Communism Kills, pt. 2: Mega Murder, Marx, and Max Weber

[Originally published in the Front Range Voluntaryist, Libertarian Sociology 101 Column by Richard G. Ellefritz , PhD]

I ended my previous installment of Libertarian Sociology 101 (see issue #7) with assertions about (possibly) why it is that “we see and hear so little from this side of our opposition (Right-progressives are another story) about the mass murders, starvation, imprisonment, and general malaise of people living in full-blown socialist and communist societies.” But, what are “full-blown socialist and communist societies?” After all, how often has it been said that “true socialism” or “true communism,” whatever those might be in the minds of Marx’s apologists, have never really been instituted. I would say the same of a free market system – in fact I once quipped that as my response to a then-shocked Master’s student who trotted out the tired no true Scotsman fallacy that, “well, true communism has never really been tried.” As if we would want it to be!

For those who desire the “equality for some” of socialism, or liberty for none of communism, look to The Black Book of Communism to tally the body count (here derived from its article on Wikipedia):

· 65 million: People's Republic of China
· 20 million: Soviet Union
· 2 million: Cambodia
· 2 million: North Korea (DPRK)

Or, if you, the lurking Left-progressive or curious contemporary sociologist, want further assurance that communism is a historically undesirable system, look to amateur historian Scott Manning’s “Communist Body Count,” or to political scientist R.J. Rummel’s tallying of the victims of communist megamurderers. Of this phenomenon, Rummel contends:

Communism has been the greatest social engineering experiment we have ever seen. It failed utterly and in doing so it killed over 100,000,000 men, women, and children, not to mention the near 30,000,000 of its subjects that died in its often aggressive wars and the rebellions it provoked. But there is a larger lesson to be learned from this horrendous sacrifice to one ideology. That is that no one can be trusted with power. The more power the center has to impose the beliefs of an ideological or religious elite or impose the whims of a dictator, the more likely human lives are to be sacrificed.

To that end we have found a historically undesirable and despicable politico-economic system, communism, toward which socialism was always aimed.

To the objection that communism is inherently undesirable, some might half-heartedly agree with the argument starting with, “sure, communism looks good on paper, but….” The assumption is that we are to take as a pragmatic problem the socialist revolution, redistribution of wealth, abolition of private property and the family, the dissolution of the dictatorship of the proletariat, or the implementation of global, world-wide communism in any regard. I suggest any who believe those to be merely practical problems of implementation consider first the above historical facts, and then, if you still think communism looks good on paper, read Requiem for Marx (Maltsev 1993) and Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (Mises 1922). Marxism doesn’t even work in theory, let alone historically or practically!

I doubt there are more than a handful of contemporary sociologists who are aware of either of those books, let alone of Ludwig von Mises the man (not to mention Austrian economics). In my estimate, a pathway forward with pushing these peddlers to stop promoting one of the world’s most dangerous, deadly, and disastrous ideologies, communism – second perhaps only to the antithesis of voluntaryism, statism – would be to discuss with them the merits of Max Weber’s works. Weber, constituting one of the three classical (European) founders of sociology – known as the Marx, Durkheim, and Weber trifecta, is well-known to sociologists, but his ideas are often cut short of what I believe are his underlying motivations.

Weber, younger than Marx by 46 years and an elder to Mises by 20, critiqued and contended with the father of communism directly, yet diplomatically, and is cited as an influence on Mises’ methodological thinking, a fact recognized by some sociologists and economists alike. Inspiring to many sociologists’ as well as my own career and thinking was an edited set of translated essays in the form of the book, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. One reason this is hailed as a foundational text in sociology is that Weber expanded our (sociologists’) concepts used to understand the stratified social order of society. Put differently, Weber moved sociological thinking beyond a simplified view of society as an economically deterministic class-based dichotomy to thinking of class in context of two other important sources of social conflict, status groups and political parties. Putting prestige and power in context of property relations, Weber allows us to think about the organization of society in a way that dispenses with the fact that Marxian thinking had led to a confusion and conflation of class with community. Weber warned of this mistake with elegance and grace:

“Above all, this fact must not lead
to that kind of pseudo-scientific
operation with the concepts of
‘class’ and ‘class interests’ so
frequently found these days,
and which has found its most
classic expression in the
statement of a talented author,
that the individual may be in
error concerning his interests
but that the ‘class’ is ‘infallible’
about its interests.”
(Weber 2009 p. 184-185).

Put bluntly, Marx made an egregious mistake – many more than this to be sure, but this was an error that ended in millions of men, women, and children dying as a result of a system allegedly set forth to liberate them from toil, misery, exploitation, and oppression: Marx and his heirs treated collectivities as primary and individuals as secondary, privileging the former in ways that made the later expendable.

What Marx (and Durkheim) gave to the world of sociologists was the power and will to analyze collectivities as sui generis entities, as things with their own properties beyond those of their constituent parts. While I do not disagree with this mode of analysis in theory or principle, it must be remembered that, while groups are real in their own right, it is the Individual who has Rights. Individuals are the entities with the thoughts, feelings, dreams, and desires that motivate us toward our destiny, that drive us to seek or fortunes and fates. When the individual is viewed as secondary to the collective, we lose sight of both the fact that brains reside in our corporeal being, and that whatever can be done to the collective can be done to the individual.

I will take up the moral case for a conscientious approach to methodological individualism in the next installment of this series.