MARXIST
COMMUNISM

the most devastating ideology in human history

What are Marxism and Communism?
Marxism is a far-left social, economic, and political philosophy created by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which analyzes history and class struggle. Communism is the stateless, classless society that Marxism identifies as its ultimate goal.

While it is experiencing a resurgence in popularity in today's far-left political sphere, it is important to know that Communism has caused more suffering and damage than any other ideology in human history. While we must understand the circumstances in which Karl Marx lived and developed his ideas and manifesto — for his was a time of great social uncertainty with industrialisation on the rise, and laborours and workforces being pushed to their limits, almost to the point of dehumanisation — the situation has changed vastly over the last century, making any justification for Marxism as a viable, modern-day societal system largely obsolete.

While it claimed to champion equality and the working class, in practice, Marxist-Communism has consistently resulted in authoritarian governments that gained and maintained power with brutal disregard for human rights and dignity, including mass surveillance, secret police, repression of identity and belief, economic mismanagement, mass executions, forced labour, purges, forced collectivization, engineered famines, and political repression. Altogether, this political ideology has a penchant for inflicting human suffering on an extraordinary scale, and has resulted an estimated death-toll of 120 to 150 million people worldwide.

It is not a cool new revolutionary way of thinking. It is not a viable tool for bettering society. From Stalin’s Gulags to Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Pol Pot’s Killing Fields, Marxist-inspired regimes turned entire nations into laboratories of misery, proving time and again that this theory’s utopian promises inevitably lead to dystopian realities. If you truly care about social justice and the well-being of your fellow human beings, this is not the ideology for you.

Major Communist Regimes and Their Estimated Death Toll

Soviet Union (1917–1991)

  • Deaths: 20–30 million
  • Causes: The Red Terror, forced collectivization (Holodomor famine: 3–7 million deaths), Gulag labor camps, Stalinist purges, mass executions, and political repression.

People’s Republic of China (1949–present)

  • Deaths: 50–80 million
  • Causes: The Great Leap Forward famine (30–45 million deaths), Cultural Revolution (1–3 million executions and purges), forced labor, and political purges.

Cambodia (Khmer Rouge, 1975–1979)

  • Deaths: 1.5–2 million
  • Causes: Genocide, mass executions, starvation due to forced agrarian collectivization.

North Korea (1948–present)

  • Deaths: 2–3 million+
  • Causes: State-induced famine (1990s), forced labor camps, political purges, mass executions.

Soviet Eastern Europe (1945–1989)

  • Deaths: 1–3 million
  • Causes: Forced deportations, labor camps, political repression (Hungary, Poland, Romania, East Germany, etc.).

Marx the Hypocrite
Born in 1818, Marx spent decades of his adult life shaping socialist and communist ideas and writing his manifesto. Yet while he railed against capitalism and the bourgeoise (upper class society), he happily lived off capitalist wealth, spent time in high-class hotels and restaurants, neglected his family, harbored racist views, and held disdain for the very working class he claimed to represent.

It is ironic that Marxism became a movement of fanatical devotion, for the man himself seemed indifferent to the actual plight of workers, treating them more as an abstract class rather than real people, and worse, was happy to loose a dangerous ideology on the world without thinking of its consequences.

Personal Wealth and Lifestyle

  • Despite his anti-capitalist rhetoric, Marx lived off the financial support of a wealthy friend, Friedrich Engels, who made money from his textile business — a capitalist enterprise which exploited workers and which Marx never even visited.
  • Marx rarely held a steady job and relied on handouts while writing about the dignity of labor and the destruction of capitalism.
  • He lived in relative comfort compared to the working-class people he claimed to champion, frequenting nice hotels and dining in good restaurants, rather than among the workers he idealized.
  • He even had a maid, despite his apparent disdain for the upper-class.

Hypocrisy in Family Life

  • Marx treated his wife, Jenny von Westphalen, and his children, very poorly. He even fathered an illegitimate child with his maid, Helene Demuth, whom he refused to acknowledge or support.
  • His wife and children lived in poverty and squalor at times, yet when he did receive money, he often spent it on books, cigars, and personal luxuries rather than improving their living conditions.
  • Three of his children died from neglect and malnutrition, and others suffered from the instability of his household.

