How Marxism fails

I do not hate Karl Marx and his political philosophy Marxism. I actually have a strong sympathy to his ideology to change the world to relinquish the national borders among individual citizens of the world and then to provide them with their ultimate sovereignty completely free from subordination to the traditional superstitious authorities. The rulers of the modern politics maintain the surplus value which represses the reward for majority individuals by introducing their complex economic and legal system. Individuals' sovereign is in crisis more than the past due to the intolerance of individuality in such a more collectivised world politics and modal code. More humans have lost their authentic loyal ethical principle in their daily life because they have chosen to obey and been secured by their superior authority at the sacrifice of their individual sovereignty. Marxism might be right to diagnose these illnesses; but, it seems to be the wrong method of prescription to tackle with these illnesses.

However, there are several objections to Marxism, and Marxism theoretically fails to explain about economics and ethics. First of all, Marx and his fellows had often described the modern world hegemonic political structure as Capitalism, which I strongly doubt about. Secondly, capitalists no longer control over the means of production in the modern world economy and politics. Finally, his loving united proletariat are more servile than he assumed, and his hating rich capitalists, individualistic nonconformists, and honest egoists are virtuous unlike he condemned.


Marxists affirm that, in the market economy, the rich minority individuals as known as the bourgeoisie monopolise the market with their power of controlling their means of productions. But then, what happens when the bourgeoisie start not being able to sell their offering products when majority become too poor to afford to purchase? Well, these bourgeoisie may invest their money to the financial market instead of investing to the good&service market. But, they also need to watch out and analyse the financial market trend not to lose their financial game. Some may argue that the bourgeoisie may protect their wealth by defending their property right of lands and the other assets. But, without a political stability where majority citizens are not too frustrated to be stabilised so they eventually need to find the way to redistribute their wealth for the communal security. The bourgeoisie may buy a huge militant force to form their own private militia to oppress their existing as well as potential enemy-proletariat to defend their monopolistic interest. But, the excess expenditure on the military and the low motivation of their subordinate proletariat impoverish the aggregate productivity of the economy they are living in. While lacking an abundant extractable resource from their economy, their state is always threatened by the invaders.

In order to strengthen these minority bourgeoisie, their political economy eventually enriches and motivate the rest majority proletariat, the majority citizens. Also, these ruling class bourgeoisie constantly monitor and compete against their rival bourgeoisie group to survive their games of the financial market and the foreign diplomacy backed by their military force, which are never be easy to keep winning. Furthermore, they may also want to remain this system enabling them to revenge when they lose. So, this implies that some proletariat may also have a chance to revenge to be promoted to become a member of the bourgeoisie. All in all, the ruling class individuals are also struggling in a competitive market system so that capitalism does not always deserve the capitalists. The market mechanism is abstract to explain but it certainly exists as something objective as Adam Smith described as the invisible hand of God. None has ever known what the next market trend in the future: Only what they may do to survive to thrive is to analyse how individuals' behavour and mind and the surrounding natural environment remain and change.


When the distribution flow and the overall economic activity are stagnated, a more visible and collective political force is affecting to stratify this economic and political structure than what Marx assumed. Neo-Marxists admit that capitalists are more proletarised than the past; this means that many traditional capitalists have lost their control over their capital because of the rise of two new capitalist classes called transnational entrepreneurs and national bureaucrats. Transnational entrepreneurs take advantage of this globalised world politics to gain the wider scale monopolistic power. National bureaucrats take advantage of their regulatory power and their authority of the government economic intervention. The name value of transnational entrepreneurs and the charisma of elite bureaucrats of a nation maintain their authority which is powerful and influential enough to enable them to accumulate their capital and its means of production.

Money is an intermediary of exchange: Money follows into where the exchangeable quantity and quality are located. The power of gathering money of the previously mentioned two ruling class groups is their authority to authorise what and where are legitimately exchangeable. This legitimacy authorised by their new authoritarianism is the means of their production of their capital to maintain their wealth and political power. So, only earning a huge amount of money itself to own a huge amount of capital does not enable individuals to have an authority to control over capital and its means of production.

Nevertheless, these new ruling class also do not have the full control of their means of production enough to prevent the pressure from the market force. Despite the significantly huge influential power in the market, these transnational entrepreneurs also need to constantly inject their own resource investments into analysing the current market mechanism and trend enough to maintain their wealth and preventing their potential predators against their dominance. National bureaucrats also need to constantly take enough attention to their resource allocation of the public sectors to optimise the level of taxation and regulation. The excess regulation causes the stagnation in the overall national economy, the extractable resources for these bureaucrats, and the loyalty of their fellow individual citizens to the national bureaucracy. Overall, these ruling class are always under the pressure of various external forces threatening their dominance, and the controlling capital and the means of production is not a permanent political power of reign.

