Karl Marx Was Wrong--And Evil!

Part 9b in a series . . .

No thinker, prophet, reformer, or revolutionary in history, except for Jesus Christ, has had such a direct, immediate, and wide-reaching influence upon mankind as Karl Marx. He forever changed the way men think and act. At the peak of its influence in the 1980s, Marxism was the official doctrine of more than a third of the world’s population, and Marxist ideas have dominated humanities and social science departments in American and western European universities for the last 75 years. Even though the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc collapsed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and even though we now know that these Marxist regimes were responsible for the deaths of over 120 million people over a 70-year period, Marxism is still trendy with the hoity-toity, artsy-fartsy, and namby-pamby.

Marxism claims to be a systematic, universal, and true philosophy of human life that offers a synoptic account of man’s past, present, and future. It’s meant to explain just about everything! Indeed, it’s meant to be the culmination and end of philosophy as such. Ironically, Marx also believed that human history is governed by immutable laws that cannot be altered individuals motivated by philosophic ideas. And then, in a double irony, he helped found an international political party the purpose of which was to usher in the final movement of history. Marx’s followers dedicated their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor in the name of his philosophy.

In Part I of this two-part essay titled “Karl Marx Was Right—Well, Sort of,” which was based on a reading of Marx’s essay “On the Jewish Question,” we examined Marx’s critical analysis of his present, i.e., his assessment of the world of nineteenth-century classical liberalism. We there saw that Marx correctly identified the fundamental political principles and institutions of a free society (e.g., constitutionalism, separation of church/school/economy/culture from the State, natural rights, individualism, privacy, contracts, and various market mechanisms such as the division of labor, competition, and the price mechanism). More importantly, he also identified the moral heart and soul of capitalism as self-interest or what he sometimes called egoism. It’s true that he hated and condemned these moral principles, but he knew they were fundamental to and necessary for the functioning of a free society. Marx knew what the moral foundations of a free society are better than most twentieth-century American conservatives such as Irving Kristol.

Marx’s critique of capitalism went to its moral core. He taught that all the principles and institutions of a free society were only an illusion and cover serving the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party, for instance, Marx argued that the bourgeoisie was driven by “naked self-interest” and “egotistical calculation.” But Marx’s critique went further. He was not only or simply criticizing the selfish interests of the bourgeoisie, but he was, more importantly, hoping to eliminate from human nature the very possibility of selfishness or self-interest, whether it was pursued by the bourgeoisie or anyone else. At the deepest philosophic level, at the heart of Marx’s rejection and condemnation of capitalism and liberalism, was his moral repulsion with the role played by self-interest in human affairs. In this way, he shared one important element of the Christian moral teaching.

Marx was wrong of course—deadly wrong—in his critical assessment of the principles and institutions of a free society, but he was, to repeat, mostly correct in identifying capitalism’s core and necessary principles and institutions. Free-market economists such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek have done admirable work in critiquing Marx’s economic and political principles, but Marx’s moral principles stand largely unchallenged. In fact, some twentieth- and twenty-first-century American conservatives agree with Marx’s assessment of capitalism’s moral foundation, and, like Marx, they denounce that foundation. With friends like that, who needs enemies! Maybe—just maybe—the moral principle that Karl Marx hated the most and attempted to eradicate from human nature is the very principle that most needs to be defended.

In Part II of this essay on Marx and Marxism, we shall examine through our continued reading of “On the Jewish Question” (and a few other selected texts) Marx’s view of the past and future, i.e., his view of man’s historical nature and man’s future in a communist society. Marx’s moral and political philosophy represents a total rejection of virtually all that had preceded it. His historical narrative tells the story of the coming-into-being and the passing away of all societies hitherto, but his “positive” political philosophy and his envisioned new society begin de novo and with a tabula rasa to resurrect man’s true, original nature. Specifically, we shall examine Marx’s moral alternative to self-interest and egotism: a new form of selflessness and self-sacrifice.

