# What is/was Marx's legacy? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [September 28, 2013, 9:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859 "2013-09-28T09:18:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 3:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/21 "2013-09-29T03:02:48Z")
I don’t know. I have an amateur understanding of him and his writings at best. I tried reading one of his books (I forget which one) once. I liked his ideas about history being a class struggle, but then he (and/or Engels) started writing about social engineering, which to me seemed really unrealistic. I’ve heard one of the traits of fascism iswriting off social engineering as an idiotic utopian fantasy. That was my impression of the social engineering I was being exposed to. Marx wrote his ideas long before we knew anything about psychology, sociology, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, etc. Having said that, I think Communism has been used as a boogie-man by people who stand to benefit from banana republics and corporate fascism. The abuses of people like Stalin, Mao, the Kim regime or Pol Pot definitely didn’t help. But communists did help nations escape from imperialism. Granted they sometimes just created new empires and dictatorships though. For those in the know, why was Marx so sure that communism would come about in an industrialized society like the ones in western europe instead of rural agrarian societies like it did eventually develop in (China, Russia, southeast asia, various other nations, etc)? Also was Marx really that radical compared to other writers of his time? The revolutions of [1848](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1848) occurred both as and before Marx wrote his books. I don’t see Marx’s ideas being too radical in an environment where something like that could happen in various nations. Was he just a mouthpiece for the frustrations of the time? Another thing I don’t get is how was communism pro-nationalist in some nations but anti-nationalist in others? In places like the US or Chile communism seems like an anti-nationalist movement. In places like Vietnam it seemed pro-nationalist. Maybe it had to do with whether you felt your nation was a pawn of international forces or not. His overall legacy is hard to judge. Communists get a bad rap in the US, but they did do a lot of good. Communists organizations offered a legal defense when the Scottsboro boys were falsely accused of rape as well as taking a stand against lynching. Communists played a role in starting the labor movement in the US, which gave us a higher standard of living. I’m sure there are other things they did that history has whitewashed. [Social Democracy](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy) is a nice middle ground. I see that movement growing in international momentum. ---
**Author:** ![Athabasca](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/b38774/32.png) [@Athabasca](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Athabasca)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/22 "2013-09-29T05:07:21Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > And here I entered the thread to say, “those glasses with the mustache.” But now I’ll fondly recall the t-shirt showing the brothers three, with the slogan, “Sure I’m a Marxist!” Actually, there were 4 bros. You forgot Gummo. ---
**Author:** ![Ibn\_Warraq](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/e19b73/32.png) [@Ibn\_Warraq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ibn_Warraq)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 5:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/23 "2013-09-29T05:29:52Z")
> [@Gack](#): > > Marx’s legacy is pervasive and profoundly negative. > > First, you need to read ‘The Communistic Manifesto’, it’s online and isn’t too long. On one hand it has a biting analysis of the downside of capitalism. However, I read it for the first time recently and commented online about the sharp analysis of capitalism, and someone responded that Adam Smith had done a better job 100(?) years prior. > > Once you get past the analysis of capitalism you get to the vision for the future and the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Here the concepts have a quality similar to those of a comic book, complete fantasy and totally without substance. How can anyone take a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ seriously for even a minute? It is not possible. > > So, what is missing, Marxism is clearly something more than a dated critique of capitalism and a comic book vision of the future. What is it? It is a rational for the destruction of existing society, Marxism provides the mindless slogans masquerading as ideas that provide a cover for a revolutionary element to destroy society. > > And, in communist Russia, we’ve seen the results. A government that massacred its own citizens in the millions, with estimates running for 20 million to 60 million. > > The cant of Marxism is that the masses will become a revolutionary force motivated by Marxism and will act to overthow the capitalist government. But that has never happened, the Russian revolution was a top down revolution that turned out to be a disaster for the Russian peasant. > > The Russians were never able to export their revolution to the industrialized societies as Marx envisioned. They realized that the proletariat was bound to the existing governments by culture and tradition, to the extent that Marxist rhetoric could never get through to them. > > German Marxists recognized that they only way a communist revolution could take place in an industrialized country was if the existing cultural institutions of the society were destroyed first. What they developed is called cultural Marxism, and the group that developed it is known as the Frankfurt school. Wiki has an informative article. > > The pillars of western society are the family and Christianity. So, these are the primary targets of cultural Marxists. With the rise of the Nazis the Frankfurt school left Germany and moved to Columbia Univ. in NY. > > Cultural Marxists play significant roles in every movement in the US that is an attack on the traditional values of the country. You can figure out for yourself what these movements are. I think the Greeks, the Romans, not to mention the Jews and Muslims, would find your claims about “Christianity” being one of the pillars of the West quite stupid. Perhaps you could explain. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 5:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/24 "2013-09-29T05:50:32Z")
