The Marxist-LeninistTheory of History
The Marxist-LeninistThe crimes we shall expose are to be judged not by the standards of Communist regimes, but by the unwritten code of the natural laws of humanity.Stéphane Courtois [The Black Book of Communism, Crimes, Terror, Repression, with Nicolas Werth, Jean-Jouis Panné, Andrzej Paczkowski, Karel Bartoshek, and Jean-Louis Margolin, translated by Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer, Harvard University Press, 1999, p.3]
It is better to kill one hundred innocents than to let one guilty person go.
Dolores Ibarruri ("La Pasionaria"), Spanish Communist
[ibid., p. 343]We didn't kill enough people.... Revolutions succeed only when rivers run red with blood, and blood has to be spilled if what you are aiming for is the perfectibility of the human race.
Ares Velouchiotes, Greek Communist, [ibid., p. 329]
Communism is not a reaction against the failure of the nineteenth century to organize optimal economic output. It is a reaction against its comparative success. It is a protest against the emptiness of economic welfare, an appeal to the ascetic in us all... The idealistic youth play with Communism because it is the only spiritual appeal which feels to them contemporary.
John Maynard Keynes, 1934
Germany today is, next to Russia, the greatest exemplar of Marxian socialism in the world.
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1936
It is no defence whatever for an intellectual to say that he was duped [by Communism], since that is what, as an intellectual, he should never allow to happen to him.
Granville Hicks
Oddly enough, it is the intellectual snobbery and elitism of many of the literati that politically correct egalitarianism appeals to; their partiality to literary Marxism is based not on its economic theory but on its hostility to business and the middle class. The character of this anti-bourgeois sentiment therefore has more in common with its origin in aristocratic disdain for the lower orders than with egalitarianism.
John M. Ellis, Literature Lost [Yale University Press, 1997], p. 214
The almost universal disdain toward the middle class -- the bourgeoisie -- by those with cosmic visions can be more readily understood in light of the role of such visions as personal gratification and personal license. The middle classes have been classically people of rules, traditions, and self-discipline, to a far greater extent than the underclass below them or the wealthy and aristocratic classes above them. While the underclass pay the price of not having the self-discipline of the bourgeoisie -- in many ways, ranging from poverty to imprisonment -- the truly wealthy and powerful can often disregard the rules, including laws, without paying the consequences. Those with cosmic visions that seek escape from social constraints regarded as arbitrary, rather than inherent, tend to romanticize the unruliness of the underclass and the sense of being above the rules found among the elite.
Thomas Sowell, The Quest for Cosmic Justice [The Free Press, 1999], pp. 139-140
Many whose allegiance went to the Soviet Union may well be seen as traitors to their countries, and to the democratic culture. But their profounder fault was more basic still. Seeing themselves as independent brains, making their choices as thinking beings, they ignored their own criteria. They did not examine the multifarious evidence, already available in the 1930s, on the realities of the Communist regimes. That is to say, they were traitors to the human mind, to thought itself.
Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century [W.W. Norton & Compnay, 2000], p.118
As an intellectual construct, Capital was a masterpiece. but, like some other intellectual masterpieces, it was an elaborately sophisticated structure erected on the foundation of a primitive misconception.
...In the realm of ideas in general, the Marxian vision -- including his theory of history -- has not only dominated various fields at various times, it has survived both the continuing prosperity of capitalism and the economic debacles of socialism. It has become axiomatic among sections of the intelligentsia, impervious to the corrosive effects of evidence or logic.
But what did Marx contribute to economics? Contributions depend not only on what was offered but also on what was accepted, and there is no major premise, doctrine, or tool of analysis in economics today that derived from the writings of Karl Marx. There is no need to deny that Marx was in many ways a major historic figure of the nineteenth century, whose long shadow still falls across the world of the twenty-first century. Yet, jarring as the phrase may be, from the standpoint of the economics profession Marx was, as Professor Paul Samuelson called him, "a minor post-Ricardian."
