Putting Marx to Rest

I recently had an online experience so bizarre and surreal that I just have to put it down on paper. It suggests, if not proves, that many of humanity’s worst agonies of the last 108 years derived from abstract “thinking” so nonsensical, impractical and self-contradictory as to be absurd, if its direct consequences hadn’t been so catastrophic.

There’s a direct line of causation between that dismal “thinking” and all of the following: (1) the Russian Revolution, human history’s second bloodiest after the French; (2) the catastrophic rise and fall of the Russian Soviet Union (formally the “USSR”, or “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics);” (3) the USSR’s jackboot oppression, for decades, of Ukraine, the rest of Eastern Europe and the Baltics; (4) the 1930s “Holodomor” in Ukraine, a famine caused by Russia’s forced collectivization of Ukraine’s once-free farming sector, which killed millions of Ukrainians; (5) Josef Stalin’s mass, forced deportation of ethnic minorities, including Koreans, Mongols, and Uyghurs, all over the Soviet Union’s vast territory; (6) the Cold War and its Cuban Missile Crisis, which came within minutes of extinguishing our entire species in nuclear fire; and (7) Russia’s bloody and catastrophic second invasion of Ukraine, still ongoing today.

It’s hard to get a grip on nonsense, precisely because it makes no sense. So bear with me. We’re going to delve into the disordered abstractions of Karl Marx, I hope for the last time ever. In the process, we’re going to see how dangerous the human mind can be when untethered to cause and effect, logical deduction, common sense and history. (Bear in mind that there was and is nothing wrong with Marx’ goals: fairness and economic justice for workers; it’s just that his means for achieving those goals were so abstractly byzantine and incomprehensible as inadvertently to cause some of the most catastrophic upheavals in human history.)

Karl Marx was a German political philosopher who lived from 1818 to 1883, or 65 years. His two great works, now fading rapidly from use and memory were, The Communist Manifesto, an 1848 pamphlet, and Das Kapital (“Capital” as in “capitalism” or “capital stock”). Das Kapital is a ponderous, three volume work, written in high German, containing a vast array of highly abstract wishful thinking, analysis and theorizing. Marx also explored the discontents of the Industrial Revolution, including the human damage of taking young men from clean and healthy farms and homes and putting them into stinking, smoky, and mostly unhealthy factories and there making them work long hours in dangerous, sometimes deadly and mostly “unnatural” manual labor.

On the one hand, Das Kapital is a catalog of the personal evils of industrialization, its harsh effects on as-yet-ununionized and therefore helpless workers, and the rise of a capitalist aristocracy to replace the old aristocracy of land. On the other, it’s a ponderous exploration of an entirely fictional world in which there is no money, workers or the people (as an abstraction) somehow collectively own and run everything, and the absence of bosses somehow lets workers receive benefits “according to their needs” while they generously (and entirely voluntarily) give their all for progress and prosperity “according to their ability.” (All language quoted in this paragraph consists of direct—and oft recited—quotes from English translations of Marx’ work.)

This fictional world was, in harsh reality, the blueprint that Lenin and Stalin used to design the Soviet Union. Far from Marx’ imaginary workers’ utopia, that project left a trail of blood and tears. Russians rose and overthrew their tsar, but they built Soviet Communism over the dead bodies of Russian soldiers, resisters, Kulaks, and czarist Russians, and with the deportation and oppression of millions from ethnic minorities.

Perhaps the most famous of Marx’ bromides is “dictatorship of the proletariat.” With this highly abstract phrase, Marx expressed his view that workers, collectively, should control the benefits, the methods and the means of their labor.

The “proletariat” is a term derived from ancient Roman Latin, referring to Rome’s propertyless underclass. Early nineteenth-century French social philosophers applied it to the underclass of workers in the Industrial Revolution, and Marx took it from there. For present purposes, it’s enough to understand that “proletariat” refers to a whole class of millions of farm and factory workers in an industrializing world.

The intended meaning of the phrase “dictatorship of the proletariat” is clear on its face: workers collectively should control the factories and industries in which they work. And their control should be absolute and unquestioned, like that of any dictator.

