Comments (18)

• flint

  Agreed. Very informative stuff, especially Marx's letter to Mr.Lincoln...

  A more open and honest gang of despots, I have yet to see.

  Published: September 6, 2008 11:57 PM

• theblob

  It's really interesting that they are so open about Böhm-Bawerks critic. Do socialists think these points have been refuted?

  Can someone can give me a good response to Böhm-Bawerk? The one I tried to read just praised how good Marx was in his dialectic or something, horribly written.
  (On a side note, socialist literature is usually very badly written, so I might not make much use of the archive, but it's good that it is there.)

  Published: September 7, 2008 5:16 AM

• Bruce Koerber

  Which comes first the civilization or the virtuous character? (Which came first the chicken or the egg?)

  In reality they are inseparable and so we are called upon to be individuals of goodly character and praiseworthy attributes.

  One of those praiseworthy attributes is knowledge - knowledge of the merits of the principles of classical liberalism.

  If you gain that knowledge socialism will be undone!

  Published: September 7, 2008 9:36 AM

• William H. Stoddard

  A number of years ago, I visited an old friend who lives in Amherst on her fiftieth birthday. She took me on a tour of used bookstores. I can vividly remember the sudden moment of revulsion that hit me in one of them, when I looked at an entire wall devoted to shelves of literary criticism, and realized that roughly one-third of it was Marxist and another one-third was psychoanalytic; and I thought, "Don't these people realize that they're basing their criticism on ideas that no one in economics or psychology has taken seriously in decades and that are hopelessly out of touch with reality?" But both schools of thought seem to live on as myths.

  Even so, it's possible for a Marxist to read real economics and learn from it. I'm thinking of the science fiction writer Ken MacLeod, a Trotskyite who discovered von Mises' economic calculation argument and decided that von Mises was right about the impossibility of socialism, and whose fiction includes many sympathetic references to both anarchocapitalism and classical liberalism. I wish there were more like him.

  Published: September 7, 2008 9:57 AM

• Deacon

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  So very few understand Marxism
  as well as this scribbler does.

  NEVER, EVER draw your conclusions
  by what Marxists provide as theory on
  what the ideology means to do for Man
  or how it may best be applied.

  Always point out the RESULTS of
  Marxism, and you'll kill it to death in
  the mind of anyone with even a
  modicum of intelligence.

  Here's my report on what MARXISM/
  SOCIALISM/COMMUNISM means...
  by its RESULTS, not by what those
  shallow-brained, emotion-driven and
  FILTHY Marxists - LEFTISTS - may
  tell you:

