A Brief Refutation of Marxism

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Marx has tremendous merits, both as a thinker and as a writer. But his errors are too large, frequent, and virulent for me to be able to admire his achievements on balance.

He was full of hatred and too willing, even keen, to embrace human carnage on a large scale for the sake of his vision.

These severe drawbacks are simply too weighty to be balanced out by the great contributions he made to a multifaceted analysis of social affairs.

He was scientifically outdated and made obsolete by social democracy even at the time he was writing, and tellingly became the prophet of history's grand infernal laggards, as represented notably by the world spanning communist movement.

Here is a very brief and readable refutation of Marxism by Lord Kenyes, who blogs under

Social Democracy for the 21st Century: A Realist Alternative to the Modern Left:

(1) the long-run tendency of capitalism, even in the 19th century, was to massively increase the real wage, which has soared above subsistence level, even for workers (see here and here), contrary to Marx’s theory that the tendency of capitalism is to keep the real wage at a subsistence level (which is the value of the maintenance and reproduction of labour-power).

The growing real wage and rising disposable income even of workers in capitalism also allowed a massive capacity for production of new commodities and new opportunities for employment (e.g., especially in services and middle class employment), which in turn has helped to overcome technological unemployment for most of the history of capitalism, contrary to Marx’s prediction of subsistence wages and increasing technological unemployment. Even if we do experience mass technological unemployment this century, it need not lead to disaster, with demand-management, a guaranteed income and government employment programs.

The size of the working class eventually stabilised and society was swelled by a growing and prosperous middle class and social mobility, contrary to Marx’s prediction of all people – except a small class of capitalists – being reduced to proletarians.

(2) Marx’s claim that machines, generally speaking, are an unmitigated evil in capitalism whose primary effect to increase the intensity and speed of work by labourers is an outrageous falsehood – a perversion of history and reality. In reality, machines have, generally speaking, tended to decrease the intensity, difficulty and monotony of human labour and often reduced to human labour to lighter work of visual inspection and overseeing of machine work, not physical labour. On this, see here and here. Advanced capitalist nations have also virtually eliminated child labour as well, and in our time have tended to pay women the same hourly wage for the same type of work as men.

(3) highly developed and advanced Western capitalist states like Britain and the US proved the most resistant to communism and Marxism (contrary to Marx’s theory), and when communist revolutions broke out it was in backward Russia and China.

(4) the business cycle of capitalist economies is better explained by Keynesian economic theory, in which the level of aggregate investment fluctuates with shifting subjective business expectations, and other instabilities are caused by an unregulated financial sector.

(5) in contrast to Marx’s failed predictions, the Keynesian and Social Democratic solution to the problems of laissez faire market economies produced a Golden Age of Capitalism (1946–c. 1973) and unprecedented prosperity.

Marx thought that the large industrial reserve army is a necessary consequence and necessary condition of capitalism, but this is incorrect. In the Keynesian era of full employment, where there was very low unemployment and indeed labour scarcity in the advanced capitalist world, capitalism continued and thrived.

(6) the end of the Keynesian period and the return to revived neoclassical theories from the 1970s brought with it a return to lower growth, higher unemployment, stagnating real wages, and higher income inequality, but, above all, a transnational globalised neoliberal capitalism, which has shipped a great deal of Western manufacturing and jobs to the Third World, and allowed legal and illegal Third World mass immigration into the West to lower wage costs.

(7) the renewed deteriorating plight of Western workers and even segments of middle class by (6) has not produced any renewed Marxist or Communist movements of any importance in the First World.

Rather, people have reacted with increased support for nationalist and protectionist conservatives, and Marxists and Communists – where they still exist – militantly support the disastrous mass immigration policies that more and more people hate and reject. In particular, modern Marxists are mired in irrational regressive leftist and cultural leftist delusions, such as Third Wave feminism, the idea that all cultures are equal and mass immigration is always a positive force.

Concludes Lord Kenyes:

So, all in all, modern Marxism has made itself largely irrelevant to the struggle of modern proletarians, and Marxism itself has become just one branch of the bizarre regressive left cult, which is itself largely a movement of middle class, university-educated leftists, who have pathological hatred for working class, especially for white working class men, who are subject at times almost to homicidal demonisation as racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic fascists.

 

The source.