How Marxism Became Outdated

It remains popular to view Marxism as a theory that exposed human exploitation by humans, accurately predicted the development of the global economy, and served as a revolutionary doctrine that enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power. By the late 19th century, the founders of Marxism had aptly described many aspects of the economic system that existed at that time, particularly those related to industrial production. The Bolsheviks utilized many tenets of this theory to gain power in Russia. However, today, Marxist descriptions of the economy are outdated, most of its predictions have failed, and the Bolsheviks came to power more through significant modifications to the theory, some of which even contradicted it. In this article, we will prove this thesis to better outline an alternative developmental path for the social-democratic movement.

What Is Marxism?

First, let us define what Marxism is. The Great Russian Encyclopedia defines it as “a movement in socio-political, philosophical, and economic thought from the second half of the 19th century, representing a wide spectrum of doctrines based on the ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its most significant aspects are the materialist interpretation of history, the critical theory of capital accumulation, and ‘scientific socialism’ as a concept of revolutionary societal transformation”¹. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Marxism is “a body of doctrine developed by Karl Marx and, to a lesser extent, by Friedrich Engels in the mid-19th century. It originally consisted of three related ideas: a philosophical anthropology, a theory of history, and an economic and political program”². In general, we can say that Marxism is a set of socio-political, philosophical, and economic doctrines developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, along with their subsequent development and a program of economic and political actions based on these ideas.

The Dictatorship of the Proletariat Is Not the Future of Societal Development

Karl Marx acknowledged the following:

As far as I am concerned, I cannot claim the credit for having discovered the existence of classes in modern society, nor the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle, and bourgeois economists the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: 1) that the existence of classes is merely linked to particular historical phases in the development of production, 2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, 3) that this dictatorship itself constitutes only the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society³.

If the first of these points can be seen as a historical analysis, the second and third are questionable, as they seem more like prophecies than a realistic vision of future developments. How did Marx envision the implementation of these ideas in practice? He believed that the dictatorship of the proletariat would first arise in the most industrially developed countries:

The country that is more developed industrially only shows to the less developed country the image of its own future… Society, even when it has discovered the track of the natural law of its movement — and the ultimate aim of my work is to reveal the economic law of motion of modern society — cannot leap over natural phases of development, nor abolish them by decree⁴.

What do we observe in practice? In the most industrially developed countries, protest movements forced elites to compromise. A dictatorship of the proletariat did not emerge. Furthermore, in third-world countries where industrial production and large industrial working classes began to appear (e.g., Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan), no dictatorship of the proletariat developed either (in China, a dictatorship of the nomenklatura emerged). Marx’s theory harmed the social-democratic movement in 20th-century Europe when some social democrats, as Karl Popper noted, “abandoned the workers in their plight. They did not know what to do. They awaited the promised self-destruction of capitalism”⁵. Fortunately, the majority of social democrats eventually adapted to democratic frameworks and achieved significant successes.

The dictatorship of the proletariat was not awaited; instead, it was attempted in the USSR but resulted in the dictatorship of the nomenklatura — this collapse of the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat is examined in greater detail in a separate article. Consequently, no classless society emerged. It must be acknowledged that two foundational theses of Marxism failed in practice.

The Ambiguity of the Term “Proletarian Revolution”

Contrary to the established and popularized Soviet notion that socialist revolutions are “proletarian” and carried out by the proletariat, neither the theory nor the practice of socialist revolutions was developed or implemented by proletarians. The founders of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, were not workers. This was also confirmed by Vladimir Lenin:

The doctrine of socialism arose from those philosophical, historical, and economic theories developed by educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intelligentsia. The founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged, by their social status, to the bourgeois intelligentsia⁶.

The founders of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) were also not proletarians. At the party’s first congress, where it was established, “some delegates opposed naming the party ‘workers’. They argued that, in fact, few workers were currently part of social-democratic organizations. Opinions were divided. By a majority of five votes ‘against’, the congress approved the name ‘Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’. The word ‘labour’ was added only after the congress, during the drafting of the Manifesto, with the agreement of two members of the Central Committee“⁷.

