ABSTRACT
Un t i l he was in his seventies, Freud ignored Marx and Marxism, which is really remarkable. He l ived i n a wor ld in which thousands of intellectuals were hotly debating Marxism, but even the Russian Revolution d id not lead h i m to say anything about Marx or Marxism in any of his books. This is even more astonishing than Nietzsche's silence on the same subject. Unl ike Shaw, Russell, and Gide, to name only a few of his illustrious contemporaries, Freud evidently found Marxism totally uncongenial. The two late works i n which he finally broke his silence on this subject leave no doubt about this. I n Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) he d id not discuss Marxism at length; but speaking of aggression i n Section V, Freud referred to "the extreme intolerance of Christianity" and then continued:
Nor was it an unintelligible accident that the dream of Germanic world dominion called upon anti-Semitism to complement it, and one sees how it is comprehensible that the attempt to construct a new Communist culture in Russia should find psychological support in the persecution of the bourgeois. One merely asks oneself with apprehension what the Soviets w i l l do once they have exterminated their bourgeois.49
