By Michael Shook
Over the last two months, we’ve gotten “thumbnail” sketches of both the innate desire of humans for a perfect, usually communal, society, and of the father of modern Communism, Karl Marx. Now it’s time for a look at some of the fruits of the ideologies of Marxism and Communism.
For all Karl Marx’s faults – his dogmatism, egocentricity, and narcissism, his contempt for the individual, and so on – he changed the way we think about economics, about social relationships (helping pave the way for modern sociology), and critiqued accurately capitalism’s worst propensities (especially the way wealth cyclically becomes concentrated in the hands of the few).
The above concepts are intertwined. Marx’s understanding that labor is the foundation of all value helped workers realize their own worth and was instrumental in the labor rights and union movements of the late 19th and early to mid-20th centuries. It also led to the realization that, stripped of a social context – that is, absent meaningful community economic relationships within which to labor – workers in the new industrial jobs became alienated from what they made, and from themselves. They were mere cogs in a machine.
Marx’s writing on historical materialism and class struggle brought into focus how profoundly humans can be shaped by their living conditions. Inadequate food, shelter, clothing, and lack of education – in short, poverty – all contribute to what too often becomes a culture of despair, and of humanity degraded.
Such conditions were not an abstract feature in Marx’s life and, surrounded by the juggernaut of the full-blown Industrial Revolution of the 1800s, he was radicalized. The scale, sheer depth, breadth, and speed of the changes wrought by mass industrialization were something never experienced before. (The onslaught of computer, smartphones, and AI technology we are currently dealing with is analogous.)
Bearing this in mind, we can understand better why Marx’s reaction was one of anger, frustration, and determination; anger that such events should happen to people, especially through no fault or action of their own; frustration because of the overwhelming power bearing down on the populace (including him); and determination to expose, confront, and change the whole dynamic.
Unfortunately, his mindset blinded him to any possibilities for change beyond violent revolution. Fixated on his own vision, and trying to make sense of the economic chaos swirling about him, he was unable to imagine capitalism ever changing in significant ways.
Yet that, of course, is precisely what happened. The changes were not easy, and the resistance encountered by workers’ efforts to organize was fierce, unrelenting, and sometimes deadly. But eventually the tide turned, legislation was passed giving workers rights, and “guardrails” were instituted to prevent abuse of power by corporations.
That these remedies have been battered, and in some cases, nearly lost, does not diminish the productive impact they had, and continue to have.
In this process, capitalist nations adapted and thereby not only survived, but flourished under the regimes instituted. In contrast – despite Marx’s insistence on historical materialism’s inevitability (and thus, the proletariat’s victory) – Communist nations, nations for which Marx and Engel’s (and Lenin’s) doctrines are gospel, have collapsed, or changed into something no longer recognizably Communist. This is the case with Communist China and Vietnam. Why?
On a mundane level, scholar Michael Aaron Cody succinctly identifies three conditions essential for any system – plant, animal, or political – to function. One, there must be internal variation. The system must allow for different approaches, risk-taking, and different outcomes. Two, there must be feedback. The results of the different approaches must be visible, measurable, and consequential. Three, there must be selection pressure. Successful approaches must be given room to propagate and unsuccessful approaches allowed to die off.
Under Communist doctrine, none of the three essentials are encouraged. To the contrary, they are actively discouraged. Those living within the system are not just expected, but required to conform to whatever dictates are handed down. Individual initiative is regarded as threatening to the Party, just as accurate feedback is regarded as threatening, because whatever does not conform to “the plan” has the potential to undermine the entire enterprise. Absent those two necessities, selection pressure is effectively nullified, since to acknowledge some action has failed again threatens the Party doctrine.
On a human level, Marxist/Communist ideology fails because at its heart lies the belief that humans are infinitely malleable. Essential to Marxism is the belief in a reductive, deterministic process of human life, as if a person could be taken apart, put into a mold, and, by applying enough pressure, out would come a “new man.”
This man would be void of any impulse toward acquisitiveness and eager to subsume his individuality in the greatness of the collective. It is astonishing to consider that someone of Marx’s intellectual acumen – and many, many others since him – could not see the fallacy of such an idea.
In a final irony, Marx was dismissive of the notion that individuals, and ideas issuing from individuals, could affect history. He believed it was history itself that implacably marched forward, from one dialectic explosion to another, to find its rest when the last cataclysm was seen through, the proletariat victorious, and humanity gloriously experiencing its full and unequivocal freedom. Yet, it was his ideas, so carefully rendered in volumes of writing, that in fact affected modern history in profound ways.
Marx died in relative obscurity in 1883, two months shy of his 65th birthday, his dream of a revolution of the proletariat still only that. In the years that followed, his writing would be the basis for political movements that altered human history like few others ever had.
Sadly, those movements, though ostensibly begun with the intent to create a worker’s paradise, were so violently murderous that the death toll (so far) of people living under Communist systems is difficult to comprehend.
It is appropriate to at least note the numbers (all approximate): Soviet Union – 61 million. Communist China – 50-60 million. Cambodia/Khmer Rouge – 2 million (from a country of 7 million). North Korea –1.6 million. Cuba – 100,000. About 125 million people. All sacrificed in pursuit of the perfect Communist society.
As the great Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski wrote, “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of [the twentieth] century.” And, one might add, the most deadly.
Next month, we will examine Communism, capitalism, and the rule of law.
