Fall 2016—Self-Defeating Dream: Marxist Justice In A World Dominated By The Individual

As we celebrate yet another Thanksgiving Day in the history of the American republic, I think it’s important to consider the principles that make it possible for us who live in the alleged “Free World” to enjoy peace and prosperity when we gather with friends and family on this important holiday.

We conservatives are quite fond of citing the virtues of market capitalism when we talk about what has helped to make America great. Indeed, it is true that capitalism has done more to bring material wealth to a majority of Planet Earth’s human population than ANY other economic system ever invented by man.

But once in a while, I think it’s also imperative for conservatives like me to remind others that a big part of the United States’ success story involves past generations of Americans rejecting certain principles that destroy freedom, individuality, and the pursuit of excellence. In today’s political climate, with partisan slogans advocating for “making America great again,” I would argue that it is important for American citizens—and the politicians who lead them—to continue rejecting false principles that can only lead to our republic’s decline and destruction.

The United States of America has risen to become the world’s great superpower and guarantor of freedom, peace, and prosperity by rejecting false ideologies of socialism, fascism, and communism. Despite this profound historical truth, many Americans today are pushing for an expansion of government along socialist lines.

Socialism’s greatest champion was a man named Karl Marx, and Marxist socialism is probably world history’s greatest example of a theory that went tragically wrong when implemented in the real world.

Karl Marx, the founding father of the philosophy that bears his name and to which thousands of scholars, academics, social theorists, and policy makers have subscribed, once complained that “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways.” For this young German journalist and revolutionary, philosophy only became useful if it was used to “change” the world.  In other words, Marx believed that speculating about historical developments was pointless and disconnected from action unless the conclusions of such speculations were applied to real-world economic, political, and social problems. Attached to this notion was an implication that the truly purposeful historian will seek to use their philosophical models to fashion and impose a sense of justice upon the world in which they live.

What was Marx’s conception of justice? Were the atrocities and social calamities associated with 20th century efforts to implement communism and its version of justice results of a misapplication of Marxist theory, or were they the logical and inevitable manifestations of a flaw in that theory? I conclude that while Marxist notions of justice center on ensuring that the greatest number of individuals have their economic needs and wants sufficiently met, Marxist theory—and its 20th century real-world applications and implementations— is ultimately self-defeating because it denies recognition of the individual as an important factor in the history of human societies. Indeed, Marxism’s emphasis on the material world and class consciousness comes at the expense of a proper understanding of individual human needs and wants, ensuring that Marxist communism in the 20th century was doomed to end in economic stagnation, political oppression, and social chaos.

According to Marx himself, a truly just society would meet the constantly evolving economic needs and wants of all its members, and this society would do so in a way that would perfectly reconcile individual and community interests and allow people to express their authentic selves through pure interactions with and through the collective. He explained that “law must be based on society; it must be the expression of society’s common interests and needs, as they arise from the various material methods of production.”  Note the economic underpinning to Marx’s understanding of justice; for him, true justice was achieved when economic activity was used for the satisfaction of human needs and the production of well-being for all, and not just some, of the members of society. Justice was a group experience, a conception of collective being. Anything less—anything centered on the individual—was not a legitimate conception of justice at all.

In stark contrast to the common good, the “doctrine” of capitalism had resulted in a “denial of life and of all human needs,” teaching that “the less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.”  Marx taught that life under capitalism was meaningless for the vast majority of the population—especially the working population—because humanity could not experience true freedom and expression if its existence was dominated by the endless pursuit of profit and property. Unless economic production was brought under “common control, instead of being ruled by it as some blind power,” capitalism would only continue its inexorable dehumanization of mankind.  In the Marxist’s outlook, the capitalist societies of Western Europe in the mid- to late 1800s had only served to enrich the relative few and alienate the working populations, pitting the bourgeois and proletarian classes against one another.

