Marxian Socialism

Socialism can be explained partially by man’s eternal desire and faith in a better life to come.[1]

The very attitude of dogmatism and cock-sureness brands Socialism as unscientific.

The socialists hold an exaggerated idea of the importance of economics in the materialistic interpretation of history.

They hold the incorrect labor-cost theory of value.[2]

Their wage theory is incorrect.

Because of their exaggerated stress on economic determinism they take a fatalistic attitude of the inevitability of the “social revolution” not realizing the many factors that are likely to retard or totally eliminate what they consider the inevitable impoverishment of the masses.

They have an unbounded faith in the justice, humanity, and wisdom of an all-inclusive State. A faith for which there are no scientific grounds to substantiate.

They have a perverted notion of the importance of men to react upon their environment and class all such attempts by the derogatory name of “utopian.”

Their replies to the criticism that the vast centralization which socialism implies would mean incompetence, tyrrany, corruption, a condition of classes, an insufferable bureaucracy with no limits to the denial of individual freedom give evidence to their utopian faith that such would not be so. This unfounded faith they brand as “scientific”.

History can best be explained by man’s will to live, that is his unquenchable desire to express himself to the full extent of his potentialities, and the economic factor is but a part of the manifestation of this will.[3]

This will to live expresses itself in many non-economic phases such as art, religion, sex, power, ambition, contest, display, pleasure, play, love of emulation, etc. which though inseparably bound up with economic processes are more or less distinct from them. In other words life is much more complex than the Marxians seem to think. Tho it is true that to a hungry man the filling of his belly seems to him to be the most important thing in life.

Man is more than the passive recipient of progress, but also the active creator of it.

While history can largely be explained by a theory of class struggle to say that this struggle is based only on economic grounds is to take a lop-sided view of things. The fact is that these struggles were seldom between those who had and those who had not as Marxians think but between those who had and desired more with those who had not doing the fighting.

[1] “Man’s” mistakenly spelled as non-possessive.

[2] The original document has a typo double “the.”

[3] “Man’s” mistakenly spelled as non-possessive.