Jordan Peterson's Critique of the Communist Manifesto

What I did instead was return to what I regarded as the original cause of all the trouble, let's say, which was the Communist Manifesto. What I attempted to do because that's Marx—and we're here to talk about Marxism, let's say—and, um, what I tried to do was read it. To read something, you don't just follow the words and follow the meaning, but you take apart the sentences and you ask yourself at this level of phrase and at the level of sentence and at the level of paragraph: is this true? Are there counter arguments that can be put forward that are credible? Is this solid thinking?

I have to tell you—and I'm not trying to be flippant here—that I have rarely read a tract now. I read it when I was 18. It was a long time ago, right? That's 40 years ago. But I've rarely read a tract that made as many errors per sentence, conceptual errors per sentence, as the Communist Manifesto. It was quite a miraculous re-read, and it was interesting to think about it psychologically as well, because I've read student papers that were of the same ilk in some sense, although I'm not suggesting that they were of the same level of glittering literary brilliance and polemic quality.

I also understand that the Communist Manifesto was a call for revolution and not a standard logical argument. But that notwithstanding, I have some things to say about the authors psychologically. The first thing is that it doesn't seem to me that either Marx or Engels grappled with one fundamental truth, which is that almost all ideas are wrong. It doesn't matter if they're your ideas or someone else's ideas; they're probably wrong. Even if they strike you with the force of brilliance, your job is to assume first of all that they're probably wrong and then to assault them with everything you have in your arsenal and see if they can survive.

What struck me about the Communist Manifesto was that it was akin to something Jung said about typical thinking. This was the thinking of people who weren't trained to think. He said that the typical thinker has a thought; it appears to them like an object might appear in a room. The thought appears, and then they just accept it as true. They don't go the second step, which is to think about the thinking, and that's the real essence of critical thinking.

So that's what you try to teach people in university: to read a text and to think about it critically, not to destroy the utility of the text, but to separate the wheat from the chaff. What I tried to do when I was reading the Communist Manifesto was to separate the wheat from the chaff. I'm afraid I found some wheat, yes, but mostly chaff, and I'm going to explain why, hopefully in relatively short order.

I'm going to outline 10 of the fundamental axioms of the Communist Manifesto. These are truths that are basically held as self-evident by the authors, and they're truths that are presented in some sense as unquestioned. I'm going to question them and tell you why I think they're unreliable. Now, we should remember that this tract was actually written 170 years ago. That's a long time ago. We have learned a fair bit from then about human nature, about society, about politics, about economics. There's lots of mysteries left to be solved, but we are slightly wiser, I presume, than we were at one point.

You can forgive the authors to some degree for what they didn't know, but that doesn't matter, given that the essence of this doctrine is still held as sacred by a large proportion of academics—probably among the most, what would you call, guilty of that particular sin.

So, here's proposition number one: history is to be viewed primarily as an economic class struggle. All right. So let's think about that for a minute. The first of all is there—the proposition there is that history is primarily to be viewed through an economic lens. I think that's a debatable proposition because there are many other motivations that drive human beings than economics, and those have to be taken into account. Especially that drive people other than economic competition, like economic cooperation, for example. And so that's a problem.

The other problem is that it's actually not nearly a pessimistic enough description of the actual problem. This is to give the devil his due—the idea that one of the driving forces between history is hierarchical struggle is absolutely true. But the idea that that's actually history is not true because it's deeper than history; it's biology itself. Organisms of all sorts organize themselves into hierarchies, and one of the problems with hierarchies is that they tend to arrange themselves into a winner-take-all situation.

That is implicit in some sense in Marx's thinking because, of course, Marx believed that in a capitalist society, capital would accumulate in the hands of fewer and fewer people. That actually is in keeping with the nature of hierarchical organizations. Now, the problem with that isn't so much the fact of the—there's accuracy in the accusation that that is an eternal form of motivation for struggle.

