March 16, 2009
What is Marxism?


Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is a sort of pagan religious cult. It is a theology. It is a form of superstition.


Marxists claim that Karl Marx understood capitalism and economics. He did not. They also claim that the entire validity of Marx's set of theories on all subjects rests ultimately on how valid Marxist economic thought is. Marxist economic thought was completely wrong.


Marx claimed that all products contain value that is directly proportional to the amount of labor embodied within them. He was wrong. All the rest of Marxism is based entirely on this mistaken and falsifiable premise.


Marxists claim that the operations of markets have a natural tendency to spawn monopolies. They call this "monopoly capitalism." In reality, markets have a natural tendency to break up and undermine monopolies. Almost all monopolies under capitalism are those set up by governments stifling and interfering in the operations of markets.


The most harmful monopolies in modern economies are the labor unions.


Marxists claim that corporate monopolies are growing in importance and in power. In fact, monopolies have been losing power and strength under capitalism for well over a century.


Marxists think that large corporations collaborate and operate power-sharing arrangements among themselves. They do not and cannot. Large corporations compete, undercut, and threaten one another's market shares every day. As one of many proofs, just look at the number of inter-corporate law suits.


Marxism is based on conflict between "social classes." But social classes do not exist at all. This is not to say that there are not richer folk and poorer folk all about. It only means that all the richer folk share no collective common interests, and the same is true for all the poorer folk.


Marxists claim that people's ideas and ideals are dictated by property relations. They are wrong.


Marxists and socialists in general care a lot about the distribution of material wealth. But they have no idea how to bring about the creation of the material wealth that they wish to redistribute. They just assume it all gets produced all by itself. That is why people in communist regimes starve.


Marxists claim that workers are oppressed in capitalist societies. Workers in communist societies always try to sneak out into capitalist societies. No one in South Korea is trying to sneak into North Korea. The Berlin Wall was not built to keep West Germans from sneaking into East Germany's collective farms. Cubans in Florida do not steal boats to seek asylum in Cuban collective farms.


Marxists claim that lower-income people support the Left and that higher-income people support the Right. Generally the opposite is the case. Let's not forget the Hollywood Left.


Marxists claim that capitalism creates "crises of surplus," where materials build up that cannot be sold. They are wrong. Surpluses just cause prices to drop.


Marxists claim that capitalists do not work and that workers do not own capital. That is why they comprise "social classes." But nearly all capitalists work, often in work days with very long hours. Meanwhile, a huge portion of capital is held by workers themselves through their pension funds and other institutional investment intermediaries.


Marxists claim that businesses are owned by a small closed clique of capitalists. Actually, most businesses are "public," meaning they are owned by shareholders and anyone at all can be a shareholder in them.


Marxists claim that capitalism cannot be democratic. But every single democratic society on earth is predominantly capitalist. Not a single communist regime was ever democratic. Communists take power via military coups and military conquest, not via elections.


Marxists claim that capitalists use violence to protect their perquisites and privileges. In truth, Marxists in power use violence to protect their perquisites and privileges. They use violence to suppress opposition wherever they manage to seize power, including violence against opposition groups of workers. It is conservatively estimated that 100 million people were killed by Marxism and by Marxists in the twentieth century.


Marxists claim that people are prisoners of their material circumstances and of their classes of birth. Tell that to the limousine Marxists, the endowment-fund Trotskyists, and the tenured socialists.


Marxists claim that all workers share common interests and shared goals, making them into a "class." In reality, they share nothing in common and have no common interests.


Marxists think that all capitalists share common interests and get together in large stadiums every few weeks to plan out a program to achieve those. In reality, if capitalists were ever to congregate in such a stadium, they could agree on absolutely nothing, not even on the price of the beer. There is no single issue in economic policy over which all capitalists have the same position or share the same interest.


Marxists claim that workers in capitalist societies feel "alienated." In reality, pampered children in capitalist society feel alienated because capitalism produces wealth, makes material comfort possible, and so creates the opportunities for idleness and leisure that lead to recreational feelings of alienation.


Marxists think that if you earn more money than me, it means you are exploiting me. In reality, it means you are more talented, harder working, better skilled, and luckier than me.


Marxists think that if one person has more wealth than a second person, it can only be because the first one stole the wealth of the second. Ditto for richer and poorer countries.


Marxists think that only things matter in economics, meaning tangible products, and so services do not. They believe that big products are more important than small products, big industries being more important than small industries. They also believe that consumer goods are superfluous and should not be produced much. All those ideas are why the quality of life and the standard of living are so miserable under communist regimes. In wealthy countries, small- and medium-size enterprises are the main engines for producing wealth.


Marxists do not see why workers should need to be allowed to vote. The interest of workers is always defined as whatever those claiming to speak in the name of the working class happen to support and desire.


