Ben Klassen (1918–1993)

As of finishing the documentary Welcome to Leith I figured I’d check out the tome on which the ideology was based on, and having checked on the index I saw a chapter on Marx. As a philosophy undergrad it stood out and I decided to read it.

If this chapter is representative of the whole work then my god what an embarrassment to follow it’s edifications.

Klassen posits that Marx’s work was disseminated by Jewish propagandists to corrupt western civilisation and that it actually does not possess any value. Klassen believes a conspiracy that Marx was selected as a figurehead of Jewish writing. Clearly the writer has not realised that Marx was a fervent antisemite, even writing a work on the Jewish Question. He calls Das Capital boring, as if that is even a just argument against a work of philosophy; and believes Marx had ripped off Hegel (even though the dialectics stated by Klassen is Fichte’s formulation) and hadn’t written anything new, when in fact Marx serves as a critique of Hegel. He says that Marx pulls the terms proletariat and bourgeoise out of nowhere, wouldn’t such an action be new if these terms hadn’t been used in that way before?

He criticises communism as supposedly if under Jewish leaders it would corrupt the youths, using money as it’s means, although a key facet of communism is the dissolution of money. The twisting of the term socialism is also incorrect, Marx saw socialism and communism as interchangeable terms and Lenin saw socialism as a transitional period toward communism. Klassen would be better disposed to use the term mutual aid. He also seems flagrantly unaware of the petit bourgeoise, which have significant differences to the rest of the bourgeoise. There is also a great irony and clear lack of self-awareness, Klassen attacks Marx for generalising the bourgeoise into some ill-defined threat, when Klassen’s entire discussion is of a similar manner when discussing international Jewry.

Emphasis is placed on how Marx did not produce constructive plans after revolution, which is in a way a fair criticism, but Das Capital is a work of diagnosis. The ways in which a communist society would be formulated are expounded elsewhere, most clearly in the Critique of the Gotha Program. There is a consistent lack of research in this work. He also discusses the similarities between Christianity and Marxism as if they were a new fact in the 1970’s, when liberation theology had already made its presence felt in the 1950’s and 60’s in Latin America.

All of this serves as a truly bad faith reading that serves as an unfounded justification for the writer’s anti-semitism, and I can imagine such arguments permeate the entire book. If you are a white nationalist/supremacist that has read this far, make sure to dedicate hours to the writers that have been criticised; don’t take Klassen’s mischaracterisations as a given. In one chapter alone Klassen has written nothing but defamation and speculation. Do yourself a favour and read in ways that don’t only serve to confirm your biases, citing works such as these will only make you appear stupid.… (meer)

Author was clearly an egomaniac and flagrant white supremacist in the strongest sense of the word. Not merely that he wants separation from other races or some such--he earnestly considers white people to be better than all others, and says so, and wants to dominate other races.

He seemed to want to create his own cult and be the leader thereof. He dreamed of 100,000 churches of his new "religion," the lack of development for which (e.g. ritual, worship, devotion, piety, virtue, none of these concepts are even attempted) shows he knew nothing at all about real religions and what compels people to follow them. He was really just an atheist who scoffed at religious sentiment per se.

He committed suicide in 1993. (less)… (meer)