What’s the main reason to be opposed to Marxism? My personal answer is that I have 100,000,000 reasons that are all tied for first. That number is a reasonable estimate of the number of people who were killed by their own Marxist governments during the 20th century. Of course, as with all such estimates, there is a good deal of controversy – no Marxist government keeps accurate records of those it chooses to exterminate. However, this number is defensible as a good estimate of people intentionally killed by their own Marxist governments. It is intended (in my case, not all authors do so) to exclude victims of war and preventable agricultural disaster. Even those who think this number is too high allow that the actual number is at least the still-shocking 85,000,000.*
Add in the death toll from unintentional (but avoidable) famine and the toll that lack of freedom and hope takes on the human spirit, and it becomes clear that Marxism must be opposed at every turn.
The response to this (from Bernie Bros, for example) is often, “well, sure, but you’re really talking about Communism – I’m not a Communist, just a Socialist, and a Democratic Socialist at that. It’s completely different!” The problem with this reply, of course, is that the Marxist governments who did the killing in my accounting above said that they were only Socialist, too, and Democratic to boot (they were just hoping to get to Communism someday). Could they help it if Communists just happened to win all the (“democratic”) elections?
At any rate, Socialism is just Communism with its claws retracted, and Democratic Socialism is just a system wherein the people get to choose the color of the collar on the tiger. Once the government owns the means of production, distribution and exchange (Socialist economic structure), it truly becomes irrelevant that there are elections to choose the particular Socialist who will run things. It also becomes largely irrelevant whether or not other forms of private property are allowed or not (Communism). As the old Soviet-era joke went, “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Once that is true, whether you are allowed to buy anything with your “salary” becomes rather a moot point.
I should also mention here, (since Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have made this the zombie argument that just keeps coming back no matter how many times it’s been killed) that Scandinavia (in particular, Sweden for some reason) is not an example of the success of Democratic Socialism – see here and here and here for increasingly-exasperated articles about this. Scandinavia is a different system entirely, often called Social Democracy. It certainly has a more extensive “safety net” than the US does, at the cost of a higher overall tax burden (which brings its own problems), but it is not Socialist; in fact Social Democracy requires a capitalist economy to generate the income needed to throw off the taxes needed to support the safety net. Various Scandinavian countries were moving in the direction of Socialism in the 1970s and 80s, but the resulting economic wreckage made it clear that this wasn’t going to work, so significant reforms were put in place making the Nordic countries more economically free (and capitalist) by some measures than the US. The UK is also frequently put forward as another example of the success of Democratic Socialism. Here, we are perhaps closer to the mark: after World War II, the UK moved much farther along the path toward Democratic Socialism, having nationalized a number of industries, but again, as the economic wheels came off the Marxist train, a staunch anti-Marxist named Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister in 1979, and she did the hard, thankless work of steering the UK off the reefs of Socialism, even if she didn’t ultimately get it on the course she wanted. From that time, the UK also has essentially been a Social Democracy, rather than a Democratic Socialist government. For a good discussion of this history, see The Socialist Temptation, by Iain Murray.
There are many dangers of Marxism, and we’ll detail a few of them in this category, but the principal danger is the tyranny that is necessarily involved in instituting and maintaining a Marxist government. Any USA version 2 worthy of the name must vigorously resist tyranny!
Postscript: following the writing of this essay, I became aware of an excellent Ilya Somin article regarding Victims of Communism Day (he advocates for a May 1 observance, but is willing to go with November 7 as well). It is an excellent summary of many of the same horrors I am describing here.
*Following the sourcing of data for this essay, news came out that Wikipedia is considering removing the Mass Killings under Communist Regimes page that I used as a source in the first paragraph. It will likely become a bit harder to find the information to which I refer here. I’ll try to find some other, more stable source for the same information. Edit: I have now found a stable source – Dave Kopel’s 2022 article in the Gonzaga Journal of International Law, (his summary here). Drawing on the work of the late political scientist Rudolph Rummel at the University of Hawaii, Kopel derives a Communist murder toll of 168,759,000 from 1900-1987 (note that this estimate is significantly higher than even the estimates I gave above, which are themselves fairly close to the 1997 Black Book estimates; the higher Rummel estimates don’t even cover the whole 20th century). Kopel’s paper also gives murder tolls for fascist governments (27,848,000) and for other totalitarian but non-Communist, non-fascist governments (16,374,000, some of these were arguably Marxist but not Communist, so could have been included in my Marxism death toll). Based on this new (to me) information, my 100 million estimate is looking like a very reasonable lower bound.
Also since the writing of this essay, though, the Victims of Communism Museum has opened in Washington, DC. I suspect that it will be an excellent source for the information used here. It’s worth noting that, at the dedication of the museum, there were representatives from the governments of Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania (as well as contributions to the museum from those countries), but none from USA version 1. How very, very sad.