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August 7, 2022

Throughout the 1800s, the world’s dominant philosopher was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1830).  He thought the universe was a logical machine, like a steam engine.

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Hegel and his contemporaries agreed that Nature contains an underlying structure.  The Hegelian dialectic was all the rage for a century.  These philosophers wanted to sound scientific and mathematical.  First thesis meets second thesis, producing third thesis.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) absorbed this thinking and concluded that history itself is a logical machine, like a cash register.  Events do not happen randomly.  There are laws — and Marx alone could explain them.

For Marx, the big predictions were about capital — i.e., money.  He probably wrote a thousand pages, but his answers came down to a simple diagram.  Capitalism works almost too well.  Industrialists could acquire fortunes, but that is the trap.  Capitalists are greedy bloodsuckers who reduce workers not just to poverty, but to starvation and desperation.  Inevitably, according to Marx, workers rise up in righteous wrath, kill the industrialists, and divide the money among the workers, ushering in a communist paradise.

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The problem for communism is that Marx had a flimsy theory to promote, and he could be reckless about it.  Almost everything done in his name, as we’ll see, was dishonest.  He hacked his own history machine.

Karl Marx laid down an important parameter from the get-go.  To have a proper communist revolution, you need a successful industrial country, like the U.S., England, Germany, France and…that’s about it.  Obviously, you couldn’t have a Marxian revolution in agrarian backwaters like Russia, China, and Cambodia, as you would simply divide poverty among impoverished peasants.  Ergo, all the big communist revolutions were illegitimate and could not have been caused as Marx prescribed.

The next problem was that despite Marxian analysis and predictions, the capitalists were spreading the wealth.  Almost any entity with excess money will invariably build parks, public housing, schools, museums, handsome municipal buildings, etc.  One of the richest industrialists in American history (Andrew Carnegie) personally built 1,600+ libraries!  This inevitability is captured in the phrase “trickle-down economics.”  Marxists use this phrase sarcastically so maybe people won’t realize that it points to the central truth.

Here’s where the story gets really interesting.  There was a lot of agitation in the 1820s and 1830s, especially in England, demanding that the government raise standards and protect workers.  In fact, change was happening.  Governing bodies passed new laws every year.  So what did Marx and his polemical partner Friedrich Engels do? 

Paul Johnson, author of the splendid book Intellectuals, devotes a chapter to illuminating how Marx and Engels complained that society was getting worse each day, even as their own evidence revealed the opposite.  They had an Armageddon mindset and didn’t want to give it up.  Rich swine must swing from every lamp post.

Johnson comments: