Why Marxism-Leninism Is Wrong

Failures All Around

If you’re like me, you grew up thinking that Marxism was primarily about economics. Assuming you thought about it at all.

So when I read the standard textbook that Stalin had ordered into existence, The Handbook of Marxism-Leninism, I was startled to find that the first chapter was concerned with philosophy. The first four chapters , almost a quarter of the 630 page book, were all concerned with philosophy (dialectical reasoning, the theory of knowledge, and the theory of history).

If you have a tendency towards intellectual masochism, you can find a copy online and download it for free.

However, if you read the first two pages of the introduction (pages 15 and 16), you really learn all you need to know about Marxism-Leninism as a materialist philosophy. The introduction contains so many confusions it’s hard to sort them out, but here are the two most important

First, it ignores two thousand or so years of Western philosophy, claiming that “Idealism” is simply a “reactionary” means ensuring people remain “blindly obedient” through superstition. Materialism, by contrast, “rest[s] squarely on reality, on the real world in which we live.” So therefore Materialism is “scientific,” that is, it sees “nature as fully knowable.”

I apologize for not quoting these opening sentenced in full, but to be frank, the test is so needlessly verbose that you have to extract what the authors are trying to say.

But what you end up with is just a recycling of what Leon Daudet called the “Twenty-two Stupidities” of the nineteenth century, specifically, the numbers on, two, first two:

1. The nineteenth century is the century of science.

2. The nineteenth century is the century is the century of progress.

7. The future is science. Science is always beneficent.

9. Religions is the child of fear.

Writing a few years after the Great War, Daudet was bitterly skeptical, and his other “stupidities” are equally on the mark. But the main point here is that the Handbook’s, concept of Materialism is neither new nor true.

Even more damning is the reality of “science.” Sir Isaac Newton was a devout and professing Christian, so therefore he was an Idealist, but the physical laws he posited worked perfectly well without referring to supernatural causes, and neither does calculus.

Sure, if you work back far enough to start wondering how the world came into being, and Newton did just that, but that’s something quite different. In fact, most of the “laws” which the Handbook uses to justify Marxism-Leninism were made by men who obviously didn’t see any contradiction behind their religious views and figuring out how things worked. It just didn’t come up as a factor.

In fact, Joseph Priestley, who among other major scientific insights discovered the existence of oxygen, was what one reference source calls a “maverick theologian,” and a supporter of the French and American revolutions. But that hardly had much to do with his work as a scientist.

So either the authors of the Handbook were deliberately falsifying matters or they were just like the fanatical adherents to religion they were castigating. I’m inclined to the latter, based on the paragraph that starts off the introduction.

Marx’s teaching is all powerful because it is true.

But speaking of Marx, a few comments.

A Common Error

The error that men like Comte and Marx made was assuming that just as Newton and Priestley and so forth had identified “laws” that allowed us a more accurate explanation of the physical world, it was possible to do the same for human behavior, which is why Comte is correctly seen as the founder of sociology. I think that to a degree, Adam Smith and David Ricardo were attempting that for economics, as witness the principle of Comparative Advantage attributed to the latter.

Actually there’s a double error there. It easy to explain the behavior of inanimate objects—assuming an absence or measuring error—because they’re inanimate. They can’t decide to thwart you, which humans and animals do all the time. See Sigmund Freud’s discovery of “resistance.” But a hydrogen atom can’t decide to become a helium atom, and an artillery shell can’t refuse to react to an explosion in the gun barrel (Newton’s Third Law).

Although as everyone who works with these matters quickly learns, there are times when it definitely seems it’s the opposite. Murphy’s Law.

But the other error, which became quite common in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was to assume that while we could provide accurate explanations for many phenomena, that hardly meant we could supply them for all. In fact, in the history of science, we often see a situation in which one explanation was widely believed, only to be disproven, and replaced by what sometimes seemed like its opposite.

Just to name a few: the attempt to explain phenomena by positing the existence of substances that didn’t exist (phlogiston in Priestley’s time, ether ). A century or so later, another substance, ether, was posited—and rejected.

In the last century, the argument in geology that craters all caused by volcanoes, and the emergence of continental drift theory.

I’ve deliberately restricted myself to the physical sciences, simply to show that figuring out that part of the world isn’t all that easy, and when it comes to other areas, it’s much worse. When the French microbiologist Emile Duclaux observed that “It is because science is sure of nothing that it is always advancing.” He nailed it.

As to why people like Comte and Marx—and whole phalanxes of others—made these mistakes, my personal explanation is that in the nineteenth century, science increasingly began to have its own language, which was mathematical, involved areas like spherical trigonometry, statistics and probability theory, and calculus.

Consider, for a moment, what you had to learn before you could understand spherical trigonometry: algebra, geometry, logarithms, and trigonometry. And for most people, no matter how intelligent, those subjects required instruction, were complex all by themselves. Then there was calculus, an understanding of which gradually became essential, if for no other reason than it marked a major divide between scientists and everyone else.