Marxists think that socialism works. It does not. The only form of "socialism" that has not produced mass impoverishment and starvation is Scandinavian capitalism merged with a bloated "socialist" welfare state.


Marxists claim that most Marxists come from the working class. In reality almost all Marxists are the pampered children of middle class and wealthy parents. There are more Marxists today on the campuses of some American universities than in all of eastern Europe.


Marxists claim that under Marxism everyone receives according to his needs and contributes according to his capabilities. In reality, under Marxism everyone receives according to whatever the entrenched party apparatchiks decide their needs are, usually sub-sustenance levels of consumption, and the same people decide what are your abilities, generally assumed to be your ability to work endlessly at whatever you are told to do without getting paid much. To put this differently, in the absence of positive incentives, no one is capable of doing anything and everyone's needs are infinite.


Marxists think that "experts" can tell what needs to be produced. They cannot. That is why Marxist experts produce starvation. In some cases Marxist starvation has produced cannibalism. There is not a single Marxist scholar or expert on earth who could produce a pencil by himself.


Marxists think that efficiency in production can be achieved by terrorizing factory workers and communal farm members. While terrorizing them, it has never successfully achieved efficiency that way. People are always smarter than the terrorizing officials and manage to thwart them.


Marxists believe that economic incentives do not matter. That is why they think there is no need to pay people more for working hard or exerting effort. It is enough to appeal to their "class interests." That is why people starve under communism.


When a Marxist speaks of "dictatorship of the proletariat," he means he thinks he has the right to use violence to impose his own arbitrary dictatorship upon members of the working class and upon everyone else, without asking for their approval or votes.


Marxists claim that Marxism is fundamentally democratic. In reality it is always fundamentally anti-democratic.


Marxists pretend to be in favor of the working class collectively owning all property. In reality Marxists always steal the property of members of the working class and turn it over to well-paid party apparatchiks.


Marxists think that Marx understood economics. In fact, virtually all Marxist "theories" were completed debunked 160 years ago. Marx was wrong about virtually everything he wrote on economics. It is more difficult to say whether he was correct about anything in sociology, but that is more a commentary on the nebulous and muddled nature of sociological thinking.


Marxists see no need at all for "finance capital." That is why they always steal everyone's savings in communist societies. It is also why workers in communist societies hide their savings in banks in capitalist societies.


Marx did not have the slightest inkling about what determines wages of workers in markets. He had even less understanding of what determines prices.


Marxists use the term "concrete" whenever they do not know how to finish a sentence, or whenever they have no idea of what is being discussed.


Marxists think that women live better lives under Marxism. That is because they never speak with any women who grew up under communism.


There is not a Marxist on earth who has actually read and understood Karl Marx's tedious book "Das Kapital." You can read a summary of the book on Wikipedia, written by people who did not read it either. In reality, Marx had no idea at all even what capital is.


Marxists often want to abolish the family, but that is because they became Marxists in the first place as a way to antagonize and irritate mommy and daddy.


Marxists believe that people living under Marxism lose interest in religion. They do not.


Marxists believe that in every voluntary transaction, one side wins and the other loses, and so it is impossible for two sides to profit from it. That is why they think you should be told what to buy and how much you should pay for it.


Marxists claim that capitalist countries engage in imperialism. But since World War II the largest empires of imperialist conquest were those headed by Marxist regimes.


Marxists believe that there are no real conflicts of interest between the workers living in different countries and speaking different languages or coming from different cultures. That is without a doubt the very stupidest idea of all coming from Marxism. In any case, that is why Marxism is generally spread only via military conquest.


Marxists think that capitalism makes people greedy. Actually people living under communism become much greedier because they are poor and desperate.


Marxists claim that Marxism is a science. It is not. It is today little more than a form of mental illness.

The above article has many errors, and where it's got reasonable arguments, presents them poorly. Here are my comments, enumerated by paragraph in the original.

Par. 1

Marxists claim they are "scientific socialists". They mean "scientific" in roughly the same way we study "political science" or "social science" or even "economic science" and "computer science". These aren't sciences in the way that physics, mathematics, or chemistry are sciences. They're "soft" sciences, even softer than biology or psychology.

They claim to be scientific because they are empirical and hypothetical. Their ideas are based on observation, and hypotheses about these observations.

P 2

Marx understood economics. His economics was simple compared to what economists today know, but, that's because he was studying economics 170 years ago.

P 3

The labor theory of value has validity. It just states that the price of an object will include the average cost of the labor used to create the object.

Where Marx went a little off was his idea of "use value." Since the original article didn't attack this idea, I won't discuss it further. Just know that they missed an easy attack here.

P 4

Monopolies tend to form over time in unregulated markets. This is due to the importance of capital in capitalist economies -- the cost of competing with established companies tends to rise.

