Of Marx and His Side of History

 

Photo by Maximilian Scheffler on Unsplash

Karl Marx was a bad prophet.  His record is abysmal.  Reality paved a road moving opposite to the predictions of Marx.  That is a serious problem for someone whose theories of economics, life, and the future boastfully rest upon assertions of inevitable fulfillment clothed in scientific jargon.

My friend, Alex Pollock, has frequently said to me that predicting the future is easy; having the predictions come true is the hard part.  Richard M. Ebeling, a professor at The Citadel, has done what many have not.  He has studied what Karl Marx foretold in comparison with what happened.  The differences are stark.  Ebeling reports, “Being blunt, every one of Marx’s ‘predictions’ has failed to come true.” (See Richard M. Ebeling, “How Marx Got on the Wrong Side of History,” June 16, 2017, Foundation for Economic Education.) To begin, Marx’s forecast of the progressive immiseration of the general population was exploded by the greatest increase in standard of living in the shortest period of time for the largest number of people in history. 

His prediction that mass production would render labor skills ever simpler and homogenous, rewarded with mere subsistence wages, compares poorly with the dramatic expansion of the complexity, variety, sophistication, and compensation of employment and employees in the nearly two centuries since.  I admit that I am not comparing Marx’s predictions with the reality in Marxist societies, where Marx’s predictions of employee drudgery and subsistence living have come too painfully close to fulfillment.

Indeed, perhaps only in such a view, where Marxist experiments have been tried, can one find any relevance of the Marxist concept of being on the “wrong side of history.”  The once oppressed residents of the former Soviet bloc are still trying to get caught up with their neighbors who did not spend decades living Karl Marx’s utopian nightmare.  That is to say, the idea that the Marxist conception of history having “sides” has only been demonstrated in the negative by regimes who have imposed Marxist prescriptions on what they call their “masses,” often within walls to keep them on the inside.

What history has shown is that no one controls it, other than God.  From time to time God provides His prophets visions of future history, usually with invitations and cautions, invitations to actions that will bring progress and happiness, and cautions that if ignored yield destruction and sorrow.  Those prophecies have always come true.  In that sense, and that sense alone, to be “on the right side of history” is to be on the right side of God and His encouragements and warnings.

God our Father loves us and our freedom so much that He gives us room for our exercise of choice in creating our own history, disinclined to force what He wants or to prevent what He hates, ever offering counsel and eager to help when asked in faith.  History is littered with the ruins of societies that acted otherwise, when they reached a point described in scripture as being “fully ripe in iniquity.”