In April 1845, Karl Marx’s mother-in-law sent to the Marx family a nanny named Helene Demuth, known as “Lenchen.” Marx’s long-suffering wife, Jenny, was thrilled. After all, she had long expressed the wish that Karl would “earn some capital rather than just writing about capital.”
But Karl refused to earn money. Just as he refused soap and bathing, which spawned boils all over his body. As the late historian (and close friend of The American Spectator) Paul Johnson noted, Marx’s boils “appeared on all parts of his body, including his penis…. They brought on a nervous collapse marked by trembling and huge bursts of rage.”
All the more reason for Karl to refuse work. So, when Jenny’s mom sent Lenchen, Marx’s wife breathed a huge sigh of relief.
Then again, it isn’t quite right to say that Lenchen worked for Karl’s family, given that she toiled without pay. One Marx biographer described Lenchen as Marx’s “chattel to be exploited.” Karl, champion of the proletariat, never paid her a penny. The stumpy, frumpy, poor girl gave her everything to the Marx household, including her body — to Karl.
Karl bedded Lenchen behind Jenny’s back. Historians have no idea how often. “He would take his comfort where he could,” wrote one biographer of Marx’s seeking a sexual receptacle in Lenchen. “That she was virtually his bondslave was a matter of entire indifference to him…. We shall probably never know whether he raped or seduced the servant.” In due course, a child was born.
In June 1851, Lenchen gave birth to a baby boy. Karl, who had several children with Jenny, refused to concede that the little boy was his and naturally refused even a penny of child support. The illegitimate son was named “Freddy” — named after Marx’s infamous co-author, Friedrich Engels.
Marx and his family lived largely off Engels, or, more specifically, Engels’ inheritance from his capitalist father. Engels was Karl Marx’s sugar daddy. And now, Engels bailed him out yet again.
“Engels had accepted paternity for Frederick,” wrote Marx biographer David McLellan. He agreed to say that he was the father. As another Marx biographerput it, “Engels cared not a whit about his reputation, especially with regard to women.” Though like Marx the moocher, Engels likewise refused to give Freddy a roof over his head. Freddy was shipped off to foster parents.
Marx’s devoted but despairing wife surely wasn’t surprised. What else did she expect from the man she referred to as her “wild black boar” and “wicked knave”?
I revisit this sordid history here (detailed at length in my biography of Marx) because of the sordid event that our perverse American culture commemorates today: International Women’s Day.
What Karl Marx did to Lenchen is a metaphor for what communism has done to billions of human beings and for how Marx viewed women. It’s also an appropriate omen for International Women’s Day, which has long been a communist holiday.
Yes, correct. If you’re shocked and outraged at what I just said about your new holiday, well, you have my sympathy. You’re a victim of this country’s horrific government schools and university indoctrination mills. Leave it to modern young Americans celebrating this annual day to not even know its Marxist origins.
For me personally, it has now become my unfortunate custom to write on International Women’s Day for The American Spectator every March when the wretched thing rears its ugly head (click here, here, here, and here). And it rears it mightily. The world’s dominant search engine highlights IWD immediately when the clock strikes 12:01 a.m. I would here name that search engine, but if I do, its faceless censors will flag this article and publication. We’re at its mercy.
Not unlike how we’re at the mercy of the useful idiots who now celebrate International Women’s Day every March 8, utterly oblivious to its socialist origins. When I try to inform them that they’re commemorating a day that the Bolsheviks championed, they give me a blank stare or a glare. In friendlier cases, they will object incredulously: “Well, so what? It isn’t a Marxist or socialist holiday to me!”
Indeed, for most people celebrating the day today, it is not (though, for many, it is). We in America have long had a major problem with the wider liberal Left and the culture at large cluelessly signing up for causes and campaigns cleverly launched by Marxists. In fact, it’s telling that one of the longest books I ever published was titled Dupes. The far Left has been so successful precisely because of the non-leftists it has reeled in as dupes for over a century.
As for International Women’s Day, it’s another example of that. Just as the commies were able to sucker wider swaths of the American public into their various front-groups simply by giving them appealing names like the American Peace Mobilization or the American League Against War and Fascism, so they’ve done with events like International Women’s Day.
If you would like evidence, simply go to the websites of Communist Party USA, People’s World, or the Trotskyist rag The Militant. Yes, go there. Look at how they mark International Women’s Day. Read and learn. In fact, I’ll make it easy for you: click here and here. Or click this for a big, fat archive on International Women’s Day. Or click here and celebrate International Women’s Day with Vladimir Lenin’s widow!
Those links ought to make you red (pun intended) in the face. And if you’re still willing to celebrate the Bolshie holiday after that, then you’re what the communists used to call a sucker. Woke women, wake up! You need to understand that International Women’s Day, like Vladimir Putin, was promoted by the KGB. Would you blithely celebrate a day celebrated by fascists or Nazis?
I find no great joy in writing this (well, maybe a little). Believe me, it often pains me to know what I know and what others don’t know. The naïve need to know that their handy new holiday for women is old, rotten fruit from a poisoned tree. Karl Marx’s tree.
Speaking of whom, crusty old Karl is no doubt laughing from the grave. Karl Marx would have loved to see millions of non-Marxists jumping in bed with International Women’s Day. Just as he jumped into bed with Lenchen.
Paul Kengor is Editor of The American Spectator. Dr. Kengor is also a professor of political science at Grove City College, a senior academic fellow at the Center for Vision & Values, and the author of over a dozen books, including A Pope and a President: John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, and the Extraordinary Untold Story of the 20th Century, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Communism, and Dupes: How America’s Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century. He is also a speaker available through Young America’s Foundation’s Campus Lecture Program.
