A concise exploration of how Marx started with a false premise and proceeded to rationally and passionately draw logical

(but equally false) conclusions from that premise resulting in the principles of modern Communism we know as The Communist Manifesto.

Mikhail Panankovich
Available wherever intellectually sound theories are sold

The Errors of Marxism

One Out of Three

When the win loss record is totaled we find that Karl Marx was right in only one out of his three fundamental aspects that formed his foundation for Marxism. This is an acceptable ratio for salesmen and major league baseball hitters, but when trying to construct a socio-economic system that is to control nearly every facet of human interaction on a global scale the ratio can only be disastrous. Karl Marx was unconcerned with either baseball or sales ratios; instead he spent inordinate amounts of time and energy documenting cause and effect relationships based primarily on incomplete or erroneous information in an effort to explain the inherent oppression he perceived in the capitalist system. Marx was not an idiot, nor did he assume that he had so much time on his hands that he could afford to write it wrong the first time. He simply chose a very poor time and place from which to make his assessments and draw his conclusions. In spite of this handicap, Marx inadvertently established one undeniable and previously unknown fact which enriches mankind. The fact that Marx failed to comprehend the most rudimentary aspects of the system he was critiquing, namely capitalism and had no inkling of there being any further development of that system. Imagine you walk into a room and there is a woman profusely sweating and screaming out in the most awful agony she does not speak any language you recognize. She is obviously in great distress and her condition is getting steadily worse, your intuition tells you she cant hold out much longer. Youre not a doctor, and even if you were, you cannot communicate with this patient. How would you react to such a situation? Marxs conclusion was that the patient was dying, and could not be saved but through a new more compassionate system the future suffering of others can and must be prevented. In truth the woman, which in this analogy was the society of Europe in the time of Marx, was in labor and about to give birth to a whole new phase of the industrial revolution and paving the way for the technology age we live in today. Birthing contractions are so intensely painful that women are gifted with a higher threshold of pain than men possess simply for surviving the child

bearing experience. This is much like what European society was going through a very painful time. The social, political, economic order that had more or less worked for the past 500 years seemed to be breaking down. Marx could see that there were times in history when this had happened before and the transition required a new socio-economic system. Having the benefit of the trend of history up to that point, he opens the dialog about the need for change in the introduction to the Communist Manifesto. He traced from the very limited enfranchised populace of Rome, to the less centralized and slightly more egalitarian feudal system, and ultimately to the parliamentary democracy or constitutional monarchies of Marxs day which had gone much further in breaking down classes and decentralizing power. It was easy to conclude where the distribution of power authority was headed over that historical evolution. Furthermore, there had been an overall elevation in the standard of living for a great number of people who now comprised the middle class, but the working poor and indigent had receive almost no benefit in the preceding half millennium. He rationalized by a process of elimination that it was only logical that the next socio-economic change would be the revolution of the proletariat. They were the last and final class who would become enfranchised in the power structure allowing them to share in the material benefits of society. Additionally, he saw the next step in the political arena as the end of state all together and humanity working together in a classless society towards a common dignified future. It made perfect sense at the time, and even in retrospect it seems a logical step, even a desirable one. The problem was Marx was wrong about the nature of the tumult his contemporary world was going through and ultimately wrong about the effects that would come from the turmoil. In many ways Marx had a lobotomized view of capitalism where there is only limited development in the past, no future in which to grow, only the static now by which to define capitalism and his Communist ideology is custom tailored around this myopic view. The old aristocratic nobility was still in power at the top of a hierarchy that had emerged from the ashes of the Rome Empire, and now aristocracy had begun to show their inefficiency at governing in a time of mass migration to urban centers. The monarchs were ill equipped to cope with the dynamics already transforming their kingdoms, empires, and principalities. Autocrats, by their nature resisted social change in order to maintain the status quo that had afforded them the lavish lifestyles that their ancestors had enjoyed nearly uninterrupted for centuries. The nobles of Europe attempted to maintain a stalwart appearance but rather than slowing the

