A children’s guide to Marxism

That was pretty much the whole summary. Marx was a kindly figure like Jesus who said that we should all care for the poor and was shunned and maligned and crucified by the world, but was revered and vindicated by history. The end.

Half the problem is that this in no way does any justice to Marx’s actual theories, and in fact ignores them completely, preferring instead to editorialize about what (some) people thought or think about him. The other half of the problem is the very selective nature of the opinions offered and the very selective treatment of the historical facts about the application of his ideas. His ideas were popular and were applied broadly. His ideas of being nice to the poor. Is that all there is to say about them? I don’t gain any real information about what his actual ideas were or how they were applied, except for those two assertions. So what idea of Marx should I be expected to take away from this summary?

If all we’re doing is making judgments about whether someone was right or wrong or had good ideas or bad ones based on past or present opinions or historical popularity and application, then it’s probably worth mentioning that Marxism resulted in more mass slaughter than any idea ever conceived in history. Literal hundreds of millions, whose deaths still remain largely unacknowledged by history.

It’s also worth noting that Marx himself evinced very little “caring for poor people”. He didn’t go around like Mother Teresa, serving the poor. He lived the life of an entitled aristocrat, living off the money of others and preferring to spends his time writing essays and giving speeches. And few people beyond his own children (not counting the one he never acknowledged) would describe him as kindly or cuddly. He had a habit of insulting and belittling and using slurs against anyone he didn’t like or agree with.

If your goal is to describe Marx according to opinions about him or the popularity of his ideas, these facts are at least somewhat relevant. If that is the core of all you seek to address about Marxism. Marx himself considered his ideas to be not merely analytical or theoretical, but historical and empirical. He said that he was accurately describing history: past, future, and present, not merely elaborating a theory.

Marx’s actual idea was that all history was a process of class struggle, that the upper classes did not produce, but rather stole their wealth from the actually productive lower class (parasitically), that gradually this process of abusive theft would worsen and worsen to further extremes (until workers got nothing and elites got everything), and that the workers would eventually throw off this oppression, seize the means of production and wealth from the oppressor class (either by taking what they had or by eliminating their parasitical existence altogether), and a new utopia would be born where property would cease existing, everyone would be happy, wealth and wellbeing would be unconstrained, productivity would be unshackled, government would become largely unnecessary, and a new age would dawn. And this was all about to happen. And history would prove it.

What actually happened is that half the world tried communism, and in almost every case the worker’s paradise was bought at the cost of the blood of millions, and yet still the hoped-for paradise failed to arrive (and they got famine, waste, and corruption instead; those that died from famine alone across the socialist states in the 20th century number in the tens of millions). Socialist states, far from resulting in less government, became all government, with the most controlling tyrannies of the modern age. The socialist states ended up being some of the least free and most unstable countries in history, as well as having records of human atrocity unmatched in history, lategely against their own people. Their atrocities and terrible results were ignored, suppressed, and painted over, because it would all be worth the sacrifice in the end when paradise arrived. It was all a justified and necessary part of the process. Except paradise never arrived.

China today is perhaps the closest thing to a successful socialist state, but the actual present government and economics of China are so far from Marx’s ideas and so similar to the historical pattern of government and revolution in Chinese history that it can only be considered socialist in name. It succeeded as a socialist state by giving up on socialism and focusing on being a single-party autocratic state with immense capitalist ambitions. All the other socialist states, as a Chinese leader once remarked, became poor, while those that went with America and its system became rich. So China would follow America and get rich. Of course, poverty is harsh, and wealth is nice, but considering the cost in blood and tyranny that Marxism produced, the fact that it also left the countries poor and dysfunctional and corrupt and tyrannical made the sacrifices and moral compromises even more senseless.

The fact that this happened again and again and again has some relevance, considering how Marx viewed his own ideas: as historical, not theoretical. And the fact that the capitalist states enjoyed the greatest expansion of wealth and wellbeing in history, the immense amount of reform to labor and pay standards and conditions, the protection of worker’s rights and the advancement of medicine, technology, and property rights to the benefit of so many, all were completely contrary to the predictions of Marx.