But it's an underestimation of the seriousness of the problem because it attributes it to the structure of human societies rather than the deeper reality of the existence of hierarchical structures per se, which, as they also characterize the animal kingdom to a large degree, are clearly not only human constructions. The idea that there's hierarchical competition among human beings? There's evidence for that that goes back at least to the Paleolithic times.

So, the next problem is that this ancient problem of hierarchical structure is clearly not attributable to capitalism because it existed long in human history before capitalism existed, and then it predated human history itself. So the question then arises: why would you necessarily at least implicitly link the class struggle with capitalism, given that it's a far deeper problem?

Now it's also—it's got to be understood that this is a deeper problem for people on the left, not just for people on the right. It is the case that hierarchical structures dispossess those people who are at the bottom, those creatures who are at the bottom—speaking, say, of animals—or those people who are at the bottom. That is a fundamental existential problem.

But the other thing that Marx didn't seem to take into account is that there are far more reasons that human beings struggle than their economic class struggle. Even if you build the hierarchical idea into that, which is a more super-comprehensive way of thinking about it, human beings struggle with themselves, with the malevolence that's inside themselves, with the evil that they're capable of doing, with the spiritual and psychological warfare that goes on within them. We're also actually always at odds with nature, and this never seems to show up in Marx, and it doesn't show up in Marxism in general. It's as if nature doesn't exist.

The primary conflict, as far as I'm concerned, or a primary conflict that human beings engage in, is this struggle for life in a cruel and harsh natural world. It’s as if that doesn’t exist in the Marxist domain. If human beings have a problem, it’s because there’s a class struggle that’s essentially economic. It’s like, no, human beings have problems because we come into life starving and lonesome and we have to solve that problem continually, and we make our social arrangements at least in part to ameliorate that, as well as to, well, on occasion, exacerbate it.

So there's also very little understanding in the Communist Manifesto that any of the, like, say hierarchical organizations that human beings have put together might have a positive element, and that's an absolute catastrophe. Because hierarchical structures are actually necessary to solve complicated social problems. We have to organize ourselves in some manner, and you have to give the devil his due.

It is the case that hierarchies dispossess people, and that's a big problem. That’s the fundamental problem of inequality. But it’s also the case that hierarchies happen to be a very efficient way of distributing resources. Finally, the case is that human hierarchies are not fundamentally predicated on power. I would say that biological and anthropological data on that are crystal clear. You don’t rise to a position of authority that’s reliable in a human society primarily by exploiting other people. It’s a very unstable means of obtaining power.

So, that's a problem. Well, the people that laugh might do it that way. Okay, now another problem that comes up right away is that Marx also assumes that you can think about history as a binary class struggle with clear divisions between, say, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. And that’s actually a problem because it’s not so easy to make a firm division between who’s exploiter and who’s the exploitee, let’s say.

Because it's not obvious, like in the case of small shareholders, let's say, whether or not they happen to be part of the oppressed or part of the oppressor. This actually turned out to be a big problem in the Russian Revolution, and by big problem, I mean tremendously big problem. Because it turned out that you could fragment people into multiple identities and that that's a fairly easy thing to do. You could usually find some axis along which they were part of the oppressor class.

It might have been a consequence of their education or it might have been a consequence of their wealth that they strived to accumulate during their life. It might have been a consequence of the fact that they had parents or grandparents who were educated or rich, or that they were a member of the priesthood or that they were socialists or—anyways—the listing of how it was possible for you to be bourgeois instead of proletariat grew immensely.

That was one of the reasons that the Red Terror claimed all the victims that it claimed. So that was a huge problem; it was probably most exemplified by the demolition of the kulaks, who were basically peasants—peasant farmers, although effective ones—in the Soviet Union who managed to raise themselves out of serfdom over a period of about 40 years and to gather some degree of material security about them. About 1.8 million of them were exiled, about 400,000 were killed, and the net consequence of that removal of their private property because of their bourgeois status was arguably the death of six million Ukrainians in the famines of the 1930s.

