Remember Marx for all the things he got wrong

On May 5, admirers of Karl Marx celebrated his 200th birthday. Marx didn’t make it to 200, but the ideas he injected into the global conversation and the ideologies that bear his name far outlasted the German economist and philosopher.

As socialist ideas grow in popularity in the U.S., and as the memory of the Cold War fades, respect for Marx is enjoying a bit of a resurgence.

But something about this celebration of Marx sits uneasily. For those who have read history or lived through the 20th century, it’s hard to forget the tens of millions of people who starved to death under Mao Zedong, the tens of millions purged, starved or sent to gulags by Joseph Stalin, or the millions slaughtered in Cambodia’s killing fields. From North Korea to Vietnam, 20th century communism always seem to result in either crimes against humanity, grinding poverty or both. Meanwhile, Venezuela, the most dramatic socialist experiment of the 21st century in a nation with the world’s largest oil reserves, is in full economic collapse.

This dramatic record of failure should make us wonder whether there was something inherently and terribly wrong with the German thinker’s core ideas. Defenders of Marx will say that Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot exemplified only a perverted caricature of Marxism, and that the real thing hasn’t yet been tried. Others will cite Western interference or oil price fluctuations as the reason for socialism’s failures. Some will even cite China’s recent growth as a communist success story, conveniently ignoring the fact that the country only recovered from Mao after substantial economic reforms and a huge burst of private-sector activity.

All of these excuses ring hollow. There must be inherent flaws in the ideas that continue to lead countries like Venezuela over economic cliffs.

The best way to look for those flaws is to follow Cooper’s advice and read Marx with judicious detachment. My favorite example of this is a 2013 post in which University of California— Berkeley economic historian Brad DeLong tried to boil Marx’s big ideas down to their essentials, and evaluate each one. Marx, DeLong writes, failed to appreciate the degree to which capital investment raises worker productivity and living standards. He didn’t predict the shift from manufacturing to services. And he underrated the power and usefulness of the signals and incentives created by the price system in a capitalist economy.

Those mistakes alone would be enough to hobble an economy and send any economic doctrine to the rubbish heap. But they can’t explain why communism was so often accompanied by atrocities.

The brutality and insanity of communist leaders might have been a historical fluke, but it also could have been rooted in another of what DeLong sees as Marx’s mistake—the preference for revolution over evolution.

But overthrowing the system has usually been a disaster. Successful revolutions tend to be those like the American Revolution, which overthrow foreign rule while keeping local institutions largely intact. Violent social upheavals like the Russian Revolution or the Chinese Civil War have, more often than not, led both to ongoing social divisions and bitterness, and to the rise of opportunistic, megalomaniac leaders like Stalin and Mao.

Meanwhile, the most successful examples of socialism— mixed economies of the Scandinavian countries, France, Germany, and Canada—came not from the violent overthrow of the old order, but from gradual change within the democratic, partly capitalist system.

Even in the supposedly capitalist bastion of the U.S., the social safety net is a lot stronger than people give it credit for—thanks to government benefits, America’s child poverty rate is at an all-time low. Meanwhile, almost all rich countries now have progressive income taxes, universal public education and laws against child labor—all things that Marx demanded in 1848 in the Communist Manifesto.

So although Marx was far-sighted in identifying some of the problems of capitalism, he got the solution very wrong. Remembering this is the best way to commemorate his birthday.