P 5

Labor unions are not monopolies. Some compete with each other fairly often. Today, the AFL-CIO is no longer the only labor federation. Also, half of the unions out there are not affiliated with an international union. They are independent.

Additionally, corrosive "right to work" laws in some states have stripped the power of unions to control a monopoly over labor in organized workplaces.

The upshot has been a steady decline in union membership for four decades.

P 6

This is patently untrue. Companies have been more monopolistic than ever, but it is allowed because national monopolies compete against each other in international trade.

P 7

Large corporations do compete against each other, but, they also organize themselves into strong networks of boards of directors. The boards coordinate their companies so they don't compete with each other -- rather they compete against other companies.

So, if IBM invests in RedHat Linux, then other competitors to IBM may invest in Linux. Novell invested in SUSE Linux. Apple invested in BSD. Each large computer company acquired a Linux company, or formed a relationship (cemented by the board's decisions). The board members try to prevent the Linux company from competing directly against their computer company -- and the computer company will cooperate with, rather than compete against, the small Linux company.

Thus, one kind of competition is preserved, but another kind of competition is prevented. The ultimate goal, however, is for one network of companies to kill off the others, and establish monopolies in each sector in which they do business.

(Incidentally, all these companies invested in Linux as a way to compete with Microsoft, which has an effective monopoly on operating systems.)

Another example of this is the UPS/Mailboxes Etc merger, and the FedEx/Kinkos merger. These combined companies compete against each other, but Mailboxes Etc became the UPS Store and now can't sell FedEx (or other courier). Kinkos sells only FedEx, not UPS or other couriers.

P 8

Social classes were defined by Marx based on the idea of ownership of capital. The owners of capital were called the "bourgeoisie" and those who lacked capital and sold their labor for money were called the "proletariat".

At the time, the delineation was clear.

Today, it's less clear, because "ownership" of capital has been popularized, and many people have some form of ownership over stocks, via mutual funds or retirement plans. Also, many more people own their homes.

That this happened was not an accident. After the 1930s, when it seemed possible that the US would go socialist, the capitalists (the bankers et. al.) asserted to each other that capitalism needed to be modified so that more people felt like "owners". In any 1950s issue of Fortune or Forbes, you'll find ads where banks and brokers boast that they're helping average Joes own a pension, or some other investment. Also, home ownership was popularized by the government. Again, this was an effort to reduce the concentration of renters in a dense inner city -- a demographic/geographis situation that could aid social revolution.

Additionally, rich people definitely have a shared class interest, and it mobilizes them politically. There's a vast, and powerful political movement that focuses on increasing the power of private property, making it more absolute, even to the point of allowing private property rights to eliminate other rights.

Just look on any libertarian website, or apartment property owners website, or industry association website, and you will probably find the property-rights rhetoric present, along with requests for donations to a political action fund.

So, the OP is incorrect, there is a common interest that rich folks share, and it's the basis of political action. It's a "class".

Poor folks could also share an interest, as workers, but we are divided by racism, sexism, and anti-gay sentiments.

Rich folks are also divided by these things as well, but, they manage to unify around property rights because property rights make them rich.

Because division between working people (proletariats) prevents class unity, the rich are very active in funding political movements that harm unity between working class people.

P 9

Hey, I agree about this one line.

Marx's weakness, and Marxists' weakness, is that they underestimate the power of culture. The primary resistance to capitalism doesn't come from the proletariat, but from communities that maintain culture.

When a culture starts to challenge capitalism, the capitalists attempt to destroy the culture.

P 10

The Communists great failing was to assume that people would engage in production if they were told to. It turns out that fear of starvation is a better motivator than a sense of national responsibility. That's why the West is great at production - they use suffering to improve productivity.

In contrast, in Communist Russia, people didn't starve. So, they became unproductive.

P 12

The OP says total bullshit. The Hollywood Left tend to be the actors, who are low on the totem pole. The people who own the studios tend to be right-wingers or at least economically very Right Wing.

The actors are part of a "left" that is sympathetic to the working class -- they are supporters, not members. They support because many actors have been poor.

When working class people support the Right, it's usually not the economics they support, but the cultural things like anti-gay, racist, and anti-feminist positions.

P 13

What planet are they on? There are huge lots filled with unsold cars. Houses are going unsold for months. These are surpluses.

The crisis of surplus refers mainly to the post-WW2 US economy, when production was sufficient to supply all a person's needs. It really happened.

What happened was, marketing changed to convince us that we needed "stuff" to feel good.

P 14

See above.

There most definitely are people who own so much that they don't have to work.

P 15

See above.

P 16

There are few truly democratic countries. They are all mixed economies.

Capitalism can't be democratic, because it operates on the idea of one share, one vote. So peole with more shares have more vote.

P 17

I can't continue this - it's too long already. I hope this response is demonstrating that the original poster has no merit.

(Incidentally, I am not a Marxist.)