On Marxism, Communism, Capitalism, and Idiocy
Yes, there are alternatives to bankrupt economic "isms" (and they all are bankrupt)
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property. — Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Chapter 2, Paragraph 13)
I happened along this quote when doing some mind-distracting “star battle” puzzles. (You get a quote if you solve the puzzle.) The statement seemed a little too loaded, and divergent from what I remember. I both read and analyzed the full The Communist Manifesto when I took a graduate class on “Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche” at Syracuse University in the early 1990s.
Marxism has gotten a bad name lately, mostly because of its recent bumper crop of idiotic, parroting so-called followers. “Marxism, communism, and socialism are all the rage, haven’t you heard? Free stuff for everyone! Eat the rich!” Yeah, it’s pretty much that stupid and uninformed.
Most of these political fashionistas couldn’t even tell you the difference between Marxism and communism. So let’s check that off here, before we go on with the discussion by looking at the civil service exam distinction:
Marxism is a social, political, and economic theory originated from Karl Marx, focusing on the struggles between capitalists and the working class. Communism is based upon the ideas of common ownership and the absence of social classes, money and the state.
Basically Marxism is the theoretical framework, and communism is the attempted application of Marxist theory in the world. And, boy, do attempts at communism ever fail in their implementation. (See Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc. and check on the tens of millions of murders committed in the name of each.) Totalitarian dictatorships replaced communitarianism. Hell on earth replaced idealism as soon as allegedly communist actions moved past Marxist ideas.
However, Marx’s original analysis has proven to be quite durable in its lessons for democratic rule, quite at odds with the the monstrous, anti-democratic regimes that have followed Marx in history. It turns out that Marxist-derived ideology and bureaucratic politburo communism share VERY much with crony capitalism and technocratic Great Reset/New World Order/World Economic Forum (WEF) globalism.
Each is trying to assert a type of neo-feudalism with a class of so-called elites as the new lords. None believe in democracy or trust people to make decisions over their own lives. The ruling theory behind practical communism, capitalism, globalism, and even socialism is that an intellectual vanguard of “betters” (read technocrats, bureaucrats, or party officials) are the ones qualified to make the choices for the the broader populace.
Each is essentially rapacious and interested in concentrating power and wealth and having people live on subsistence wages. Who can forget the roundly derided WEF “prediction” that all of us “will own nothing and be happy.”
All of them seem to believe in making people purposefully suffer to “expedite” the timeline for change that puts more power in their hands. They do this by creating emergencies (like lab-created pandemics) that beget “emergency powers” that further beget a concentration of power and wealth for them and loss of civil rights and personal autonomy and agency for you, including even the erasure of “free and informed consent” over your own body. You see this with everything from vaccine mandates, to “dear leader” dictates, to attempts to make unelected, supranational bodies like the World Health Organization sovereign over elected leaders and nations.
This is where it gets richly ironic. Marx, it turns out, was NOT advocating the abolishment of ALL property, but he was advocating the abolition of property accrued by a bourgeois, rentier class, the very same parties who use the rhetoric of Marx and capitalism both (on the so-called left and right) to strip people of their rights and “self-earned” property.
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property…
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily…
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others...
According to Marx, if you make money and buy property as a result of your sweat: You ought to own it. You make money and property on the basis of someone else’s sweat (or captured governmental and corporate power like that of the monopolist), you basically ought to be stripped of it, because, it is tantamount to stolen property— a theft of value from the truly productive and industrious that drives dangerous concentrations of wealth and power.
Who wouldn’t agree with this sentiment, from the utopian-eyed college socialist to the culturally conservative labor union member? It’s just never been practiced. Quite the opposite, all major attempts at communism have created MORE concentration of power, separation of wealth, and disempowerment of workers. (The reader can probably point to some minor COMMUNITY-level attempts to enact idealized communism successfully.) Theoretical Marxism seems to provide no practical defense against practical exploitation.
Stalin was no “man of the people”, nor Lenin, nor Mao, nor any major communist leader I can think of. They were largely butchers and autocrats, centralizing power rather than devolving and distributing it, but apparently the “working class” mantra gives people hope, before betraying that hope. This is no different in method from Republican and Democratic parties, always promising to help “working families” but only delivering for the donor class.
We all know we are getting ripped off by the “passive income” of capitalists whose “money works for them” (no it doesn’t: YOU work for them). When they win in the stock market, they take home huge gains that are taxed AT A LOWER RATE than a secretary’s salary. When they lose from a market downturn YOUR tax money bails them out with a zero interest rate policy (ZIRP) cash infusion that sends the stock market soaring again.
Meanwhile, the minimum wage in the U.S. has not been raised in 13 years, savings interest rates have remained at zero during that time, and there has been a notorious divergence in wages and productivity since the 1970’s.
In other words, you work harder and you get paid less in real dollars, made worse with rampant inflation. Now, with the regulatory capture of ostensible “democratic” government and both major parties in the United States, it has become feeding time at the zoo.
No prosecutions for monopolies or actual financial crimes costing trillions of dollars. Endless wars. Cost-plus accounting (guaranteed profits) for corporate profiteers and price gougers, again paid by you. No cost containment for them but forced patronage of medical insurance monopolies for you. Massive transfers of wealth from the productive, working and creative classes to the lordly and lazy capital-social parasites in the technocratic, bureaucratic, and hedge fund classes.
It has become economically pornographic at this point.
What to do when stuck between a rock and a hard place
This problem will not be solved by Marx (which is now hopelessly outdated despite some relevant analyses). The problem will not be solved by a technocratic neo-liberal nanny state or a bullying, monopolistic, crony capitalist state. These all serve the same lords. Nor will it be solved by utopian socialism that does perhaps a better job of distributing gains and pains but does little to transform a system built on exploitation. Our problems won’t be solved by any “ism” currently in operation, because they are all predatory, centralized, and catering to the few over the many.
So where can we go? How about starting by inverting the three operating assumptions of these defunct systems mentioned above.
Instead of having a centralized tiny ruling elite that tells you what to do, why not set up decentralized, localized governing which directly responds to the needs of people from the bottom up.
Instead of having predatory mentality the concentrates wealth and power, find community ways to channel local labor and goods back to people at the local level, so they both benefit from and share in their efforts directly.
Instead of creating fear and suffering and then using this trauma to enact top-down emergency measures that rob people of their civil liberties, why not enhance civil liberties, health, and well-being through real-world education, exchange, and non-censored freedom of speech.
I talk about this generally as the practice of “democracism”. There are many particular forms of this some of which is discussed in my book Transforming Economy: Democratic capitalism is where money serves people rather than people serving money. Democratic socialism is where corporations and governments serve people rather than people serving them. We are just developing some of the post-Marxist, post-crony capitalist practices— peer lending, local currency, farmer’s markets and urban gardens, simplicity movements, “unplugging” from corporatized media, developing and patronizing local business, debt forgiveness, tax-free donation to each other, bartering, and the list goes on.
We will have to improvise, because any “grand plan” will necessarily make the same mistakes that Marx made, imposing a top-down idealism that only ends up serving the few at the expense of the many. We need a bottom-up pragmatism, driven by universal principles of appreciation, amity, and exchange where differences are seen as the life blood of community rather than some deviation to be stamped out for purpose of some abstract purity.
What are your ideas for a new economy? Put them in the comments below!
I really appreciate your article. I wish O had ideas that were productive. Maybe some of us can come up with some momentum at the local level.