So then, which human individuals control over capital and its means of production? The answer should be that none actually holds the ultimate economic and political power to maintain their dominance. Under the modern structured politics, even the ruling class individuals are constantly under the pressure of maintaining their status-quo a nation and/or a transnational institute. All of them live to survive as the cogwheel parts of their belonging institute. As they are already integrated into the structure, they unintentionally keep serving for their non-human machine-like structure in order to keep themselves surviving in it. In order to escape from this structure, the member individuals will be expected to become considerably brave and somehow deviant enough to challenge and escape from their accustomed modern structure of economy and politics.



Marxists put emphasis on the diversification of power enabling the majority citizens called the proletariat to replace the current ruling class minority with the proletariat majority rule. The old types of Marxists insist on persecution against the ruling class of the current status-quo as their revenge against the exploitation for a long time. Neo-Marxists insist less on what this old ideology but they still affirm to replace the ruling class with the proletariat rule by the diversification process. All Marxists agree to hate the minority rich for the cause of the proletariat. Furthermore, the proletariat class individuals not agreeing with Marxist cause are highly humiliated by Marxists as traitors, uneducated, and/or whores of the ruling class. Marxists claim for a strong altruism and devalue egoism to forcibly encourage citizens to unite. By contrast, there is always a question about why the rich individuals are evil enough to be hated and why all the majority citizens need to keep feeling miserable with their daily life.

These proletariat are frustrated due to their lack of satisfaction caused by the low reward for their high effort in their daily life. Marxists argue that this is a productive motive to challenge against the status-quo to diversify the ruling power to provide the unsatisfied proletariat with their right to improve their life. Marxists tend to blindly assume that all the privileged rich are selfish and brutal enough to keep exploiting the majority citizens to accumulate their wealth and political power furthermore. However, this has been questioned by the classical Liberalists from the British classical economics.

The following graph simulates the correlation between income and happiness=utility. An extra-income gain makes individuals significantly happy when their income level is lower than the certain point meanwhile its marginal rise of happiness=utility diminishes after exceeding this point.

In this graph, the income boundary is divided into this certain point where the marginal utility starts diminishing as the extra income gain increases. As shown in this graph, the marginal utility based on the income gain is higher than the marginal income at the relatively lower income level. The area chat shows the imaginary population distribution assuming the 10% rich individuals enjoy their "high income enough to be happy enough" and the rest 90% enjoy "extra income gains" more than the 10% rich.

The remarkable British classical economists such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall argue that these rich individuals tend to become altruistic because their own personal ego is already satisfied under the market economy described as capitalism by Marxism. The market economy is the first political economic system which provides individuals with the opportunity to accumulate their wealth so massively that it is not impossible to fulfill their egoistic interests. Furthermore, the market economy is a magical system where individuals' egoism turns to be an altruism because they exchange for their demanding reward for the others' needs. Then, rich individuals start redistributing their wealth voluntarily without relying on the government involuntary force in order to acquire their heroic honour. In addition, the rich individuals could not become rich without injecting enough efforts and using their wisdom due to the constantly competitive market economy. So, they have more experiences, knowledge, and wisdom to run big projects which the low income citizens have seldom had the opportunity of. Therefore, it is worse off to remain these rich individuals thrive rather than defeating them by the political power diversification.

At the same time, Marshall was afraid of the proletariat suddenly taking over the political power by replacing their hating rich with their sudden diversification. Even though these proletariat started doing good for all at the beginning after the diversification process, it is suspected to be the case that these proletariat violating the system to deserve for themselves. Marxism simply implies replacing the bureaucracy of the old regime with the bureaucracy hijacked by the Marxist proletariat coup. As the proletariat coup have been frustrated due to their lack of the marginal utility, they are more eager to cling to their irrational egoism by violating the politics. These bureaucrats of the proletariat coup seem to be too vulgar to maintain their rationality after suddenly acquiring such a monopolistic power of capital explained in the aforementioned paragraph.

Moreover, Marxists are too accustomed with despising egoism so persistently that they are hardly enable to admit the ego of others. They often force the others to deserve them and their revolutionary ideal to prop up their altruistic political structure. Unlike the capitalist regime which does not intervene to the others' business and personal egoism, Marxists tend to be paranoid about other individuals. The market economy, capitalism, accepts or even encourages egoism as a form of individuals' natural need and desire meanwhile Marxism and majority forms of socialism do not. Marxism and the other form of socialism regard highly of the collective effort to achieve their ultimate goal with the altruism. They may not directly force but they will indirectly force the others to follow their altruistic command by treating those opposing parties as uneducated and/or misguided.


Soren Kierkegaard said that Marxists and all the modern idealists are unhappy individuals because they will never be content enough to be happy in their daily life. They are always in a day dream of being better in their anticipating future, and then devalue their inevitable past experiences and memories and neglect what they have already acquired and achieved at the present moment. Unhappy individuals tend to be convinced to Marxism and all the modern idealism meanwhile the other individuals who are reasonably happy in their life are not convinced. Marxists may think these already reasonably happy ones are uneducated and/or misguided so that Marxists often preach these general public with their ideology to "help" them to overcome from the false-consciousness imprinted by the status-quo. Nevertheless, these preached one may feel this is not help; it is simply an annoyance.