Some Mistakes of Marx; W. H. Chamberlin

The life of this apostle of socialism, communism, and class war was spent, for the most part, in obscure and sometimes squalid poverty. Marx was unable to make even a humble living as a writer and journalist; he had no other trade or profession. He would probably have' had to go on poor relief, in his time less generous in England than it is now, if it had not been for handouts from his dis ciple and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, who enjoyed the advantage of having a successful capitalist fa ther. Marx's record of political achieve ment at the time of his death seemed quite sterile. Because, in a moment of bravado, he renounced Prussian citizenship, he was unable to go to Germany or take any intimate part in the German socialist movement. He played no role in English poli tics. To put it mildly, Marx was not a mellow or lovable character. His habits of excommunicating from the socialist movement everyone who disagreed with nim kept his circle of friends very li~ited.

There is an abundance of histori cal evidence for Max Eastman's caustic profile of Marx in Reflections on the Failure of Socialism: If he ever performed a generous act, it is not to be found in the record. He was a totally undiscipliried, vain, slovenly, and egotistical spoiled!child. He was ready at the drop of a hat with spiteful hate. He could be devious, <Jisloyal,snobbish, anti Semitic, anti-Negro. He was by habit a sponge, an intri~er, a tyrannical bigot who would rather wreck his party than see it succeed und~r another leader. But if there. were few mourners, literally or figur~tively, at the grave of Marx the mall, the idea of Marx ism, the vision <>f a world in which the proletariat, loppressed by capi talism, was to become the architect of new millennial order, marched from success to.success. Before World War I Marx was re55 56 THE FREEMAN January vered as the founding father of the socialist parties which had sprung up in most European countries. Be cause a Russian genius of revolu tionary action, Vladimir Ilyitch Lenin, swallowed Marx's ideas whole without conscious reservation, Marxism became the creed of the new communist regime in Russia.

William Henry Chamberlin (1897 1969) was a frequent contributor to The Freeman.Author of the Russian Revolution and numerous other books and articles on world affairs, h~ was uniquely qualified to discuss Marxian errors by having lived and traveled where such mistakes ate obvious. It is especially timely to review what Chamberlin reported more than twenty-five years ago to be some of the mistakes of Marx. This article is reprinted from the May 1956 Free man. This regime, which has never wa vered in its belief that someday its power will encompass the entire world, represents a revolt against all the values of Western civiliza tion, against religion and the moral law, against civil and personal lib erties, against the right to own property, which is one of the first and most indispensable of human liberties. After World War II com munism, the offspring of Marxist teaching, extended its dominion over China, over the countries of Eastern Europe, so that today [1956] it has been imposed as a dogmatic faith on more than one third of the popula tion of the world.

And the influence of Marx is by no means restricted to nations under communist rule. The appeal of Marxian ideas to European social ists, to the half-baked intellectuals of newly emancipated countries in Asia has been considerable. And, al though the number of persons who can honestly claim to have read through with comprehension the dry and abstruse Capital must be small, the simplified version of Marxist theory presented in The Communist Manifesto and elsewhere possesses strong psychological appeal. Marx Sets the Proletariat Against the Bourgeoisie Marx professed to know all the answers, to offer a complete expla nation of human activity on the ba sis of historic materialism. In the Marxian scheme there is a hero, the proletariat, a villain, the bourgeoi sie; and the hero is represented as a certain ultimate winner. There is a vision of revolutionary victory that will transform the conditions of hu man existence and usher in a mil lennium, of the nature of which, to be· sure, Marx offers few and vague hints. To trusting minds which ac cept Marx's premises and assump tions without question there comes 1982 SOME MISTAKES OF MARX 57 ~ into~icating sense of being in step wIth hIstory, of professing a creed that is based on infallible science.

But it is just this myth of infalli bility that is the Achilles' Heel of Marx as a thinker, of Marxism as a system. An examination of the works of Marx and his collaborator Engels reveals ten big mistakes, of which some are so fundamental that they completely discredit, as a preview of the future, the whole superstructure of faith in capitalist misery and doom, and socialist prosperity and triumph, which Marx laboriously reared on a foundation of Hegelian metaphysics and minute research in government reports on the seamy sides of early British capitalism. These mistakes are as follows: (1) The doom of capitalism is as sured because under its operation the rich will become richer and fewer; the poor will becomepoorerand more numerous. To quote one of the more striking rhetorical passages in Cap ital: While there is a progressive diminu tion in the number of the capitalist mag nates, there occurs a corresponding in crease in the mass of poverty, oppression, enslavement, degeneration and exploi tation. But at the same time there is a steady intensification of the wrath of the working class-a class which grows ever more numerous and is disciplined, uni fied and organized by the very mecha nism of the capitalist method of production. Capitalist monopoly becomes a fetter upon the method ofproduction which has flourished with it and under it. The cen tralization of the means of production and the socialization of labor reach a point where they prove incompatible with their capitalist hu~k. This bursts asun der. The knell of c~pitalist private prop erty sounds. The' ~xpropriators are ex propriated.