But how? Workers are individuals, millions of them. As history (including our own 2024 presidential election) shows, millions of people are unlikely to agree on anything, let alone on all the details of running a factory, employing each individual worker, and rewarding all properly for their individual parts in the whole.

Marx never says how, except for his abstract wish that each should give “according to his ability” and receive “according to his need.” And he never even addressed an even more perplexing question: how can ordinary workers, who in practice are often less educated and experienced than their bosses, best determine the goals and means of work designed to realize, for example, the benefits of science, when those benefits require long education and skill in abstract thinking even to foresee?

My conclusion was that this phrase is self-contradictory, abstract nonsense. A whole class of millions of people cannot be a “dictator,” who—according to the dictionary definition and numerous dismal examples from real history—is a single individual, almost always a man, ruling absolutely. Only such a man can make myriad decisions, right or wrong, at the drop of a hat. Stalin alone, not some abstract “proletariat,” was who ended up ruling the Soviet Union—the system of government that is now (and one hopes forever!) the single most faithful effort to reduce Marx’ vague, abstract ideas to reality.

My second encounter with the vague nonsense that is Marxist “Communism” came recently, in writing my essay on the ongoing collapse of American capitalism. I referred to Soviet Russia as the single purest example of “Communism” in human history. And I described its two most salient characteristics as: (1) government ownership of all means of production, including all industry; and (2) the forced collectivization of agriculture, in so-called “collective” farms (as occurred in Ukraine and caused the Holodomor).

In response, a commenter cited and quoted a definition of “Communism” from Wikipedia, which contained two points completely unfamiliar to me: (1) control of productive industry somehow by “the people” or an unspecified “collective,” rather than any government; and (2) the absence of money as such. The definition implied that workers, as Marx urged, would be rewarded according to their needs and would give their labor according to their ability, without the need for any currency or other tangible means of exchange.

I checked Wikipedia and found the commenter’s recital accurate. Then I composed an AI prompt for a definition of “Communism” based in historical reality, i.e., actually implemented in some nation’s governance. To my astonishment, Google AI produced a vaguely similar definition, but without the ridiculous abandonment of money. It said that the government, not some vague abstraction, runs industry in most Communist nations. But still it repeated the abstraction that somehow “the people” or a collective runs it.

In fact, worker management was and is a rare exception in the actual history of Communism, especially in Soviet Russia. According to Google AI, “In the Soviet Union, the period of management by employee committees was short-lived and largely confined to the earliest years of the revolution. By the early 1920s, the state transitioned almost entirely to a system of state-appointed officials and ‘one-man management.’” In other words, worker management in the Soviet Union lasted less than eight years out of 74, or about one-tenth of the Soviet Union’s lifetime.

There were exceptions to this rule in Cuba and Vietnam. And employee representation on governing boards does exist in today’s China, which practices “Communism,” in name only but, in reality, is a paragon of state capitalism. Under a Chinese law that became effective in 2024, governing boards of both state and private enterprises must include at least one employee member. In this respect China now resembles modern Germany, which no one would accuse of being “Communist.”

Nowhere, to my knowledge (or Google’s) has any real nation practiced anything resembling Marx’ fuzzy thinking. And to my knowledge, nowhere in modern history has any industrial nation, even for a moment, abandoned money as a means of exchange. Yet somehow, these vague and whimsical products of Marx’ high-German abstractions have penetrated the Internet, our modern Oracle at Delphi, as if they were or have been real.

In the real world, only a handful of nations have even tried seriously to implement anything resembling Marx’ vague and fanciful vision of “Communism.” In order of geopolitical importance and influence on our global imagination, they include Russia, China, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam (but not today!) and (temporarily) various nations in Central and South America.

To my knowledge, none has ever abandoned money or currency as a means of exchange or tried for more than a decade to implement a “dictatorship of the proletariat” by somehow letting workers collectively control their own destinies through committees or elections. They all have implemented dictatorships the old-fashioned way, by giving male dictators absolute power, including the power to jail and kill, backed by lots of obedient soldiers with guns and sometimes heavy weapons.

Of those dictatorships, Russia’s Soviet Union is the paradigm because it lasted the longest (74 years, from 1917 to 1991), covered the largest geographical area (including Russia’s huge land mass and eleven time zones), and had the most far-reaching historical impacts. Among those impacts were: the subjugation by force of Eastern Europe, a pyrrhic victory over Nazism in WWII, the Cold War and near-self-extinction of our species, and the Soviet Union’s spectacular, public economic collapse in 1991.

