In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, in response to the abuses and consequences of the industrial revolution, many people embraced Karl Marx’s communist ideology. That was suicidally naive. What followed was a century of bloody, catastrophic failure. Today, for anyone to embrace communism, they must be unforgivably ignorant or evil – or both.
Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in the mid-19th century, just as Western governments were beginning to address the excesses of the Industrial Revolution. In his book, Marx went far beyond addressing those ills, and instead advocated for a complete reworking of society, starting with the formation of labor unions, building into socialism and then to communism. To Marx, all history was a history of class struggles; all society was divided into two classes – the oppressed and oppressors; and all problems were socio-economic in origin and solution. Marx’s promise was that a communist government with plenary power over individuals and the economy could perfect society.
And naive people actually bought into this in the half century plus after Marx published his works. They ignored all the complexities of mankind, they ignored the true lessons of history regarding the evil of tyrannical governments, and they embraced the utopian dream. For but one example, in 1907, a Dutch socialist philosopher, Anton Pannekoek wrote in an article:
The socialist teachings have inoculated the laboring class with an entirely new conception of the world. The realization, that society is in a process of continual transformation, and that misery, poverty, exploitation, and all the suffering of the present are only temporary and will soon yield to an order of society, to be inaugurated by his class, in which peace, abundance, and fraternity shall reign, this realization must revolutionize the whole world conception of the laborer from the ground up. The theory of socialism furnishes the scientific foundation for this world conception. Political economy teaches us to understand the internal laws, which move the capitalist process, while historical materialism lays bare the effects of the economic revolution upon the conceptions and actions of people. And this stands irreconcilably opposed, as a materialistic doctrine, to religion.