The Dystopia Of Marxism
From 'The Communist Manifesto' By Karl Marx
Introduction
I was reading ‘Rage (Courtney Series 6)’ by Wilbur Smith and he had mentioned ‘The Communist Manifesto’, written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.
I usually don’t get around to reading what I plan to read. So, I started reading ‘The Communist Manifesto’ right away.
I liked it till I got to the part at around the middle of the book, where Marx starts painting his dystopia.
What You Can Expect In The Dystopia
Your property will be confiscated if it was obtained via the labour of others (that is, if you are a rich bourgeois and employ others to make your money).
You can keep your property only if you got it with your own efforts (that is, as an individual employee).
You can’t get married.
Public and private prostitution will be banned.
If you are a woman, you will become part of a ‘community of women’.
You can have kids by way of the ‘community of women’. There are no details about the exact mechanism but you can’t keep the kids. So, you can’t have a family. To his credit, Marx terms this ‘infamous’. Since allowing a relationship will be like allowing a family, logically, you will have to be mandatorily single.
No Kids
He justifies not being allowed custody of kids by saying kids are at school anyway for most of the time. Boarding schools must have been common then. This proposal of not being allowed to spend time with your kids at all is more extreme than the ancient Gurukul system.
Another reason for this is rampant child labour at that time. So, the children of the working class were anyway separated from the parents.
So, why should the bourgeois alone have access to their children seems to be the thinking.
The ‘Community Of Women’
There can be no doubt what Marx means by ‘community of women’. He specifies what he considers as the model for this that existed at his time.
He says bourgeois have access to the women of the proletarians, prostitutes and each other’s wives.
He says bourgeois marriage is a ‘system of wives in common’, which is ‘hypocritically concealed’.
He says the ‘community of women’ will be ‘openly legalised’. That is, men have access to the ‘community of women’. He then talks about abolishing prostitution, the implication being that it’s now redundant. This is disturbing and is clearly the ‘free sex’ that communists keep harping about, but I don’t think it will be as fun as they assume as I will clarify below.
He justifies this by saying that this will prevent women from being ‘mere instruments of production (reproduction)’.
So, what will they be now? The implication is that now women have a say in when to reproduce but will it be so?
Marx’s vision is that communism is more efficient than capitalism. So, he says that after communism replaces capitalism, the output will go up.
For this, they would need more kids. So, women may actually be exploited more as ‘instruments of production’.
Interestingly, the ‘double systems theory’ says that women are exploited by two systems. The first system is capitalism, which exploits them by paying minimal wages for maximum output just like it does men.
The second system is patriarchy, which exploits them more than the male workers in terms of pay iniquity.
Now, we can argue that Marxism also is a double system for exploitation of women. To output more than capitalism, it might create one system for exploiting women to produce more children and another system to exploit them to work more when they aren’t producing children.
The compensation for this extra works seems to be the distribution of all the wealth seized from the bourgeois.
Conclusion
So, let’s say you get your share of the bourgeois wealth. Would it be worth it to give up marriage, kids, a life partner, even prostitutes?
What would you spend the money on assuming the ‘State’ allows you free time?
Since production will be high, you can spend it on stuff. How will it be different from the consumerism under capitalism?
P. G. Wodehouse brought up a problem with communism. In ‘Mike and Psmith’, Psmith says, “…. I’ve just become a socialist. It’s a great scheme. …. You work for the equal distribution of property, and start by collaring all you can and sitting on it.”
If this comes true, we would just be trading capitalist bourgeois for communist ones.
Reading the manifesto was eye-opening. We need to do all we can to prevent his nightmare from coming true.
If you liked this, you might like my books.