So let's get into what Marxism is so that we can understand it. And the way I
find it interesting to do that is to draw a parallel, a historical parallel, to
an earlier time when there was another system that produced critics. We call
that system slavery; a system in which some people, a minority, were masters and
other people, a majority, were slaves. The slaves did all the work. The slaves were
literally the property of the Masters who made them do the work. And when the
work was done everything that those slaves produced belonged to the masters
as indeed the slaves themselves did. And then the masters would do what seemed
reasonable they give a portion of the food, clothing, and shelter those slaves
had produced back to the slaves so they could survive and be slaves tomorrow and
next week and next month so that this system could survive. Well as you might
imagine there were critics of slavery particularly among the slaves, which
shouldn't come as a major surprise. And you might think of the critics of
slavery the way in modern times socialists are critics of capitalism. But
among these Socialists who were critics of capitalism, just as among the critics
of slavery, there were disagreements. So for example some of the critics of
slavery were angry that slaves had particular kinds of suffering imposed on
them: their families were separated, children were taken from parents,
husbands and wives were separated because they were property and could be
sold by their masters pretty much at the Masters will. Then there were other
people who were horrified that the diets given to the slaves were inadequate, that
the clothing and the housing was inadequate. These people were critical of
slavery in the sense that they wanted the slaves to be treated better. In the
United States for example in the whole first half of the 19th century
when slavery was actively criticized, particularly in parts of the United
States other than the south but even in the south too, there were those who wanted
an improvement in the conditions of the slaves. They were critics of slavery who
wanted improvement. You might parallel them with socialists
who think that capitalism needs to improve the conditions of working people:
pay them higher wages, give them better benefits, provide them with a pension as
they get old, take care of their medical needs through a medical insurance
program. Improve the conditions of the workers is what socialists say about
capitalism just like improve the conditions of slaves was what critics of
slavery had to say. But then in slavery there were people who went much further.
For them the horror of slavery was not merely and not even primarily that
slaves weren't well treated. For these critics the problem was slavery itself.
One human being, they said, shouldn't be the property of another. For them the
solution to the problems of slavery was called abolition. They called themselves,
and were called by others, Abolitionists because their analysis said that the
difficulties faced by slaves, the suffering of the slaves, had
fundamentally a cause in the nature of the system, the master slave system, and
that the solution for the problem of the slave majority was transition to a new
and different system in which one human being could not ever be the
property of another. And here comes the parallel with Marxism. Marxism's
analysis, starting with Marx himself and developed since, was an analysis that
said that the problems of capitalism (wages being too low, inequality being too
high, unemployment being a problem that oppresses and frightens and is an
ominous presence to almost everyone in a capitalist system) these kinds of
problems are not going to be solved by improving the conditions of the workers
because if that's all you do, the Marxist argue, then you're forever worried that
the employers (the people who run the system, the capitalist equivalent of the
masters inside slavery) will take back whatever improvement you win. And that
the solution therefore is abolition of capitalism, moving to another system in
parallel to how abolition was the final solving of the slavery problem in, for
example, the Emancipation Proclamation issued by Abraham Lincoln.