The solution to the deprivations and inequities of capitalism—the road to Marx’s version of a just society—was for the proletarians of the world to unite, seize power from the capitalist rulers of the Western world, and inaugurate a new era of communist justice. Marx and his ideological collaborator, Friedrich Engels, said as much in The Communist Manifesto when they announced to the world that “all previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interests of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interests of the immense majority.”  Capitalism had resulted in the oppression and expansion of the working class; the elites of society had accumulated more wealth and property, pushing more of the population into the lower classes and encouraging them to identify with the aims and goals of the proletariat. For this reason, Marx and his disciples believed that the eventual transcendence of capitalism was inevitable. The expanding lower classes would see their aims and goals steadily becoming synonymous with the aims and goals of a legitimately just society that existed to serve the needs and wants of all. Put simply, the injustices of capitalism would expand the proletarian class until the inevitable world revolution of workers erupted and restructured society according to principles of collective justice that facilitated the greater good.

Justice in the Marxist sense was the generally stated goal of all 20th century attempts to impose the proletarian revolution in countries and territories across the globe from Russia to Cuba, Vietnam to Angola, and China to Nicaragua. In all of these places, Marxism and its close ideological offshoots inspired economic, political, and social revolutions that transformed the structures of human civilization in the name of the greater good for the purpose of ensuring that the needs and wants of all members of society were sufficiently met. However, it has also been generally acknowledged by many scholars, historians, and political scientists, that Marxism as a worldwide movement—and certainly as a worldwide revolution—has either failed entirely or faded away into obscurity. The dissolution in 1991 of the Soviet Union, the most globally hegemonic communist superpower of the last century, seems to have validated this line of thinking.

Although it is unrealistic to say that the worldwide communist movement of the 20th century was exclusively responsible for that century’s many crimes against humanity, the atrocities and social calamities associated with efforts to implement communism are well-documented. Whether we refer to the man-made famines of Stalinist Russia, the killing fields of Pol Pot’s Cambodia, or the parricide of China’s Cultural Revolution, communism’s rather substantial 20th century body count is rather indisputable. Varying forms of political oppression, social chaos, and economic stagnation have been attributed to Marxist communism’s legacy in world history, and the question for many scholars has not been whether or not these tragic results of communist revolutions are real, but whether or not these atrocities and calamities are results of misapplications of Marxist theory.

Careful study of Marx’s original theory—in particular his understanding of the place of individuals in human history and their relationship with the material world and their social class—reveals that the flawed results of communist revolutions the world over are themselves the direct result of flaws within the theory itself. Marx, as a philosopher, saw very little value in studying individuals apart from their belonging to an economic class, and he also saw the world around him as one determined primarily by economic forces. Both of these viewpoints limited the importance of individuals and, indeed, human individuality in all its unique manifestations, leading Marxism down a path of real-word implementation that was bound to fall short of its goal of providing for all human needs and wants. The flaws of Marxism as a theory proved to be self-defeating for Marxism as a practical policy.

For Marx and Engels, the economic basis of any society was always the determining factor for its cultural superstructure of ideas. In their version of historical materialism, “man’s ideas, views, and conception, in one word, man’s consciousness” changed “with every change in the conditions of his material existence.” They ridiculed anyone who resisted the notion that “the history of ideas prove…that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed.”  Marx returned to this concept repeatedly in his writings, stressing how economic modes of production condition “the social, political, and intellectual life process in general.”  Rather than understanding the development of human history as a complicated and complex interaction of a variety of equally important factors, Marxists have argued that history is primarily an economic story with derivative effects in the political, cultural, and social areas of life.

It is crucially important to understand that Marx based his worldview on a powerful but flawed outlook: that mankind’s understanding of existence—with all of the accompanying and varying belief systems, attitudes, motivations, and behavioral patterns—was nothing more than a restrictive reflection of economic conditions. In cruder expression, this worldview seemed to imply that individuals could be nothing more and conceive of little else beyond what their economic lives dictated. I cannot and will not chronicle in comprehensive fashion all of the various ways that human beings have defied Marx’s cold materialistic determinism throughout history; even a casual consideration of history’s religious martyrs, inventive dreamers, and irrepressible explorers will suggest that humans are motivated by much more than mere external material conditions. History is filled with simple yet profound individual acts of seemingly irrational sacrifice for family, loved ones, principles, and ideals, and these stories of the past instill serious doubt concerning Marx’s theory of strict historical materialism. In seeking justice for all mankind, it is little wonder that Marxism fell short when its founding tenets gave so little regard to the idealistic human spirit that has moved so much of history forward.