Lots of people could tell you that Marx wrote Das Kapital and some stuff on alienation of labor from product, and I’m one of them, and I don’t know much about Marx. Marx was not himself impressed with the Manifesto and stated he wasn’t a Marxist. The stuff on alienation is considered important philosophically and his observations in Das Kapital are considered his most important work. That capitalism could be disasterously immoral and dehumanizing was pointed out by an earlier economic philosopher, one Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations. Smith has been embraced by anti-Marxists, but his warnings largely ignored. My university (UCLA) was overrun by Marxist teaching assistants when I was an undergraduate. As Marxists, the utterly despised my liberalism, which they considered more dangerous to the inevitability of history than conservatism. And for good reason. I’m an anti-socialist and anti-communist. But I will consider a policy or program on a piecemeal basis on its merits even if it could be fairly described as socialist or communist. Such as social security or universal health care. If something can work better being done by the government than private industry, I’m all for a genuine pilot project and when proven adopting widely. Like the post office. Much better than UPS or FedEx for efficiency to be run by the government. Or Universal Health Care (UHC) or Social Security. These have been shown to work quite well. Modern conservatism wants to make workers desperate and to die early as a supply of labor for industry. As a liberal I find that monstrous. ---
**Author:** ![eschereal](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/eschereal/32/18939_2.png) [@eschereal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/eschereal)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 7:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/25 "2013-09-29T07:49:50Z")
> [@Athabasca](#): > > Actually, there were 4 bros. You forgot Gummo. Five. Gummo was a vaudevillian who never appeared in their movies but worked behind the scenes. The one that was in a few early movies was Zeppo. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 12:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/26 "2013-09-29T12:37:25Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > And here I entered the thread to say, “those glasses with the mustache.” But now I’ll fondly recall the t-shirt showing the brothers three, with the slogan, “Sure I’m a Marxist!” And I’m only here due to an interest in Family Circus cartoons. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 1:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/27 "2013-09-29T13:28:57Z")
> [@The\_Second\_Stone](#): > > My university (UCLA) was overrun by Marxist teaching assistants when I was an undergraduate. As Marxists, the utterly despised my liberalism, which they considered more dangerous to the inevitability of history than conservatism. And for good reason. I’m an anti-socialist and anti-communist. But I will consider a policy or program on a piecemeal basis on its merits even if it could be fairly described as socialist or communist. Such as social security or universal health care. If something can work better being done by the government than private industry, I’m all for a genuine pilot project and when proven adopting widely. Like the post office. Much better than UPS or FedEx for efficiency to be run by the government. Or Universal Health Care (UHC) or Social Security. These have been shown to work quite well. Modern conservatism wants to make workers desperate and to die early as a supply of labor for industry. As a liberal I find that monstrous. Why did communists hate your liberalism? I’ve heard in latin america some communists (decades ago) despised social democrats because they felt that the social democrats were helping the peasants get contented with crumbs when they could’ve had the whole cake. Was that what was going on in your situation, liberalism was considered a form of triangulation and appeasement? ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 3:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/28 "2013-09-29T15:00:30Z")
> [@Athabasca](#): > > Actually, there were 4 bros. You forgot Gummo. Both Gummo and Zeppo were out of the act very early on. They’d be the Marxist Apocrypha. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 5:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/29 "2013-09-29T17:59:57Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Why did communists hate your liberalism? I’ve heard in latin america some communists (decades ago) despised social democrats because they felt that the social democrats were helping the peasants get contented with crumbs when they could’ve had the whole cake. Was that what was going on in your situation, liberalism was considered a form of triangulation and appeasement? Precisely. Us petty bourgeois are a great danger to their perfect plan for a perfect world. Never mind that every example of communism ever attempted has turned out to be a hideous tyranny, which they excuse as it wasn’t really a Marxist government. No shit. The most effective communist government ever is in China because they’ve combined the worst of communism and capitalism. Which would you rather have? Chinese style commie/capitalism, or Swedish socialism lite? ---
**Author:** ![Subterraneanus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Subterraneanus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Subterraneanus)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 6:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/30 "2013-09-29T18:06:09Z")
Aside from enormous philosophical contributions in his early writings, his discussions of surplus value and the labor theory of value are nothing if not seminal. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/31 "2013-09-29T18:08:39Z")
Marx’s legacy? A hundred million dead. ---
**Author:** ![BrotherCadfael](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@BrotherCadfael](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrotherCadfael)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/32 "2013-09-29T18:10:07Z")
OK, technically it’s closer to sixty-five or seventy million… ---