Later, when the Bolsheviks transformed into a “party of professional revolutionaries” in accordance with Vladimir Lenin’s concept, the revolutionary activities of party members began to be funded by the party treasury (the source of Bolshevik funding will be addressed in a separate article). This allowed them to focus entirely on revolutionary activities, as Lenin had envisioned in his work “What Is To Be Done?” From this point, the core of the Bolshevik party largely consisted of the intelligentsia — individuals paid for intellectual labor.

Suddenly, intellectuals approach a worker and declare: “Your point of view is not truly representative of your class. We, the intellectuals, will teach you your class interests”.

Isn’t this strange? Not just strange, but suspicious…

…Indeed, what is the worker’s point of view? He wants to increase his wages and improve his working conditions. For this, he is ready to struggle, uniting with other workers. Is this not the class interest of a worker?

“This is trade unionism,” the intellectuals warn with an incomprehensible yet seemingly derogatory term, “This is a betrayal of the working class’s interests!”

But what are these interests, according to the intellectuals who have appeared? It turns out, they involve bringing to power a party led by these same intellectuals. Pray tell, whose class — or group — interest are these intellectuals trying to ‘introduce’ into the consciousness of the worker: his, or their own?⁸

Socialist revolutions are led by the communist intelligentsia (though the revolution is also carried out by classes allied with the intelligentsia — for example, in Petrograd’s Winter Palace and Moscow’s Kremlin, it was workers and peasants who stormed them, acting as soldiers and sailors). The communist intelligentsia may be supported by workers, peasants, and other oppressed classes and can be recruited from various classes, including the bourgeoisie. This occurs through the introduction of consciousness, which we will touch upon later in this article when discussing materialism.

Was a powerful working class, an industrial proletariat as described by Karl Marx, actually formed in Russia? Was Russia ripe for a socialist revolution according to Marxist principles? According to the 1897 All-Russian Census, the total number of workers was about 3 million people⁹ out of a total population of 129 million. The rural population in 1908–1914 accounted for 85% of the total population in Russia¹⁰. A thorough study would show that neither the leadership of the Bolshevik Party nor the country’s population featured the proletariat as a leading force; it played a secondary and allied role. Therefore, discussions of a proletarian revolution or the idea that a social-democratic party must be proletarian lead to a theory that, when applied in practice today, will fail. These ideas do not align with objective reality.

Proletarian Revolutions Occurred in Backward, Not Advanced, Countries

According to Marxist logic, a socialist revolution should begin in the most industrially developed countries — those where the proletariat constitutes a significant portion of the population. Friedrich Engels wrote on this subject:

The communist revolution will not only be a national one; it will occur simultaneously in all civilized countries, that is, at least in England, America, France, and Germany. In each of these countries, it will develop faster or slower, depending on the degree of industrial development, the accumulation of wealth, and the number of productive forces in each country. Therefore, it will take place most slowly and with the greatest difficulty in Germany, and most quickly and easily in England. It will also significantly influence other countries and fundamentally change and greatly accelerate their previous course of development. It is a worldwide revolution and will therefore have a global stage¹¹.

However, in reality, it turned out that developed countries have sufficient resilience and capital to improve living conditions for the majority of their population. As a result, revolutions, as envisioned by Marx, have no chance of succeeding there. As researcher Mikhail Voslensky writes:

Trade unions emerged and strengthened, protecting the economic rights of workers; the right to strike as a means of improving labor conditions was recognized and implemented; the unemployed were no longer doomed to poverty but began to receive guaranteed benefits sufficient for subsistence; workers gained the freedom to change their employers and even emigrate to other countries. These innovations did not create an ideal society but undoubtedly limited exploitation, significantly improved working conditions, and raised the living standards of workers. It should be emphasized that this was not due to the benevolence of capitalists but rather the achievements of the labor movement and, to a large extent, the ideas of Marx¹².

