One of the most insidious ideologies of our time is Marxism. Its proponents use Marxism to undermine our political and social institutions. They dismiss ordinary morality as a tool to cover up exploitation and oppression. They claim that capitalism exploits workers and that it should be replaced by socialism, even though socialist and communist regimes have killed millions of people. We must arm ourselves against this devil’s brew. For that reason, it’s essential that we study what the two greatest social thinkers and defenders of freedom, Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard, have said about it. That way we will be prepared to battle against the forces of evil.
Marx said that capitalism pushes down workers’ wages until they barely provide enough money to live on. In fact, as Mises points out, capitalism results in a vast improvement of the workers’ standard of living. Mises says: “What really destroyed Marx was his idea of the progressive impoverishment of the workers. Marx didn’t see that the most important characteristic of capitalism was large-scale production for the needs of the masses; the main objective of capitalists is to produce for the broad masses. Nor did Marx see that under capitalism the customer is always right. In his capacity as a wage earner, the worker cannot determine what is to be made. But in his capacity as a customer, he is really the boss and tells his boss, the entrepreneur, what to do. His boss must obey the orders of the workers as they are members of the buying public. Mrs. Webb, like other socialists, was the daughter of a well-to-do businessman. Like other socialists, she thought her father was an autocrat who gave orders to everybody. She didn’t see that he was subject to the sovereignty of the orders of the customers on the market. The ‘great’ Mrs. Webb [Beatrice Potter] was no smarter than the dumbest messenger boy who sees only that his boss gives orders.” [Mrs. Webb was a leading member of the Fabian Society. She and her husband wrote a defense of Stalinism called Soviet Communism: A New Civilization.]
How do Marxists cope with the fact that Marx’s claim that capitalism drives down wages to bare subsistence is false? As Murray Rothbard points out, they do so by changing what Marx claimed. He was really doing something else besides saying what has turned out to be false. They keep doing this when their new interpretation of what Marx was saying also turns out to be false: “Thus, when Marxian predictions fail, even though they are allegedly derived from scientific laws of history, Marxists go to great lengths to change the terms of the original prediction. A notorious example is Marx’s law of the impoverishment of the working class under capitalism When it became all too clear that the standard of living of the workers under industrial capitalism was rising instead of falling Marxists fell back on the view that what Marx ‘really’ meant by impoverishment was not immiseration but relative deprivation One of the problems with this fallback defense is that impoverishment is supposed to be the motor of the proletarian revolution, and it is difficult to envision the workers resorting to bloody revolution because they only enjoy one yacht apiece while capitalists enjoy five or six. Another notorious example was the response of many Marxists to Bohm-Bawerk’s conclusive demonstration that that labor theory of value could not account for the pricing of goods under capitalism. Again, the fallback response was that what Marx “really” meant was not to explain market pricing at all, but merely to assert that labor hours embed some sort of mystically inherent ‘values’ into goods that are, however, irrelevant to the workings of the capitalist market. If this were true, then it i! difficult to see why Marx labored for a great part of his life in an unsuccessful attempt to complete Capital and to solve the value-price problem.”
Marxist socialists want to overthrow capitalism and replace it with central planning. But Mises proved in an article in 1920 that it is impossible for socialism to work. In order to know what to produce, the planners would have to be able to calculate with money prices. Without money prices, they couldn’t tell which of their investments were successful. But money prices exist only under capitalism. Without them, a socialist economy would inevitably collapse into chaos. Mises gives a brief summary of his argument here: “Without economic calculation there can be no economy. Hence, in a socialist state wherein the pursuit of economic calculation is impossible, there can be—in our sense of the term—no economy whatsoever. In trivial and secondary matters rational conduct might still be possible, but in general it would be impossible to speak of rational production anymore. There would be no means of determining what was rational, and hence it is obvious that production could never be directed by economic considerations. What this means is clear enough, apart from its effects on the supply of commodities. Rational conduct would be divorced from the very ground which is its proper domain. Would there, in fact, be any such thing as rational conduct at all, or, indeed, such a thing as rationality and logic in thought itself? Historically, human rationality is a development of economic life. Could it then obtain when divorced therefrom?”
In spite of this, Marxists try to undermine our institutions. Maybe it would be better to say because of this. They love destruction and want to bring down our world in ruins. Murray Rothbard argued that this will to destruction is an expression of a messianic religion that teaches the present world must be destroyed in a violent revolution before a communist millennium can be established: “The key to the intricate and massive system of thought created by Karl Marx is at bottom a simple one: Karl Marx was a communist. A seemingly trite and banal statement set alongside Marxism’s myriad of jargon-ridden concepts in philosophy, economics, and culture, yet Marx’s devotion to communism was his crucial focus, far more central than the class struggle, the dialectic, the theory of surplus value, and all the rest. Communism was the great goal, the vision, the desideratum, the ultimate end that would make the sufferings of mankind throughout history worthwhile. History is the history of suffering, of class struggle, of the exploitation of man by man. In the same way as the return of the Messiah, in Christian theology, will put an end to history and establish a new heaven and a new earth, so the establishment of communism would put an end to human history. And just as for post-millennial 
Christians, man, led by God’s prophets and saints, will establish a Kingdom of God on Earth (for pre-millennials, Jesus will have many human assistants in setting up such a kingdom), so, for Marx and other schools of communists, mankind, led by a vanguard of secular saints, will establish a secularized Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In messianic religious movements, the millennium is invariably established by a mighty, violent upheaval, an Armageddon, a great apocalyptic war between good and evil. After this titanic conflict, a millennium, a new age, of peace and harmony, of the reign of justice, will be installed upon the earth. Marx emphatically rejected those utopian socialists who sought to arrive at communism through a gradual and evolutionary process, through a steady advancement of the good. Instead, Marx harked back to the apocalyptics, the post-millennia coercive German and Dutch Anabaptists of the sixteenth century, to the millennia1 sects during the English Civil War, and to the various groups of pre-millennial Christians who foresaw a bloody Armageddon at the last days, before the millennium could be established. Indeed, since the apoca- lyptic post-mils refused to wait for a gradual goodness and sainthood to permeate mankind, they joined the pre-mils in believing that only a violent apocalyptic final struggle between good and evil, between saints and sinners, could usher in the millennium. Violent, worldwide revolution, in Marx’s version, to be made by the oppressed proletariat, would be the inevitable instrument for the advent of his millennium, communism. In fact, Marx, like the pre-mils (or ‘millenarians’), went further to hold that the reign of evil on earth would reach a peak just before the apocalypse (‘the darkness before the dawn’).
Let’s do everything we can to educate people so that they fully understand how dangerous and Satanic Marxism really is!
