Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels sallied forth with the Communist Manifesto in 1848 untortured by doubt and undistracted by facts.
The Manifesto was cobbled together after Brook Farm and sister utopian experiments fell into ruination on the counterfactual premise that men could metamorphose into angels and would unswervingly obey Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Skill, foresight, and industry, the Manifesto postulated, would emerge by spontaneous combustion without the spur of a profit motive. But as the saying went in the Soviet Union during the 1970s, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
The Communist Manifesto is a recipe for mass impoverishment and backwardness—as divorced from truth as Trofim Lysenko’s theory of the inheritability of acquired characteristics. Herbert Hoover’s famine relief in the Soviet Union, 1921-23, saved millions of Russians from starvation born of Bolshevik Vladimir Lenin’s embrace of Communist Manifesto lunacies. Chairman Mao’s deranged, Marxist inspired Great Leap Forward in China caused 30-40 million to starve to death.
The Communist Manifesto expounds a price theory that can be discredited without even intellectual warm-ups: “[T]he price of a commodity, and therefore also of labor, is equal to its cost of production.” Really? Professional athletes and movie stars earn tens of millions of dollars vastly in excess of the cost of subsistence. Max Scherzer of the New York Mets was paid more than $43 million in 2022. The price of labor is determined by supply and demand, not the cost of production. The price spiraled in the aftermath of the Great Plague that killed 30 percent of Europeans with no hike in the cost of producing workers.
Commodity prices also fluctuate according to supply and demand curves independent of the cost of production. The price of corn, cotton, tin, gold, silver, and other commodities change daily with no change in the cost of production. The Hope Diamond, extracted in the 17th century from the Kollur Mine in Guntur, India, is worth $200-350 million, dwarfing its cost of production. Similarly, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Paul Gachet sold for $83 million in 1990, infinitely greater than the painter’s costs of painting the portrait.
The examples disproving Marx’s labor theory of value are infinite, yet the theory is absurdly taught in colleges and universities as capturing truth. It is indistinguishable from alchemy, perpetual motion machines, and turning sunbeams into cucumbers.
The Communist Manifesto discerns a unity of economic and political interests among all employees. But the vast majority of workers choose not to belong to unions (90 percent). Neither have they joined together under a single political roof. What interest does a worker in Silicon Valley share with an agricultural laborer?
The Manifesto denies that wage-labor creates any property for the laborer. But wages are routinely used to acquire clothes, homes, vehicles, electronic devices, and countless other items of real or personal property.
The Manifesto promises abolition of the family and vilifies typical parents as exploiting their children as profit centers until they die like Gavroche in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. How then did Marx and Engels survive their childhoods?
The two offer simple-minded answers to complex questions, but they are all wrong. You can’t be a Marxist and critical thinker at the same time. It is a sad commentary on the state of academia that the Communist Manifesto commands intellectual standing worthy of respect.