Marx proposed the total subordination of the individual to the collective and the private sphere to the public sphere, the total suppression of civil society by an omnipotent State, and the abolition of a private property and a free-market economy. In its place, he proposed building a comprehensive, totalizing State that would recreate man’s lost or forgotten original state of being, where men lived in peace and harmony with one another. Our goal in what follows is to identify Marx’s deepest philosophic values and ambitions.

Marx’s Moral Alternative to Liberal Political Society

As we saw in Part I of this essay, Marx drew a distinction in “On the Jewish Question” between political and human emancipation. Political emancipation for Marx means liberation from the State (i.e., an absence of external coercion or constraint) and from one’s moral duties to the common good. This is the form of emancipation that was launched at the end of the seventeenth century and was reaching its peak throughout Europe during Marx’s lifetime via the philosophy and institutions of classical liberalism.

While Marx recognized that political emancipation is one step—maybe even the last step—on the road to the highest form of emancipation (what he calls “human emancipation”), he also recognized that liberal society represents the highest or last form of moral degeneration because it dehumanizes man by reducing him like no other previous society to a selfish, grasping, exploitative, isolated, and, in the end, deeply unhappy human being. In a free and liberal society, religion, education, property, and work are privatized (through separating government and civil society) and particularized (through the division of labor), thereby alienating man from his true being, from his “true and authentic” self, or what Marx calls his “species-being.” In capitalist societies, according to Marx, men treat other men as means to their selfish ends. Marx wanted to create a society in which in all men share in all things in pursuit of a common end.

Marx’s idea of “species-being” is the key to unlocking his moral vision. It represents his deepest view about what human nature is, was, and should be. The difficulty in understanding what Marx meant by this curious concept is that he nowhere explained its meaning with sufficient depth or breadth. (Marx’s fullest discussion of “species-being” is in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, but even that is relatively brief and cursory.) Though Marx uses the term “species-being” multiple times in “On the Jewish Question,” one can only infer its full meaning with the assistance of some of his other texts.

In essence, “species-being” is Marx’s term defining the true nature or innermost identity of all living beings. All animate beings are identified and defined by their species classification. Put differently, all species have a distinct form of being. By accepting and using the concept “species,” Marx is suggesting that animate beings, including man, have a fixed nature. For instance, all lions (Panthera leo), tigers (Panthera tigris), and bears (Ursidae) have a nature or state of being associated with their species that distinguishes them from all other species. The same is true, of course, for man as homo sapien. Man’s species-being is what distinguishes him from lions, tigers, and bears, and it describes what his ideal, un- or non-alienated state of existence is.

Man’s real existence or “true self” for Marx is not as an isolated, individualistic, self-interested, and egoistic being. These qualities represent the corruption and alienation from man’s true, “species” self. Alienation for Marx means the fracturing of man’s true self; it means his enslavement to things beyond or outside himself, to what he called “commodity fetishism,” to man’s enslavement to money (the ultimate symbol of man’s enslavement), and then, finally, his separation from his neighbors for a false and corrupted self, driven by self-regarding desires. And, not surprisingly, the highest form of man’s corruption occurs under laissez-faire capitalism (i.e., separation of economy and State), where man’s egoism is emancipated, and where men are alienated from their true essence. Freedom to pursue one’s self-interest, private property, the division of labor, and various other market forces drive men apart, Marx declared, teaching them to see each other first

as competitors and then as enemies. Morally, true human emancipation for Marx is to be liberated from selfishness and reunited with man’s true self, i.e., his communal self. True emancipation means that all human activity is to be social and other-oriented.

What, then, is man’s “species-being”?

According to Marx, man’s species-being is as a social or communal being. But what could this possibly mean?