Just as historically in the west, a mastery of Latin (and even beyond that, Greek) was regarded as class marker (separating the educated from from the uneducated), understanding this new language of numbers did the same for sciences.

So the ideas of Comte and Marx (just to name a few) were quite persuasive for people who were equally in the dark. And since I observed earlier I was speaking personally, I’ll go a step further by way of clarification.

When I was an undergraduate, back in the dark ages, in order to take the one year course in economics, a student had to have taken a year of calculus. And in those days, the one year course met five days a week, and course credit was awarded accordingly. I survived the course, did pretty well in economics, but it made me understand the whole bit about a separate language.

Then there was the course sequence in chemistry. You had to take two full years of basic courses (four courses, each with a lab component), before you even got to organic. I survived, but just barely, and when someone asked me what I’d learned abut organic chemistry, I replied, truthfully, that I learned how to make neat little geometric figures on graph paper.

But the actual point I’m trying to make here is that by the time you went through the sequences I just described, that was a third of your degree. So naturally, most students just kept on, while their counterparts in other areas didn’t even take those courses.

A Few Words About Marx

Now the interesting thing about Marx was not just his immaculate ignorance about the matters I’ve been outlining, but the degree to which he cloaked his ideas in a language that was weirdly complicated even by the standard of his German language contemporaries.

His insights fre­quent­ly col­lapse into the platitudinous: "with the change of the economic foun­dation, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed." The "more or less rapidly" serves to distract attention from the vapidity of the actual thought, in which, the nouns are interchangeable. "With the change of the buoy­ancy, the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed," i.e., if a hole is punched in the bottom of a ship it will sink. The bigger the hole the faster it will sink.

Worse still, Marx lacked the genuine faculty of the philosopher to see an entire system in terms of his ideas. Every major philosopher in the West developed some sort of theory of art. But Marx left pronouncements about the arts largely up to Engels, and contented himself with a few curiously pedestrian ideas like the one that Greek sculp­ture and poetry in "certain respects prevails as the standard and a model beyond attainment."

When Marx turns to the nascent science of economics, however, his thoughts, although unfor­tunately not his style, take a decisive turn for the better. Along with Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Thomas Robert Malthus, he may fairly lay claim to inventing the science of economics. Marx lacked the depth of Adam Smith, who saw far deeper into human nature and was surprisingly pessimistic abut what he saw. He was unable to make the kind of fundamental Newtonian discoveries about economic life that we find in Ricardo, nor was he able to look at life and construct anything like Malthus's dictum that the food supply increases arithmetically while the population increases geometrically.

His claim to be included with these men rests not so much on his con­clusions as it does on the idea of an objective analysis of the social situation. The portrait of the capitalist, not as greedy pig but as a man driven to oppression by the per­fectly understandable necessity to maximize profits, opened up an entirely new means of conceptualizing social relations.

In this sense Marx is arguably one of the main founders of the social sciences, and the attempts of most cultural anthro­pologists to wriggle free of this claim have never been particularly con­vin­cing.

That being said, it is important to note that Marx’s economic ideas rest on three fundamental fallacies. In that he was like Malthus, who failed to recognize that agricultural productivity, as measured by output per hectare, was not by any means fixed, and that there was absolutely no proof that the population increased geometrically over long periods of time.

The first fallacy was the idea that it was the value of labor that determined the value of the product. While this may have been true in a pre-industrial economy, where everything was made by hand, it definitely isn’t the case in an industrial one. Basically, Marx was arguing that a hole dug by hand with a shovel was worth more than one dug by a back hoe—simply because the former required more man hours of labor.

The second fallacy was one widely shared by early economists, so it wasn’t particularly original. That was the belief in the objective value of of objects. This too can easily be disproved. You may think your house is worth a half a million whatever, but its true value is whatever someone is willing pay for it. Therefore, value is entirely subjective, which means that the values of objects are not comparable. Sure, on the micro level, value seemed objective

Lastly, Marx saw the economy as a zero sum game. In his model, the only way the “capitalist” could make a profit was by depriving the laborer of his just reward. Like Malthus, Marx failed to realize that there was no reason why productivity could not be dramatically increased, which in turn would profit both classes. To use an old figure of speech: as the size of the pie increased, so would your share—and for the same amount of labor.

Sure, your share could be less than before, but since the pie was now much bigger, so was your share. For a good many people you could say this insight was counter-intuitive, but Mandeville had pointed out that early on, and Adam Smith gave actual examples.

But the more serious problem with Marxian ideas was his embrace of Dialectical reasoning.