We have already mentioned that revolutions are not carried out by the proletariat but by various classes under the leadership of certain segments of the intelligentsia. This is confirmed by the social structure of the countries where socialist revolutions occurred — the majority of these countries had underdeveloped economies with a significant share of markets and bourgeoisie, as well as semi-feudal characteristics. This was examined in detail by Mikhail Voslensky in his book “Nomenklatura”.

At the beginning of the book, Engels’ list of countries where proletarian revolutions were expected to occur first, according to his theory, was mentioned: England, the USA, France, and — with some delay — Germany.

However, here is where “proletarian revolutions” actually took place: Russia, Mongolia, Tannu-Tuva, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Albania, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, North Vietnam, North Korea, China, Cuba, South Yemen, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Angola, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Grenada, Afghanistan.

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A curious pattern emerges: “proletarian revolutions” occurred only in underdeveloped countries. In Europe, with the exceptions of Yugoslavia and Albania, these revolutions succeeded only under conditions of direct Soviet military or political intervention. Meanwhile, in the most developed capitalist countries, despite complete freedom of activity for communist parties and other groups fervently advocating for “proletarian revolution”, no such revolutions occurred.

The pattern, therefore, is as follows: the higher the level of development of the productive forces, the fewer chances for a “proletarian revolution.” This is an anti-Marxist pattern, but it consistently manifests itself without exception. Proletarian revolutions in developed countries, as predicted by Marx, do not happen.¹³

It is noteworthy that in developed countries, social democrats rather than communists came to power, highlighting which of the two movements is truly progressive. Boris Bazhanov, Joseph Stalin’s former secretary who fled the USSR and thus gained the freedom to publish his views, also noticed the inconsistency between the class nature of socialist revolutions and Marxist principles long before his escape:

I am trying to deepen my understanding of Marxist theory. What immediately stands out is that the Russian social revolution occurred contrary to all of Marx’s theories and predictions. On the “capitalist” West, these predictions are entirely refuted by reality — instead of the dire impoverishment of the proletariat, there is a constant and unprecedented rise in the standard of living of the working masses (I recall Marshal Boban’s famous report to Louis XIV, which stated that a fifth of France’s population was dying not from old age or disease, but from hunger; I compare this to the early 20th century and the living standards of workers in the West). And Marx never envisioned a social revolution in Russia, where 85% of the population were smallholders — peasants — and workers comprised, laughably, just over 1% of the population (in 1921, the population of Soviet Russia within its then borders was 134.2 million; industrial workers numbered 1.4 million; these figures are taken from the official “History of the CPSU”, Vol. 4, p. 8, published in 1970).¹⁴

One of the key principles of Marxism — the prediction of a transition to the dictatorship of the proletariat in developed countries — turned out to be incorrect in practice.

Extremely Low Probability of a Global Revolution

Since proletarian revolutions did not occur in industrial countries, another problem arises. It turns out that socialist revolutions do not happen as a result of economic development and the universal replacement of old production forms by new ones. Instead, they occur only when a large number of factors coincide: poor state policies, the presence of strong communist parties in the country, and so forth (we will attempt to explore the circumstances under which revolutions occur in a separate article). The coincidence of all these factors is now difficult to expect even in a single country. To imagine this situation arising simultaneously across all countries within a relatively short period seems almost impossible.

Such chances would have been higher if communist regimes had demonstrated greater viability compared to democracies. However, the opposite happened — many of these regimes collapsed far earlier than communists managed to gain power over most of the globe.