These are resPunding words, but utterly empty words, in view of the fact that social ~nd economic devel opment in capit~.list countries has proceeded along.a precisely opposite direction from the one predicted by Marx. What was' in Marx's time a social pyramid hFlS become more like a cube. The capitalist system has brought to the working class not in creasing "oppres~ion, enslavement, degeneration anp! exploitation," but an increasing share of new inven tions and comforts that did not even exist for the wea~tlty a hundred years ago: automobiles" radios, television sets, washing m8Jchines, as well as money in the bank" stocks, and bonds. (2) Socialism cOrn only come about when capitalism has exhausted its possibilities of development. Or, as Marx puts it in his Critique ofPolit ical Economy: No form of society declines before it has developed all the forces of production in accordance with~ts own stage of de velopment.

But, of the three countries which, 58 THE FREEMAN January according to Marx, were ripest for the transition to socialism, as most industrially developed, the United States is still, by and large, the freest economically. The larger free part of Germany, after the terrific shock of the war, has achieved a remarkable recovery by shedding Nazi and Allied con trols and resorting to old-fashioned individualistic incentives. Great Britain has settled for a kind of so cialistic New Deal, without violence or outright expropriation and well short of Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat. " On the other hand, the countries where violent revolutions were car ried out in the name of Marx, the Soviet Union and China, were, on Marx's own theory, completely un ripe for socialism. Capitalism was in a fairly early stage of development in Russia. Much of China lived in precapitalist conditions. Experience has shown that, in precise contra diction of Marxist dogma, capital ism is harder to overthrow as it strikes deeper roots and shows what it can accomplish. A plausible case can be made out for the proposition that, although political and eco nomic change would have come to Russia, there would have been no communist revolution if World War I had been avoided and Stolypin's policy of breaking up the old peas ant communes and giving the peas ant more sense of individual property had developed long enough to yield results.

(3) The "dictatorship of the prole tariat" is a just and feasible form of government. This is based on two false assumptions: that the "prole tariat," or industrial working class, has some kind of divine right to rule and that governing power can be di rectly exercised by this group of the population. Both are wrong. Marx never clearly explained why· the proletariat, for which he foresaw in creasing poverty and degradation, would be qualified to rule. ·And So viet experience and Red Chinese ex perlence offer the clearest proofs that dictatorships of the proletariat, in theory, become ruthless dictatorship over the proletariat, in practice. Ab solute power in communist states is exercised not by workers in facto ries, but by bureaucrats, of whom some have never done any manual work; others have long ceased to do any. (4) Under socialism the state will "wither away." This grows out of Marx's belief that the state is an in.;.

strument for the suppression of one class by another. In the classless so ciety of socialism, therefore~ there will be no need for the state. Events have played havoc with this theory. Nowhere is the state more powerful, more arbitrary, more of a universal policeman, snooper, 1982 SOME MISTAKES OF MARX 59 and interventionist than in the So viet Union. Yet it is here that the new regime has abolished private property in means of production, thereby, according to Marx, inau gurating a classless society. One is left to choose between two alterna tive conclusions. Either the Marxist theory of the state as an instrument of class rule is a humbug or the kind of class rule that prevails in the So viet Union must be uncommonly crude and ruthless. (5) Capitalism (in the nineteenth century) has exhausted its produc tive possibilities. This flat statement is made by Marx's alter ego, Engels, in his Anti-Duhring, written before the internal-combustion engine, X rays, aviation, synthetic chemistry, and a host of other enormously im portant additions to the productive process, brought into existence by the stimulus of capitalism.

(6) All ideas, all forms of intellec tual and artistic expressionarea mere reflection of the material interests of the class in power. This conception is expressed repeatedly in Marx's writings, notably in German Ideol ogy, where he writes: "The .class which has the dominant material power in society is at the same time the dominant spiritual power.... The dominant ideas are nothing but the ideal expression of material condi tions." One of the few wisecracks associated with the name of Marx is that the Church! of England would rather give up all its Thirty-Nine Articles of Faith than one thirty ninth of its possessions. The historical 1record shows that this interpretat1<>n of human con duct is crudely ope-sided and inac curate. Men die far more often for ideas than for material interests. The communist victory in Russia was not due to the fact that material condi tions for the m&sses became better after the Bolshevik Revolution. This was emphatically not the case. What did happen was that the organized, disciplined, communist minority ac quired an iron grip on the masses by its double weaponlof propaganda and terror, kept passions of class hatred and class envy at'·the boiling point, whipped laggards i ! into line by ruth less regimentation, and thereby pre served their regime through years of civil war and famine. Sometimes the materialistic, interpretation of history becomes s~eer absurdity, as in the case of a Moscow musical an nouncer, whom I' once heard offer the following bit: We will now he~r Glinka's overture, "Ruslan and LudmHla." This is a cheer ful, buoyant piece of work, because when it was written Russ~an trade capitalism was expanding and conquering markets in the Near East.

