of the Interior in Prussia (overseeing the police department) while Karl was under "investigation" by this same Prussian department. In other words, Marx's brother-in-law was in charge of investigating subversive activities. Over the years the von Westphalen family strongly supported Marx. For 40 years the Marx's maid, Demuth, was paid by the Westphalens and in fact Demuth was personally selected for the job by Baroness Caroline von Westphalen. Two of Karl Marx's early essays were actually written in the von Westphalen estate at Kreuznach, and money from the estate was left to Marx.”

Why would American bankers and Prussian industrialists and nobility be supporting a revolutionary propagandist who was ostensibly against everything they stood for?

On Engels’ support for Marx, I find the following from a Smithsonian article on Engels telling:

As a wealthy member of the bourgeoisie, he provided, for nearly 40 years, the financial support that kept his collaborator Karl Marx at work on world-changing books such as Das Kapital. Yet at least one biographer has argued that while they were eager enough to take Engels’s money, Marx and his aristocratic wife, Jenny von Westphalen, never really accepted him as their social equal.

Who then was of higher social class: Marx or Engels? The answer seems obvious. And does the reader not find it at least a little bit ironic that the great authors of the Communist Manifesto were the son of a prominent Jew married into an aristocratic Prusso-British family and the son of a wealthy British industrialist?

As for the American side of Marx’s financial support, which would have appeared to have been associated with American banking interests, I think it’s necessary to understand that from it’s inception American banking was in an obligatory subservient or conspiratorial role to the City of London and the Bank of England; and that British and American banking families including the Rothschilds, the Warburgs, the Schiffs, Kuhn and Loeb were of German extraction. I’ve written about this before in a review of Eustace Mullins’ Secrets of the Federal Reserve: The London Connection:

Besides all this, it had been understood ever since the time of Bismark’s socialist plan in Prussia and Clinton Roosevelt’s The Science of Government (1841)—the latter predating the Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto by seven years—that government, socialism, banking and industry could go hand in hand.

The Roosevelt family had developed the Bank of New York and the sugar refining industry. From the same elite family was later born Franklin Delano Roosevelt who laid out the American New Deal in the 1930’s, bringing to fruition Clinton Roosevelt’s vision. Like British policies implemented a century earlier, Roosevelt’s New Deal prevented an outbreak of violent socialist revolution following the [banker induced] Great Depression, placating the populace with new social policies (at the same time serving Roosevelt’s personal interests).⁴

But for Russia—and later China—a more radical implementation of socialist ideas was desired: the toppling of the Czar and the imposition of a despotic regime that could only mean that the formerly prosperous and already liberalizing Russian society would be thrown to the ground and become dependent on the graces and gifts of American industrial and financial lords. Thus, the lower classes were to be diverted into a trap

What? But, the Soviet Union pulled itself up by it’s own bootstraps and become a world superpower! someone contests. I can only say go and consult Anthony Sutton on that.⁵

Rather, what was created was immediate impoverishment and death by famine and tyranny that devalued independent initiative and forced the peasants into slave labor in agricultural communes and factories with a supreme emphasis in industrialization, militarization and police state politics (aka fascism). Meanwhile, what wealth there was left was concentrated in a central bank—as Marx and Engels promised—run by a Morgan-associated banker.⁶

As Waldne writes:

The industrial revolution had produced the proletariat, which had to work under inhuman conditions in the factories for wages that barely sustained a life as starvelings in rags and misery. Men, women and children had to work hard every day for 10 hours, and then slept with total strangers, their companions in misfortune — not only in a single room, but together in a single bed. A life without any human dignity, without any hope, a life that no citizen would ever want or expect for himself or his family. Marx and Engels were now ready to bring the announcement to the readers of their Communist Manifesto, that in the future everyone would be proletarians, and that this would be the promise of communism.

Such Communism could hardly be more frightening to its original followers. In the ideal of joint ownership, they had seen the chance that no man should live as a proletarian, rather than the necessity that all people must become proletarians — even if the proles would then have the power take over the state. Imagine if Abraham Lincoln had announced in the US that first the system of slavery would abound more and more, until almost all citizens of the United States had become slaves; until at last sometime the overwhelming number of slaves would overthrow their slave owners and justify a slave state. Until then, no one could do anything, because this development would be historically-materialistic inevitable and scientifically proven. Human intervention in the specified course of history would not be possible or would even hinder progress on its inevitable way. To live according to the teachings of Marx and Engels, was to reject any concrete and practical resistance of the workers and citizens against the interests of big business.

Again, it must be stressed that the way in which the socialist ideals of The Science of Government (1841) and the Communist Manifesto were ultimately implemented differed from East to West because the aims of the British aristocracy and the banking cabal based in Germany, Britain and America differed from one region to the next. Beginning with the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia was set back. China followed. The Nationalist Socialist Party of Nazi Germany was set up by the same financiers as a variation on a theme to serve it’s temporary purpose, only to be ultimately cast down.⁷ Japan was subdued. The Arab world was divided and parcelled. The socialist State of Israel was established. And the United States was made into the new world empire, the financial-industrial-military hegemon in occult service to Great Britain.

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This article is meant as background for what is to follow. In coming posts, I will be presenting articles by Mees Baaijen who has helped me to better understand how this situation of shifting power and financial hegemony has come about.

Recommended Reading

Books:

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution by Anthony Sutton

The Federal Reserve Conspiracy by Anthony Sutton

Tragedy and Hope 101 by Joseph Plummer

Web articles:

The Mechanical Marx: an Anarchist Critique of Marxism by Darren Allen

The Technological System by Darren Allen

Notes:

1. Anthony C. Sutton, The Federal Reserve Conspiracy, p. 41 & c.

2. Sutton (p.41-43) cites primary sources for this information and notes that Laffite did not die in 1823 as reported but went underground and had a colorful career as an agent in contact with many prominent personalities.

3. Sutton discusses what he calls Roosevelt’s “Manifesto” (The Science of Government) in chapter four of The Federal Reserve Conspiracy.

4. See Sutton, Wall Street and FDR.

5. Sutton wrote a three volume inventory of American material and technological contributions to the Soviet Union which he then followed up with his well documented Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and The Best Enemy Money Can Buy.

6. Ruskombanken was the first Soviet bank and was led by Olof Aschberg, a key Morgan man who managed Morgan relations with Russia both before and after the Bolshevik revolution, including financing the revolution itself via the important Guaranty Trust Company.

“In tsarist times Aschberg was the Morgan agent in Russia and negotiator for Russian loans in the United States; during 1917 Aschberg was financial intermediary for the revolutionaries; and after the revolution Aschberg became head of Ruskombank, the first Soviet international bank, while Max May, a vice president of the Morgan-controlled Guaranty Trust, became director and chief of the Ruskombank foreign department. We have presented documentary evidence of a continuing working relationship between the Guaranty Trust Company and the Bolsheviks .” (Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, ch. XI)

One thing Sutton writing in the 1970s apparently doesn’t realize is that Morgan himself was an asset/agent of the British Rothschilds—something thoroughly documented by Eustace Mullins in Secrets of the Federal Reserve: The London Connection.

See also Paul Cudenec’s article, BRICS in the Wall of Global Greed.

7. See Sutton, Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler.