 May 5th this year marked the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, and in spite of inspiring a wide variety of political movements that have caused countless human rights disasters, Marx continues to be an object of admiration among many intellectuals and artists. One such example can be found in Raoul Peck's new film, The Young Karl Marx, which portrays Marx as a principled radical with a laudable thirst for justice. Hello, this is Rye MacMacon, and you're listening to Radio Rothbard. Fortunately for Marx the man and his reputation, he never personally gained control of the machinery of any state, thus the dirty work of actually implementing the necessary dictatorship of the proletariat was left up to others, and those who attempted to bring Marxism into the light of practical reality quickly found that applied Marxism brings impoverishment and the destruction of human freedom. Nevertheless, after a century marked by brutal socialist regimes based on various interpretations of Marx's ideas, Marx's rehabilitation often rests on the idea that real socialism has never been tried. That is a truly pure socialist experience, as Marx presumably wanted, has always been tainted by the presence of bourgeois ideas or lingering capitalistic habits present in the state apparatus. A typical example of this sort of thinking can be found in Noam Chomsky's insistence that the obviously socialist regime in Venezuela is really, quote, quite remote from socialism, unquote, and it's also notable in philosopher Slavo Zizek's 2017 article in The Guardian called The Problem with Venezuela's Revolution is that it didn't go far enough. In Zizek's view it seems socialism can work if the habits and customs of the status quo are destroyed utterly and replaced by entirely new ways of thinking, or as Zizek describes it, old proverbs, that is, modes of thought, must be totally replaced by new proverbs. For example, Zizek writes, radical revolutionaries like Robespierre fail because they enact a break with the past without succeeding in their effort to enforce a new set of customs. The leaders like Lenin and Mao succeeded, for some time at least, because they invented new proverbs, which means that they impose new customs that regulated daily lives, unquote. Thus the problem in Venezuela is not that countless private businesses have been seized, rights been destroyed, and countless citizens deprived of basic freedoms, no, the problem is that the Venezuelan regime was too conservative and failed to implement a total break with the past. But how is that break from the past to be brought about? The truth lies in the language used by Zizek himself. It involves enforcing a set of customs, quote, unquote, and, quote, imposing new customs, unquote. This of course is the language of coercion and violence. These new customs wouldn't have to be imposed, of course, if people wanted to adopt them voluntarily. From the point of view of the socialist purist, if only a new Lenin or a new Mao were to come and try harder, well then socialism might finally succeed. After all, as the satirical publication The Onion recently suggested, quote, Stalin was just one great purge away from creating communist utopia, unquote. As hyperbolic as such statements may seem, this idea nevertheless fundamentally describes the mindset of those who claim that socialism has never really been tried. If socialism is to be implemented, something must be done to relieve people of their attachment to private property and all the other customs and ideas that get in the way of utopia. In practice, this has always meant using the power of the state to force a new way of life on people. Moreover, thanks to economic realities, it has also meant that the more socialism is applied, the lower the standard of living sinks. But thinking goes, so long as the socialist planners keep forging ahead and refuse to be sabotaged by capitalist thought, then utopia can be reached. Yes, there will be a lot of suffering in the interim, but the ultimate payoff will be incalculably great. Both Marx and Stalin admitted this unfortunate interim stage was a problem. As Ludwig von Mises notes, Marx even had to invent a two-tiered evolution of socialism. Mises writes, quote, in a letter, Karl Marx distinguished between two stages of socialism. The lower preliminary stage and the higher stage. But Marx didn't give different names to these two stages. At the higher stage, he said, there will be such an abundance of everything that it will be possible to establish the principle to everybody according to his needs. Because foreign critics note its differences in the standards of living of various members of the Russian Soviets, Stalin made a distinction. At the end of the 1920s, he declared that the lower stage was socialism and the higher stage was communism. The difference was that at the lower socialist stage, there was inequality in the rations of the various members of the Russian Soviets. Equality will be attained only in the later communist stage, unquote. Note however that capitalism doesn't suffer from this problem. If we take a middle-of-the-road interventionist economy and start introducing partial halfway-free market liberal reforms, does this cause the economy to collapse? Certainly not. Indeed, everywhere we look and find a relatively less socialist economy, the less poverty and more prosperity we find. Historically, this is obvious. The countries that embraced free trade, industrialization, and the trappings of market economies early on are the wealthiest economies today. We also find this to be the case in post-war Europe, where the relatively pro-market economies such as those in Germany and the UK are wealthier and have higher standards of living than the more socialist economies of southern Europe, such as Greece and Spain. This is even true of the Scandinavian countries like Sweden, which as Per Bieland has noted, historically built its wealth with a relatively laissez-faire regime. We see this phenomenon at work in comparisons between West Germany and East Germany. In West Germany, after World War II, pro-market reforms helped usher in a period of immense economic growth, with only halfway reforms. By abolishing price controls and other government-imposed restraints on the economy, the German economy took off while more socialist economies, like that found in the UK at that time, were more stagnant. Obviously, in the case of Germany, the West German state did not adopt pure capitalism. They merely adopted relatively more laissez-faire, and the economy expanded. In fact, according to Hans Senholz, the West German state rather accidentally stumbled upon its free-market reforms. And yet we call the results the German economic miracle. Other examples can be found across Eastern Europe and Latin America, where markets are more relatively free, the higher the standard of living, and the greater the economic growth. Capitalists aren't forced to make excuses about how real capitalism has never been tried, even though purely free markets have never existed anywhere. 200 years after Marx, though, every new Marx-inspired failure causes his defenders to resort to the same excuse again and again. One can only hope that 200 years from now, they've given up. Thank you for listening to this edition of Radio Rothbard. Have a wonderful day. For more content like this, visit Mises.org.