Thomas Sowell, On Classical Economics [Yale, 2006] p.184-186 [boldface added]
Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.
Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography
LASCIATE OGNE SPERANZA, VOI CH'INTRATE
Dante Allighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, III:9
["Abandon every hope, you who enter"]
Karl 
Marx (1818-1883) did not have a theory of morality; he had a theory of history. Thus, Marxism was not about right or wrong but about what will happen in history. Marx was contemptuous of people who judged things in moral terms. When diehards say that Marxism has actually never been "tried" (despite what Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Ho, and Daniel Ortega thought they were doing), they don't understand that Marxism was not a rule for behavior or a program for action; it was supposed to be the theory of a deterministic mechanism that will produce the future, a theory of actions that will arise spontaneously because of historical circumstances -- although we can infer what kinds of actions people, including ourselves, will be taking -- after all, Marx said that the purpose of his work was to change the world, not just understand it. It is the theory, however, the world will change because of the objective economic conditions, not because of some decisions we make. This was not a theory about "human nature" or "human psychology," but about how the mode of economic production (how goods and services are produced) determines all the other political, social, cultural, and moral structures of a society (though some Marxists are uncomfortable with this in an absolute sense). The needs of the "English petty bourgeois" are thus not "false needs" [note], however dismissive Marx sounds, but true needs in relation to a capitalistic mode of production -- needs which will change over time, in a historicist sense, as the mode of production changes. As a "science" of history, Marxism would succeed or fail to the extent that it could actually predict the evolution of production and its various effects.
Marx thought that as capitalism had replaced feudalism with a new mode of production, which was more productive and efficient, the same thing would happen to produce a replacement for capitalism. In the end, as the workers were impoverished (when capitalists drove down wages) and the number of capitalists dwindled (as competition was replaced by larger and larger monopolies), the capitalists would end up with no one to sell their goods to and nothing to do with the capital derived from their profits. This would produce increasingly severe credit and banking crises, until the proletariat would easily tip over the whole rotten structure and replace it with a classless society.
Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is brust asunder. [Capital, Vol. I, p.837, Charles H. Kerr & Co., Chicago, 1906, translation by Edward Aveling, quoted by Thomas Sowell, On Classical Economics [Yale, 2006, p.170]
With suriving employed labor concentrated in large corporate entities, the revolution would more or less happen of itself. History would thus flow in the following way:
However, although nominal wages were falling in the United States from 1865-1897, real wages were rising, and there didn't seem to be a problem with over-production or with capital investment. Marx's own data showed rising real wages, as in Britain they rose by 80 percent in the last half of the 19th century. Recognizing that things weren't going as predicted, Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov, 1870-1924) proposed that colonialism and imperialism were relieving the stress on capitalism and had temporarily derailed history: Colonies were a safety valve for excess capital and over-production; and the exploitation of colonies enabled the capitalists to buy off the proletariat at home. But Lenin's own data showed that most foreign investment was in other capitalist countries, and it is hard to imagine how an impoverished colonial population could buy things that the proletariat back home couldn't afford. Nevertheless, Lenin's theory at least addressed the issue. He therefore saw the flow of history in these terms:
When the Russian Revolution came, Lenin and his colleagues had to address the paradox that according to orthodox Marxism Russia was not ready for a real communist revolution, since it had never passed through the necessary stage of capitalism itself. Although developing quickly enough, and the fourth largest economy in the world just because of its size, Russia was still largely a feudal society. Lenin died before much sense could be made of the situation, especially when his programs caused the economy to collapse and he had to retreat from an attempt at pure communism into the semi-market economy of the New Economic Policy (the NEP). Subsequently, Stalin (Iosif Dzhugashvili, 1879-1953) followed the principle that the Russian Revolution would substitute a benign replacement for capitalism, namely "socialism," which would do the same job of industrialization without capitalist exploitation. Meanwhile, the new Russian state, the Soviet Union, would fight against imperialism and work for de-colonization and national liberation. If imperialism and colonialism could be ended, then capitalist economies would revert to the dynamic described by Marx and communism would develop there in the natural way. Stalin thus saw the flow of history in this way:
With the Great Depression, which looked like just the sort of credit and production collapse that Marx had predicted, and which gave many Westerners the impression that Stalin's programs were producing better results in the Soviet Union, things seemed to be getting back on track. Then, when capitalist countries joined in to help defeat what should have been their own best hope, fascism [note], things really started looking up. The post-war world then began to see the start of de-colonization. For fear of "neo-colonialism," newly independent countries were advised to nationalize foreign holdings and limit capitalist exploitation (i.e. foreign investment). Stalin's Five Year Plans were seen by people like the new Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), as the proper way to modernize an economy.
