Detractors of capitalism argue that it took over fifty years for the British Industrial Revolution’s benefits to reach average workers. That narrative is at best contested and, at worst, wrong.
Marx was an economic analyst. You can argue he got predictions wrong — and he did get some badly wrong — but he was describing mechanisms he observed in 19th century industrial capitalism: surplus extraction, concentration of ownership, the tension between labor and capital. Those are observable phenomena, not ideology. Engels literally walked through Manchester factories and documented what he saw.
What Stalin built, what Mao built, what Pol Pot built — those were authoritarian power grabs that used Marxist vocabulary as legitimizing cover. The USSR was a state-capitalist dictatorship with a centralized command economy run by a party elite. The workers didn't own the means of production. The Politburo did. Calling that "communism" is like calling North Korea a "Democratic People's Republic." The label is the disguise, not the description.
The conflation is useful though, and that's why it persists. If you can make Marx synonymous with the gulag, then anyone who points out that capital is concentrating or wages are stagnating can be dismissed as a fellow traveler. Like in "the incalculable human suffering their acolytes caused" — as though observing that productivity gains aren't being shared makes you complicit in the Holodomor. This is a silencing move, not an analytical one.
To say Marks was just an economist as like saying that I thief is just a locksmith. Mark‘s advocated violent revolution. And he can’t get out of the responsibility for tens of millions of deaths just by claiming that other people misused his work. And at the end of the day, the idea that the solution to the problems were massive, radical red distribution in the destruction of capitalism is beyond beyond stupidity beyond crazy.
Marx was an economic analyst. You can argue he got predictions wrong — and he did get some badly wrong — but he was describing mechanisms he observed in 19th century industrial capitalism: surplus extraction, concentration of ownership, the tension between labor and capital. Those are observable phenomena, not ideology. Engels literally walked through Manchester factories and documented what he saw.
What Stalin built, what Mao built, what Pol Pot built — those were authoritarian power grabs that used Marxist vocabulary as legitimizing cover. The USSR was a state-capitalist dictatorship with a centralized command economy run by a party elite. The workers didn't own the means of production. The Politburo did. Calling that "communism" is like calling North Korea a "Democratic People's Republic." The label is the disguise, not the description.
The conflation is useful though, and that's why it persists. If you can make Marx synonymous with the gulag, then anyone who points out that capital is concentrating or wages are stagnating can be dismissed as a fellow traveler. Like in "the incalculable human suffering their acolytes caused" — as though observing that productivity gains aren't being shared makes you complicit in the Holodomor. This is a silencing move, not an analytical one.
To say Marks was just an economist as like saying that I thief is just a locksmith. Mark‘s advocated violent revolution. And he can’t get out of the responsibility for tens of millions of deaths just by claiming that other people misused his work. And at the end of the day, the idea that the solution to the problems were massive, radical red distribution in the destruction of capitalism is beyond beyond stupidity beyond crazy.