**Author:** ![Subterraneanus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a183cd/32.png) [@Subterraneanus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Subterraneanus)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 6:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/33 "2013-09-29T18:10:23Z")
Another legacy is having elicited more strident hand waving from the semi-literate than perhaps any other thinker in modern history. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 7:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/34 "2013-09-29T19:38:17Z")
> [@BrotherCadfael](#): > > OK, technically it’s closer to sixty-five or seventy million… I’m pretty sure that Marx didn’t personally kill or direct the killing of anyone. Attaching responsibility for deaths done by fanatical followers to a harmless eccentric is a formula for lobotomizing all the intelligentsia. And Ayn Rand. Not that Marx would care, being dead and all. But that kind of logic makes Adam Smith (the classical economic philosopher of the enlightenment, not the modern author) responsible for every industrial death and accident, impoverishment, mechanical war death etc. Smith was a harmless philosopher, just like Marx. Machiavelli may have written a manual on how to commit evil to gain power, but that doesn’t make Hitler and Stalin, his biggest fans, less than actual instigators. Vince Gilligan isn’t responsible for all the Walter White wannabes. ---
**Author:** ![Malden\_Capell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/malden_capell/32/5274_2.png) [@Malden\_Capell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malden_Capell)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/35 "2013-09-29T21:13:12Z")
I think his greatest contribution is his emphasis on history as something deserving scientific study, rather than as most people before him had done, present history as a series of great men doing great deeds alone. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [September 29, 2013, 11:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/36 "2013-09-29T23:31:55Z")
Marx didn’t invent that, though. Hegel had done it before him, and even Vico to an extent. As to the other question, I do think it’s fair to say that the people who died under Communism is part of Marx’s legacy. It’s not what Marx intended, and, like **Second Stone** , he didn’t kill anyone himself. But I think that’s a narrow way of looking at it. He was a writer and a theorist, and his writings and his theories led that stuff to occur. Certainly, if you say, as **Lumpy** said “The biggest legacy of Marx today is that industrial societies have in fact reformed from the Dickensian/ robber baron capitalism of the 19th century- quite possibly as the result of conscious awareness of Marxist and Socialist doctrine.” then you have to say that the deaths under Communism are also part of his legacy, because Marx didn’t himself reform any industrial societies either, just like he didn’t commit any of the Stalinist purges. ---
**Author:** ![Cheshire\_Human](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/5f8ce5/32.png) [@Cheshire\_Human](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cheshire_Human)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/37 "2013-09-30T02:08:55Z")
> [@Subterraneanus](#): > > Aside from enormous philosophical contributions in his early writings, his discussions of surplus value and the labor theory of value are nothing if not seminal. You forgot ‘stupid’. No matter how much labor you put into a mud-pie, it’s still a mud-pie, value zero. ---
**Author:** ![WillFarnaby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/willfarnaby/32/514_2.png) [@WillFarnaby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/WillFarnaby)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/38 "2013-09-30T03:14:48Z")
Marx’s legacy is applying a pseudo-intellectual facade to adolescent misunderstandings of human nature, morality, economics, and class theory. ---
**Author:** ![The\_Second\_Stone](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/bbe5ce/32.png) [@The\_Second\_Stone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Second_Stone)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 6:21am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/39 "2013-09-30T06:21:17Z")
Saying Marx killed people because people read his books is like saying Jesus started the Crusades and all the religious wars in his name because of the Sermon on the Mount and its naivete. As for Marx being a real or pseudo-intellectual facade, I leave that to the academics and philosophers who have actually read his stuff, which I have not. It is my understanding from real intellectuals that Das Kapital is serious economic and philosophical exposition critiquing capitalism’s worst excesses. Unlike say, Atlas Shrugged, which is the straw man fantasy ramblings of a welfare queen hypocrite whose work in the best light possible is to strive persistently, hide in a secret valley with lots of servants and invent a fantasy steel while the world goes to hell. The great evil done in the name of Marxist ideology and purity is not a warrant to commit great evil in the name of capitalist ideology and purity. Government is and should be of, by and for the people, not economics. Worship of any “ism” and converting thought under any coercion, physical, economic distress, or emotional is simply inhumane. The great evil of Marxist governments that failed is that they were simply tyrannical in the forcing of their “ism”. Just like nationalism and imperialism can lead to great evil and horrific wars, or racism or religious or ethnic purity. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [September 30, 2013, 6:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859/40 "2013-09-30T06:59:26Z")
Marx failed to appreciate the fundamental contradiction in his beliefs. He said that capitalism was flawed because of the unbridgeable divide between the bosses and the workers - the bosses were unanswerable to the workers and shared no interests with them so the bosses would ruthlessly exploit the workers. But Marx’s political system essentially duplicated this flaw. The Communist Party would in theory be running the country on behalf of the citizens. But in reality, you had the same imbalance of power. The Party was the bosses and the citizens were the workers. And like in its economic counterpart, the Party was unanswerable to the citizens and shared no interests with them so the Party would ruthlessly exploit the citizens. People like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao ended up committing the kinds of crimes Marx predicted corporate leaders would commit when they had enough power. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-was-marxs-legacy/669859.md?page=3)