Criticism of Marxism
This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism (both philosophical and historical), arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives.
Conservative historian Paul Johnson in his 1988 book Intellectuals wrote that Marx "developed traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of half-assimilated materials and to plan encyclopaedic works which were never completed; a withering contempt for all non-scholars; and extreme assertiveness and irascibility in dealing with other scholars.
He continues: "The truth is, even the most superficial inquiry into Marx's use of evidence forces one to treat with skepticism everything he wrote which relies on factual data".
For example, Johnson stated: "The whole of the key Chapter Eight of Capital is a deliberate and systematic falsification to prove a thesis which an objective examination of the facts showed was untenable".
[9] This economic "base" of society supports, is reflected by and influences the ideological "superstructure" which encompasses culture, religion, politics, and all other aspects of humanity's social consciousness.
Law, politics, the arts, literature, morality and religion are understood by Marx to make up the superstructure as reflections of the economic base of society.
For instance, Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard criticized historical materialism by arguing that Marx claimed the "base" of society (its technology and social relations) determined its "consciousness" in the superstructure.
[14][non-primary source needed] Marx's theory of history has been considered a variant of historical determinism[15] linked to his reliance on dialectical materialism as an endogenous mechanism for social change.
[17]The concept of the dialectic first emerged from the dialogues of the ancient Greek philosophers, but it was revived by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century as a conceptual framework for describing the often-opposing forces of historical evolution.
Historical determinism has also been associated with scholars like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, but in recent times this conceptual approach has fallen into disuse.
[22] In an effort to reassert this approach to an understanding of the forces of history, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar criticised what he considered the narrow conceptual basis of Marx's ideas on historical evolution.
Whenever a single factor, however important and fundamental, is called upon to illuminate the entire past and by implication the future, it simply invites disbelief, and after closer inspection, rejection.
They both offered an easy prey to the critics, and the result is that today historical determinism is regarded by most scholars as an idea so bankrupt that it can never be solvent again.
[26] The American neoclassical economist Milton Friedman argued that the absence of a free market economy under socialism would inevitably lead to an authoritarian political regime.
[31] Even if this new aristocracy were to have originated from among the ranks of the proletariat, Bakunin argued that their new-found power would fundamentally change their view of society and thus lead them to "look down at the plain working masses".
British economist Alfred Marshall attacked Marx, saying: "It is not true that the spinning of yarn in a factory [...] is the product of the labour of the operatives.
The shift from labor being the source of all value to subjective individual evaluations creating all value undermines Marx's economic conclusions and some of his social theories.
The free market solution is the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how a good should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for it.
The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability which in turn allows on the basis of individual consensual decisions corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses.
Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution and, without the information provided by market prices, socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources.
[54] The economist John Kenneth Galbraith has criticised communal forms of socialism that promote egalitarianism in terms of wages or compensation as unrealistic in its assumptions about human motivation: This hope [that egalitarian reward would lead to a higher level of motivation], one that spread far beyond Marx, has been shown by both history and human experience to be irrelevant.
Once those errors are corrected, Marx's conclusion that aggregate price and profit are determined by—and equal to—aggregate value and surplus value no longer holds true.
[61] Critics who have alleged that Marx has been proved internally inconsistent include former and current Marxian and/or Sraffian economists, such as Paul Sweezy,[62] Nobuo Okishio,[63] Ian Steedman,[64] John Roemer,[65] Gary Mongiovi[66] and David Laibman,[67] who propose that the field be grounded in their correct versions of Marxian economics instead of in Marx's critique of political economy in the original form in which he presented and developed it in Capital.
In a recent survey of the debate, Kliman concludes that "the proofs of inconsistency are no longer defended; the entire case against Marx has been reduced to the interpretive issue".
[70][71][72] John Maynard Keynes referred to Capital as "an obsolete textbook which I know to be not only scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the modern world".
According to Leszek Kołakowski, the laws of dialectics at the very base of Marxism are fundamentally flawed: some are "truisms with no specific Marxist content", others "philosophical dogmas that cannot be proved by scientific means", yet others just "nonsense".
Economist Thomas Sowell wrote in 1985: What Marx accomplished was to produce such a comprehensive, dramatic, and fascinating vision that it could withstand innumerable empirical contradictions, logical refutations, and moral revulsions at its effects.
[89]Many notable academics such as Karl Popper, David Prychitko, Robert C. Allen, and Francis Fukuyama argue that many of Marx's predictions have failed.
The socialist revolution would occur first in the most advanced capitalist nations and once collective ownership had been established then all sources of class conflict would disappear.
Popper has argued that both the concept of Marx's historical method as well as its application are unfalsifiable and thus it is a pseudoscience[93] that cannot be proven true or false: The Marxist theory of history, in spite of the serious efforts of some of its founders and followers, ultimately adopted this soothsaying practice.
