• Any society that would give up liberty to gain security, deserves neither and will lose both. - Benjamin Franklin

Marxism

Middle-of-the-Road Policy Leads to Socialism
By Ludwig von Mises  
Fri, 17/09/2010 - 1:00am
Tue, 18/04/1950 - 1:00am

This address was delivered before the University Club of New York, April 18, 1950.

Introduction

The fundamental dogma of all brands of socialism and communism is that the market economy or capitalism is a system that hurts the vital interests of the immense majority of people for the sole benefit of a small minority of rugged individualists. It condemns the masses to progressing impoverishment. It brings about misery, slavery, oppression, degradation and exploitation of the working men, while it enriches a class of idle and useless parasites.

This doctrine was not the work of Karl Marx. It had been developed long before Marx entered the scene. Its most successful propagators were not the Marxian authors, but such men as Carlyle and Ruskin, the British Fabians, the German professors and the American Institutionalists. And it is a very significant fact that the correctness of this dogma was contested only by a few economists who were very soon silenced and barred from access to the universities, the press, the leadership of political parties and, first of all, public office. Public opinion by and large accepted the condemnation of capitalism without any reservation.

Mises bores into Marx

Posted by Robert P. Landis on 30th August 2010 1:19pm

I hadn't seen this criticism of Marx before and when I did I laughed, because it's so true ...

"The most remarkable fact about this unprecedented prestige of an author is that even his most enthusiastic admirers do not read his main writings and are not familiar with their content. A few passages and sentences from his books, always the same, are quoted again and again in political speeches and pamphlets. But the voluminous books and the scores of articles and pamphlets turned out by Marx are, as can be easily shown, not perused even by politicians and authors who proudly call themselves Marxians. Many people buy or borrow from a library reprints of Marx's writings and start reading them. But, bored to death, they usually stop after a few pages, if they had not already stopped on the first page."

The next time you meet a marxist, ask them what primary works they have read of his. If they hold the position that communism has never existed, remark that crude communism has and point them in the direction of "Private Property and Communism" in Marx's Economic Manuscripts.

Overview of the Schools of Economic Thought
By Jim Cox  
Mon, 30/03/2009 - 11:08pm
Mon, 30/03/2009 - 11:08pm

There are four major schools of economic thought today.  An understanding of these four schools of thought is necessary for an understanding of economics.  The four schools are Marxist, Keynesian, Monetarist, and Austrian.

Marxist economic thought is based on the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who wrote in the mid to late 1800's.  Essentially, Marxist thought is based on economic determinism wherein societies go through the developmental stages of primitive communism, slave systems, feudalism, capitalism, socialism and finally communism.  In each of these stages the economic system determines the views of those living during that system.  Each includes a class struggle which leads inevitably to the next stage of societal development.  Thus feudalism has a class struggle between landlord and serf which produces the next stage, capitalism.  In capitalism the two classes are capitalist and worker.  The conflict between capitalist and worker results in the overthrow of capitalism by the working class thus ushering in socialism and ending class conflicts.  Socialism leads to the ultimate fate of humanity--communism.