Ladies and Gentlemen: Posted below is a comment from a recent email exchange between myself and an ardent Marxist. Pretty succinctly, it describes my position on Marxism, and I think it does a pretty good job poking holes in Marxist methods. While it is not as polished as most of my writing, remember it is from an email exchange, and was not “for a grade” so to speak.

To protect the innocent, the other side will not be named. Just know that everything except the innitial sentence fragment was written by me.

so long as we rely upon anyone but your own personal gurus, Morales and Chavez (there are probably others),

These are not my personal “gurus”. I don’t follow Chavismo like you follow Marx. I am sorry if you misunderstand. Hopefully I can compose this without too much condescension: I have only always said that these two individuals provide AN example (not THE example, I have NEVER argued this) of what course we could consider for our country. I have never claimed to support a chavista programme for the United States, but I sure support it for Venezuela. The things Chavez does in Venezuela would not work in the United States.

His methods, however, could work and are something we should explore, because we should want to look at ALL options available to us. Similarly, I have always said that where Marx works in the United States, we should utilize his method. Where he does not fit,
just like where Chavez does not fit, we should not use them. I have said it before and will probably say it a hundred times more until you feel the need to stop attacking me because I think seizure of political power (in WHATEVER way possible) before economic power is dealt with is a good idea.

However, just like I say, with complete sincerity, that Chavez does not necessarily offer us a programme that will work here in the United States (because objective conditions are way different than they are in Venezuela), neither will Marx’s programme (for the exact same reason). They may offer us some methods, but we must develop the programme ourselves, for our own people. We should not strive for the end product of either Chavez or Marx, because that would be as alien to us as if a monarchy were restored in the United States.

I shouldn’t have to go over scientific method with a “scientific socialist”, but it seems that we all need a refresher, so here goes. The scientist classifies, describes and predicts. His experiments have variables that he lists to provide other scientists the opportunity to reproduce his experiments in a controlled setting. In essence, Marx did an experiment (he didn’t actually experiment in the real world, of course, but on paper, thereby avoiding seeing any ramifications of his experiments, and allowing him to say the results are always positive and progressive.) He presented a set of objective conditions, and then suggested where some variables could be changed to produce an alternative outcome that differed from the outcome expected if all the variables were left alone. “Scientists” have “duplicated” this experiment a number of times on paper, always deriving the same result, and Marx’s “experiments” have long been declared valid.

The problem is that objective conditions have changed on their own, and the “scientists” that still declare Marx valid have not taken this into account. They continue to conduct the same experiments using the exact same variable (and of course, on paper), and of course come up with the same conclusions and make the same predictions. It’s easy (for a person who willfully stands outside the experimentation regime that controls the thoughts of the “true” Marxists) to see, but it seems that today, these marxist “scientists” are so committed to bringing out the same solution that they willfully maintain that things are NOT different in the United States (and indeed in all capitalist countries) today than they were 150 years ago in Great Britain. In this sense, it is the “scientists” who have lost track of objectivity all together, because of their committment to the programme. They impose a bias based on agenda on thier own experiments, which render their experiments at best invalid, and at worst disingenuous.

And ironically this unwillingness to admit an alteration of objective conditions runs contrary to another of Marx’s prediction, that things change over time, that History is a progression, not a static element, and things move toward a higher form. Marx did not claim that history stops (at least until communism is achieved), but this must be so for these “marxist” scientists to claim that things are exactly as they were when Marx did his “experiments”. And this assumes that Marx was exactly right, and did not make an error himself (though we can be sure that no man, as man is perfect and never errs.)

Unlike yourself, I am willing to believe that perhaps Marx did not have ALL the information necessary to concoct a completely coherent and universal theory (because nobody can possibly know all the information), and that history has progressed beyond where Marx classified things. In essence, the classification has changed significantly enough to yield significantly different results should the variables that Marx suggested should be tweaked actually are tweaked. Don’t believe me? Look what happened in the Soviet Union. Way different objective conditions than what Marx predicted, and that was just a few decades later. Look how differently China was from the USSR. Look how different Cuba was from China, or North Korea, or Vietnam, all claiming they are using Marx’s formulations, but ignoring that their objectives variables are significantly different as to render the lable “Marxist” absolutely disingenuous.

But the “experiment” always works, because Marx seems to claim that the world is only ONE WAY, always like that throughout the world, there are no differences between the composition of the working class in Britain of the 1850s and the United States of the
2000’s, nor is there a difference between workers in the United States and Germany, or Venezuela. Hell, there is a difference between workers who do menial jobs in an office building in New York City and those who work in a mine in Montana! There is a difference in the world they operate in, the intensity of their labor, and their attitudes toward others. They are both exploited, no doubt, but this may be the ONLY thing they have in common (outside of the statutory things, like they both pay taxes to the Federal Government).

To assert that these groupings are somehow different and live in different objective conditions from one another is always a bourgeoise assertion, because it demonstrates a fatal flaw in the armor of an otherwise well constructed argument. In essence, the working class *can’t* be different, or else the entire experiment fails, so anyone who suggests that it might be other than that is obviously trying to undermine the system Marx set up, and therefore must be in alliance with the ruling class. That is absurd.

At the end of all this, I am suggesting that perhaps it is not the cynic who is mistaken, but the True Believer. After all, Marx is just a man, as I am, and has the same exact probability of being wrong as I do (maybe more, because I am arguably more educated than he was about things he could never have imagined, and have the benefit of hind sight). I say where he applies, we use his method, where he does not, we figure something else out. And we should always do it with the idea of aiming toward our own outcomes, unique to our own country, so we don’t end up imposing some foreign, alien formula on ourselves, which we neither sufficiently understand, nor, in the long run, end up supporting. That is the surest guarentee of failure.