Thus, a global communist revolution turned out to be practically unachievable and ultimately did not take place. Hypothetically, achieving it would require creating forms of production and property ownership that are more competitive than current ones, but these have not yet been developed. For now, we can only speak of the possibility of a global democratic revolution — since democracy has proven its viability and even greater efficiency compared to authoritarianism, and the number of democratic regimes has grown significantly since the 18th century. However, it would be incorrect to claim that a single political force (e.g., social democrats) could come to power simultaneously in all countries, as democracy thrives on providing citizens with alternatives and strong opposition. This possibility exists, but it is exceedingly small.

The State Does Not Wither Away After the Socialist Revolution

The theories of Marx and Engels are — alongside other theories and doctrines — an important starting point for the workers’ movement. Nevertheless, the impact of this political program was quite limited — obviously because Marx and Engels, in their analysis, either did not consider or could not consider several very important factors. Chief among these is the relationship between socialism and the state.¹⁵

The impossibility of achieving a global communist revolution creates another problem — without this, the state in a single country cannot wither away, as Marxism envisions. Surrounded by other (often conservative) states, it becomes necessary to maintain one’s own state, at least as a safeguard against external threats. However, there are many other factors that make the abolition of the state not a progressive step, but rather a regression to pre-state forms of human development, which we discussed here.

In all examples of “Marxist” revolutions, we have seen the opposite — the strengthening of the state, with all the associated drawbacks. Stalinism, in fact, made one of its key tenets the idea that the state would wither away through its maximal strengthening.

Not the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, but the Dictatorship of the Nomenklatura

It turns out that simply prohibiting people from being nobles or bourgeois is not enough to transition to a society without exploitation. Soviet Marxism did not recognize the nomenklatura as an exploiting class — this renders such Marxism largely meaningless. However, the phenomenon of the nomenklatura is so significant and so underexplored that we deemed it necessary to write an entire series of articles on the Soviet nomenklatura. In these, we argue that this class is not only exploitative from a Marxist perspective, just like capitalists, but also less moral and far less effective as an organizer of production. Broadly speaking, the outcome was what Mikhail Bakunin had warned about:

So, from whatever perspective one views this issue, the same sad result emerges: the governance of the vast majority of the masses by a privileged minority. But this minority, Marxists say, will consist of workers. Yes, perhaps former workers, but who, once they become rulers or representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will view the entire world of laborers from the heights of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their claims to govern the people. Whoever doubts this is completely unfamiliar with human nature.¹⁶

More Complex Forms of Ownership and Organization in Production

Marxism examines the classic model of “capitalist vs. worker”. However, there are many forms of ownership over the means of production that disrupt this model, making it only partially accurate and partially incorrect. For example, a worker can be a shareholder of a company and thus receive a portion of the surplus value. Alternatively, instead of a single capitalist, there may be many small shareholders. In some cases, ownership may be held by the state, thereby involving bureaucracy in the economic life of society. There are also situations where an employee himself uses hired labor — for instance, employing a domestic worker or a personal assistant — in which case it becomes unclear whether he is a proletarian or a bourgeois.

Consider the following case: a factory foreman boards a train, driven by an engineer, to inspect the progress of the construction of a house being built for him by a construction company. To which of these strictly divided categories does this foreman belong — to the employers or the employed? All of this is utter nonsense.¹⁷

Overall, because Marxism considers only one model of relationships, which is rarely encountered in its pure form in the modern economy, this theory is outdated. It is impossible to create a theory that would encapsulate the essence of modern exploitation within a simple dichotomy. Professor Ha-Joon Chang of Cambridge University, a recipient of the Myrdal Prize, confirms that the forms of ownership and management of property and business have changed radically since the 19th century:

Today, the owners and managers of most manufacturing companies are not individuals; they are corporations. They can only be called “persons” in a legal sense. In turn, these corporations belong to many individuals who purchase their shares and co-own them. But owning shares does not make you a capitalist in the classical sense of the word. If you own 300 out of 300 million shares of Volkswagen, it does not mean that you can fly to the factory in Wolfsburg, Germany, for instance, and start giving instructions to “your” workers on “your” factory about how they should spend one-millionth of their working time. Ownership and management of operations in large companies are separated.

