Fundamental problems with the thinking of Karl Marx

“Ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language.” - Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari.

Animals, Harari argues, can only talk about things you can point to. “No animal,” goes an old saying, “can say, ‘My parents were poor but honest.’” Animals are natural materialists.

1. Marx’s Dialectical Materialism is founded on his Labor Theory of Value. Only the physical things made by the hands of workers have value, and only the laboring proletariat should get the money in our society. (As a businessman remarked, this ignores management, distribution and marketing.) The bourgeoisie and their fictional capitalist corporations are robbing workers of the value produced by their hands.

On the one hand Marx is reactionary, his objection to “capital” (Das Kapital) a reversion to medieval prohibitions on “usury.” On the other, Marx is engaging in the fundamentalist oversimplification of valorizing the “materialism” of limiting thought to those things you can point to.

A digression: In 2012 I bought an iPad 3. It couldn’t perform the videophone function of FaceTime. Before long, a free software update from Apple enhanced the usefulness of my purchase. According to Marx, the hundreds I paid for my iPad should have gone to the workers at Foxconn who made it. In reality, which has an antiMarxist bias, without the thousands of hours of design, the iPad would just have been a paperweight. Ditto for the additional thousands of hours for iOS, the software (FaceTime, etc.) which enables Personal Electronic Devices to actually do things. Add software development and design to “management, distribution, and marketing.”

2. So, based on the fallacy of The Labor Theory of Value, what is the place of everybody else — the bourgeoisie, the middle class — in the Workers’ Paradise Marx envisioned?

There isn’t any. Marxism is eliminationist. Marx’s abstract theory, in real life, implies Ethnic Cleansing. In any case where someone not a laborer has the good things of life, it’s unjustified “privilege.”(1)

Moreover, political democracy is about all the people. Civil rights is about all the people.

Marxism’s unrelenting bias against everyone except the One Favored Class — its class warfare aspect — means that Marxism is essentially discriminatory in its very nature.

It is no accident that no Marxist regime has ever been democratic; or that Marxist regimes, with respect to civil rights, have consistently been autocratic. The late Soviet Union; North Korea; Maoist China, the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik).

Marx’s thought was in its very nature arbitrary and bigoted. In the founding of societies its emergent property was autocracy.

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(1) In my experience, no one will listen to criticism of “Check your privilege,” even though “privilege” arguments are concealed Marxism.