Radically contrary to Marx’s claims at the end of his manifesto, socialist governments proved that the workers of the world had plenty to fear from the dawn of socialism, and as well capitalist economies proved that they had a lot to offer and hope for. Maybe not utopia, but a more human and realistic kind of opportunity. Marx argued that there was nothing to lose with socialism, no bad results to expect, only good; and that there was nothing to gain from capitalism, no good results to expect, only bad.

Of course the immediate response you hear from everyone, for the last hundred years, is, well, maybe it wasn’t his ideas that were the problem (despite being disproved on his own terms), maybe the problem was the execution. His ideas sounded so good. Maybe people didn’t really do it right, or didn’t really try. This is an extremely tired response. But it has to be answered because it is trotted out any time anyone brings up the fact that Marxism was, historically (which was Marx’s main interest), an unmitigated disaster.

There are two main responses. The first is to question exactly how many failed states and how many bodies it takes, and how many instances of things turning out exactly the opposite of how Marx said they would, to disprove Marx’s historical thesis. Socialism got tried a lot. A lot a lot. And it returned the same results across dozens of countries, dozens of cultures, dozens of races, dozens of situations, again and again and again like clockwork. Blood, tyranny, instability, corruption, fear, dishonesty, poverty, and ruin. Not just mild examples, the biggest examples of each ever in history, it can be easily argued.

And they didn’t inflict these results on the weak and corrupt and fragile capitalist states, they inflicted these results on themselves. Socialism is a “scientific” philosophy. And according to the science, according to the results of the experiment, repeated across time and across as many different and diverse conditions and populations as you could possibly hope for in our world, it yielded the same results again and again. So yes, it was a very pleasing hypothesis, but it has not been borne out.

Although not affiliated with Marxism, even the Nazi party was a socialist platform. As with other countries, the Nazis’ identified a specific group that exploited and manipulated the economy, a parasitic class that did not earn but rather stole their success at the expense of the real productive class. Their substantive difference was in associating this parasitic and oppressive class with a specific race (the Jews), and the oppressed and productive class with a specific race (the Germans).

In each country where socialism was tried, some group, some demographic (Jews, other ethnic groups, city dwellers, landed gentry, peasant landowners, economic middle men, foreigners, aristocrats, etc), was identified as belonging to the corrupt and parasitic class and was subsequent disenfranchised or destroyed. And yet still somehow the productive paradise failed to arise. In fact one could argue that, but for its overextension and defeat in the war, Germany was the most successful of these attempts at a productive revolution that sought to overturn the existing social and economic structure and unleash the expansion and dominion of the oppressed class (as they defined them).

So, to sum up, the problem isn’t that Marxism hasn’t been tested in a historical or practical sense. It’s been tested a lot. And so have opposing theories. And the scientific results have been overwhelmingly bad for Marxism. People really did try to bring in the workers paradise. They tried hard. Again and again. And it never arrived. That’s a historical fact, and not at all the one that Marx predicted. So how many oppressor classes do we need to experiment with wiping out before we realize that it won’t fix the world?

So, Marxism was tried, and it didn’t do what it said it would. That leads us to an implied follow-up objection, and the second response. The implied follow-up objection is that Marxism still isn’t to blame because Marxism wasn’t really tried, it wasn’t tried in the right way, and so Marxism can’t be blamed for all those bad experimental results. Despite the scientific and historical evidence, there is no internal necessary connection between the ideas of Marxism and the actual historical results. Proper Marxism (whatever that is) wouldn’t have had those results, because those results aren’t what Marxism predicted.

Well, for one thing, that kind of objection could just be referred back to the first response. Just how many experimental attempts do you think you think you need, how many contrary results have to pile up, before you’re willing to accept their validity? If your stated condition is that only results that affirm your thesis are valid results, therefore all the many and various attempts are invalid and not to be counted, then one might wonder exactly how scientific and historical and empirical your theory actually is. An experiment that only accepts positive results and ignores an enormous and consistent data set of negative results can’t really be said to be truly experimental.

