I know, controversial, but Karl Marx has got a lot to answer for. His work inspired Lenin and the Bolsheviks to overthrow the Russian capitalist establishment. He drew attention to the class division and class conflict that existed between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, in turn inciting a revolution. He was a man of good intentions but history has proven that his radical ideas fail in the real world.
Karl Marx was a man without an endgame, a man with a half-baked vision that could not withstand close scrutiny. He admitted that the only way to seize ownership of capital from the upper-class elite was to use force but how the bourgeoisie would learn to accept it was not made so clear. Once common ownership was a reality, Marx argued, class divisions would slowly die out. However, he didn’t know how or how long, insisting that a “temporary” communist regime must hold the peace in the interim.
To me that not only seems unlikely, but to be missing the point entirely. Marx pigeonholed everyone from every walk of life into a narrowly defined stratum; you were either a member of the bourgeoisie or of the proletariat, one or the other. He didn’t see the world as being populated by individuals but as a battleground on which diametrically opposed classes fought. What Marx failed to understand is that individuals do not act in herds, that self-actualization is a very real goal us humans strive for, and that a certain degree of inequality in terms of income is not only natural but also desirable.
After the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 political and economic philosopher Francis Fukuyama declared that this spelled the “end of history”. That statement may have been just a shade triumphalist but there’s no doubt in my mind that that moment represented the end of Marxism as a credible philosophy and, similarly, the end of Communism as a viable form of rule.
Winston Churchill famously once said that “democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried.” He mightn’t be thought of as a great thinker like Marx is but at least Churchill saw the world as it was.