  Communism is the goal of socialism, which is
  but a temporary pause in leftists' forced march
  of humanity towards hell on earth, about which hell
  this scribbler has been giving warnings to anyone
  sympathetic to that cause – to that horrific
  insanity! – of socialism/communism, which ism's
  bottom-line underpinnings are expertly retold by
  Long Visalo, a returnee to Pol Pot's communistic
  Cambodia in 1973, and who gave this horrifying
  account of an indoctrination seminar for
  intellectuals at camp K-15, conducted by Khieu
  Samphan ["Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare," by
  Philip Short, pp. 316-317]: "How do we make a
  communist revolution? The first thing you have
  to do is to destroy private property. But private
  property exists on both the material and the
  mental plane...To destroy material private
  property, the appropriate method was the
  evacuation of towns...But spiritual private
  property is more dangerous, it comprises
  everything that you think is 'yours',
  everything that you think exists in relation
  to yourself—your parents, your family, your
  wife. Everything of which you say, 'It's
  mine…' is spiritual private property.
  Thinking in terms of 'me' and 'my' is
  forbidden…The knowledge you have in your head,
  your ideas, are mental private property, too.
  To become truly revolutionary, you must...wash
  your mind clean...So the first thing you must
  do to make yourself fit to participate in the
  communist revolution…is to wash your mind...
  If we can destroy all material and mental
  private property...people will be equal. The
  moment you allow private property, one person
  will have a little more, another a little
  less, and they are no longer equal. But if
  you have nothing – zero for him and zero for
  you – that is true equality…If you permit
  even the smallest part of private property
  [and private thinking!], you are no longer
  as one, and it isn't communism"...[p. 325]:
  "The whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow
  the range of thought...In the end we will
  make thought-crime literally impossible,
  because there will be no words in which to
  express it. Every concept that will be
  needed will be expressed by exactly one
  word [no hint of what that one word is
  here], with its meaning rigidly defined
  and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out
  and forgotten…Every year fewer and fewer
  and fewer words, and the range of
  consciousness always a little smaller...In
  fact there will be not thought as we
  understand it now. Orthodoxy [communist
  orthodoxy] means NOT THINKING [my emphasis]
  ...Orthodoxy is unconsciousness"; an
  INSANITY, dear reader, that's lost on all
  leftists harboring any hope of goodness and
  truth being found in socialism/communism,
  and so extreme in its Utopian pursuit of
  equality that even to THINK of how beautiful
  a sunrise is or to smile at the missteps of
  a toddler at play or to feel even a hint of
  pleasure from a warming morning sun invites
  MENTAL INEQUALITY, which necessarily leads
  to material inequality, according to the
  leftist Utopians. How dare you to steal
  a mental pleasure that some comrade,
  somewhere, cannot equally share with you?
  There can be no private thoughts! And
  today's socialism-/communism-/feminism-driven
  Left within Western democracies is
  incrementally leading us there, as today's
  fairness-driven leftists are tomorrow's
  equality-driven Pol Pots – those Marxian
  ARCHITECTS and their liberal-Christian and
  secular-humanist dupes! – who'll eventually
  come to TORTURE and/or KILL any opponents of
  their perfect Marxian equality, and which
  fact about them ought to horrify any reason-
  driven person anticipating future results of
  the Marxists' DIVERSITY MOVEMENT and
  requisite FORCED INTEGRATION, which their
  open-borders immigration policies now demand
  worldwide.

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  Published: September 7, 2008 1:50 PM

• nick gray

  Let me make the obvious joke- is there any sort of Marxist other than well-red?

  Published: September 8, 2008 12:35 AM

• Deacon

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  Here's something to ponder,
  by using Aristotle's method
  of EXTRAPOLATION to
  arrive at a soundly logical
  conclusion about an idea
  or thing:

  "Judaism is COMMUNISM,"
  an admission made by many
  Talmudic- and/or Torah- based
  rabbis.

  Here's another one:

  Feminism is COMMUNISM.

  Ponder that, dear reader!

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  Published: September 8, 2008 6:59 AM

• Brad

  The easiest way I can boil down Marx's mistakes in theory is that he never created anything of value and he never turned in a hard day's labor his whole life. He was an indigent journalist who lived by the kindness of trust fund babies. Therefore, while he had a keen eye toward history, and what superstitions had done to enslave man, his theories on how to break from the past had to include the way that layabouts like himself were placed at the top of the pyramid. That's when his assessments of the past as to plunge into future went from keen assessment to spoiled roadkill. And it's the same with all socialists - the record of what artists and poets and librarians is plain for all to see. People who are theorists, people who can't suffer themselves to actually turn in a decent days labor. The people who couldn't invent a better mouse trap much less figure out the one that already exists and what they visualize the world to be. Basically erudite people who have little practical to offer anyone. They are the ones who lay their hands on the power supply and use whatever brutality is required to put themselves at the top despite their clear mediocrity (or worse).

  I have (in the past) spent some time at marxists.org. I have read many of Marx's shorter essays and can find much to agree with, again as far as trying his hand at taking a systematic look at history. It is when he has to pull together his manifesto, and he describes some sort of nonsense about dictatorship of anything that it becomes clear that this shabby little man who has done near nothing of value means that the likes of him will be those very dictators and decide when paradise has decended. That's the time when one who is an individualist realizes that Marx has taken an extreme turn in logic. Marxists.org helped fill in much that is lacking if one just reads the Manifesto. It fills in much of the "backstory" and one is left in a position to criticize more roundedly against the moral void that is created by the application of Marxist theory.