It would seem, 1that, in order to carry any semblance of plausibility, 60 THE FREEMAN January this should have been accompanied by proof that Glinka owned stock in the expanding companies-a highly improbable contingency, if one con siders the economic status of Rus sian musicians. (7) Production depends on class antagonism. To quote Marx, in The Poverty ofPhilosophy: From the very moment in which civi lization begins, production begins to be based on the antagonism of orders, of states, of classes, and finally on the an tagonism between capital and labor. No antagonism, no progress. This is the law which civilization has followed down to our own day. Like many of Marx's "laws," this is a mere unsupported assertion of a pedantic dogma. No proof is ad duced. The greatest human con structive achievements, the cathe drals of the Middle Ages, the great dams and skyscrapers of modern times, are the fruit of cooperation, not of antagonism.

(8) Nationalism is a negligible force. Marx and Engels lived in an age of rising national consciousness. Conflicting nationalism was the strongest force that let loose World War I. Yet in all their writings the attitude toward nationalism is one of contemptuous deprecation. As Isaiah Berlin, a fairly sympathetic biographer, writes (Karl Marx, p. 188): He consistently underestimated the force of rising nationalism; his hatred of all separatism, as of all institutions founded on some purely traditional or emotional basis, blinded him to their ac tual influence. (9) War is a product of capitalism. This idea has found some acceptance outside the ranks of the Marxist faithful. The temptation to seek an oversimplified scapegoat for war is strong. But while, theoretically, such Marxian motives as struggle for trade, colonies and commercial spheres of influence, might lead to war, there is no serious historical evidence that any major conflict was ever touched off by such considera tions. There were differences of eco nomic interest between the indus trializing North and the mainly agricultural South before the Civil War. But these could easily have been compromised. What made the fratricidal conflict "irrepressible," in Seward's phrase, were the two big political and moral issues: secession and slavery.

World War I was purely political in origin. There was the clash be tween Slav nationalism and Austro Hungarian desire to hold together a .multinational empire. A system of tight and almost automatic alli ances turned what might have been an Austrian punitive expedition against Serbia into a general war. World War II was the handiwork 1982 SOME MISTAKES OF MARX 61 not of any magnates of capitalism, but ofa plebeian dictator, Adolf Hit ler, pursuing aspirations of conquest and military glory that far antedate the modern capitalist system. The three countries that were best pre pared for war were the communist dictatorship in the Soviet Union, the Nazi dictatorship in Germany, the authoritarian military regime in Japan. Capitalism makes. for free trade, free markets, limited govern mental power, and peace. And the principal war threat today comes from the expansionist urge of com munist imperialism.

(10) The worker is cheated because the employer, instead of paying him the full value of his work, holds out on him profit, interest, and rent. Or, as Marx himself states his theory of "surplus value" (Capital, Modern Library edition, p. 585): All surplus value, whatever particular form (profit, interest, or rent) it may sub sequently crystalize into, is in substance the materialization of unpaid labor. The secret of the self-expansion of capital re solves itself into having the disposal of a definite quantity ofother people's unpaid labor. It requires little reflection or re search to realize that "surplus value," like many other Marxian catch phrases, is a myth. How, under any economic system-capitalist, fas cist, socialist, communist-could in dustry expand and provide more goods and more Jobs for more people if capital were· not withheld from immediate payment to finance fu ture constructioni? Perhaps the best refutation of Marx's rabble-rousing myth that surpl'Q.svalue is a pecu liar dirty trick of capitalists, prac ticed against wor}{ers,is that the ex traction of what might be called surplus value is ipracticed on a gi gantic scale in ,the Soviet Union through the medium of a sales or turnover tax that often exceeds 100 per cent.

A ClassicFailure It is amazing that, with such a de monstrable record of failure to un derstand either the world in which he was living or the direction in which that world, was going, Marx should be hailed as an unerring prophet. The truth is that there is nothing remotely scientific about Marx's socialism. 'He started with a set of dogmatic a priori assumptions and then scratched around in the British Museum for facts that would seem to bear out these assumptions. Like the EmperQIj in the fairy tale, Marxism, for all ~ts ponderous ap pearances, really has no clothes on when examined jlllight of realities, in Marx's time and in our own. His supposedly infallible system of in terpreting history ,and life is riddled with mistakes, of rwhich the forego ing ten are only the most obvious and the most glaring. I) A REVIEWER'S NOTEBOOK JOHN CHAMBERLAIN EnterpriseZones THE IDEA of establishing Enterprise Zones, small free trade enclaves with special tax concessions, in the slum areas of our decaying central cities, was brought to America by a British economist, Stuart M. Butler, who works for the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C. In a generous foreword to his book on the subject, Enterprise Zones: Greenlining the Inner Cities (Universe Books, 381 Park Ave. South, New York, NY 10016, 175 pp., $12.95), Mr. Butler credits the concept to the collabora tive thinking of Professor Peter Hall, a former President of the socialist Fabian Society, .and Sir Geoffrey Howe, a Conservative Member of Parliament.