Marxist Myths & Misconceptions

There's so much misinformation going around, so much propaganda tailored to the needs and ideologies of the ruling class, that it's difficult to argue against them. Especially when words like Marxism, socialism or communism are involved, mental barricades are built from these manufactured misconceptions.

_{source: Wikimedia Commons}

Karl Marx's theories in particular have been the subject of misrepresentation through vigorous propaganda by and on behalf of the ruling class of our times. Consequently many people hold opinions about Marxism, socialism and communism that are based on the propaganda, rather than on the ideas themselves. I'l try to correct a few of those in this post and encourage anyone who still holds on to some of the ideas mentioned here, to dig into Marxist theory themselves.

There's this belief among many people that Marx was against hierarchies in human societies, that socialism and communism strive for a world devoid of any kind of top-down authoritarianism, which is simply not true. On the contrary, Marx acknowledged the existence of hierarchical relationships throughout the entirety of human existence. Even in tribal societies there's a natural respect for and submission to the wisdom and authority of the elderly, there's always been a divide between responsibilities of male and female members of the tribe; Marx and Engels never called for a society of complete equals, not even on the material front, let alone the social. No, Marxism speaks against one particular form of hierarchical relationship, which are the social classes that come about when a minority owns all the means of production, and this class-division first appeared during the Neolithic age when we invented agriculture. The class struggle is therefore 10,000 years old, but has come to its peak during its latest incarnation when feudalism was traded in for capitalism.

Another belief that's hard to eradicate is this idea that capitalism is the best system for creating wealth and that wealth-creation is the best remedy against poverty. How many times have we heard how capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system before it? The misconception here is multi-dimensional; first it's believed that Marxism argues against this point. Well, it isn't. Marx was the first to concede that indeed capitalism main appeal was exactly its ability to create wealth in record quantities. Marx didn't even argue that under capitalism the rich would become richer while the poor become poorer: of course he also saw that the poor were lifted by the rising tide as well. What Marx did argue however, and no one in their right mind would disagree, is that the rich would become richer very much faster than the poor. In other words: the gap between rich and poor would continue to grow, hugely disrupting the fabric of society. Also he understood that poverty is always felt in relationship to other members of your own society, and the rich understand this too, which is why they so desperately paint themselves as philanthropist, donating to charities (in ways that benefit themselves mostly), just to prevent the proletariat to grab their pitchforks...

The final Marxist myth I want to address today is the complete misunderstanding of the term "dictatorship of the proletariat". This is something, a term that Marx did in fact use, and it fuels the idea that socialism and communism can only work in dictatorships, when in reality the opposite is true. Marx argued, and rightly so, that the working class can only take ownership of the means of production through the process of democracy. This is based on the simple realization that even we, who live in democratic societies, leave the democracy as soon as we clock in at work. For 8 hours each day we are in fact slaves who do exactly what we're ordered to do. Everything w produce during those hours belongs to the employer. Marx never argued that profits are theft, he did argue however that profit is the result of the owner class exploiting the labor of the working class, which is something else that has never changed since the Neolithic 10,000 years ago, except for the few blips of socialism here and there.

A while ago there was this rather popular debate between Jordan Peterson and Slavoj Zizek on the relationship between Marxism, capitalism and happiness, which you can see right here. Peterson, as a well know critic of Marxism, based his arguments on The Communist Manifesto, which is an infinitesimal small piece of Marx's work and only dealt with a tiny fraction of the ideas discussed in his main body of work, much of which can be found in Capital: Critique of Political Economy; Marx is famous and respected mainly because of how good his critique of capitalism is. Our times are proof of that. Linked below is a video with a reaction to Jordan Paterson's argument during the debate with Zizek, in which Taimur Rahman, a socialist political activist from Pakistan, ties Peterson's mistakes to the misconceptions I mentioned, and manages to throw in a lot more of them.

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