When Karl Marx Made the Case for Capitalism

[Chris]

The more I learn about Marx and socialism and communism and collectivism, the more I realize the left admires and the right despises something neither really understands. When Karl Marx Made the Case for Capitalism is a case in point. What, Marx praised capitalism!?!? Indeed he did. And this is consistent with his belief that a culture must first progress through capitalism to reach communism. It is consistent with his designing communism as a variation of capitalism where, by replacing capitalists with workers, the economic system is advanced. Most of all that communism was for him the epitome of individualism where the autonomous person is freed from the chains of society, so much for collectivism.

Why are these matters so confused in modern minds?

To the article...

In November 1864, Karl Marx wrote a letter congratulating President Abraham Lincoln on his reelection to the White House. "From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of England felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class," Marx declared. He was therefore thrilled by the news that Lincoln would continue "to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world."

That reconstructed social world did not just involve a Union victory in the Civil War. What Marx had in mind was the triumph of the North's free labor system and the accompanying spread of Northern capitalism throughout the would-be Confederate States of America.

If the idea of Marx welcoming the spread of capitalism comes as a surprise, that's because you don't know Marx. The free market economist Joseph Schumpeter famously likened capitalism to a "gale of creative destruction." But Marx actually said something similar in The Communist Manifesto, co-written with Friedrich Engels in 1848.

In barely a century, they wrote, capitalism "has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together." It has "rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life" and "wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal" arrangements. "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away," and "all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air."

According to Marx, history unfolded in a grand series of stages, each defined by its dominant mode of economic production and each specifically arising to replace the one that preceded it. "In broad outlines," he wrote in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society." Capitalism, in other words, was a historically necessary step in human progress....

[RMNIXON]

Socialism (and modern attempts at Communism) simply feed off of Capitalism like a parasite and Marx understood this.

A totally Socialist World would be an economic disaster! The Soviets and more recently the Chinese have spent decades feeding off the technological and free market benefits of Capitalism.

[Chris]

Socialism (and modern attempts at Communism) simply feed off of Capitalism like a parasite and Marx understood this.

A totally Socialist World would be an economic disaster! The Soviets and more recently the Chinese have spent decades feeding off the technological and free market benefits of Capitalism.

Socialism is a weird beast. Per Marx, it was a transitionary dictatorship to communism. It was adopted because the workers had not revolted and taken over from the capitalists. At least two problems emerged: One, you cannot design and command an economy--it's this failure that led to its feeding off capitalism; and two, those in power never relinquish power but by a subsequent revolution--you end of with state capitalism.