Marx knew that throughout history many political philosophers had viewed man’s essence as social in nature, and he knew that even in free, liberal, and capitalist societies men associate, cooperate, and share with each other. Whereas some previous philosophers—including liberal philosophers—had argued that man is social by nature (i.e., gregarious), Marx argued that man’s true being is and certainly should be social by nature. Nay, more: Marx is suggesting that man is more than just social or gregarious by nature. Man’s nature is, for Marx, inherently communal or herd-like.

Specifically, Marx argued that man is a needy being who must produce what he needs to live (e.g., food, clothing, shelter, fuel, etc.), but his needs can only be satisfied in conjunction with others. Man does not have the natural or innate qualities, abilities, or skills to provide for all his basic needs. Man is a dependent being and production is a social act, according to Marx. Man must live and work with others to satisfy his needs and wants. He cannot reach his human potential without a dynamic interaction between himself and other men. Marx believed that each person is part of a larger whole that defines his essence as an individual. Man for Marx is the only being who has the capacity to know he is part of a larger whole that is improved and fulfilled by sharing. Marxism is therefore dedicated to helping men merge their individual selves into a larger self—the whole of humanity, the universal brotherhood.

But a difficulty immediately arises in attempting to understand what Marx means by species-being. Marx is either suggesting that man was once communal by nature (without indicating when that was), but that his communal nature was corrupted and lost over time; or, alternatively, he is suggesting that man’s species-being represents not necessarily what man once was in the past, but rather is a projection of what man might, could, or should be in the future. It turns out that Marx meant both.

In The Grundisse (1857-58), Marx says of man’s species-being that “human beings become individuals [this is not necessarily a good thing for Marx] only through the process of history.” In becoming individuals, they become what he derisively calls “Robinsonades,” i.e., men like Robinson Crusoe, who live spiritually isolated lives from other men. Man as “Robinsonade” is the consequence rather than the cause of free, liberal, capitalistic societies, according to Marx. Marx rejected the classical-liberal idea that man qua individual is or should be the proper unit of moral value. The “Natural Individual” is, he wrote, a product of history and does not represent man’s essence or natural being.

To discover man’s true nature or essence, Marx encourages his readers to recover man’s original species-being through historical examination.

The more deeply we go back into history, the more does the individual, and hence also the producing individual, appear as dependent, as belonging to a greater whole: in a still quite natural way in the family and in the family expanded to the clan [Stamm]; then later in the various forms of communal society arising out of the antitheses and fusions of the clans.

Marx goes on in The Grundrisse to claim that man, in his original, uncorrupted state, “appears originally as a species-being [Gattungswesen], clan being, herd animal.” This is man’s true being or essence, according to Marx. The history of man is, therefore, the history of man’s alienation from his true self.

It should be noted that Marx’s view of man as a social or communal being is entirely different than that of any previous thinker in the history of moral and political philosophy. Marx radicalized the traditional view of man as a social being. According to Marx, men only become fully human when the differences that divide them are eliminated, when they merge into a common life of sharing, and when they are the same psychologically, morally, socially, politically, and economically. That’s what the taxonomy and meaning of species-being is!

Marx revealed both the highest or purest expression of this view of man and how to achieve it in one powerful statement found his “Critique of the Gotha Program”: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” What this principle means in practice is that the work and wealth of those with greater abilities will be redistributed according to the needs of those with lesser abilities. These greater abilities must necessarily include differences in moral qualities such as initiative and dedication and certain moral virtues including work and productiveness. This guiding moral-political principle of Marxian socialist society is premised on the idea that all men must become true friends with all other men, devoted to everyone’s wellbeing. It also assumes that all men will gladly renounce their self-interestedness in favor of universal and indiscriminate sharing.

What Marx refused to see or understand is that ability is ultimately limited and fixed by nature, whereas needs and wants are potentially unlimited. Only so much juice can be squeezed from the lemon, but the taste for lemonade far exceeds the capacity to produce it. And if the men with ability eventually reduce their production because they cannot keep the fruits of their efforts (as they undoubtedly will), poverty will spread and be experienced by all. This is the history of socialism and communism.