Views on Race and Ethnicity

  • Marx often wrote in blatantly racist and anti-Semitic terms.
  • He referred to his political opponent Ferdinand Lassalle as a "Jewish n****r" and mocked his features.
  • He saw Slavic peoples as racially inferior and advocated for their destruction in various writings, calling them "racial trash" who would be swept away by history.

Contempt for the Working Class

  • While he claimed to fight for workers, Marx rarely engaged with them in real life.
  • In private letters, he expressed disdain for the very working-class people he claimed to represent.
  • He often dismissed the working-class movements of his time when they did not align exactly with his theoretical framework.

Revolution in Thought, not in Practise

  • Unlike Lenin, who actively organized the Bolshevik movement, Marx mostly theorized from a distance. In other words, he enjoyed playing the comfortable intellectual known for his 'contrary' attitude. He avoided situations where he could be imprisoned or persecuted for revolutionary activities.
  • Marx never outlined how socialism should actually be implemented beyond vague ideas of proletarian dictatorship and the eventual “withering away” of the state. This led to interpretational chaos—later Marxists (Leninists, Trotskyists, Maoists) had to guess what Marx’s ideal system would look like, with devastating results. That this system took root in so many different forms — all of which failed catastrophically — is telling.

The Manifesto Itself: A Flawed Blueprint
Set aside the man and look only at the document. The Communist Manifesto (1848) is barely 12,000 words, yet it has been used to justify some of the most destructive political projects in modern history. It is not a rigorous economic thesis, but more of a confident, sweeping pamphlet — one whose central claims about history, economics, and human nature have not held up, and whose prescriptions (violent overthrow, abolition of private property, dissolution of the bourgeois family) supplied the exact justifications later regimes used for terror. When psychologist and author Jordan Peterson debated Marxist philosopher Slavoj Žižek in 2019, his opening remarks were built around a line-by-line re-reading of the Manifesto; he said he had "rarely read a tract that made as many conceptual errors per sentence" as it did. Whatever one makes of that debate, it's worth walking through where the document's core claims actually break down.

History Reduced to Class War

  • The Manifesto opens by declaring "the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" — a single lens applied to the whole of human history. Critics, including Peterson, argue this collapses a vastly complex web of culture, ideas, institutions, and individual agency into one axis: oppressor versus oppressed.
  • Peterson specifically objected to the resulting narrative of an inherently "good" proletariat and inherently "bad" bourgeoisie, arguing that this kind of group-identity framing is exactly the mechanism that authoritarian movements exploit.
  • It also assumes people rise in social hierarchies mainly by exploiting others, rather than through skill, competence, or the creation of value. Marxism's claim is one that rigorous analysis and research do not support.

Predictions That Didn't Come True

  • Marx predicted the "immiseration" of the working class under capitalism — that wages would be driven down and workers progressively impoverished. On the contrary, living standards for ordinary workers in market economies rose dramatically over the following century under capitalist systems.
  • He predicted the middle class would disappear, polarizing society into a tiny bourgeoisie and a vast proletariat. Instead, industrialized economies produced the largest middle classes in human history.
  • Marx treated capitalism's collapse as historically inevitable, but not only have capitalist societies survived and thrived, they have repeatedly proven more adaptable — and more effective at reducing global poverty — than the command economies built to replace it.
  • As Peterson put it during the 2019 debate, capitalism may be flawed, but it has outperformed every alternative tried at scale. In his words; "[Capitalism may be] the worst economic system - except for all the others."

No Real Blueprint, Just Demolition

  • The Manifesto is detailed about what to tear down — private property, inheritance, national identity, organized religion, the traditional family — but vague about what replaces it beyond a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the eventual, unexplained "withering away" of the state.
  • Its own ten-point program (a heavily progressive income tax, abolition of inheritance, centralization of credit and communication in the hands of the state, state ownership of all factories and land) requires a level of centralized state power that, in practice, is precisely what produced the surveillance states, purges, and famines of the regimes that followed it.
  • Marx never squared this circle: a document that begins by warning against oppression ends by prescribing the concentration of total economic and political power in a single authority - a dangerous and undesirable outcome by any measure.