The great irony of Marx’ dismal excuse for thinking is how many and how various are the human tragedies and catastrophes it has caused. They include Russia’s two revolutions, Mao’s conquest of China by force, and China’s tragic self-abuse in the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, the vast repressions,dislocations and predations that followed—for 74 years in Russia!—the Castro brothers’ rape and pillaging of Cuba (still ongoing), a dismal series of “dictaduras” in Central and South Americas, the near-extinction or our species in the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Vietnam War, and the paralysis of our own American politics caused by Republicans largely successful demonizing as “Communist” every honest attempt to improve the lives of ordinary people, from Social Security, through Medicare and Medicaid, to Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s present-day quest to get New Yorkers free, fast bus transit.

The catastrophic effects of Marx’ dismal excuse for “thinking” are self-evident even in our American politics today: the ability of self-interested pols and demagogues to distract millions of workers from their own welfare by getting them to foam at the mouth at the mere mention of “Communism.” Marx himself would not be pleased.

There is an even greater irony. Marx’ ideas were childlike in their innocence and impracticability, but at a wishful level they were true and human. Any child in a working family can wonder. Why don’t my Mom or Dad get paid good wages? Why do my parents’ bosses do such arbitrary things? Why don’t my parents, who actually do the work, have more control over how it gets done? Why do the business owners get most or all the rewards when my Mom and Dad, and others like them, do all the hard work?

Those childish questions are apt and ageless. Since the very first industrial factory opened, they have been valid and unanswered. Marx never really answered them, at least in any practical way. What he did was clothe them in impenetrable high German and turn them into nonsense terms and phrases like “Communism” and “dictatorship of the proletariat,” whose lack of intrinsic meaning and practicality merely repeat the same questions in a more impenetrable form.

So I think it’s time to put Marx to rest, fully and finally. Let’s build a big symbolic coffin. Let’s throw in the original editions of The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and all of Marx’ other works, which collectively have so divided and so maimed our species for so long. (We’ll keep digital copies for the historical record.)

Then let’s light a big fire under that coffin and burn it to ashes. Finally, let’s pledge never to use Marx’ self-invented terminology or nonsensical, self-contradictory “logic” to promote practical ideas for bringing more fairness, equality, and justice to workers and our societies, to demonize those who promote those ideas, or to confuse voters trying to make up their minds.

Let’s forget that Marx ever lived, and let’s try to forget the wars, violent revolutions, despotism, oppression, dislocations, mass deportations, jailing and executions perpetrated on our species in his name, or in the name of the vague, self-contradictory and impractical ideas he foisted on us. Instead, let’s do our best, in innumerable ways involving real, practical and democratic politics, to realize the simple but profound goal of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill: “the greatest good for the greatest number.”

That goal is clear. Its meaning is self-evident. It has been around for over three centuries. Realizing it will require implementing the kind of effective and workable democracy of which our Founders dreamed, but which is now failing, perhaps permanently, from its own flaws and internal contradictions.

Nevertheless, the underlying concept is apt, despite the increasingly self-evident failures of our Constitution, drafted with the goal of validating slavery clearly in mind. In whatever society you can imagine, workers, underlings and followers will inevitably outnumber leaders, aristocrats, oligarchs and despots. So a true democracy, in which a majority rules in practice, will have the best chance of realizing Marx’ goals of justice and fairness for workers. Our Founders self-evidently have failed to realize such a democracy, as evidenced by our current despotic president (showing increasing signs of senile dementia) and his cult-like sycophants holding onto office for no discernible reason besides their own personal short-term benefit.

But smart people never let a single failure discourage them. They try again, and again, until they get a good idea to work.

The real way to realize Marx’ goals is to build a true and effective democracy, not to invent a whole new vocabulary of nonsensical and self-contradictory terms. The mission, in essence, is to complete the project begun by ancient Rome. That was left unfinished through the Dark Ages. But it began again when the Enlightenment arose in Northern Europe. It’s to that era—the real origin of modern democracy, human rights, international cooperation and science—that we should look for inspiration now.