In most large corporations, today’s owners have limited liability for them. In limited liability companies (LLCs) or public joint-stock companies (PJSCs), if something goes wrong in the organization, shareholders will lose only the money they invested in their shares, and that will be the end of it. In Adam Smith’s time, most company owners had unlimited liability, meaning that if things went badly, they had to sell their personal property to pay off debts; otherwise, they ended up in prison.¹⁸

Inefficiency of a Planned Economy

Since Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels did not create a specific economic program, limiting themselves to vague formulations such as demands for “socialization” and “nationalization” of the means of production, Joseph Stalin, having staged a coup in the Politburo, interpreted their formulations as necessitating the nationalization of industries and a transition to a planned economy. Boris Kagarlitsky, Director of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements, asserts that the classics left no direct instructions on this matter (although Engels’s work “Principles of Communism” mentions “the management of industrial production according to a social plan”, albeit without much specificity). However, the very logic of Marxist theory leads to a planned economy:

Strictly speaking, neither Marx nor even Lenin in the last years of his life wrote about a planned economy. There was no concept of a planned economy. There was merely an idea that under socialism, the economy, breaking free from market anarchy, should be built according to some rational, organized principle. From this concept of rationality, unified organization in the interests of the entire society, the idea of planning follows implicitly.¹⁹

At the same time, in practice, the planned economy was a complete failure and shares the same drawbacks as monopolies, since it is essentially a universal state monopoly. We described in a separate article the insoluble problems of a planned economy, such as the problem of minimizing plans, the problem of “implementation”, the problem of quality, and so on. Marx’s predictions in the second volume of “Capital”, where he foresaw “constant relative overproduction”²⁰ for the period of socialism and communism, turned out to be incorrect for such an economy — it was characterized rather by a constant crisis of underproduction.

Labor Theory of Value

One of the most challenging tenets of Marxism is the labor theory of value. We wrote a separate article explaining its flaws and what changes should be made to make it usable. Simple explanations can also be found in Mikhail Voslensky’s works:

Indeed, is the value of a commodity determined solely by the amount of socially necessary labor time spent on its production, as this theory claims? Hardly. The same fur coat will have entirely different values in cold Siberia and hot Africa, even though the amount of socially necessary labor time invested in it does not change due to its transportation. Value depends not only on the labor embodied in the commodity but, seemingly to an even greater extent, on the demand for the commodity at any given moment. This is well understood by bourgeois merchants, who do not aspire to theoretical heights and organize the familiar to Western readers summer and winter sales.²¹

Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk cited the example of a bottle of wine placed in a cellar, whose value increases every year²². At the same time, no labor is necessarily invested in increasing the bottle’s price. Antiques, branded goods, and much more also do not fit into the framework of the labor theory of value. This theory also creates the so-called “transformation problem”.

The aforementioned Boris Bazhanov also expressed his rejection of the labor theory of value. In short, he accuses Adam Smith of applying not the methods of exact sciences to economics, but the methodology of German idealistic philosophy, which could not lead to a scientific understanding of economics. According to Smith, the price of goods, or value, is determined by the physical labor expended in their production. Bazhanov provides examples of contemporary critiques of Adam Smith, such as the case of a machine performing the same work as a human, or the price of a diamond found effortlessly on a seashore, and so on. David Ricardo later concluded that a capitalist pays a worker less than the full value of what the worker produces, retaining a portion as surplus value, which allowed Karl Marx to assert that every capitalist is a thief and a fraud. Ultimately, Boris Bazhanov evaluates the labor theory of value as follows:

At first glance, it even seems strange that this nonsense can be considered scientific. According to it, only the manual movements of a worker create value, useful things, goods, and drive the economy. But what about the work of a scientist, an inventor, an engineer, or an enterprise organizer? This is work done not by hands but by the brain. Does it create nothing, play no role? Yet, humans have always had hands, but the immense development of societies’ and masses’ well-being was achieved only when the brains of scientists and engineers discovered how to move hands — and machines — to achieve immeasurably better results. Meanwhile, according to Marx, if you do not move your hands, you are a thief and a parasite. What miserable nonsense this is. How everything is turned upside down in this absurdity that pretends to be scientific²³.

