The failure of Marxism

SIR – I am less concerned than the Bank of England’s governor Mark Carney about the possible advance of Marxist ideas (report, April 14), once those ideas are examined.

There are two basic notions. One is the labour theory of value, which is a denial of the idea that the value of something is that which someone else is willing to pay for it. This contradicts the whole principle and practice of commerce since the invention of barter. In modern terms, it contradicts the accountability of a supplier to a customer under an agreed contract, on which our present prosperity is entirely based.

The second idea is that social change can only come about through a war in which one class defeats and supersedes another class. In fact, the democratisation of our society has been a gradual process, with power and wealth being transferred by stages from an aristocratic oligarchy to the whole of the population. Attempts by Marxist historians to show that such a class war occurred in England in the 17th, 18th, or 19th centuries are unhistorical distortions.

These two Marxist ideas have only been applied in practice in the Soviet Union and its satellites, and in Maoist China. A centralised, bureaucratic dictatorship controlled the whole of the society and economy on the false claim to act on behalf of the working class. The outcome was terrible misery, cruelty, poverty and stagnation. By contrast, capitalism and the market economy have generated wealth and opportunity through technological innovation, and distributed it throughout society, to a degree beyond the imagination of the Marxist theoreticians.

Anthony Pick Newbury, Berkshire