Perhaps the greatest antidote to Marxism is an intelligent, discerning adult actually reading Marx’n’Engels. The civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr tried just that, during his Christmas holidays in 1949. He was not impressed. In particular, he found their central argument, ‘dialectical materialism’, to be utter rubbish.
First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history […] Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything – force, violence murder, lying – is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end […]
Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state – Martin Luther King Jr
Even the Marxists had to grudgingly admit that Marxist economics was ludicrous bunkum. From the ‘Labour theory of value’ to so-called ‘commodity fetishism’, it was all so idiotic that only an academic could believe. Worst for the Marxists was the annoying habit of reality proving them wrong, from the ‘withering away of the state’ to the ‘rising misery of the proletariat’, both of which conspicuously failed to happen (although the communists made a pretty good job of making their own proles pretty miserable – where they weren’t just dead).
Another who read Karl Marx and immediately spotted Marxism’s glaring failures was philosopher and economist Ludwig Mises.
Mises pointed out that Marx’s philosophy is not just falsified by reality, but contradicted by even itself. Consider Marx’s arguments that material forces determine everything and the ‘laws of history’ made the triumph of communism inevitable. History is predetermined and human agency is an illusion.
Mises saw the fatal flaw immediately. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.
The contradictions Mises exposed weren’t subtle. They were obvious […]
Marx declared that socialism must arrive through inevitable material forces. Nothing can stop it. History has already decided. So Mises asked the obvious question:
If socialism is inevitable, why did Marx spend his entire life writing manifestos, organizing workers, and agitating for revolution?
If material forces determine everything, why does human action matter?
Marx lived as if ideas could change history, while writing that ideas are powerless against material forces.
Marx also lived – or at least, tried to – in complete contradiction of his foaming hatred of the bourgeoisie. As Francis Wheen has shown, the amount of money Marx sponged off his friends and relatives should have enabled him to live a pretty comfortable middle-class existence. Yet, he was constantly in debt with creditors, from the local butcher to the landlord, forever banging on the door and demanding this resolute moocher pay his bloody bills for once. So, where did all the money go?
Frittered away on vain attempts to ape the lifestyle of the upper-classes: a live-in maid (whom he promptly banged up in secret), annual seaside holidays, riding lessons for his daughters... anything but pay the baker’s bill.
That wasn’t the only way his life contradicted his philosophy.
Marx claimed all ideas are products of class interests.
Bourgeois thinkers produce bourgeois ideology. Proletarian thinkers produce proletarian truth.
Mises called this “polylogism.” Different classes have different logics.
The problem? This principle applies to Marx himself.
If all thought is class-determined, then Marx’s theory is just bourgeois ideology. He was, after all, a wealthy intellectual, not a factory worker.
You cannot claim “all ideas are ideological” while exempting your own theory from that rule.
But Marx’s biggest problem – and the source of his lasting appeal to middle-class students and academics – is that he knew absolutely nothing about the real world of work and capital. Even his partner in half-baked philosophy, Friedrich Engels, only knew as much about The Condition of the Working Class in England as could be gleaned from the lofty heights of his father’s offices in the cotton mills that funded Engels’ idle-rich, trustafarian lifestyle.
If Engels had actually had to build a business empire, rather than leeching off his father’s hard work, he might have been able to tell Marx that he was just jerking off.
Marx said “material productive forces” determine everything. Tools, machines, and technology create society. Law, culture, and ideas all flow from the means of production.
But Mises identified a fatal circularity:
Tools and machines don’t fall from heaven. They are themselves products of ideas.
Before you can build a steam engine, someone must think of a steam engine.
Most fatally – literally, for the hundred million victims of communism – Marx and Engels never once bothered coming up with a single practical idea of how to implement their utopia.
Marx never thought about how his system would actually function.
He tore down without building up. He promised without planning. He diagnosed without prescribing.
That glaring hole in Marxism gave the green light to Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and every other communist dictator to write the history of communism in the blood of the innocent.