The author of the economic bestseller “How Rich Countries Got Rich and Why Poor Countries Stay Poor”, Erik Reinert, also points out that the theories of Marxists and libertarians are rooted in the philosophical reflections of Adam Smith and David Ricardo, leading to numerous errors.

Both communism and liberalism (both Joseph Stalin and Milton Friedman) trace their origins to Ricardo’s theory. Thus, the Cold War was a civil conflict between two branches of Ricardian economic thought, sharing several common beliefs. Specifically, in its mature form, both branches failed to acknowledge the importance of technology and entrepreneurship or the role of the state. Under communism, for instance, the state was supposed to “wither away”. To achieve Ricardo’s mythical equilibrium, communism simply replaced the market with a giant calculator… As I mentioned, both poles of Ricardian economic thought evolved into something akin to religion, so during the Cold War, fact-based economic science (the historical schools in Europe and the institutional school in the U.S.) was pushed out and almost disappeared. Ricardian economics is characterized by a priority of form over reality²⁴.

Classical Marxism also proves unsustainable after the first steps of a socialist revolution. The point is that it labels anyone who employs the labor of others (such as servants, security personnel, etc.) as an exploiter. However, when Marxists come to power, a rather mundane issue arises concerning the security of the state’s leaders, and they inevitably become employers of, say, security personnel (as we saw in the case of the October Revolution). A contradiction arises: a Marxist cannot be an exploiter, yet the hiring of security is essential (and this can and will be used by opponents in political propaganda). The logical solution to this contradiction seems to be this: to conceal the very fact of employing such workers. From this, it logically follows to conceal all other privileges, which will grow at an accelerated pace.

Marxism Breeds Dogmatists

Marxism emerged because social democrats aimed to overcome the inhumane, oppressive conditions of society. Today, however, many Marxists no longer care about this; what matters to them is adherence to dogmatic formulas like the “dictatorship of the proletariat” or “socialism”, while how people live under these formulas becomes a secondary concern. If you present such dogmatists with factual evidence of the exploitation of the working class by the Soviet nomenklatura and its appropriation of surplus value, they will come up with justifications like “but there were no private factories”, thereby revealing that the facts of people being robbed do not bother them — only the formulas matter. Marxist theology loves to declare, using selective quotes from Marx and Lenin, that there was no exploitation in the USSR, diverting the argument from its essence into a “quote war”, the outcome of which can only be a stalemate due to the contradictions found in all writings or collected works.

Since Marxist dogmas are unrealistic, they have a generally destructive impact on the leftist movement. For instance, Richard Tames, in “The History of Japan”, demonstrates how harmful the influence of Marxism was on the Japan Socialist Party:

The largest opposition party, the Japan Socialist Party, was too constrained in its actions to directly win elections; its electoral base consisted of the labor union movement, which continued to shrink as heavy industry lost its position. Moreover, the socialists were overloaded with Marxist intellectuals and thus pursued unrealistic goals. The only way to come to power would have been through a pre-election alliance, but rapprochement with the communists faced resistance from centrist parties, and vice versa. Thus, the LDP — though not to everyone’s liking — remained in power²⁵.

The Abolition of Private Property Harms the Oppressed

We published a detailed separate article explaining why, in the absence of guarantees for private property rights, it is the underprivileged masses whose property and belongings are the least protected that suffer the most. The abolition of private property, described as a cornerstone of Marxism²⁶, does not, in practice, reduce inequality, as evidenced by the history of the USSR and its nomenklatura. It merely grants new elites the right to rob the people even more intensively than the old elites, openly seizing property from the masses (because property is not protected). Be sure to check out the article at the link — it provides numerous practical confirmations of this.

