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Dr. James Ricks, Region 4 Coordinator, Cape Girardeau MO |
| Menu Options | Man's Marxism Pt. 2 |
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Man's Marxism Pt. 2[printer friendly]By: Michael Baumann This portion edited by: James Ricks The Marxist do more than ignore that which cannot be ignored, they also confuse cause and effect by believing the fallacy that economic conditions and the social and political circumstances that attach to them serve to shape everything and everyone. They have never stopped to ask themselves what (or who) changes economic conditions and why. Public policy and political theory are enacted only by real and identifiable human beings, not by any alleged impersonal forces of change set loose in the world at large. Individual human beings are the true movers and shakers in political affairs, not "the spirit of the age," not "the winds of freedom and equality," not "historically determined class struggle," not even "ideas whose time has come." Classes, as such, do not exist. Only fallen individual human beings exist. Classes are a sociologist’s fiction, a shorthand method of identifying and interpreting the great many billions of individuals who now live or who have lived upon this planet. In that way, Marxist theory is the political and sociological equivalent of philosophical realism and, as result, has most of philosophical realism’s attendant strengths and weaknesses, reification among them. I cannot explain it any more plainly than has Rose Wilder Lane: In the human world there is no entity but the individual person…. So far as Society has any existence, it exists when boy meets girl, when Mrs. Jones telephones Mrs. Smith, when Robinson buys a cigar, when the motorist stops for gasoline…when the postman delivers the mail and the labor bosses discuss a strike…and the dentist says “Wider, please.” Human relationships are so infinitely numerous and varying every moment, that no human mind can begin to grasp them…. To call these relationships Society, and then discuss the welfare or progress of Society, as if it existed as a bee swarm does, is simply to escape from reality to fairyland. (Lane, pp. 5-6) Marxists seem subject to the same delusions as the sociologists described in C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength. …whose education had had the curious effect of making the things he read and wrote more real to him than things he saw. Statistics about agricultural laborers were the substance; any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow. Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (Lewis, p. 87). Such ideas are not new. Centuries ago Aristotle understood that those with money and those without were likely to be mentally and socially crippled by the distorted way the viewed each other as only either rich or poor, rather than as individual human beings. Modern Marxists are subject to the same ancient interpretive delusion to which Aristotle alluded. Marxist taxonomy binds Marxists – and those over whom they rule – in the chains of error. The Marxists not only see aggregates where only individuals exist, they also see only imperialists, revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. That is, the Marxists not only fall afoul of the fallacy of aggregation, they apply laudatory or pejorative labels to the aggregates they have created, and thereby applaud or condemn millions of individuals happen to fall into one or the other artificial category. For such “offenses” millions of people, quite literally, have died. But, though people rule the world, and not impersonal forces or faceless masses, one must not conclude that therefore ideas are either unimportant or inconsequential. As University of Chicago Professor Richard Weaver properly observed, ideas have consequences. But ideas do not have consequences independently of the people who conceive them, refine them and apply them. Thus, on their own, ideas do not lead us places, we take them somewhere. Only to the extent that people act upon their beliefs do ideas have consequences. People do not always do so; but when they do, they themselves are the active agents in history, not their mental conceptions. The Marxists mistakenly believe that justice is synonymous with equality. It is not. Justice is not having the same as your neighbor, regardless of differences in skill, investment, effort, ownership, worth and chance. Nor is justice the same as confiscating the personal property of some in order to give it to those who have no moral or legal claim upon it. Justice is not synonymous with either equality or coercive redistribution. Justice is having what is rightfully yours by inheritance, by hard work, by legal purchase and by good fortune. Justice is the same as equality only for those people and in those circumstances that are truly equal. Such people and such circumstances, however, are exceedingly rare. We human beings, and the varying circumstances in which we find ourselves, are not equal. Whatever else they may be, things that are all the same are not human. Things that are not the same are not equal. To misunderstand this fact is to misunderstand justice. To misunderstand justice is to set a course for political and economic failure. As Brian Griffiths explains, To aim for after-tax equality of income as a major objective of economic policy has three basic difficulties associated with it. By blunting the incentives of economic life to start with, it would discourage enterprise and reduce the real income of the society as a whole. Next, it would seem to many unfair not to allow differentials in wages based on such