Abolition of Family and Property

  • The Manifesto explicitly calls for the abolition of private property and states plainly that the bourgeois family, too, "will vanish as a matter of course" once capital is abolished.
  • This frames the family and inheritance themselves as instruments of class oppression, rather than as basic, cross-cultural human institutions — a framing later regimes used to justify state control over child-rearing, education, property, employment, even language.
  • Removing private property and inheritance also removes a key check on state power: when the state owns everything, there is no independent base from which citizens can resist it. Such measures can only (and indeed did) result in a withering of personal rights and freedoms and a 'climate of fear' for all members of society but those in power.

A Call to Force, Not Persuasion

  • The Manifesto closes by stating its aims "can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions" and famously ends with a call to arms rather than a call to debate. This is not incidental rhetoric — it is the document's own stated method. It supplied direct ideological cover for the revolutionary violence, purges, and "class enemy" logic used by nearly every regime that later claimed to implement it.
  • A political philosophy that begins by ruling out persuasion and gradual reform in favor of forced upheaval should be judged, in part, by that choice — and by the track record it produced.

Peterson's Response, Condensed
During his 30-minute opening statement in the 2019 debate, Peterson worked through the Manifesto line by line and laid out roughly ten objections to its core reasoning. Condensed to the essentials, they boil down to two things: the Manifesto's diagnosis of history is too narrow, and its own prescribed remedy is 'more dangerous than the disease'.

The Diagnosis Is Too Narrow

  • Hierarchies and dominance struggles predate capitalism — they show up throughout nature and human history long before industrial class divisions existed, so blaming capitalism for creating them gets the causality backwards. Ironically, Marxist-Communist regimes force hierarchy and dominance, which only amplifies the problem.
  • Reducing history to a single economic class struggle ignores humanity's other, arguably larger, struggles: against nature, against chaos and uncertainty, and against our own "malevolence" and psychological failings — none of which a change in property ownership resolves. In fact, during the European enlightenment the founders of today's liberal democracies often posited that private property was foundational to civil society and economic development.
  • "You don't rise to a position of authority in society primarily by exploiting other people" — competence, skill, and value creation, not exploitation, are what most reliably produce status in a functioning hierarchy.
  • Marx and Engels never grapple with the idea that most ideas — including their own — are likely wrong to some degree, and never build that humility into a theory presented as a near-total explanation of history.

The Cure Is Worse Than the Disease

  • Dividing society into a virtuous class and a villainous one is, in Peterson's telling, exactly the mechanism authoritarian movements use to justify persecuting whoever gets sorted into the "bad" group — and it scales into real violence once a revolution needs an enemy to blame.
  • A "dictatorship of the proletariat" assumes the working class will wield absolute power virtuously. Since it is absurd to believe that everyone in a given group is 'virtuous', concentrating unchecked power in such a group reliably produces (and has produced), in his words, "bloody misery" rather than liberation.
  • Marx's own text credits capitalism with unleashing enormous productive power — which sits awkwardly next to a theory built to condemn it as pure exploitation; if it works this well, the Manifesto never adequately explains why it must be destroyed rather than reformed.

A Call For Reason
Though Marxism is being reframed nowadays as a tool for social justice (and even championed as a solution to the West's ills in certain circles, from economic disparity to climate change to gender equality), it remains an ideology whose core ideals — though seductive at face value, especially for those who are facing hardship — have failed again and again to create a better, more just, fairer world. On the contrary, Marxist-Communism has consistently given rise to new forms of authoritarianism, injustice, oppression and pain, and cannot be the solution.

It is too easy to destroy, and far harder to repair and improve. Western society has its problems and its share of suffering, certainly, but it also provides freedoms and opportunities to its citizens unimaginable even two hundred years ago. Longer and healthier lives, access to resources previously unattainable (foods, medicines, trade materials, and living essentials), freedom of identity and speech and religion, access to knowledge and education, self-determination, freedom of travel, the right to vote, among many other precious gifts.

None of these benefits and rights simply came into existence on their own, and at no other time in recorded history has humanity enjoyed them as we in the West do today. It has taken centuries of hard work to create such a society and it is still a work in progress, but as citizens of this great project, we can only try to make things fairer and kinder. And we can only improve what we have if we don't destroy it, first.

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