The Truth About Karl Marx; What We Should Remember

Richard Ebeling emails:

Dear Bob,

I have a new article on the Future of Freedom Foundation website on, “Karl Marx and Marxism at Two Hundred.”

 May 5, 2018 marked the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx, who was born in Trier, Germany in 1818. After the tyranny, terror, and mass murder in communist countries that his ideas inspired in the twentieth century, one would think that his name and ideas would be as infamous as Adolf Hitler’s. Instead, he is being fawned over as a “deep thinker” still profoundly relevant for our time.

In fact, Marx was a cruel, manipulative, vengeful individual with few if any
personal redeeming qualities. This included being racist and anti-Semitic in his views, both in print and in his correspondence.

He foisted on to the world an illusionary conception of human relationships as being defined by and built upon a “class conflict” between “capitalists” and “workers.” And using a pseudo-scientific theory of the “laws of history,” created a mythology of the “inevitability” of socialism and communism over capitalism.

He formulated a call for a “dictatorship of the proletariat” that became the template for tyranny and terror in every country that experienced a successful Marxist revolution. He hailed the establishment of socialist central planning, which brought economic disaster and despair for hundreds of millions forced to live in a “workers’ paradise.”

The end product was an ideology of paranoia, in which dictatorship was rationalized by the assertion that anti-socialist “class enemies” were everywhere, which justified a secret police, mass murder, comprehensive censorship, and thought control to preserve and expand the collectivist state of today and tomorrow.

Yes, let’s mark Marx’s birth, but as a lesson in the consequences of mad and mistaken ideas that brings down disaster on humanity.

https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/karl-marx-marxism-two-hundred/


Best,

Richard