rate of change, the nobilitys intransigence only accelerated their slide into irrelevance. In the developed nations of the world with few exceptions what vestiges remain of nobility are little more than tourist attractions with a bit of cultural heritage attached like Disney characters in the United States. The proletariat would indeed gain power and material wealth, but it was to be a much slower and osmotic process than Marx envisioned. Education would play a role in the elevation of many working poor. The welfare system designed as a bulwark against the spread of Communism also played a role, by providing hope more than any lasting material advancement. What Marx missed entirely was the key role that capitalists would play in the continuing rise of the proletariat. In many ways this is the how and where Marx revealed his failure to understand the nature of the system he had written off as pass and ripe for replacement. Marx got the class of people in need of enfranchisement right, but as for the economic system and the sociological system that would achieve that end he was dead wrong.

Whats Wrong with these Damn Peasants?

Marx seemed to have a great deal of difficulty selling his idea to what should have been his most ardent believers, the exploited, uneducated, and mainly agrarian populace who had migrated to urban centers in increasing numbers during the second half of the 19 century continuing to a veritable flood in the early 20 century. With limited education and few relevant job skills that suited their new environment, the immediate prospects of improving their lot surely seemed bleak. From Marxs vantage point the rich capitalist owned the means of production and the workers were little more than human livestock providing labor for subsistence wages at best. Much to Marxs bewilderment, he found little support or even interest in the very people he was going to help the most. From Marxs understanding of Capitalism it was a slightly more advanced form of feudalism with factories and another repressive layer of controllers. The Boss man and his managers formed a Nuevo-nobility who attained near dictatorial power over the worker not by a claim to Divine Rite, but by the monopolization of capital and profit produced by the sweat and suffering of the workers. Instead he found his initial support in the disaffected intellectuals such as Lenin and Trotsky. While Marx contemplated the failure of the exploited masses to commence
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the revolution on cue, Lenin and Trotsky went to work with their fiery oration, propaganda, and when that also failed to incite the proletariat to action, a group of professional revolutionaries. Why was the proletariat so recalcitrant in pursuing the glorious workers revolution? The time was ripe; they had the means, the numbers, and a plan for how to build a future where their class was the primary beneficiary. It didnt make sense, that they would need so much prompting to seize the moment, their moment in history. As odd as this scenario may have seemed to Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky at the time, it is not unique in the history of communist revolution. In fact, the failure of the proletariat to revolt is so commonplace that it would require Marx, if he were alive today, to revise the Communist Manifesto in future editions where he claims:

Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a genuinely revolutionary class.
In every case where there has been a Communist revolution, it has always been through the agitation, motivation, direction, organization, and even under the threat of decapitation by a middle or upper class intellectual, such as Fidel Castro in Cuba, Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Bolivia, Mao Tse Tung in China, Ho Chi Min in Vietnam, just to name a few. There is only one situation in all of history where the proletariat spontaneously initiated any kind of revolution like the one Marx proposed. It occurred in 1791 on the French colony island of Saint-Domingue, modern day Haiti. In spite of this remarkable and heroic revolt which created the first republic ruled by people of African ancestry, Haiti remains sadly the most impoverished nation in the western hemisphere. The motivation that led to this revolution was far less esoteric than a political thesis written by an obscure German sociologist, it was motivated by the extreme cruelty with which the plantation owners of Saint-Domingue inflicted upon the slaves who were being systematically worked to death.
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However, we still have failed to resolve why the downtrodden and exploited proletariat seems so hard to motivate toward revolution that is in their best interest without the prospect of genocide being the only alternative. Lenin concluded that it was a kind of catatonic stupor, which required the Vanguard of the Party to spark the revolutionary fury within the proletariat. While Lenins idea is generally accepted in Marxist ideology today, it is accepted more so out of lack tenable options than grassroots belief. The failure to understand the inaction of the proletariat as well as the acceptance of Lenins comical explanation is, if I may use the expression, a red flag that there is something else fundamentally wrong with Marxs vision. The cause in both issues, being the proletariats indifference and the acceptance of irrational explanations for such an event, is intellectual bias. So certain were Marx and Lenin in the rightness of their own thoughts that they never stopped to consider that perhaps they were wrong. The

