This year marks 140 years since the death of Karl Marx. To this day, many in and outside of academia consider Marx to be one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind. Marx not only provided ideological inspiration for Stalin, Lenin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, and many other genocidal revolutionaries, but also influenced countless social reformers, politicians, and philosophers. Marx is perhaps one of the most influential intellectuals on earth, whose achievements were largely driven by his utopian promises.
What did Marx promise the world? An end to all alienation. What was alienation? The loss of racial identity. What was the cause of this alienation? Private property and division of labor, Marx argued.
First, the concept of ownership, “private property,” the desire to “own,” made man selfish and alienated him from his social nature and, consequently, from humanity.
Second, Marx believed that humans are defined by their work. “What a man is,” he said, “is determined by his production, by what he produces and how he produces it.” The division of labor tied people to certain positions: some were fishermen, some factory workers, some lawyers, and so on.
This separation alienated people from each other. Work guarantees survival, so labor is necessity Work became motivated by selfish reasons (survival) rather than the creative expression of one's abilities, further alienating people from their social nature: work was for oneself, not for the benefit of the human species.
Communism: The Chicken or the Egg?
The solution to this terrible alienation was communism: under communism, the means of production (factories, farms, mines, channels of distribution, etc.) would be owned collectively by everyone, so that the relations of production would be “perfectly simple and intelligible”, and everything would be handled “very simply” according to a “common plan” (nowhere explained) to everyone's satisfaction.
The cause of alienation is the need for the division of labor that underlies class formation (some are workers, some are lawyers, some are CEOs) to disappear and for everyone to be free to develop in “all directions,” so that people can “do this today and that tomorrow; hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, and tend to cows in the evening.”
This freedom to work would energize people and result in an oversupply of goods. Even if the workday were cut in half, people would produce more goods than ever before. With every good available in abundance, the concept of private property – the desire to “own” and the selfishness that comes with it – would disappear from people's minds, because everyone would be able to have as much of whatever they wanted as they wanted.
Freed from selfishness, the Communist would be transformed into a thoroughly social creature. He would always be happy to work in a factory, to clean sewers, or to dig coal, because that would be an opportunity to exert his faculties in the service of mankind. All difficult and dangerous work would be done voluntarily, even though everyone would be perfectly free to choose what to do each day, whether that be fishing, composing music, or writing poetry.
Strangely enough, this communist is a product of a communist society; and The prerequisite for establishing such a society is that excess makes man altruistic, and only naturally altruistic man produces excess, under conditions of freedom of labor. In his embarrassing ignorance of causal relations, Marx defined the communist man as both the chicken and the egg.
How would this impossible communism begin? Marx was convinced that only a “forceful” revolution could shatter the power of capitalism in general, the church, and the state in general — a violent revolution that would require “despotate aggression” on the “question of private property,” as he wrote in his infamous “Communist Revolution.” Communist Manifesto.
French philosopher Proudhon He told Marx that the proletariat would not make much progress if all it had to offer was “blood to drink.” Marx accused him of being an overly imaginative fool.
Karl GrunGrün, the founder of “real socialism,” warned that Marx's plan would only shift the oppression of the working class to the bourgeoisie, but would not completely abolish oppression, which is the ultimate goal of socialism/communism. Marx accused Grün of being a gullible fool.
The Anarchist Pope Bakunin He feared that if workers seized control of the state rather than abolishing it, the revolution would lead to a new dictatorship. Marx could only ridicule his rival's “nightmare of domination.”
An empty story
Marx was proven wrong. None of the communist revolutions inspired by Marx established a communist classless society. On the contrary, the warnings of Grün, Proudhon and Bakunin repeatedly came to frightening reality. Marx did not feel the need to heed the warnings of other socialist thinkers. After all, he was a man of great intelligence and a man who despised the emotional utopianism that communism had heralded before him. He considered himself the pioneer who had “discovered” it.Scientific evidenceFor Communism.”
However, that is a false claim.
Marx's “dialectical materialism” is not a historical “law of motion” but merely story—an unfalsifiable prophecy disguised as science, based on a highly incomplete analysis of history. Moreover, he asserted the inevitability of Communism long before the influence of positivism, or empirical science, appeared in his writings.
Marx understood the limitations of philosophy and attempted to prove the collapse of capitalism through economic criticism.
In 1867 Marx capital A trilogy. Vast and bombastic, it reads more like an indictment of capitalism than a scientific work. While some of his criticisms of capitalism are valid, the book is weakened by blatant bias and arbitrary selection of data. Worse, two fundamental components on which Marxian economics is based are seriously flawed: his labor theory of value is deeply flawed, and he fails to prove the law of diminishing profits, the linchpin of his “scientific” predictions.
Unable to piece together the loose ends of his economic theory, Marx spent the last 26 years of his life collecting data, trying in vain to find the missing pieces of the puzzle that would turn his patchwork theory into an irrefutable whole. On March 14, 1883, the iconic bearded activist lay dead at his desk at the age of 64. His lifelong ideological companion, Friedrich Engels, compiled two further volumes of his work. capital He learned from his friend's notebooks, but despite his confident promises, he was powerless to correct the axiomatic flaws in Marxian economics.
Marx left his mark on history, a dark one indeed: he instigated the murder of an estimated 100 million people (though the actual number may be much higher). taller than) And over the generations, billions were enslaved under an iron-fisted regime. The alienation he promised to eliminate was nowhere to be found, and the classless utopia he predicted never materialized. There was hunger, not surplus. There was not even the proletarian uprising he so eagerly awaited. He only inspired people like himself: the intellectual bourgeoisie. Miserable And then these bad guys take up arms to overthrow the unjust regime and often install an even worse one.
In summary, none of the good things Marx promised have come to fruition.
Fraud
So why do people still believe in him?
Marx was a great speaker, an eloquent speaker and extremely intelligent. He privately confided to Engels that his dialectical approach allowed him to express his propositions in a way that was “right either way”. Arnold RugeThe publisher, who worked briefly with Marx, describes Marx as having the following characteristics:
The talent to affirm and prove everything, the true Eulenspiegel of dialectics. No one doubts his mastery of the art.
As a result, Marx's 50,000-page work is a giant buffet of ambiguities and dialectical positions, with endless Pilpuru The debate over “what Marx really meant” is a settled debate. Marx's opponents I can't understand him This is due to their own ignorance, and he who can understand this is a wise man who can understand his teacher, or at least an obedient disciple.
Marx fooled countless junior intellectuals into believing that the contradictory mess that was his work was in fact a scientific riddle that only the cleverest could decipher, but there was nothing to decipher; instead, he raged, raged, trampled on causality and logic as he relentlessly pressed forward toward his “truth,” making it up on the spot.
Marxism is not, in essence, a science. It is a system of persuasion built on utopian promises, unprovable “science,” an extremely reductionist view of history, and a mountain of criticism, all governed by a morality that “the ends justify the means.” Marxism has proven highly effective at persuading people to destroy their world, but is utterly inept at leading them to the promised land of classlessness, equality, and freedom of labor.
Communism is truly a haunting ghost: it haunts, it frightens, but it never materializes.
I am nothing to me, but my youthful arms
It will make your chest tight,
For both of us the abyss lies gaping in the darkness.
And if you sink, I'll laugh along.
I whisper in your ear: Come down and join me, my friend!
-Karl Marx
