You Don't Understand Marxism.

But don't feel bad. Marx didn't understand it either.

I have yet to see a reasonable treatment of Marxist thought on any social media outlet. This isn’t going to be that, either. I’m not a Marxist, so I’ll leave that to those who have dedicated themselves to explicating Marxism, and keeping up with new developments in that school of thought. Of which, you may be surprised to know, there are many.

The thing that always jars me about the hysterical critiques of Marxism that I see is the olympian levels of ignorance about what Marx, and Marxists have actually said, and how those who claim to be Marxists actually put their ideas into praxis.

Let’s start with an obvious one. The “Communist Manifesto” is what Marx wrote when trying to create…well…a manifesto. It is a politically motivated piece of writing designed to persuade literate layfolk. It is not an in-depth piece of analysis or theory. That’s “Das Kapital,” the book everybody knows about, but that almost no one reads who isn’t getting paid to do so.

But Marxism didn’t stop evolving with “Das Kapital.” If you look at the intellectual history, and its political development, you can see that Marxists are constantly engaged in ferocious battle with their sworn traditional enemies: Other Marxists. Lenin would have had every member of the Frankfurt School executed, Stalin would have dug up their bodies and executed them again. Mao hated them all. Bakunin hated them worse.

If you’re going to blame one big ideology for everything that’s gone so very wrong since the 20th Century, you could just as easily blame Capitalism or Christianity. But you’d be just as wrong. These movements are too big, and too diverse to be anything but the broadest possible brushes.

So learn something before you start going on about Marxism like you understand anything about it. You might also consider being a bit more careful about classifying ideologies in general. They are motivators of behavior, but they provide propulsion, generally, rather than direction. The Chinese make the rich richer in the name of Communism, the Russians are authoritarians in the name of the classless society, the Americans hand out billions of tax dollars to trillionaires in the name of the free market. What an ideology says, even what its proponents believe, is far less revealing than what those who adhere to it actually do.

If you would understand an ideology, your first move out of the bush leagues is to acknowledge that ideologies and movements are products of their history, and that they change in response to different cultures and conditions. Talking about Marxism as if it ossified at the First International, or Capitalism as if it were the same thing it was when Adam Smith was writing betrays laziness, dishonesty or both. If it’s important enough to blame, it’s important enough to understand.