whatyareckon

by Peter Burrows 7/19/23  

When I was in college, over half a century ago, I took a course on Marxism. I wasn’t trying to fire up any anti-capitalistic fervor, I just wanted to learn something about an economic philosophy that ruled so much of the world at the time, or at least was the pretense for ruling so much of the world.

I say ‘pretense’ because Marxism has never made any economic sense. It’s a utopian vision utterly at odds with human nature. In brief, Marx thought that capitalism would so skew wealth and income toward the owners of capital that the working class, the proletariat, would eventually break the chains of their “enslavement” and expropriate the means of production, converting it all property to common ownership, public property.

Freed from the exploitation of the capitalist class, there would “inevitably” be “an enormous development of the productive forces of human…