Vulgar Materialism

Karl Marx formulated the principles of historical materialism, and, to quote its most famous statement directly, “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness”²⁷. Friedrich Engels supported this idea — according to him, for a revolution in the consciousness of the masses to occur, “an even faster pace of revolution in production methods is needed, more machines, the displacement of a greater number of workers, and the ruin of a greater number of peasants and petty bourgeoisie”²⁸. However, even Vladimir Lenin, as a practitioner, disagreed with these Marxist principles:

We have said that the working class could not have had social-democratic consciousness. It could only be introduced from outside. The history of all countries testifies that, solely by its own efforts, the working class is capable of developing only trade-union consciousness, i.e., the conviction of the necessity to unite in unions, to fight against the employers, to strive for the enactment of necessary laws for the workers by the government, and so on²⁹.

In other words, the working class, without the introduction of consciousness from outside, does not advocate for revolution. According to Lenin, consciousness could determine not only being, and the October Revolution proved this. The working class supported the Bolsheviks in Russia, while in the West, it acted exactly as Lenin described, not in accordance with Marx’s theory. The principle that “it is not consciousness that determines being, but being that determines consciousness” is flawed in its very premise. Reality shows that consciousness can determine being, just as being can determine consciousness — it depends on the specific case. Generalizing all cases in this way reflects primitive thinking, akin to saying, “all Russians drink a lot of vodka”. Marx writes:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production³⁰.

This statement is erroneous. A person may entirely avoid entering into any production relations by moving to an uninhabited island, engaging in begging, committing suicide, and so on. Moreover, it is within a person’s will to decide what job to take, whether to participate in trade union or political struggles. Marx’s words devalue human will, which is one of the factors influencing the development of society (as we discussed in this article), thereby devaluing the will of individuals (and consequently the masses) to fight. This is not just an unprogressive view; it is a reactionary one.

Marx wrote in conditions of intense political unrest, which sometimes led him to hasty generalizations that are hard to avoid — this only underscores the need to base theoretical arguments on the fullest possible historical data, something Marx did not attempt to do as thoroughly as he might have³¹.

From this vulgar materialism logically follows the evolution of Marxism into a doctrine of predestination. Marxists believe in a kind of historical determinism, a linear development of history. This has been repeatedly disproven by the course of history itself — the future is not predetermined; history can turn either toward democratization or toward a conditional dystopia. The economy is transformed into some kind of omnipotent deity that controls everything, leaving no room for human freedom of choice. However, we have discussed this in more detail in an article containing a critique of the theory of socio-economic formations.

Class-Based Approach

The concept of class struggle, apart from not being Marx’s original discovery, is an underdeveloped and raw notion. In the Communist Manifesto, it is written:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class antagonisms; society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — bourgeoisie and proletariat³².

However, despite such generalizations, representatives of the nobility and bourgeoisie often joined the Bolsheviks (some prominent capitalists even funded them), while workers and peasants often opposed the Bolsheviks, who positioned themselves as “the power of the workers and peasants”:

Doesn’t class struggle in the transition from capitalism to socialism consist in protecting the interests of the working class from those small groups, layers, and factions of workers who stubbornly cling to capitalist traditions (habits) and continue to view the Soviet state in the old way: giving it “less and worse work”, while trying to “take more money from it”³³.

This suggests that belonging to a social class does not guarantee a specific political goal. The principle of such generalization — linking class divisions to political positions — is inherently biased. What can be said, for example, when a significant portion of the working class rejects socialism and often fights against another part of the working class? It is reasonable to acknowledge that a class may have interests that its representatives themselves do not recognize. However, this does not imply a clear political division within society or inherently shared political views among all members of a class.

