Born on this day 190 years ago, Karl Marx is best known as the father of communism, as espoused in his book, The Communist Manifesto. By the time he died in 1883, Marx was still relatively unknown, but his ideas started to have a significant influence on workers’ movements, and had a profound impact on the course of 20th Century world history. Communism became the prevailing political philosophy in Russia after the October Revolution in 1917, and many other countries – most notably China – followed suit and became communist.
According to Marx, following the industrial revolution, capitalism had replaced feudalism, but because of internal tensions capitalism would be destroyed and replaced by communism. He was particularly concerned about the alienation of labour – that is, the need for ordinary people (“the proletariat”) to sell their labour to employers (“capitalists”) in exchange for money. He correctly observed that employers were oppressing employees, but he assumed that this was the unavoidable consequence of capitalism, and his proposed solution was to abandon private ownership of property.
What Marx failed to realise was that the problems of oppression which he observed could be solved within a capitalist system far more effectively than they could within a communist system. The numerous 20th Century experiments in communism demonstrate that the removal of private property ownership demotivates people and introduces a worse form of oppression and spiritual alienation. Marxism was a kind of atheistic religion, fervently maintained by believers who were unable to prove its benefits, and it has been responsible for the two greatest genocides (20 million people in Russia under Lenin and 60 million people in China under Mao) that the world has ever experienced.