On this 5th of May, the author of the Capital would have blown his 200 candles. Embittered by the communism theorist’s admirers, Nicolas Lecaussin explains how his idea was contradicted by facts.
A Romanian who became French, Bogdan Călinescu lived his adolescence under Ceaușescu’s dictatorship. Moreover, his father was a dissident intellectual. Today, Bogdan Călinescu writes and publishes in France under the name Nicolas Lecaussin and manages a libertarian think tank, (IREF) – Institute of Economic and Fiscal Research.
I remember very well the Scientific Socialism classes that we (as all other “sister” countries) had to take in high school and also at the university. The course was part of the political education class which contributed to our indoctrination. Our teachings… the Marxist-Leninist theory.
At that time, I was far from realizing how all that nonsense around historical materialism, class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat/working class or the end of capitalism had doomed entire countries to misery and mind-numbing, still gaining the support of plenty of intellectuals from the West.
The stupidities we were told several times a week in high school were all taken from the Marxist-Leninist ideas, followed to the letter and put into practice in communist Romania. In contrast with what the nostalgic of communism claimed after its collapse in 1989, the disasters and massacres inflicted by the communists were neither deviations, nor corruptions of another “pure” and “generous” idea. Marxist and Leninist theses deliver the essential seeds for the disaster of the planned economy and communist totalitarianism.
Furthermore, upon leaving my scientific socialism class I could witness de visu the actual success (the praxis so dear to Marx) of this ideology: the poverty, the penury, the dictatorship, the repression etc. The communist society clearly proved both the failure of Marxism and the fact that Marx had been completely wrong. By putting an end to the private property and by dissolving the individual into the mass population, he set the base for the modern totalitarianism.
The author of “The Manifesto” didn’t hide his admiration for terror and believed that the socialist society and the new man had to be established by force. Due to his anti-capitalism, poverty was generalized. He, who had never entered a factory, wanted the end of classes and the communist dictatorship to be strictly obeyed by instituting the class genocide: extermination of kulaks, intellectuals, religion and any other “enemy of the people“.
Due to the applied Marxism, I witnessed the end of classes in Romania, but also the rise a new one: the dominant, exclusive apparatchiks which were “more equal than others”. They had access to shops I was forbidden to enter. They had their own dining hall at the Party’s headquarters. The laboring class dictatorship became the Party dictatorship and oligarchy.
Marxism’s criminality proved itself on all continents where this ideology was adopted because only a dictatorship could put it into practice. Communism’s dozens of millions of deaths were all victims of the radical solution that Marx had unequivocally pointed out.
And that’s not all. One only has to read the texts. Marx wants to get rid of all “dying people, the Bohemians, the Corinthians, the Dalmatics etc…” Engels demands the extermination of the Hungarians. The racial superiority of the White people is a “scientific” truth for Marx. Moreover, Ludwig von Mises compares the ten emergency measures advocated by Marx in Hitler’s Manifesto: “Eight out of ten points were carried out by the Nazi with a radicalism that would have delighted Marx”, wrote the Austrian economist in 1944.
However, thank God, since the publication of the Manifesto and the Capital, history has evolved completely different from Karl Mark’s prophecies. Capitalism did not collapse and the market economy is the only one still working, the only one to have emancipated and enriched the “proletariat”.
Had he been honest, Marx could have noticed it all by himself: facts contradicted his prophecies. Between 1818, his birth, and 1883 his death, workers’ salaries doubled, and PIB per capita in Great Britain tripled! Today, the average wealth of a Rhénanie inhabitant (Mark was born in Trèves) is twenty times superior to what it used to be in 1818! Despite the two world wars and due to capitalism.
Karl Mark was completely wrong. The only remains of his ideology, where it was used, are fields of ruins and dead bodies.