  Published: September 8, 2008 9:40 AM

• Vanmind

  "...he never created anything of value"

  Tell that to all the Marxians who continue to derive a great deal of subjective fantasy-utopia value from his absurdities.

  Published: September 8, 2008 11:39 PM

• JRS

  Good post Jim; however, when one discusses Marxism it's often best to remember that Marx commented on a variety of issues, and put forth a vast array of theories and opinions on those issues. As William pointed out, Marx had a _huge_ effect on Literary criticism - mainly because his Historical-Materialism method helped remind people of a particular novel's unique historical birth. Yes, the pricing problem did disprove much of his writings - but his theories, as they are relevant to the field at hand, are still cognizant and valid - so why not use them? Personally, I find Marxist literary criticism to be much more tolerable than the current post-modern chic.

  Published: September 25, 2008 3:29 AM

• Winnie Westrop

  Was the Archbishop right to look to Marx in his recent remarks? I have written a critique at http://www.theatheistconservative.com/articles/2008/10/01/under-the-bed-at-lambeth-palace.

  Published: October 2, 2008 5:42 PM

• Winnie Westrop

  Was the Archbishop right to look to Marx in his recent remarks? I have written a critique at http://www.theatheistconservative.com/articles/2008/10/01/under-the-bed-at-lambeth-palace.

  Published: October 2, 2008 5:43 PM

• AZ

  Note that Marxists.org is maintained by non-Marxists. It should not surprise you that they are willing to host works critical of Marxism.

  This is quite maddening for Marxists like myself. Imagine if you had learned everything you know about the Austrian School from Mises.org, then you discovered that it was run by Marxists. It is possible that they had been presenting the Austrian School honestly and fairly, but you would always wonder.

  We Marxists feel betrayed by Marxists.org.

  Published: January 5, 2009 4:01 AM

• Joe

  Bohm Bawerk's criticism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the first volume of capital. He wrongly believes it to be a theory of price, when it is actually a sociological work(Marx was above all a sociologist!)...labor value is an abstraction, a tool used to demonstrate social relations obscured by commodity fetishism. Marx outlays his price theory in volume three, and Bawerk accuses him of abandoning his old theories.

  Believe it or not, many Marxists read about opposing theories...perhaps you all should do the same, because you look like dogmatic loons when you discount Marxism without ever trying to get a grasp of Marxist theory.

  Published: July 19, 2009 11:00 PM

• Joe

  This is also interesting:

  "According to Böhm-Bawerk, in Volume I Marx claims that the labour theory of value is valid, while in Volume III, published posthumously by Engels, Marx, recognising that he had been wrong in the first volume, admits that commodities do not, in fact, sell at their values.

  Böhm-Bawerk is wrong on two counts. Firstly, as Engels pointed out in his preface to Capital, Volume II, Marx had already written the draft of Volume III when he finished Volume I!"

  Published: July 19, 2009 11:03 PM

• fundamentalist

  Wherever two or three Marxists are gathered together, there will be five opinions on what Marx wrote.

  Published: July 20, 2009 8:20 AM

• xxx

  Joe, you wrote that Böhm-Bawerk is wrong on two counts. Yes, he might not have known what was the correct order in which Marx wrote his works. But hey, what is the second one? How have you marxists refuted Böhm-Bawerk s actual criticism? As far as I know you either ignore it (sweet sweet ideology :-) or you do not care to know about it (which is plain stupid but evidently not your case). Please, please, surprise me and prove yourself to be more than a dogmatic loon.

  Published: September 5, 2009 4:56 PM

• Karl Marx

  Aren't we about due for a Gay, Socialist President?

  Published: October 19, 2009 6:53 AM