The binary class struggle idea was a bad idea—a very, very bad idea. It's also bad in this way, and this is a real sleight of hand that Marx pulls off, as you have a binary class division: proletariat, bourgeoisie, and you have an implicit idea that all of the good is on the side of the proletariat and all of the evil is on the side of the bourgeoisie. That’s classic group identity thinking.

You know, it’s one of the reasons I don’t like identity politics. Because once you divide people into groups and pit them against one another, it’s very easy to assume that all the evil in the world can be attributed to one group—the hypothetical oppressors—and all the good to the other. That’s naive—naive beyond comprehension—because it’s absolutely foolish to make the presumption that you can identify someone’s moral worth with their economic standing.

That actually turned out to be a real problem as well, because Marx also came up with this idea, which is a crazy idea as far as I can tell—a technical term, crazy idea—of the dictatorship of the proletariat. That’s the next idea that I really stumbled across. It was like, okay, so what's the problem? Well, the problem is the capitalists own everything. They own all the means of production, and they're oppressing everyone—that would be all the workers—and there’s going to be a race to the bottom of wages for the workers as the capitalists strive to extract more and more value from the labor of the proletariat by competing with other capitalists to drive wages downward.

Which, by the way, didn’t happen partly because wage earners can become scarce, and that actually drives the market value upward. But the fact that you assume a priori that all the evil can be attributed to the capitalists and all the good could be attributed to the proletariat meant that you could hypothesize that a dictatorship of the proletariat could come about.

That was the first stage in the communist revolution. Remember, this is a call for revolution, and not just revolution, but bloody violent revolution and the overthrow of all existing social structures.

Anyways, the problem with that, you see, is that because all the evil isn’t divided so easily up into oppressor and oppressed, that when you do establish a dictator of the proletariat, to the degree that you can do that—which you actually can’t, because it’s technically impossible and an absurd thing to consider to begin with—not least because of the problem of centralization.

I mean, you have to hypothesize that you can take away all the property of the capitalists; you can replace the capitalist class with a minority of proletariats. How they’re going to be chosen isn’t exactly clear in the Communist Manifesto. None of the people who are from the proletariat class are going to be corrupted by that sudden access to power, because they’re, well, by definition, good.

So, then you have the good people who are running the world, and you also have them centralized so that they can make decisions that are insanely complicated to make—in fact, impossibly complicated to make. So that's a failure conceptually on both dimensions, because first of all, all the proletariat aren’t going to be good.

When you put people in the same position as the evil capitalists, especially if you believe that social pressure is one of the determining factors of human character, which the Marxists certainly believe, then why wouldn’t you assume that the proletariat would immediately become as or more corrupt than the capitalists? That is, of course, I would say exactly what happened every time this experiment was run.

Then the next problem is: well, what makes you think that you can take some system as complicated as, like, a capitalist free-market society and centralize that and put decision-making power in the hands of a few people? Without specifying the mechanisms by which you’re going to choose them—like, what makes you think they’re going to have the wisdom or the ability to do what the capitalists were doing?

Unless you assume, as Marx did, that all of the evil was with the capitalists and all the good was with the proletariat and that nothing that capitalists did constituted valid labor, which is another thing that Marx assumed, which is palpably absurd. Because people who are—like, maybe if you’re a dissolute aristocrat from 1830 or earlier and you run a feudal estate, and all you do is spend your time gambling and chasing prostitutes, well then your labor value is zero.

But if you're running a business, and it's a successful business, first of all you’re a bloody fool to exploit your workers. Because even if you’re greedy as sin, you’re not going to extract the maximum amount of labor out of them by doing that. And the notion that you're adding no productive value as a manager rather than a capitalist is absolutely absurd.

All it does is indicate that you either know nothing whatsoever about how an actual business works or you refuse to know anything about how an actual business works. So that’s also a big problem.

Then the next problem is the criticism of profit. It’s like: well, what’s wrong with profit exactly? What’s the problem with profit? Well, the idea from the Marxist perspective was that profit was theft.