But let us not get too far ahead of ourselves. We must determine how this communal state of existence can be achieved in the wake of liberal society? In other words, how can man’s “species-being” be restored?

Recovering Species-Being

To overcome the debilitating sense of alienation that defines modern liberal life, Marx argued that man must reconstruct his world and begin de novo. He believed that human society must be reorganized so that man’s true nature can be recalibrated if not reborn. Marxism (like Christianity) seeks to eradicate human “selfishness” and “egoism,” so that no individual would ever again conceive of seeking his advantage over others. (This is not, of course, what selfishness or self-interest rightly understood is, but Marx is certainly attaching himself to the traditional understanding of selfishness.) Man’s core “being” must be, according to Marx, rebuilt in a way that recovers his natural, automatic (but lost) disposition toward unselfish benevolence and friendship.

Marx’s new man—the man of species-being—would be naturally and spontaneously devoted to the good and universal brotherhood of man rather than committed to them by artificially-contrived duties as with the commandments of Christianity or Kantian ethics. Marx believed that by redesigning man’s economic and political institutions, socialist society could literally change the nature of human consciousness, thereby eliminating man’s false consciousness.

Marx does not directly or explicitly speak of communism as the solution to the problem of human alienation in “On the Jewish Question,” but he does indicate the political means by which future communists may begin the process of creating a society that will eventually lead either to the resurrection or discovery of man’s true nature.

To that end, Marx invoked the eighteenth-century political philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to demonstrate what must be done. Marx quotes from a famous passage in Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), where the Frenchman discusses what a “Legislator”—a Legislator in the tradition of Sparta’s Lycurgus—must do to form a just and good society:

Whoever dares undertake to establish a people’s institutions must feel himself capable of changing, as it were, human nature itself, of transforming each individual who, in isolation, is a complete but solitary whole, into a part of something greater than himself, from which in a sense, he derives his life and his being. His task, in short, is to take from a man his own powers, and to give him in exchange alien powers which he can only employ with the help of other men.

This passage is critical to understanding Marxism and the history of the twentieth century. Communist man cannot be created without eradicating what the Marxists call the “false consciousness” that civilized man has developed over the course of several millennia. What this means most of all, according to Marx, is that nothing less than man’s illusory “self” or the bourgeois “I” should be exterminated, and, as he said, “egoism must be punished as a crime.” And thus we have the moral justification for force, violence, and genocide!

Thus, Marx’s anti-liberal political ideal begins with the total subordination of the individual to the collective, as incorporated in and represented by the State. Marx’s ideal society is marketless, which means without private property, the division of labor, the price mechanism, profits, competition, voluntary exchange, private contracts, money, and, most of all, freedom. Marx recognized, however, that such subordination and control require the use of State violence. In “On the Jewish Question,” for instance, Marx calls for the abolition and destruction of private property, “by declaring a maximum, by confiscation, or by progressive taxation” or, if necessary, by the “guillotine.” Marx advocated not only the use of state-sponsored violence to change human nature but state-sponsored violence by a government in a condition of what he called “permanent revolution.” In other words, the violence must never end until true man is resurrected via his species-being.

Destroying all the principles, institutions, and mechanisms of a free-market economy was not the end of Marxian communism but only the means to achieving a higher, grander end. The ultimate psychological and moral goal of the new economic relations created by first by socialism and then by communism is to reintegrate individual men into a collective consciousness. Emancipation for Marx—true human emancipation—is only possible and complete “when the real, individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers, so that he no longer separates this social power from himself as political power.”

Marxian communism seeks to recover man’s potential for acting as a “social being.” A year after he published “On the Jewish Question,” Marx wrote his “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844” in which he explained that the highest goal of communism is the “re-integration or return of man to himself.” Communism means the resurrection of man’s true, communal self. For Marx, the individual is only fully real in so far as he is serving the collective good and the solidarity of his species-being. Each person’s individuality and creativity must be expressed and realized in association with others. Man is only fulfilled, indeed, he is only truly human, according to Marx, when his self-directed actions become other-directed and correspond to his innermost identity as a social being.

