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Introduction
On April 30 of this year [2018], The New York Times
ran an op-ed piece titled “Happy Birthday, Karl Marx. You Were Right!”[1]
In view of the fact that the implementation of Marx’s philosophy in the Soviet
Union and in Communist China resulted in general economic chaos, including shortages,
rationing, interminable waiting lines (14 hours a week just to buy food), and multiple
families having to live in the same apartment, plus forced labor, concentration
camps, show trials and periodic purges to shift the blame for it all, a reign
of terror, famines, and as many as 62 million murders in the Soviet Union and
76 million in Communist China (including those killed by the government-caused
famines)[2]—in
view of all this, congratulating Marx on being right boggles the mind. Marx
could be right only if one’s standard of right was human misery and death. Only
someone utterly depraved could make such a statement. Only an utterly depraved,
despicable newspaper could endorse such a statement, and the feather-weight
rationalizations offered in support of it, by printing the piece.
In every essential respect, the philosophy of
Marxism/Socialism is a philosophy designed for sociopaths—for people who
attempt to appear merely as seeking to do good, by posturing as friends of the
poor and of humanity at large, but who have no respect for the individual
rights of others, who have no awareness that others have independent minds and
think and plan on their own initiative, who denounce such thinking and planning
as “anarchy” (an “anarchy of production”) and try to squelch it, who regard
others as mere objects to be willingly or unwillingly manipulated in the
achievement of the Marxists’/Socialists’ grand plans for the human race, and
whose response to the suffering and deaths of millions is along the lines of
“to make an omelet, you have to break some eggs.” Marxism/Socialism is a
philosophy for the depraved, for those of a warped intellectual and moral
capacity and thus capable of appearing now as morons and now as murderers. It
is a philosophy designed for a special breed of such vermin: for those who,
despite often thinking at the level of morons, nevertheless believe that they
are more intelligent than other people, so much more intelligent in fact, that
they know better how to run other people’s lives than those other people
themselves do and are entitled to use force to impose their will on them.
Marxism/Socialism is the philosophy of a breed of mental cases whose ignorance
is exceeded only by its arrogance and viciousness.
The Times’
endorsement of Marx was not an isolated event. In June, a New York State
Democratic congressional primary was won by a member of the Democratic
Socialists of America, an organization that has grown rapidly since the
presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sanders’ candidacy has been followed by a resurgence of socialism both on
college campuses and in the Democratic Party. It has gone so far in the
Democratic Party that former FBI Director James Comey, a current supporter of
the Democrats, has believed it necessary to tweet, “Democrats, please, please don’t lose your minds and rush to
the socialist left.”
The resurgence of Marxist/Socialist ideas should not be
surprising. Despite the fall of Communist regimes around the world, the essential
ideas of Marxism/Socialism remained, and still remain, largely untouched and
unchallenged. These ideas pertain to the relationship between capitalists and
wage earners, and they are accepted by the great majority of people in the
United States and throughout the world.
They are accepted not as being descriptive of the way
conditions actually are in the United States or in any other advanced country
of the present day, but as descriptive of the way conditions would be in
the absence of major government intervention. And they are accepted as both
descriptive and explanatory of the way conditions were in the nineteenth
century.
Thus, people believe that in the absence of government
intervention in the form of pro-union, minimum-wage, maximum-hours, and
child-labor legislation, and laws regulating working conditions, the
capitalists, in their greedy pursuit of profits, would drive wages down to, or
even below, minimum physical subsistence, lengthen the hours of work to the
maximum possible, force small children to work in factories and mines, and make
working conditions unbearable for all. All that allegedly stands in the way of
this nightmare-world ready to be unleashed by the unrestricted operation of
capitalism and the profit motive is legislation inspired by Marxism/Socialism.
This view of things appears to be held¸ and to have been held for more than a
century, by virtually all Democrats and perhaps half or more of the
Republicans.
The refutation of these and many other major errors about
the nature of capitalism, along with a demonstration of the destructive and
totalitarian nature of socialism, is the subject of this essay. To connect
these remarks to the title of my essay, let me say that Marxism/Socialism is a
philosophy conceived in gross error and ignorance about the nature of
capitalism, above all about the nature of the relationship between capitalists,
profits, and wages. Socialism is little more than a violent rejection of
capitalism, based on this combination of errors and ignorance, and which, once having
managed to destroy capitalism, results in economic chaos, enslavement, terror,
and mass murder. Socialism and its consequences can be likened to the assault
of a barbarian tribe become enraged at the relative prosperity of a civilized
land. After destroying the fields, the livestock, the roads, and the aqueducts
of the civilized land, it finds itself with nothing but a few remaining scraps
over which its members kill one another. That is the essential situation of today’s
socialist barbarians, inspired by Marx to hate capitalists and the civilization
that they have built.
What the socialist barbarians destroy is private ownership
of the means of production, the profit motive, private saving and capital
accumulation, competition, and the price system. In destroying them, these
barbarians have no idea that in doing so they are destroying the foundations of
material civilization, in which they have shared and could continue to share.
It is the purpose of this essay to teach those of them that both know how to
read and have not yet reached the point of burning the writings they fear, the
actual nature of capitalism and of Marxism/Socialism, in the hope that they
will then become defenders, rather than destroyers, of capitalist civilization.
Next Post: I. 1. The Essential Nature of Socialism: The Need for Armed Robbery to Establish It
[1]
See https://nyti.ms/2r9pP4k.
