Analysis of Karl Marx--and Communism

Fatal Flaws of Communism

The Communist Manifesto was written in 1848 by Karl Marx. It was written in collaboration with Friedrich Engels (Berlin 120). The essay was a defense for the communist form of government, although Marx had never governed anyone prior to sketching this philosophy. He described a predictable evil which corrupts human nature and controls the human condition. The human condition is something Karl Marx dramatically oversimplified. He ridiculously insisted that all the inhabitants of Earth, past and present, fall into one of two broad categories: the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. Some other ways to describe these categories: those that have and those that do not have; the owners and the workers; the ruling middle class and the rebels. The eloquent power of The Communist Manifesto sprouted from Marx’s own pessimistic view of the human condition. The philosophy of Karl Marx was fatally flawed because he misunderstood the concepts of love, faith, and happiness. As a result, Karl Marx wrote a manifesto of bitterness and disillusionment. Because he did not possess all the things he thought he should possess, he concluded that everyone else must give up their personal property rights.

In his book Main Currents of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski succinctly described the upbringing and background of Karl Marx. Kolakowski wrote that Marx grew up in Prussia as the child of Jewish parents. His grandfathers were rabbis, and his father was a protestant lawyer. Protestantism in Prussia was “a necessary condition of professional and cultural emancipation.” In 1835, Marx became a law student at Bonn University. The following year, he transferred to Berlin University and remained a law student. Berlin University is where Marx was introduced to a Hegelianism, a philosophy which made reason the ultimate authority (80). Marx would later reject all the philosophies of his Protestant father, and did so in such a radical way that he was exiled from Prussia. Marx loved to study philosophy and history. In April of 1841, Karl Marx was awarded a doctor’s degree by Jena University (Kalakowski 83).By the time he wrote The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx was highly educated and deeply philosophical. It is amazing how Marx was so highly intelligent and educated but somehow fundamentally misunderstood the importance of love, faith, and happiness.

His explanation for Communism completely ignored the power and influence of love, which had existed throughout every previous society. He assigned love an insignificant weight as a sociological factor in the inevitable progression of politics. Love was not a reasonable thing to Marx, who relied entirely on intellectual reason to explain everything. The text of The Communist Manifesto demonstrated how Karl Marx picked a scenario, and he knew it would be criticized as a radical example, but he still used it as a representation of overall societal family structure: “Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the communists. On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On Capital, on private gain” (Marx 371). When Marx mentioned abolition of the family in the context that it was a precept of communism, and then declared that the foundations of upper class families were based entirely on capital and private gain, he effectively denounced love. Take his comments about wives as an example:

"Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each others’ wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common, and thus, at the most, what the communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalized community of women. (Marx 372) "

Karl Marx suggested that the majority of middle class people were marital infidels. He described an immoral situation that certainly existed, and still exists, because people will not always behave morally; but he should not have based his opinions about love entirely on the existence of immoral behavior. He did not demonstrate any respect for love, and he based his philosophy partly on dysfunctional marriages, as if they were a valid representation for all bourgeoisie marriages. Marx did not acknowledge this fundamental concept of society; he did not recognize that love is the binding gel of families everywhere.

There is no true family without love. Love was factored out in the Communist equation. When considering the existence of love, most people, regardless of geographical location, think of their immediate families. They think of their spouses, sons and daughters, and parents. They also think of cousins and friends. Love is a tangible thing to the vast majority of human beings. Outside the immediate family, many people fall in love with new acquaintances. People have been known to fall in love with complete strangers. Some people even go so far as to actually love their pet animals. Love is a driving force in all civilizations. This is an undeniable fact: love exerts influence over all of human history, past and present. But the function of love is curiously absent from the manifesto written by Karl Marx, at least the true and healthy function of love. In a letter to Friedrich Engels, Marx declared: “Blessed is he that hath no family” (Wheen 7). Marx’s use of the Biblical structure was no accident. He often wrote in Biblical form to intentionally mock religion. He not only misunderstood the influence of love on society, he lashed out against the institutions of religious faith.

