Richard Ebeling: How Karl Marx Brought Ruin to the World

Splendid article from Austrian economist and Northwood University professor Dr. Richard M. Ebeling on the horrific consequences from the bad ideas of Karl Max. (hat tip EPJ)

Karl Marx was born on May 5, 1818 in the German Rhineland town of Trier, and died on March 14, 1883 in London.It is worth recalling, also, that there was a time when Marx was an anti-communist.

It is said that by its fruit you will know the tree. The last one hundred years is a clear testament to the consequences of Marx’s influence on modern history.

Accepting the “classical” labor theory of value, he concluded the workers were “exploited” by the “capitalists.” Marx claimed that “profit” was a portion of the workers’ output extracted by the property owners as the “price” the workers had to pay to have access to the privately owned physical means of production, without which they could not produce and survive.

The Austrian economist, Eugen von Boehm-Bawerk, in Capital and Interest (1884) and Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896), demonstrated that Marx had confused “”profit” with “interest.” In a competitive market, profit is a temporary discrepancy between selling price and costs-prices, eventually competed away by businesses bidding up wages for workers (and other resource prices) to work for them, and those same businesses then competing for consumers to buy their output by offering their wares at better selling prices than their rivals.

What Marx had failed to fully understand was that production takes time, and that if workers would not or could not wait until the product was finished and sold to consumers to receive their wages, then someone had to “advance” those wages to them over the production period.

That, Boehm-Bawerk showed, is what the employers did, so that what workers received while working was the discounted value of their marginal product. The “gain” received by employers over their costs of production, even in long-run equilibrium, was the implicit interest for having ‘waited” for the product to be finished and sold, when they might have done other things with the “savings” they had advanced to those workers during the period of production.

If it is recognized that “time” has value, and, therefore, an intertemporal price, the notion that workers were or could be “exploited” in open, competitive markets for resources and finished goods was fundamentally wrong.

On this foundation of sand, Marx constructed his theory of the “injustice” of capitalism that has, in various forms, continued to plague the ideas and policies of countries around the world.

In the 20th century, it inspired the communist revolutions that led to the deaths of tens of millions of innocent men, women, and children. For those not aware of the magnitude of this human catastrophe, I recommend, The Black Book of Communism (1997), written by former French socialists and “fellow-travelers, that tells the horrific tale of “socialism-in-practice,” wherever those guided by Marx’s ideas came to power.

Or Paul Hollander’s edited volume, From the Gulag to the Killing Fields (2007), that brings together excerpts from the personal accounts of those who lived through the “building” of the brave new worker’s paradise, with all their tragic details about the fate of those considered “enemies of the people,” or merely expendable cogs in the wheel of socialist central planning.

Pls read the rest here

Here are the ten planks of the communist manifesto (Wikipedia.org)

About four them are prominent features in today’s supposed market economies; particularly progressive taxation, central banking, centralization of communications and transport (this is more indirect for more open economies and direct for authoritarian states) and public school.

One would wonder how the mainstream supposedly loathes communism as to embrace some of its principles, and how communist principles have been adorned as “capitalism”.

George Orwell in 1984 would call such opaqueness and blatant contradiction as Blackwhite newspeak: (bold original)

...this word has two mutually contradictory meanings. Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary. This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in Newspeak as doublethink.

Has Communism been Shaped by Karl Marx’s Self-hatred?

Not to be accused of Tu Quoque “you too” fallacy, experience plays an important part in influencing our outlook and personal philosophy. Has self-hatred been the cornerstone of Karl Marx’s political philosophy known as Communism?

Here is an excerpt of the narration by Murray N. Rothbard of Karl Marx’s path to Marxism, (bold added)

Also prefiguring the man was a trait that Marx developed early in his youth and never relinquished: a shameless sponging on friends and relatives. Already in early 1837, Heinrich Marx, castigating his son Karl's wanton spending of the money of others, wrote to him that "on one point … you have wisely found fit to observe an aristocratic silence; I am referring to the paltry matter of money." Indeed, Marx took money from any source available: his father, mother, and throughout his adult life, his long-suffering friend and abject disciple, Friedrich Engels, all of whom fueled Marx's capacity for spending money like water.

An insatiable spender of other people's money, Marx continually complained about a shortage of financial means. While sponging on Engels, Marx perpetually complained to his friend that his largess was never enough. Thus, in 1868, Marx insisted that he could not make do on an annual income of less than £400-£500, a phenomenal sum considering that the upper tenth of Englishmen in that period were earning an average income of only £72 a year. Indeed, so profligate was Marx that he quickly ran through an inheritance from a German follower of £824 in 1864, as well as a gift of £350 from Engels in the same year.

In short, Marx was able to run through the munificent sum of almost £1200 in two years, and two years later accept another gift of £210 from Engels to pay off his newly accumulated debts. Finally, in 1868, Engels sold his share of the family cotton mill and settled upon Marx an annual "pension" of £350 from then on. Yet Marx's continual complaints about money did not abate.

As in the case of many other spongers and cadgers throughout history, Karl Marx affected a hatred and contempt for the very material resource he was so anxious to cadge and use so recklessly. The difference is that Marx created an entire philosophy around his own corrupt attitudes toward money. Man, he thundered, was in the grip of the "fetishism" of money. The problem was the existence of this evil thing, not the voluntarily adopted attitudes of some people toward it. Money Marx reviled as "the pander between … human life and the means of sustenance," the "universal whore." The Utopia of communism was a society where this scourge, money, would be abolished.

Karl Marx, the self-proclaimed enemy of the exploitation of man by man, not only exploited his devoted friend Friedrich Engels financially, but also psychologically. Thus, only three months after Marx's wife, Jenny von Westphalen, gave birth to his daughter Franziska in March 1851, their live-in maid, Helene ("Lenchen") Demuth, whom Marx had "inherited" from Jenny's aristocratic family, also gave birth to Marx's illegitimate son, Henry Frederick. Desperately anxious to keep up haute bourgeois conventions and to hold his marriage together, Karl never acknowledged his son, and, instead, persuaded Engels, a notorious womanizer, to proclaim the baby as his own. Both Marx and Engels treated the hapless Freddy extremely badly, Engels's presumed resentment at being so used providing him a rather better excuse. Marx boarded Freddy out continually, and never allowed him to visit his mother. As Fritz Raddatz, a biographer of Marx, declared, "if Henry Frederick Demuth was Karl Marx's son, the new mankind's Preacher lived an almost lifelong lie, and scorned, humiliated, and disowned his only surviving son." Engels, of course, picked up the tab for Freddy's education. Freddy was trained, however, to take his place in the working class, far from the lifestyle of his natural father, the quasi-aristocratic leader of the world's downtrodden revolutionary proletariat.

Marx's personal taste for the aristocracy was lifelong. As a young man, he attached himself to his neighbor, Jenny's father Baron Ludwig von Westphalen, and dedicated his doctoral thesis to the baron. Indeed, the snobbish proletarian communist always insisted that Jenny imprint "nee von Westphalen" on her calling card.

I suggest a read of the entire article which is rather short and includes Karl Marx’s supposed conversion to "militant atheism"

The point being; people who in good intentions believe that public welfare can be acquired through the collectivist route via communism or related socialist branches thereto, are in fact running contrary to their desires. A philosophy founded on seeming self-hatred or founded on base human instincts will not bring about prosperity but perdition through violence.

Proof of this has been the harrowing 20th century experiment where about 94 million people perished, according to the Black Book of Communism, out of the desire to achieve a utopian communist society. In other words, it took 94 million lives to prove a failed experiment and an unfulfilled utopia. Yet many are still out there preaching the same.