vast majority of the working class Europeans did not consider themselves as being exploited. They had moved from the rural hinterlands to the urban environments to improve their condition, and to a sufficient degree they had succeeded. By modern standards the idea seems outlandish, even by the contemporary standard of the relatively well heeled Marx and Lenin the lot of the working poor seemed a dreary almost slavish existence. However when compared with privation in the harsh winters of Europe without shelter or food, having a job that provided food or shelter, meager though it may have been seems a vast improvement in ones standard of living.

Evolution not Revolution

A similar form of intellectual bias is alive and well in America today. We often hear about the exploitation of workers in developing countries by multinational corporations paying a dollar a day or even less for labor. It seems self evident to us in the developed world that this is an immoral, wrong, and unconscionable act in the pursuit of corporate profits. This is the same error of intellectual bias from which Marx suffered, and is the same fundamental error that the left suffers from in the United States. Cheap labor is the benefit to the capitalist that motivates him to open a factory in the country that otherwise has no appeal. The work force is unskilled, uneducated, and often unreliable. The transportation and logistical assets such as reliable electrical power are generally poor to non-existent in these nations. The political climate can be unstable or worse. Medical and other support services are generally primitive at best. The sole benefit that could support a rational decision on the part of an executive to open a factory in such an environment would be cheap labor. The alternative to utilizing this benefit is the factory never opens at all and as a result the myriad subsequent benefits that emerge from the opening of the factory never take place. The final result is the developing country never develops. This is what Marx could not perceive about capitalism due to his intellectual bias and failure to realize that it is an evolutionary process, not a revolutionary one that raises the wealth of all mankind over time. Terms like equality, fairness, and living wage are meaningless paradigms of our own success to those who desperately want to take that first step down the road to the comfortable standard of living we take for granted.

1. 2.

It starts with a capitalist in search of cheap labor who builds a factory when he finds it. A few years to a decade down the road the population becomes a skilled work force and begins being selected for managerial positions paying higher wages. Meanwhile infrastructure is being built such as roads and bridges. A decade down the road the process continues and the managers who show talent may move into executive positions or enter other new white collar opportunities such as marketing. In 15 to 20 years is where the balance of power levels between the capitalist and labor. The capitalist is invested and moving the whole factory is an expensive option. Labor can begin to demand higher wages and better working conditions. At 25 -30 years the truly talented junior executives leave the employ of the factory because they have an idea for their own business and with the knowledge, experience, contacts, and finances he has developed over the last 3 decades he stands a better than average chance of success.

3. 4.

5.

Is this framework an idealistic one? Sure, but far more realistic than anything Marx proposed. When the system fails to run as smoothly as I suggest it could, there you will find discontented employees and if ignored by the Capitalist for too long labor leaders will emerge and unionization will occur. Collective bargaining will become a tool of those who had little more than a bow and arrow to provide for their families a few years ago thanks to one capitalist who went out in search of cheap labor one day.