Karl Marx was openly hostile toward religion. According to Marx, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience” (373). Marx arrogantly believed that the accumulation of all past history and human experience was worthless, and the opinion of a thirty-year old genius should supersede past experience. By writing his philosophy from an atheistic perspective and with so much self-righteous attitude, Marx should have known that the philosophy would be constantly rejected by millions of people. Religious beliefs have been an important factor in nearly every human culture since the dawn of civilization, and Marx was repulsed by that historical fact. According to Edward Reiss, Karl Marx was “…too quick to announce the death of religion, to declare that, for the masses, religious notions ‘have now long been dissolved by circumstance’” (135). Also, Marx thought that “religion itself involved a basic perpetual error” (Reiss 134). Communism offered no solution to the believer in God. It offered no avenue for praise.

Wars have been fought over religious differences, and it was faith that compelled men to sacrifice their own lives to glorify a certain God. When Marx discarded religion and treated the subject as irrelevant, he missed an essential factor in the construction of all governments. How will this government treat people of various faiths? This is a question Marx not only did not ask, but refused to examine: “The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination” (Marx 372). It is a subject that demands, at the very least, a government strategy. The strategy must be respectable in the eyes of different believers, or it is likely to fail; just as Communism has repeatedly failed wherever it is was tried. The founding fathers of the United States had a strategy, which was separation of church and state. People of faith usually will not tolerate religious oppression for very long. Without an avenue for praise they will struggle to be happy and eventually revolt.

Since Karl Marx was not content as an exiled political journalist, should governments assume that no other similar man can live life with contentment? Marx was only thirty years old when he wrote his version of the Communist philosophy. His writings were seemingly fueled by a laborers’ disgruntled disgust. Communism, as depicted by Karl Marx, declared that life has been governed primarily by a repetitive cycle of discontentment for both the bourgeoisie and the proletarians. Marx believed that political power was, and is always, the focus of the two discontent classes (Marx 358). Communism must be adopted in order for everyone to end the cycle of ignorance. Is Communism designed to obtain mass contentment? Karl Marx did not describe the final state of contentment, or the intended resulting state of his philosophy. He did not adequately describe the goal of Communism. According to Edward Reiss, “Marx shows misery as a widespread social malaise, whose cause is the way we organize (or fail to organize) society” (22). As a solution for the malaise, Marx believed we should surrender all personal property rights and allow governments to control the use of all resources—including human beings. This too, is a fatal flaw in the Communist philosophy.

Since free men and women typically enjoy their liberty, it is logical to conclude that freedom contributes to their happiness. Some people who have very limited material possessions are perfectly content because they possess each quality that Marx overlooked. They possess love of family and country. They possess faith in God and thankfulness. Their happiness is not derived from a stockpile of material possessions, or from an accumulation of political power. It makes no sense to propose, as a way to eradicate misery, the stripping away of human liberty. I believe Karl Marx envisioned a world having equal amounts of discontent and despair for all people. His philosophy was certainly no panacea!

An analysis of Karl Marx’s life prior to his authoring of The Communist Manifesto is key to understanding his misguided defense of Communism. In his magnanimity, Karl Marx found himself living poorly. Despite his intellectual prowess, he found himself alienated. He was alienated, exiled, and rejected by all but a few of the most radical and like-minded people. He even became an outsider to his immediate family (Wheen 8). When he died in March of 1883, there were only eleven mourners at the funeral (Wheen 1). When he was alive, he was too smart for his own well being. Thus, he embraced communism, and explained how communism could have prevented jealousy and bitterness from developing in his own life, or any other similar life. Marx embraced communism because it made him feel better about his own short-comings. It was easier to lash out at the world by portraying societies as foolish, rather than to accept his life at face value. Such was the promise of Communism; to force all men to live in an equal state of despair and discontentment, without love, without faith. The fatal flaws in Communist philosophy have been proven by the historical evidence. No nation state can survive very long without embracing love for one another, seeking faith in deity, and striving to achieve happiness in their lives. Communism, this great theory of universal misery, will always be doomed to fail so long as human compassion still exists!