The Problem With Dialectics

Marx argued that Materialism, specifically Dialectical Materialism, explained how the world worked, so as a result it was “scientific,” that it is, it explained the world without any reference to what Plato was arguing. So the argument of official Marxism-Leninism was simply a synthesis of what Comte et all had been arguing, with a method of reason.

Dialectics, of course (heh!), was a methodology developed by the German philosopher Hegel—not that the Handbook gave him much credit.

Now when Hegel explained dialectical reasoning to Hegel way back there in the late 1820s, Goethe’s response is interesting.

Let us only hope. . . that these intellectual arts and dexterities are not frequently misused, and employed to make the false true, and the true false.

Goethe was correct, although I cheerfully admit, you have to think about his point to understand his objection, A lot! But here’s where it gets interesting, because Hegel didn’t disagree. Instead he answered him by saying

That certainly happens . . . but only with people who are mentally diseased.

I should add that although “mentally diseased is a a more or less literal translation, it’s misleading. It would be more accurate too render the German as ‘“mentally ill” or “intellectually bankrupt.” And that’s clearly how Goethe took the response.

I therefore congratulate myself upon the study of Nature, which preserves me from such a disease. For here we have to deal with the infinitely and eternally true, which throws off as incapable every one who does not proceed purely and honestly with the treatment and observation of his subject. I am also certain that many a dialectic disease would find a wholesome remedy in the study of nature.

Again, although “nature” is literally what he said, Goethe’s word would be better served if we said ‘Divine Nature,” since to Goethe Nature was created by God. He was on the same page as the men who wrote the Declaration, with their references to a “creator” and “Nature’s God.”

But what Comte and his successors and colleagues failed to understand was that the terms being used by Goethe and so forth, basically revealed nothing more than a belief in a Divine Creator, which in turn went back to the implicit assumptions contained in Plato’s parable. That is, these Ideals existed outside of our perceived reality, and the parable simply explained why our understanding of them is imperfect, But they exist. As Plato said, we have a “Memory of Justice.”

Lastly, the oppositions posited by the dogma of Materialism were based on a fundamental misunderstanding of human beings. Newton didn’t see any contradiction between the “laws” he had discovered and religious belief. To the contrary: not only was he a devout Christian, but he devoted a great deal of effort to establishing that the Old Testament was an exact historical record. For that matter, Goethe himself was deeply interested in scientific questions, and his attempts to solve them weren’t much different from Newton’s.

Finally, although Marxism-Leninism was openly “scientific,” its application of dialectical reasoning reasoning led to scientific absurdities as evinced by the elevation of Lysenko during Stalin’s rule. A slogan of the time explains the result perfectly: “Socialism Triumphant Over Nature.”

Here’s the result. In 1913, Russia was the world's largest exporter of grain. By 1987, the Soviet state was the world’s largest importer. A considerable achievement! But then the Materialists, rather curiously, knew about as much about agriculture as one of my Siamese cats does about motor vehicles.

So Benda was part of a reaction to the philosophical materialism that began to dominate serious thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, as evidenced by his attacks on Bergson. To a degree we can see him as being in the same corner as Wittgenstein with the latter’s observation that

Mathematics is a logical method . . . Mathematical propositions express no thoughts. In life it is never a mathematical proposition which we need, but we use mathematical propositions only in order to infer from propositions which do not belong to mathematics to others which equally do not belong to mathematics.

Confusing, but when you think about it (a lot!) the statement is a criticism of the materialism inherent in the ideas of Marx, Freud, Comte, Spencer, Spengler, Boas, and Kroeber.

However, Benda’s ideas were basically a synthesis of Plato’s ideas and those expressed by what he regarded as the founding documents of the American and French revolutions, which are in opposition to the treason he defined. His secondary point was that materialism was opposed to basic Christian doctrine.

That’s simply a different way of saying that state bureaucracies are so obsessed with “order” that they lose sight of everything else.

So in my view, Benda identified the basic problem perfectly, and subsequent events have confirmed his ideas.

The Only Serious Flaw

I would argue that the only flaw in Benda’s idea was the same one flaw inherent in the ideal state that Plato described. It’s neatly summed up in the Latin phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Usually attributed to the Roman poet Juvenal, it describes the problem perfectly: "Who will guard the guardians?"

Although the Romans, like the leaders of the French and American revolutions, and for that matter, the 17^th and 18^th century British thinkers who came before them, all tried to devise systems that would answer that question, their success was problematic. To say the least

Curiously, the proof of just how difficult it was to ensure this control came from where one would least expect it: the Soviet Union. A state founded, and governed, and run into the ground, by explicitly the Handbook’s ideas. When Nikita Sergeyevitch Khrushchev came to power, he expressed it in his usual blunt way.

If people stopped stealing for even a single day, communism could have been built long ago.

Since Marxism-Leninism can fairly be considered as a system created in complete opposition to the principles Benda identified, I take Nikita Sergeyevich’s complaint as proof that the problem is universal.