Marx’s Defenders Should Explain Why His Ideas Never Actually Work

From FEE.org:

If an Idea Is Good, It Will Survive Imperfect Implementation

That is all fair enough. But it is not, and should not be, a Get Out of Jail Free card. If your ideas require impossible standards of purity in implementation in order to work, then maybe your ideas are not as great as you think they are.

A good idea will still work out OK even in a distorted and poorly-implemented version. That, arguably, is a big part of what makes a good idea good. The question is not whether Karl Marx, had he come back to life a century later, would have been a huge fan of the Soviet Union, the German Democratic Republic, or the Hungarian People’s Republic.

He almost certainly would not have been. He may well have stayed in London, writing grumpy articles for the Guardian and the New Statesman about how politicians in those countries were disfiguring his ideas. So what? Political and economic theories are never implemented in pure form, and their adherents are rarely impressed by politicians who claim to be inspired by them. That’s just par for the course.

Marxists, however, are pretty much the only thinkers who accept no responsibility whatsoever for real-world approximations of their ideas. Third-Way advocates may have despaired over Blair, Hayekians can—and do—rant all day about Thatcher’s shortcomings, and ordoliberals* have written scathing condemnations of Konrad Adenauer. But ask them whether they think those respective governments did more good than harm on balance; ask them whether they think those governments were preferable to the next likely alternatives—and you will get an unambiguous and unqualified “Yes!” as an answer.

In contrast, hardly any contemporary Marxist would accept that whatever "real" socialism is, surely, East Germany was at least closer to it than West Germany, North Korea is at least closer to it than South Korea, Venezuela is at least closer to it than Peru, Maoist China was at least closer to it than Taiwan, etc.

And why would they? It works for them. Every other idea is judged by its necessarily crude, incomplete and imperfect real-world approximations, warts and all. Only Marxism has the luxury of being judged purely as a set of ideas, which something as mundane as real-world experience could never blemish. [read more]

The reason why Marxists can’t explain why Marx’s ideas never work is because most of them have never read his works. They think he was “cool.” If Marxists like earning interest on their back accounts or investing in the stock market these would be banned according to Marx and they were banned under Communism. Why? Because according to Marx these products do not have value. Only products a person makes by hand is valued. It’s called the labor theory of value. Marx actually called it the law of value.

Socialists can never really explain why Socialism doesn’t work either for the same reason—they don’t know really what socialism is. It just sounds “cool.”

Another article on Marxism: “Karl Marx and Marxism at Two Hundred.”

*Ordoliberism- an economic school of thought which tried to combine free-market economics with an active competition policy.