You know, profit, well, can be theft because crooked people can run companies, and so sometimes profit is theft, but that certainly doesn’t mean that it’s always theft. What it means in part, at least, if the capitalist is adding value to the corporation, then there's some utility and some fairness in him or her extracting the value of their abstract labor, their thought, their abstract abilities, their ability to manage the company, to engage in proper competition, and product development and efficiency and the proper treatment of the workers and all of that.

If they can create a profit, well then they have a little bit of security for times that aren’t so good, and that seems absolutely bloody necessary as far as I’m concerned. Then the next thing is, well how can you grow if you don’t have a profit? And if you have an enterprise that’s valuable and worthwhile—and some enterprises are valuable and worthwhile—then it seems to me that a little bit of profit to help you grow seems to be the right approach.

Then the other issue with profit—and you know this if you’ve ever run a business—is it’s a really useful constraint. You know, like, it’s not enough to have a good idea. It’s not good enough to have a good idea and a sales and marketing plan and then to implement that and all of that. That’s bloody difficult. It’s not easy to have a good idea, and it’s not easy to come up with a good sales and marketing plan, and it’s not easy to find customers and satisfy them.

So if you allow profit to constitute a limitation on what it is that you might reasonably attempt, it provides a good constraint on wasted labor. Most of the things that I’ve done in my life, even psychologically, that were designed to help people’s psychological health, I tried to run on a for-profit basis. The reason for that was, apart from the fact that I’m not averse to making a profit, partly so my enterprises can grow, is because there were forms of stupidity that I couldn’t engage in, because I would be punished by the market enough to eradicate the enterprise.

Okay, and then so the next issue—this is a weird one—so Marx and Engels also assume that this dictatorship of the proletariat, which involves absurd centralization, the overwhelming probability of corruption, and impossible computation as the proletariat now try to rationally compute the manner in which an entire market economy could run—which cannot be done because it’s far too complicated for anybody to think through.

The next theory is that somehow the proletariat dictatorship would become magically hyper-productive. There’s actually no theory at all about how that’s going to happen. I had to infer the theory, and the theory seems to be that once you eradicate the bourgeoisie because they're evil and you get rid of their private property and you eradicate the profit motive, then all of a sudden magically the small percentage of the proletariat who now run the society determine how they can make their productive enterprises productive enough so they become hyper-productive.

Now, they need to become hyper-productive for the last error to be logically coherent in relationship to Marxist theory, which is that at some point the dictatorship of the proletariat will become so hyper-productive that there’ll be enough material goods for everyone across all dimensions. When that happens, then what people will do is spontaneously engage in meaningful creative labor, which is what they had been alienated from in the capitalist horror show, and the utopia will be magically ushered in.

But there’s no indication about how that hyperproductivity is going to come about, and there’s also no understanding that, well, that isn’t the utopia that is going to suit everyone because there are great differences between people. Some people are going to find what they want in love, and some are going to find it in social being, and some are going to find it in conflict and competition, and some are going to find it in creativity, as Marx pointed out.

But the notion that that will necessarily be the end goal for the utopian state is preposterous. Then there’s the Dostoyevsky observation too, which is one not to be taken lightly. What sort of shallow conception of people do you have that makes you think that if you gave people enough bread and cake—in Dostoyevsky’s terms—and nothing to do but busy themselves with the continued continuity of the species, that they would all of a sudden become peaceful and heavenly?

Dostoyevsky’s idea was that, you know, we were built for trouble. If we were ever handed everything we needed on a silver platter, the first thing we would do is engage in some form of creative destruction just so something unexpected could happen—just so we could have the adventure of our lives. I think there’s something—well, there’s something to be said for that.

So, and then the last error, let’s say, although by no means the last, was this. This is one of the strangest parts of the Communist Manifesto. Marx admits—and Engels admit repeatedly in the Communist Manifesto—that there has never been a system of production in the history of the world that was as effective at producing material commodities in excess than capitalism.

If your proposition is, look, we got to get as much material security for everyone as we can, as fast as we can, and capitalism already seems to be doing that at a rate that’s unparalleled in human history, wouldn’t the logical thing be just to let the damn system play itself out?

