The problem with Marx...

... is that he’s such a marxist!

No, seriously... we must delcare in all honesty that marxism is inherently toxic.

Melancholicus was recently discussing the origins of socialism with his brother Conor, who is an historian. While the politics and social views of we two brothers are in many ways divergent, we are at one in our appraisal of socialism.

The conversation turned to Marx and his legacy. Conor favoured a partial exoneration of Marx on the grounds that he (Marx) could not have been aware that his political philopsophy would be the blueprint for terror and murder on a global scale. But now, ploughing with mounting horror through Marx’s cold-blooded and merciless prose, Melancholicus cannot but declare that Marx must have known exactly what he was doing.

Yes, Melancholicus is now reading the Communist Manifesto. It was presented to him for study in philosophy class in seminary, but owing to sloth and human weakness he failed to read it. Now he is reading it for the first time, and — proh dolor! — it is even more blood-curdling than he feared it would be.

This is not the place for a detailed philosophical dissection of the manifesto; suffice it to say that many of Marx’s prescriptions for the communist utopia are so contrary to human rights and even to human nature that there is no doubt they could not have been implemented without the application to society of extraordinary violence.

This violence, to the communist, would be good and moral, because it would usher in the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. The “proletariat”, of course, is a philosophical concept. Let us not confuse Marx’s proletariat with any person or group of persons, since no persons whatever have any rights in the communist system. Should a working man express a grievance, or complain that some aspect of the system simply does not work, he becomes thereby a counter-revolutionary and therefore a legitimate target for execution.

Communism is ultimately an expression of the belief that something is if I say it is. Marx attempts, in the pages of this obnoxious document, to decree into existence a new order of being, a new reality, where the laws of nature (at least as they concern man) are altogether different from the laws of nature as ordered by reality.

Therefore we cannot exonerate Marx, as though he could not have forseen the crimes committed in his name by over-zealous disciples. He could not have failed to know, by dint of sheer common sense if by nothing else, how the utopia of the workers would be brought into being, and how it would be sustained, were his ideas implemented in practice. He cites previous revolutionary upheavals; he was not ignorant that common to all these upheavals was a vast amount of bloodletting.

Further to the point, we cannot exonerate those persons alive today, who, upon reading the bloodthirsty text of the Communist Manifesto, and with the hindsight of nearly a century of communist violence and terror to warn them of the consequences, still persist in believing that Marx’s ideas will bring about an earthly utopia — if only they can be correctly implemented! — rather than the precise opposite, and that in the pages of Marx one finds the magic pill which will cure all the social, economic and political ills of mankind.

All historical precedent has shown that any attempt to create heaven on earth is doomed from the beginning to abject failure, and the more fervently one strives for an earthly heaven, the closer one comes to realizing an earthly hell.