But there is a legitimate question under all this, a disbelief. Surely, there must be some version of Marxism that doesn’t entail all the mass murder and tyranny? It sounds so good, has such noble intentions. Help the poor, right the world, and fix history. Surely the fact that there is so much mass murder and genocide in the Marxist experiments proves that they weren’t really Marxism, which is all about caring for the poor and bringing peace and prosperity to everyone? And this is a powerful existential argument. It’s an argument of intuition and hope and feeling. And one to which I can only give a simple answer.

No, there isn’t a version of Marxism that doesn’t entail this and doesn’t end this way. It’s a truly painful tragedy that speaks deeply to the difficulties of human condition. But there it is. There isn’t a version of Marxism that doesn’t end in revolution, murder, terror, and tyranny of one kind or another. It’s baked in. It’s earned. It’s implicit in the relationship between the ideas and their actual execution in the world we live in. It’s inevitable.

This fact has been proven many times over according to the scientific terms Marx himself favored, that Marxism necessarily ends this way. And it has been shown by many others how, purely as a theoretical construct, Marxism necessarily entails these ends. Marx himself never shied away from the necessity of revolution, including bloody revolution, even if he preferred comfort and ease himself. There isn’t a nice version of these ideas that doesn’t land you at the same end point. It may not seem obvious on the surface, especially if all your thoughts are focused on the hoped-for promises of utopia. But the utopia has never shown any signs of arising, and the tyranny and murder and instability have been proven time and time again.

Why? Well, there is no short answer for that. It has to do with the complexity of the real world, instead of the fantasies of utopias and the easy blame for who is preventing you from getting there.

You simply can’t mandate equality of outcome without a system of absolute governmental tyranny. You can’t encourage a conception of the world that defines it according to oppositions of oppressed and oppressor and encourages resentment, revolution, and seizure and expect a result that doesn’t eventually end in abuse, terror, resentment, and murder. You can’t build a system without property and expect everyone to be happy, just, fair, or honest. And you can’t correct for the problems that arise from these facts without tyrannical control, suppression, and abuse.

These are just a few of the practical problems, but there are many technical ones as well when it comes to ordering societies and economies. There are all kinds of major problems with Marxist theory that people have long pointed out, and those problems have a long history of being proved valid in practice.

You can’t separate Marxism from its historical outcomes. Partly because that’s how Marxism is constructed as a theory. Partly because its outcomes are perfectly earned and valid extrapolations of its content. If you believe in Marxism and you really want to try it, and you take it to a country, this is what you will do and this is what will result. It’s consistent both theoretically and empirically. You can’t get the paradise without the revolution, and you won’t get the revolution without the blood and tyranny. And, we’ve learned, you also won’t get the paradise. And you’ll have to get even more draconian and make even more sacrifices to try to cover it up or fix it.

Is any of this worth appending to the summary “Marx cared about the poor and was treated badly, but his ideas later became very popular”? Is any of this relevant? I have to think so. I have to think that the bodies of the hundreds of millions that died by imprisonment, terror, and starvation for the sake of their countrymen’s socialist dreams at least deserve that much respect.

A bad outcome or bad execution does not necessarily prove that an idea was itself bad. That’s a fallacy. But if you structure your idea as a prediction of what will actually happen, and are proved drastically wrong again and again and again, then maybe that actually is a result. At least it’s worth mentioning. And if there are good arguments that explain why those bad results are a necessary component of the fundamental ideas, and those arguments have been borne out in practice across dozens of cases, then that’s also probably worth acknowledging in a summary that trades in perceptions, popularity, and results (rather than actual ideological content).

In a way, perhaps this children’s philosophy book is daring us to answer its question, “No! ” An idea becoming popular and fashionable does not mean it is a good idea. A person becoming influential does not necessarily mean that they had good ideas. No, you have to dig into the idea and its premises and assertions, as well as look at the real results if it proposes to be a scientific and historical description, to see how good a theory it is. You have to do the work, you can’t rely on fashion.

And so I have to conclude that, on these grounds, the book does do a very good job of teaching you to think, if you’re up to the task of meeting its challenge and investigating and defending your answer to this question it asks. Errors and omissions often make for the best teaching opportunities, if you’re up to the task of truly meeting them and making them better than they are. You’ll learn far me from exploring and correcting an error than you will in being given a correct answer.