An Open Letter to a Young Marxist

By Max Borders

Someone has provided for you for most of your life. Some parental figure saw to your needs, whether food, clothing, or amusements, and you were raised a net consumer. I’m guessing you were more comfortable than 99 percent of anyone who has ever lived in human history. Yet you probably didn’t deserve any of it, at least not as a diligent worker deserves a paycheck. This is the way it goes in most families:

From each according to his ability to each according to his need. 

Because this is an open letter, I can’t possibly know the particulars of your “lived experience.” But I do know this: Someone provided for you. Did you expect all of those goodies? Most of us take our providers’ generosity for granted at some point. You might protest that you had chores, but an adolescent’s sense of entitlement rarely matches her contribution. 

Thus, you are alive and reading this because you were the beneficiary of someone else’s productive effort. (So was I, mind you.) Indeed, not only did your folks have to work, but nearly everything you enjoyed was produced by other people collaborating in a productive effort. The legal structure for this is called a corporation. There are different corporate forms, from worker cooperatives to traditional firms.

I understand you don’t like all of them.

As you got older, hopefully, you lost some of that adolescent sense of entitlement. Maybe you came to realize that you did, indeed, grow up comfortable and that not everyone does. Maybe you felt guilty. You might have even experienced the first stirrings of indignation about the circumstances of the working poor. Soon, a burning rectitude, a sense of injustice, became familiar but undefined. People live hard lives outside of wealth’s cottony confines and work long hours for little pay. When opportunities are few, people must take what work they can get.

Such is the way it is and has always been—though with great improvements through time.

But somewhere along the way, you discovered Karl Marx. Most start with The Communist Manifesto. If you graduated up to Das Kapital—congratulations! (It’s a beast.) In any case, I hope you’re up for a challenge. From here on, I’ll lay out some of Marxism’s fundamental problems.

Neither in Theory Nor in Practice

Two common cliches invite intellectual gymnastics on Marxism’s behalf: It’s never been tried in its truest form, and It’s good in theory but not in practice. We can dismiss both of these claims because Marxism offers little good in either theory or practice.

Consider this brief tour of Marxism coupled with critiques:
 

1. The Labor Theory of Surplus Value. In a sense, this objective theory of value is the lynchpin of Marxist economics and his theory of exploitation. Without it, the theory fails. The idea is that because profit goes to the capitalist, it is an unearned surplus that ought to accrue to the workers who create the real value.
   
   I will pass over the fact that in traditional firms, owners bear all the risks of their decisions and strategies, and making good decisions is an essential form of work. But the fundamental problem with Marx’s Labor Theory is that all value is subjective. It doesn’t matter what the inputs are. In other words, the value of any given product lies solely in customers’ eyes.
   
   For example, Marx tee shirts and Menger tee shirts might have exactly similar inputs – such as cotton, dyes, labor, and machines. Because so few people know of Menger, the Marx tee shirt is likely to fetch a higher sum. The point of entrepreneurship, whether determined by the ‘capitalist’ or workers voting in a cooperative, is to discover what people value and make bets accordingly. If the communist wants to argue that only workers should be allowed to take risks, more should try co-ops before fomenting violent revolution.


2. Alienation. This is probably Marx’s most substantial claim. The idea is that workers operating in conditions of industrial specialization become cogs in a larger machine, like a factory. But as a cog, the worker becomes separated from the products of her labor. This creates a negative psychological state that can rob the worker of the dignity and sense of efficacy she might once have found in some cottage industry.