Such a vulgar approach once led, for example, to the following situation: “Among some Soviet jurists, the ‘theory of the class approach to the criminal’ became widespread, resulting in cases where courts exempted bribe-takers, fraudsters, and other criminals from punishment solely based on their proletarian origin. This expanded the social base of participants in the ‘untouchable caste’ and entrenched their procedural immunities not only in party directives but also in legislation.”³⁴.

When selecting for leadership positions, “political factors” were often prioritized over professional qualifications, which negatively affected the quality of management personnel.

This meant, for example, that if the position of director of a physics institute were contested by the non-party bourgeois specialist Albert Einstein and a comrade from the Baltic Fleet, party member Vanya Khrushkin, preference would have to be given to Vanya³⁵.

Generalizations that lack a scientific or professional foundation, which were characteristic of many people in the 19th century — including Marx — are the source of many errors in his theory.

The idea of Marxism, much like the classical school of economics from which it largely emerged, is based on the assumption that people always act rationally and selfishly (i.e., the bourgeoisie seeks economic benefits for itself, and so do the workers). In practice, however, business representatives often make decisions that harm their business, and workers frequently vote for populist politicians. This notion was challenged with the emergence of the behavioral school of thought. For instance, Nobel laureate Herbert Simon built his ideas around the concept of bounded rationality. He criticized the neoclassical school for its assumption that people possess unlimited information-processing capabilities or “divine” (or “Olympian”, as he called it) rationality³⁶. Simon argued that while we strive to be rational, our ability to think in such a way is severely limited, especially given the complexity of the world. This is why the Bolsheviks, who realized this even before the behavioral theorists, had to resort to the concept of “bringing consciousness”. Classes have their interests, but this does not mean that their representatives are, for the most part, aware of these interests.

Is Everything in Marx’s Theory Wrong?

This article might give the impression that Marxism is entirely flawed, but we must also note that some of its provisions remain of interest for study. In addition to the already mentioned labor theory of value, which merely requires modernization and narrower specialization in its application, these include:

• The theory of the proletariat’s impoverishment (which was considered disproven for some time until the publication of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”) and the general law of capitalist accumulation. Marx was mistaken about absolute impoverishment (as the well-being of populations in poor countries has gradually improved in recent years); however, his predictions about relative impoverishment are currently accurate, as inequality levels continue to rise. That said, this can potentially be mitigated through effective government regulation;
• The conditionality of ideology by class interests;
• Marxist feminism, which has contributed to the development of the women’s rights movement.

These and, possibly, some other aspects of Marxism have contributed to progress rather than being fundamentally flawed. Here, we largely omit the philosophical component of Marxism, as philosophy does not align with the red politics framework of our journal.

Why Is Marxism So Popular?

Marxism is a cunning methodology that allows almost any question to be addressed without deep study. Any historical event, political struggle, or prediction can be superficially analyzed and presented with a “unique” and “original” opinion through the lens of “class struggle”, materialism, the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on. As a result, someone who has mastered a few simple Marxist dogmas becomes an “expert” on almost all topics. Such individuals believe in the scientific nature of Marxism, and therefore in the correctness of conclusions derived through its methodology. This simplicity of understanding, simplicity of truths, and reductionism of reality give a person a sense of superiority over others, making it difficult for them to abandon this perspective. A typical example of its application is labeling any non-communist country as “capitalist” — from prosperous Sweden to impoverished Zimbabwe, from the highly centralized North Korea to Somalia, and so on. In this way, the negative traits of unsuccessful countries can be attributed to successful ones. We wrote about this in more detail here.

Conclusion

Some works by the classical Marxist theorists represent an interesting contribution to the history of social-democratic development, but they can no longer serve as a doctrine for political movements today. This theory should be regarded in the same way as the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Maximilien Robespierre — evaluating them with adjustments for the modern context. The most important principles of political theory and practice should be based on more relevant scientific research, such as the works of Thomas Piketty or Daron Acemoglu. Simply put, we believe that today it is necessary to use a scientific methodology rather than a Marxist one.

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