Is Marxism Back?

In recent years, Marxists and socialists have been euphoric as their delusions kick in and they announce with glee that capitalism has failed and they have the smoking gun proof - collapsed economies and and human misery is piling up everywhere. Not that Marxists or socialists even know anything about capitalism but then again neither do capitalists or those masquerading as capitalists. In Europe, hardcore socialists have been elected, voted out of office and elected again. This happened in France where the French did indeed elect Francois Holland who campaigned on taxing the rich at a rate of 75%. Holland fulfilled his promise, here.

All those warm and fuzzy sounding "ism's" like communism, socialism, Marxism, progressivism, egalitarianism, communitarianism etc. have never really existed. The concept of 'from each according to his ability and to each according to their needs' has not only been proven to be a BIG fail, it's well documented that such ideologies killed 100 million folks during the 20th century alone, mostly by starvation.

Take the collectivist "ism's" and toss in fascism, corporatism, oligarchism and crony capitalism and what you get isn't something that benefits humanity and human prosperity but a monster that merely facilitates the massive concentration of wealth and power. The high ranking communist party officials never suffered and were well supplied with the finest of everything. It was everybody else who waited for hours in a breadline for a loaf of stale and moldy bread.

The west and its so-called 'soft socialism' is sinking faster than the Titanic but this isn't a failure of capitalism.  It's the failure of the evil fascist marriage between Big Government and Big Business that grew government by zapping the wealth of the people.

While I may have a hard time convincing a Republican that fascist crony capitalism is a bad idea and quite destructive to middle class prosperity, I have an even harder time convincing liberals that capitalism truly empowers the 99% at the expense of the 1% and that all forms of statism exclusively benefits the 1% at the expense of the 99%.

 How the 1% Defeated the 99% By Concentrating Wealth and Power

Collectivists everywhere are excited about a new and updated version of The Communist Manifesto. In fact, an economic blog, azizonomics.com, wrote about it in a piece titled Is Marxism Coming Back?

In his introduction to a new edition of The Communist Manifesto, Professor Eric Hobsbawm suggests that Marx was right to argue that the “contradictions of a market system based on no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment’, a system of exploitation and of ‘endless accumulation’ can never be overcome...

That's an amazing statement. What is naked self interest, the callous 'cash payment' and a system of exploitation? That's just a dude working to survive and provide for his family. Since when is voluntarily hiring out your skills for wages an act of exploitation? While that's what humans have done since time immemorial, work to survive by making and trading goods and services, the collectivists somehow denigrate work and producing as an undesirable human  character flaw, with the major flaw being that an individual just might want to decide what he wants and needs vs taking orders from the government on his wants and needs.

Amazingly and despite the fact that collectivism vaporized 100 million folks, Professor Hobsbawm does understand that folks will be reluctant to accept Soviet style Marxism. Hobsbawm laments " “It is extremely unlikely that such a ‘post-capitalist society’ would respond to the traditional models of socialism and still less to the ‘really existing’ socialisms of the Soviet era,” and then goes on to suggest that communism will have to be redefined “What forms it might take and how far it would embody the humanist values of Marx’s and Engels’s communism, would depend on the political action through which this change came about.”  While the linking of humanist values to totalitarian collectivist hell  may be a stretch bordering on the lunatic fringe,  it's still a veiled suggestion that social change can and will painlessly produce the acceptance of communism (even though folks may not actually know they are being herded into communism).

With all its flaws and bad and unjust as it is, our deeply problematic corporatist economic system is still a much better deal for humanity than totalitarian collectivism. Still, we must continue to strive to shed the shackles of statism because it's absolutely crucial to human liberty.  Statism never recedes and it always tightens the noose around the necks of human beings until it squeezes the life out of them, their liberty and their prosperity.

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victim may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated, but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. C.S. Lewis