errors of marxism

8/3/2019 Errors of Marxism

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/errors-of-marxism 1/9

Available wherever intellectually sound theories are sold

Mikhail Panankovich

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.



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 can’t hold out

much longer. You’re not a doctor, and even if you were, you cannot communicate with this

patient. How would you react to such a situation? Marx’s 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 Marx’s 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 nobility’s 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 passé 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.

What’s 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 19th

century continuing to a veritable flood in the early

20th

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 Marx’s 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 Marx’s bewilderment, he found little support or

even interest in the very people he was going to help the most. From Marx’s 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



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 didn’t 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:

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.i

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 Lenin’s 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 Lenin’s comical

explanation is, if I may use the expression, “a red flag” that there is something else fundamentally wrong

with Marx’s 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

“Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie

toda the roletariat alone is a enuinel revolutionar class.”



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. It starts with a capitalist in search of cheap labor who builds a factory when he finds it.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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 Marx’s time, it was not unimaginable. His limitation was self

inflicted when his initial diagnosis was erroneous. Perhaps Marx’s 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,

This was but the final and perhaps most fatal error in Marx’s ideology. Within a few decades after the ink had

dried on Marx’s Communist Manifesto, many repressive totalitarian dictatorships emerged from often bloody and

bitter revolutions. In the quest for the “social justice” that Communism promised the f orced collectivization in

Russia caused six million proletariats to be murdered by starvation in a single winter. China’s forced co llectivization

murdered between 30 and 40 million proletariats, and in North Korea Marx’s legacy lives on where 12,000 to

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



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 Marx’s 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 Marx’s 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 Marx’s Communism has the same social, political, and economic viability as James

Joyce’s, 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.

iThe 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.

errors of marxism

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