Over the years, however, the countries that took this kind of advice the most seriously experienced only failure and stagnation. Nehru's great plans in fact condemned India to many decades of little improvement in its standard of living. But India was in good shape compared to Africa. By the late 80's, most former African colonies had lapsed into military dictatorships under which the standard of living was actually lower than it had been when they were colonies. All the modernistic and socialistic rhetoric of the original leaders of African independence, like Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972) in Ghana, had turned out to be nothing but a mask for incompetence, corruption, and naked power. Instead of foreign investment, African leaders demanded foreign aid delivered directly to them. Most of that was either wasted on useless projects or diverted into their own pockets: leading to the bitter characterization of them as "Swiss bank account socialists."
Meanwhile, the once admired economy of the Soviet Union showed what it was truly made of: corruption, inefficiency, and irrationality on a vast scale. Although everyone expected that the Soviet Union's own economic statistics were unreliable, even the CIA greatly overestimated the size of the Soviet economy. Outside of Moscow and Leningrad, which were bad enough, the Soviet Union was virtually a Third World country. One result today is that many who still admire Marxism and socialism have decided that it is virtuous to be poor, and that the ruined economy of a place like Cuba is a desirable "ecotopia" -- kinder to the environment than capitalism. This would be profoundly astonishing and mortifying to Karl Marx himself: the whole point about the evolution of communism is that it would be more productive and produce greater wealth for all than capitalism. A socialism that simply perpetuated poverty would be worthless -- a return, indeed, to what Marx called "oriental" despotism and a slave economy.
Why this all happened goes back to the simplest principles of economics: it was Adam Smith, not Karl Marx, who understood the mechanism of history. [See "Capitalism, the Free Market, and the Obligations of Property and Contract".]
The Essential Anti-Communist Bibliography
The Post-Modern or "Leftover" Left
"Human nature," "human psychology," and "false needs" are quotes from the ethics textbook I have used, Moral Reasoning, by Victor Grassian, p. 59. Grassian seriously misunderstands Marx, where human nature in an important sense doesn't even exist, and human psychology will be no more than a function of the "objective conditions" of production. The idea of "false needs" is not to be confused with "false consciousness," which is when someone who is not a member of an oppressor class is deceived into having the views of that class. Thus a wage laborer who believes in the free market is afflicted with "false consciousness." According to Marxism, such beliefs need not be credited or addressed on their own merits, which of course logically leads, as it did in historical fact, to a totalitarian dictatorship where the views of people are irrelevant next to the "scientific" knowledge of the dictators.
Although communists liked to see fascism as the ultimate expression of capitalism, and fascism did nominally leave property in private hands, fascism and communism nevertheless had more in common with each other than with capitalism, since each was a collectivist ideology that subordinated individual interests to the purposes of the State. It was no coincidence that both Hitler and Mussolini came out of the socialist movement, and Lenin himself had praised Mussolini as the great champion of the Italian socialist party in the days before World War I. Later, Hitler's own best role model for ruthless police state power was Lenin. Both communists and fascists knew that the opposite of both ideologies was the despised "liberalism."