Marx’s highest ambition and ultimate vision for what communism would lead to was summed up in a powerful statement in the 1844 “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts.” Marx there described the aims of communism as “the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man”; as “the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being—a return become conscious, and accomplished within the entire wealth of previous development”; as “the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and man”; as “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species”; and, finally, as “the riddle of history solved,” knowing itself to be this solution.

Communism for Marx is the solution—the final solution—to the problem of human alienation, and therefore it represents the end of history. The goal of communism is to overcome man’s alienation from his true self and to restore humanity’s species-being. Communism is both a return to man’s original and true being, but it’s also a resurrection to something even higher or better than man’s original being. Marx believed that communism is the only social system capable of actualizing man’s true human essence and potential. In fact, he was an advocate of communism because he believed it would create nothing less than a new and better kind of man (possibly even better than original man), which could only be achieved when men exercise conscious, rational, and collective control over their physical environment and over their own social-political forces. Communism would liberate men to develop their higher capacities both inherent and latent in their species-being. Communist man would be superior to capitalist man: he would be less selfish and acquisitive; he would be more altruistic and communal than certainly his capitalist counterpart; and he would be more than willing to share the fruits of his unequal ability with the needs of others.

Freed from the tyranny of antagonistic competition and the frantic quest for acquisition, communist man will naturally seek to work with others to achieve his individual and collective purposes. And, Marx believed, once the means of subsistence are distributed equally based on need rather than greed, man’s natural communal affections and bonds would be recovered. Communist man represents not only the “return of man from religion, family, state, etc., to his human, i.e., social mode of existence,” but also the “true resurrection of nature—the naturalism of man and the humanism of nature both brought to fulfillment.”

What exactly does this mean?

Marx suggests in “The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts” that the mortal individual’s life must merge under communism with the whole and with what Marx called “species-consciousness” such that his identity is inseparable from the sum of the parts. This means that everyone’s individuality and egoism must be tamed and then eliminated and replaced with total socialization in the collective consciousness. Thus, each person in communist society becomes nothing more than a specimen of the species or a cog in the communist wheel. Indeed, the collective whole for Marx is greater than the sum of the individual parts. Communist man may in fact be a “particular individual,” but he is a “real individual social being,” who is no less and no more the “totality—the ideal totality—the subjective existence of thought and experienced society present for itself.” All separate individual souls must merge with the collective soul, which has its unified, common goals. In other words, true communist man has no identify separate from the collective identity of the human herd or the universal brotherhood. In fact, Marx’s communist man would be so committed to the life of the collective that he would not even view his own death as tragedy. The only tragedy would be death of the collective.

The moral ideal of communism is not so much equality as it is unity, sameness, and oneness. Unity means the coming together of all men in a kind of universal brotherhood; sameness means absolute equality—equality without diversity; and oneness means that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It means all men sharing the same passions, opinions, and interests, and it means all men dedicating themselves to the good of the collective not as a sacrifice but as an act as natural as eating. Marx sees man as a being whose metaphysical identity is captured in the motto Alexander Dumas attributed to D’Artagnan and his friends in The Three Musketeers: “All for one, and one for all.”

Karl Marx never seems to have considered the possibility that actual human beings—and the proletariat in particular—might not want to be liberated from their egoism and they might not want to serve the common good. There’s a sense in which Marx had to know that, otherwise he would not have felt the need to use the “guillotine” to achieve his desired end. And the guillotine is, metaphorically speaking where Marxism must end.

This is why in the long span of human history nothing comes close to the tyranny, terror, and mass genocide caused by Marxism in power—nothing. It can end nowhere else precisely because Marx was mistaken entirely in his view of man as a species-being. Man is not a species-being, at least not as Marx defined. Human nature is just the opposite of what Marx said it is. Man’s nature was far better understood by the philosophers of the classical-liberal tradition.