things as training costs, risk, mobility, hard work, and innovation. Finally, the kind of society which typically decides to abolish inequality of income and wealth ends up creating inequality based on political power because of the discretion it invests in government. (Griffiths, p. 78). By abolishing private property rights, Marxism has cut economic rewards loose from risk taking ,from effort and from saving. Human beings simply cannot be relied on to make the careful and painstaking evaluations necessary to assess the real possibilities for success or failure before taking entrepreneurial risks when neither the profits gained from such risks nor the losses incurred from such risks are theirs. Nor can investment capital be accumulated except from the profits of prior endeavors, the use of which has been sacrificed for the present in order to make possible (but not certain) greater prosperity in the future. In a low-efficiency system like Marxism, where profits already tend to be very small, workers will be unwilling to work harder to raise a company’s profit margin or to endure intensified deprivation for the purpose of funding future endeavors that are not likely to be successful, or, if they are successful, will not yield profits to them but to the state. A socialist economy does not permit people to reap for themselves the rewards of their hard work, shrewdness and abstinence. For that reason, if for no other, socialism will never be as successful as democratic capitalism. When private property rights disappear, so does the entrepreneurial spirit. Incentive is tied inextricably to ownership. Marxists seem to focus more on the egalitarian redistribution of wealth than on the most effective means of producing that wealth. They seem not to understand that one cannot redistribute what has not been produced. If one’s system of production does not create the goods, then no matter how one slices the pie, the economic status of the nation will not be raised. Marxists seem to understand that some of the most fertile repositories of wealth are not susceptible to reallocation and redistribution, such as inventiveness and know-how. A great deal of Western wealth (especially the means to future Western wealth) resides not in material things but in the technological brilliance and innovativeness embodied in so many of its best and most valuable workers. That brilliance and innovativeness cannot be appropriated by the state and reassigned and redistributed at will. The market rewards those who serve and those who give, not those who do not. Capitalist prosperity hinges not upon our selfishness, but upon our successfully focusing upon, analyzing and satisfying someone else’s needs. We succeed in the marketplace only insofar as we advance the cause of our fellows and invest our resources and our efforts in that advance. If you neglect your neighbor’s needs; if you refuse to put your time, talent and treasure to work providing for his convenience; your enterprise comes to nothing. If you nurture your neighbor’s needs you will enjoy the fruits of your labors. Whatever else we may call this attention to meeting the needs of others, it is not selfishness. The marketplace is a school for virtue, not a subsidy for vice. The critics of capitalism do not understand this because they do not understand either the market-wide beneficial effects of economic competition or the inescapably civilizing effects of the marketplace. Nor do they understand that after a freely entered market exchange both parties are better off, otherwise no exchange would have taken place. Competition is a struggle for excellence that results in better products at lower and lower prices to the consumers. This was also a time when Ronald Reagan was denounced by intellectuals for his alleged clumsiness and bellicosity when he made a moving speech in Berlin urging Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the Wall. But, in 1989, when those self-same intellectuals least expected it, the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and with it began the collapse of the worst tyranny that has ever plagued humanity and all of humanity’s enterprises. The next day I sat with Hungary’s new President, Arpad Goncz, once imprisoned for his dissident activity. We talked instead about Soviet and American foreign policy. Make no mistake, President Goncz told me, Hungarians are the beneficiaries of the Gorbachev era. But, like a great sailor, a great “harnesser of wind,” Gorbachev is reacting to history, not directing it. Much more than that, President Goncz added, his countrymen were the beneficiaries of the Reagan era. They, along with other “middle Europeans,” as he refers to them, were liberated by two Reagan salients in the 1980s. First, Ronald Reagan made it possible for the West to win in the marketplace; though only minimal, deregulation and tax-cutting gave such a boost to the American economy that communist nations could not hope to compete. Second, Reagan made it impossible for the Soviets to keep up militarily by placing Pershing II missiles in West Germany and by his singular persistence in promoting the Strategic Defense Initiative. What? Central and Eastern Europe liberated by a combination of crass capitalism and macho militarism? When I reported back to my American companions what the Hungarian president had said, they reacted in disbelief, as if I had teased or even coerced this sort of repugnant Reaganism out of one of Hungary’s national heroes. How unlike anything these journalists – themselves candidates for a New York Times Magazine profile – had ever advocated at home.
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