Marxism in the Rear-View Mirror

While the advances in manufacturing productivity that result in the veritable explosion in the quantity and diversity of consumer goods was unimagined in Marxs time, it was not unimaginable. His limitation was self inflicted when his initial diagnosis was erroneous. Perhaps Marxs true limitation was one of limited vision. He could not see that the future held great promise if he had the patience to let it come to fruition. Instead, his haste to right the wrongs of an obsolete system as he concluded the Manifesto he declared with certainty,

The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

This was but the final and perhaps most fatal error in Marxs ideology. Within a few decades after the ink had dried on Marxs Communist Manifesto, many repressive totalitarian dictatorships emerged from often bloody and bitter revolutions. In the quest for the social justice that Communism promised the forced collectivization in Russia caused six million proletariats to be murdered by starvation in a single winter. Chinas forced collectivization murdered between 30 and 40 million proletariats, and in North Korea Marxs legacy lives on where 12,000 to

17,000 proletariats die every winter from lack of food and heat in order to support the dictators self-illusion that he has achieved the workers paradise that was the goal of Communism. To this very day, the socialist republics 20 years later are still crawling out from under the yoke of centralized economic planning. Those nations that embraced capitalism with the least restrictions and regulations like Poland and the Czech Republic are doing fairly well, while those that retained a good measure of Marxs centralized economic theory like Russia linger in economic malaise. In truth, capitalism is not without flaw as we see in the United States today. Government when not held to the highest of standards by the people can easily become corrupted or even hijacked by the huge sums of wealth that capitalists can wield due to the main benefit of the system, its propensity to generate wealth. Adding to this aberration is the vast consumer goods that often serve to distract the people from their most important civil duty to ensure that their republic remains sacrosanct. While it can be said that the undoing of Marxs Communism was that it was an inherently faulted system unable to produce either economic prosperity or political stability perhaps our republics capitalism is as a victim of its own success.

Marx the Man

Karl Marx was born into a middle class (or bourgeoisie) family on May 5, 1818. His father, Heinrich Marx, a lawyer who converted from Judaism to Lutheranism in order to advance his career was reasonably successful in life and known to be a man of diverse intellect. Karl was sent to the University of Bonn in 1835 Karl wished to study philosophy and literature, but his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study. He reportedly more often than not failed to show up for class and in his second semester did not attend a single class preferring to spend his time and his living expenses provided by his father at the Trier Tavern where he joined the infamous Trier Tavern Club drinking society and at one point served as its president. This would be his only notable accomplishment while attending the University of Bonn. Marx's poor grades angered his father and he forced Karl to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented University of Berlin, where his legal studies became less significant than excursions into philosophy and history. Marx eventually earned a degree in philosophy from the university in 1841. From that high point he went on to spending a great deal of his adult life either unemployed or underemployed by choice. In an unseemly irony, a sizable portion of the financial resources that Marx enjoyed during his adult life was generated by the capitalist enterprise operated by Friedrich Engels family in Manchester, England. In total Marx produced a voluminous amount of ultimately impractical, unworkable, and often irrational socio-political

theories written in a style reminiscent of Socratic Discourses but lacking the lucidity and clarity in progression of thought that Socrates possessed. Marx was by many accounts unqualified to make assessments of his contemporary socio-economic system, let alone offering improvements upon it, having never participated in any appreciable quantity of production or interacting on a social level with other than his closed circle of abstract philosophers and revolutionaries. While it is without question that Marx was an eloquent author and had an ability to make his socio-economic views seem logical his system was only workable in the abstract world he resided in most of the time. When applied in the real world it becomes apparent that Marxs Communism has the same social, political, and economic viability as James Joyces, Ulysses. While assuming the guise of political economist, historian, political theorist, and sociologist, being a deeply passionate but deeply out of touch intellectual was about the only vocation Marx could claim with any sincerity. In a twist of irony, when put into application Marxists revolutions often made it a priority to shoot the intellectuals of which Marx himself would have been a part under the premise that they were dead weight in society.

The history of African slavery has never been without some significant degree of cruelty, one

can only imagine the horrors that motivated them to such a seemingly hopeless endeavor. Even if the revolt were successful, the most likely result would be French troops retaking the islands and massacring the rebel slaves. Luckily, either the slaves were severe enough in their initial retribution against the French to ward off invasion or the French simply demonstrated their trademark response to immediately back down to even the mildest threats of force.