Why Marxism Always Fails and Will Always Fail

If you look at my past posts you’ll find that I tend to avoid anything political but if a political/economic theory contradicts Christian theology, then that needs to be exposed. One such theory is Marxism. I can’t think of a political/economic theory that has failed more resoundingly than Marxism. Although Marxism always fails, it is again rising in popularity. If you Google Marxism 2020, you’ll see that it turns up over 14,000,000 results, and if you click on some of those results you’ll soon see that there are today a lot of gung-ho Marxists. Indeed, history teaches us that some people learn nothing from history

I wrote Marxism always fails and I do mean always. Marxism has been tried again and again, with much bloodshed, but Marxism always fails. In their Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Frederic Engels were clear, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”¹ You need to give up your stuff or the Marxists will take it from you and there’s the rub: most people don’t want to give up their stuff.² This is the reason Marxism always fails, and will always fail: Marxism promises utopia but starts off with a false anthropology–one that contradicts common sense and what the Bible teaches unambiguously. I’ll explain that shortly.

The Sayings of Chairman Mao

When I was an undergrad in the mid-1970s, there was often a communist booth in the university quad proclaiming the glories of Marxism. They distributed literature, and (I’m a little embarrassed to tell you this) I bought from them “the little red book,” AKA The Sayings of Chairman Mao, to give my brother for his ordination. I thought it funny at the time, which tells you something about my humor (I don’t think it’s funny anymore).

Karl Marx and Frederic Engels published the Communist Manifesto in 1848, and although there were some earlier failed attempts to implement their notions, Marxism didn’t begin in earnest until 1917 with the communist revolution in Russia, which subsequently became the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics or U.S.S.R. Then in 1946 there was the communist revolution in China under the dictatorship of Mao tse Tung. Other countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and so on, followed—always through bloody conflict. The interesting thing about chatting with the Marxists at the university booth was that they had become disillusioned with communism in the U.S.S.R after the 1974 English publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. In it, Solzhenitsyn, documented the murders and repressions of the U.S.S.R. Solzhenitsyn himself spent eight years in a Soviet Gulag, so it is an understatement to say he knew what he was talking about. Due to the Gulag Archipelago, the communists manning the university booth didn’t think that the Soviet Union was a good example of communism.

“Swap Child, Make Food”

The trouble was that they were also down on China because of the many horrors resulting from Mao’s communism. For example, “The Great Leap Forward” of 1958 to 1962 resulted in the death, mostly by starvation, of 30,000,000 Chinese people. The severity of the famine led many Chinese people to eat their children–in one province there was even the saying “Swap child, make food.”³ Apparently those communists in the booth still thought Mao right even though communism in China was nothing to be giddy about.

Albania?

So what’s a Marxist to do? Well, the country they pointed me to, their stellar example of doing Marxism right, was “Albania.” Albania?! Albania does much better today but had little to offer while a part of the U.S.S.R. When I told my professor, John Warwick Montgomery, that the communists pointed to Albania as their shining example, he started rolling with laughter (as he often does) and mocked: “Albania is rushing into the eighteenth century!” By the way, it was from that professor that I first heard the difference between Christianity and communism: The Christian says “What is mine is thine.” The communist says, “What is thine is mine!” Know the difference!

Kill Zones

The bane for Marxists is that today they can’t point to even one example of a country where Marxism resulted in utopia rather than poverty, repression, and mass murder. Marxism’s problem is simple (and this is where anthropology and theology comes in): People are selfish so they are not going to work hard unless they think they will be rewarded for their hard work. When self-interested people really, deeply think through the implications of John Lennon’s lyric “Imagine no possessions,” they aren’t keen on communism. So President Ronald Reagan quipped, “How do you tell a communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx…. And, how do you tell an anti-communist? An anti-communist is someone who understands Marx….” Thus the Soviet Union built walls topped with barbed wire, placed mines in the kill zone, and machinegunned those who tried to flee utopia! Again, they killed those who tried to flee utopia. The same thing happens today to those who try to flee the communist utopia of North Korea.

Marx’s Gobbledygook

Karl Marx, of course, was aware of the objection that people will not work hard unless they think their hard work will be rewarded. So in the Communist Manifesto he wrote:

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property, all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us. According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. The whole of this objection is but another expression of the tautology: that there can no longer be any wage-labour when there is no longer any capital.⁴

If you didn’t understand anything after the first sentence, don’t bother reading it again. It’s just a bunch of gobbledygook. But sadly, millions bought into this gobbledygook (or were killed if their “reeducation” was unsuccessful), and so hundreds of millions of people have had Marxism fail them miserably. Why did they buy into it? Selfishness of course! They didn’t want other people to have more stuff than they had. But soon universal laziness ensues and that’s the major problem with Marxism: it begins with the false anthropology that people are not innately selfish.⁵ However, people are innately selfish (you don’t have to teach a child to yell “Mine!”). People are not born innately altruistic or even tabula raza–blank slates waiting to be written on by their environment. By the way, most liberals believe that people are either born good or born tabula raza and and that’s why they always blame the environment for why people commit crimes rather than blame the perpetrators themselves.  

Marxism Produced the “Worst Car Ever Made”

That people will not work hard unless they believe they will be rewarded for their hard work is tragically yet humorously illustrated by the fact that while the West Germans were making the Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz, BMW, and Porsche, the East Germans were making the Trabant, which has been dubbed the “worst car ever made.” Dan Neil explains:

This is the car that gave Communism a bad name. Powered by a two-stroke pollution generator that maxed out at an ear-splitting 18 hp, the Trabant was a hollow lie of a car constructed of recycled worthlessness (actually, the body was made of a fiberglass-like Duroplast, reinforced with recycled fibers like cotton and wood). A virtual antique when it was designed in the 1950s, the Trabant was East Germany’s answer to the VW Beetle—a ‘people’s car,’ as if the people didn’t have enough to worry about. Trabants smoked like an Iraqi oil fire, when they ran at all, and often lacked even the most basic of amenities, like brake lights or turn signals. But history has been kind to the Trabi. Thousands of East Germans drove their Trabants over the border when the Wall fell, which made it a kind of automotive liberator. Once across the border, the none-too-sentimental Ostdeutschlanders immediately abandoned their cars. Ich bin Junk!⁶

Nonetheless, Marxists have argued with me that there’s nothing wrong with Marxism, it’s just that Marxism has never been done right. But honest people, when they examine their own hearts, realize that people are selfish, and so they know that Marxism can never succeed. Marxism is based on a false anthropology, and, of course, is contrary to Christian theology which reveals that humans are desperately sinful.

But because people are selfish, I need to end with a warning to free market adherents. We must make sure that those with limited economic means sincerely believe it is possible for them to financially succeed or none of what I’ve written above matters. Why? Because people are selfish and if they don’t think they can succeed in the system, then they will try to destroy the system. That’s what we see happening today.

Jeremiah 17:9: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”
Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

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1. Karl Marx and Frederic Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf, 22, accessed September 19, 2020. [↩]
2. The Manifesto makes this clear: “Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the
   majority of the people.” Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 49. A “rebel” of course, is someone who doesn’t willingly give up their prized possessions. [↩]
3. Jasper Becker, Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine (New York: Free Press, 1996), 307. [↩]
4. Marx and Engels, Manifesto, 24. [↩]
5. There are other huge problems with Marxism. I’m only focusing on it as an economic theory. [↩]
6. Dan Neil, “The 50 Worst Cars of All Time,” Time.com, April 25, 2017, https://time.com/4723114/50-worst-cars-of-all-time/, accessed September 19-2020. [↩]