Own It!

In conclusion, what, then, do we say about Marxism? One often hears—even from American conservatives—that Marxism and communism are good in theory but not in practice! To this I say: There is nothing noble or attractive about Marxian socialism in theory or practice. Marx’s moral ideal—the idea of species-being—is morally grotesque, and in practice Marxism is totalitarian and genocidal by motive, design, practice, and result.

The political goal of communism is to annihilate freedom in all realms of life—economic, social, and intellectual. By philosophic design, Marxism in power must always use force to achieve its ends. Any government that expropriates and redistributes private property, any government that seeks to control the economy, any government that violates the rights of its citizens on a daily basis, any government that seeks to reconstitute human nature will and must use force as a matter of course. Thus, the theory of socialism necessitates the use of coercive force in practice.

The fact of the matter is that the Marxist ideal necessarily leads to censorship, secret police, reeducation camps, gulags, and genocide in practice. Its violent and bloody history is evident for all to see. Marxian socialism begins and ends with violence and destruction. Economically, it seeks to destroy private property, the price system, the division of labor, the system of profit and loss, wage labor, competition, and material wealth. Politically, it seeks to destroy the rule of law, constitutionalism, separation of powers, and civil rights. Morally, it seeks to destroy individual rights, egoism, and all “bourgeois” virtues. Epistemologically, it seeks to destroy independent thought. Metaphysically, it seeks to change human nature itself, eliminating free choice. This is why the communist 1 percent (the true 1 percent) must use the terror apparatus of the State to force the 99 percent (the true 99 percent) to become something they are not and do not want to be. And if that does not work, the secular philosophy of brotherly love simply liquidates as much of the 99 percent as is necessary.

In the end, all decent people must see that Marxism is evil—absolutely evil. It is the wellspring of communist mass murder. The Marxist regimes responsible for genocide are not aberrations from “true Marxism” but are its fulfillment and living embodiment. They represent what Marxism is and must be. Violence and terror are necessary instruments of the communist ideal. History demonstrates—and I hope this essay has proved philosophically—that Marxism is a philosophy of mass murder, which is precisely what it has done wherever it has held power.

Marxism leads to Stalinism, to Maoism, to Pol Potism, to Kim II Sungism, to Castroism, to dictatorship, to the police state, to terror, to show trials, to the gulag, to genocide, and finally to the grave. In other words, the problem with Marxism is . . . Marxism.

Karl Marx did not care about men—individual men; he cared about “man”—abstract man, the “species-being.” He was perfectly willing to sacrifice millions of real-life individuals to an abstraction that had no grounding in reality. Individual men, entire social classes, and even whole nations were, for Marx, simply instruments of history and were therefore to be subordinated to the end of history—namely, to the recovery of man’s alleged collective soul or species consciousness.

The perverse irony of communism is that rather than creating a society defined by brotherly love, it always and of necessity creates a society of mutually assured resentment and destruction. In any society based on the Marxian ideal, the inevitable result will be that productive abilities shrivel, needs expand, envy follows, and the society collapses over time into a war of all against all. Socialist man lives in a state of constant fear and loathing—he fears the State and he loathes his fellow man.

Marxism is a philosophy of malevolence and hatred. It is, from beginning to end, a criminal enterprise. It begins with theft and ends with murder. It is inimical to the requirements of human life. It is a system that denies man the ability to function as a rational, independent being because it denies him what his nature requires: the freedom to think and act on behalf of his own self-interest.

In conclusion, we must say this about Marxism: first, it is the single worst blight to have affected human life over the course of man’s entire history; and second, those who advocate it represent the very definition of human evil and must be openly judged and condemned accordingly.

Those who love life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness must never forget the true nature and historical crimes of Karl Marx and Marxism. And we must not let others get away with evading them.