I mean, unless you’re assuming that the evil capitalists are just going to take all of the flat-screen televisions and put them in one big room and not let anyone else have one, the logical assumption is that, well, you’re already on a road that’s supposed to produce the proper material productivity.

So, well, that's ten reasons, as far as I can tell, that what I saw in that—the Communist Manifesto—is like seriously flawed in virtually every way it could possibly be flawed. Also all in evidence that Marx was the kind of narcissistic thinker who could think he—he was a very intelligent person, and so was Engels—but what he thought when he thought was that what he thought was correct. He never went the second stage, which is: wait a second, how could all of this go terribly wrong?

If you’re a thinker, especially a sociological thinker—especially a thinker on the broad scale, a social scientist for example—one of your moral obligations is to think. You know, you might be wrong about one of your fundamental axioms or two or three or ten. As a consequence, you have the moral obligation to walk through the damn system and think, well what if I’m completely wrong here and things invert and go exactly the wrong way?

I just can’t understand how anybody could come up with an idea like the dictatorship of the proletariat, especially after advocating its implementation with violent means, which is a direct part of the Communist Manifesto, and actually think—if they were thinking and if they knew anything about human beings and the proclivity for malevolence that’s part and parcel of the individual human being—that that could do anything but lead to a special form of hell, which is precisely what did happen.

I'm going to close because I have three minutes with a bit of evidence as well that Marx also thought that what would happen inevitably as a consequence of capitalism is that the rich would get richer and the poor would get poorer, so there would be inequality. The first thing I’d like to say is we do not know how to set up a human system of economics without inequality. No one has ever managed it, including the communists.

The form of inequality changed, and it’s not obvious by any stretch of the imagination that the free market economies of the West have more inequality than the less free economies in the rest of the world. The one thing you can say about capitalism is that although it produces inequality—which it absolutely does—it also produces wealth, and all the other systems don’t; they just produce inequality.

So here’s a few stats—here’s a few free market stats, okay? From 1800 to 2017, income growth adjusted for inflation grew by 40 times for production workers and 16 times for unskilled labor.

Well, GDP rose by a factor of about 0.5 from 1800 to 1800 A.D. It was like nothing flat, and then all of a sudden in the last 217 years, there’s been this unbelievably upward movement of wealth, and it doesn’t only characterize the tiny percentage of people at the top, who admittedly do have most of the wealth.

The question is not only, though, what’s the inequality; the question is, well, what’s happening to the absolutely poor at the bottom? The answer to that is they’re getting richer faster now than they ever have in the history of the world, and we’re eradicating poverty in countries that have adopted moderate free market policies at a rate that’s unparalleled.

So, here’s an example. One of the U.N. Millennium goals was to reduce the rate of absolute poverty in the world by 50% between 2000 and 2015. They defined that as a dollar 90 a day—pretty low, you know, but you have to start somewhere. We hit that in 2012—three years ahead of schedule.

You might be cynical about that and say, well, it’s kind of an arbitrary number, but the curves are exactly the same at dollars and 3.80 cents a day and seven dollars and sixty cents a day—not as many people have hit that, but the rate of increase towards that is the same. The bloody U.N. thinks that we’ll be out of poverty defined by a dollar ninety a day by the year 2030. It’s unparalleled.

So, the rich may be getting richer, but the poor are getting richer too, and that’s—that's not the—look, I’ll leave it at that, because I'm out of time. But one of the—I’ll leave it with this—the poor are not getting poorer under capitalism. The poor are getting richer under capitalism by a large margin.

I’ll leave you with one statistic, which is that now, in Africa, the child mortality rate in Africa now is the same as the child mortality rate was in Europe in 1952. That’s happened within the span of one lifetime. So, if you're for the poor, if you're for the poor, if you're actually concerned that the poorest people in the world rise above their starvation levels, then all the evidence suggests that the best way to do that is to implement something approximating a free market economy.