Karl Marx’s flawed theory further discriminated against the individual worth of mankind by restricting human perceptions, interactions, and aspirations solely within the economic boundaries of class. “It is not the consciousness of men,” he said, “that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”  He did not believe in the power of individuals or ideas to better their world unless those individuals thought in terms of class consciousness. With this belief, Marx might be understood as attempting to validate his own calls for revolution. After all, without this emphasis on class consciousness, Marx had very little hope for the workers of the world to think of themselves as a united proletarian revolution capable of ushering in the next era of human fulfillment and justice.

Class consciousness was and is the only consciousness for which Marxists hold any fascination; for them, class consciousness is not only the force by which history is moved forward, but also the force by which mankind’s greatest achievements and ultimate justice will be realized.

Marxism misses so much about human nature!

For instance, Marx himself proposed that human beings were not naturally competitive, but that it was society—capitalist society, in particular—that made them so.  How then, would Karl Marx have made sense of the First World War, when millions of members of the working classes chose not to serve the interests of some overriding “class consciousness” by overthrowing their capitalist rulers, but to instead answer the call of those same rulers by fighting and killing each other on an industrial scale—not in the name of class, but nationalism? In ways that are too numerous to be elaborated upon in this blog post, human history seems to reveal that there is much more to human individuality than a mere economic submission to class logic would suggest.

Karl Marx’s search for justice as a class experience represented a false hope because it ignored so much of the individual’s needs and wants, many of which often exist far beyond the reach of the economic realm. His perceptions about human nature were naïve, and this naiveté played out with tragic consequences in a real world that has always been and always will be dominated by the individual. Even mass movements like communism are made up of nothing more than the aggregate beliefs, wills, and actions of individuals who do not naturally or consistently conform to the stereotypes, beliefs, perceptions, viewpoints, goals, or aims of the social groups they may or may not belong to. Individuals do not always think in terms of their material world, or of the cold realities of their economic class; Karl Marx fundamentally misunderstood this aspect of human nature. It is unfortunate that this simple yet profound misunderstanding has been perpetuated through the years and used to instigate so much suffering among the masses whose cause he so passionately claimed to champion.

In this latest election cycle, we watched as an honest-to-goodness socialist made a run for the presidency of the United States of America. Bernie Sanders was perhaps the most explicitly Marxist presidential candidate this country has ever seen since the early 1900s. His campaign energized American voters—particularly the younger ones—and gained traction in ways that shocked many of us levelheaded conservatives who understand the dangers of Marxism. I know I was shaken to see so many of my fellow young Americans clamoring for expanded government regulation of the free economy, higher taxes, forced dissolutions of private enterprises, and more government spending and an increase of the national debt and deficit.

I guess 2016 was a year to be shocked. I was shocked when my wildest dreams came true and Hillary Clinton—another candidate whose ideas have been shaped by Marxist influences—lost the presidential election to Donald Trump. I was never a fan of Donald Trump. Part of my refusal to jump on the “Trump Train” arose from my suspicion of his policy goals. Too many of Donald Trump’s ideas seem to be colored by notions originally conceived and championed by socialists in the Marxist tradition. That said, it is undeniable that Donald Trump won the presidency because of a wave of anti-socialist sentiment that has swept the nation from coast to coast; once he becomes our president, Donald Trump MUST abide by his mandate and abandon whatever socialistic plans he may have had for leading the American nation. If he does not do this, many of his most enthusiastic supporters will abandon him.

This Thanksgiving, I am grateful that Hillary Clinton is not going to be my next president. I am glad that many Americans seem to be awakening to a sense of our nation’s awful situation: that government is getting too big and that too many of our politicians have succumbed to the unyielding myth of Marxist socialism…a myth which teaches the dangerously false notion that government can and should solve all of our problems. That myth is certainly not what the United States of America was founded upon, and I am thankful to my Heavenly Father that I have been raised in a family where the truth about America’s greatness has been consistently taught since my childhood. I take this occasion now to rededicate myself to the principles that have made my freedom, peace, and prosperity—all the things I celebrate on Thanksgiving Day—realities to rejoice over and ideals worth defending.

--Christopher Peterson, November 24^th, 2016