John Hinderaker has a meme up at Powerline about the anniversary of Karl Marx’s death.
Writes Hinderaker:
Marx performed the difficult feat of being wrong about everything.
Actually, I think that is wrong, even though I blogged “Marx: Five Big Mistakes” nearly eleven years ago.
The point is that back in the 1840s when Marx was getting his stride, everybody who was anybody was fit to be tied about what to do about the industrial revolution and the rise of power of the educated middle class.
And all of a sudden they got worried about the poor. Hey, the poor had been dying like flies for the previous three hundred years as the landowners’ commitment to “improvement” and the rise of national rather than feudal armies drove peasants off the land. “Waste population” was the fashionable term of art.
The other thing to remember was the wars. The War of the Austrian Succession (1740-48), The Seven Years War (1756-63), the American Revolution (1775-83), the French Revolution (1789-92), the Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815). Know what? The poor get screwed in endless wars.
So Marx said that the world was going to change in his Communist Manifesto. And in Das Kapital he used classical economics — and its two theories of value: the exchange theory of value and the labor theory of value — to show that the workers were getting screwed. Eventually, he prophesied, the workers would get “immiserated” as all the profit got squeezed out by the competition in the market. Of course, he was right. Eventually the buggy-whip makers get driven out of business — and nobody knows what happened to the buggy-whip workers. But what keeps happening is that new industries arise on the ruins of the old.
Oh, and ten years after the publication of Kapital economists came up with the marginal theory of value that exploded the dual theories of labor value and exchange value.
Marx also predicted that the state and its bureaucracy would “wither away” after the communist revolution. In fact, as we know, bureaucracy is the religion of the educated class. Every educated person wants to regulate the market from the safety of a government bureaucracy, and bureaucracy gets stronger and stronger every year.
Marx also predicted that the alienating division of labor would disappear under socialism. Not true, old chap. If anything, socialism freezes the division of labor, because it prevents the market from reallocating labor to its most urgent need.
Let’s imagine Marx in our own era. He would be right there in the middle of the climate change movement declaring the end of the world if we didn’t all stop using carbon.
In other words, the educated class, then and now, is always coming up with ways to use government power to defeat some enemy. It could be the capitalists. It could be the bourgeoisie. It could be White Oppressors. It could be fossil fuel companies. It could be TERFs. It could be Christian Nationalists.
And now, like then, all these brilliant ideas will end up, as Communism did, in a Valley of Skulls.
Or, if you prefer, the plans of the educated class, then and now, are no better than Baldrick’s Cunning Plans in the Blackadder TV series.
So I look at Marx as less a villain than just another conceited educated class bumbler.
But what Marx taught the educated class was that the road to the future was for the educated class to be the champions of the lower class. Today this is celebrated in the notion of Allyship, with the Allies fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors. That, I suggest, is the most villainous idea in all recorded history.