TL;DR
In attempting to dissuade Marxist supporters/fellow travelers from some Marxist policy or other, first ascertain whether they think that facts matter (if not, there is little you can do – my advice is to find a reason to walk away politely). Then, while insisting on clear, stable definitions of terms, calmly ask Sowell’s 3 questions (below) about their proposed policy. Even if they remain unconvinced of your alternative, they will have spent some time pondering a non-Marxist approach to their question – it may be the only time they have actually done so.
The Details:
I wish I could say that presenting logical, well-reasoned arguments against Marxism will generally have positive results. It appears that Marxism, once it has moved from the academic framework level to the ideological level (that is, when it has moved from “sometimes oppression happens” to “oppression always happens, we just have to find it”), becomes almost a religious belief that is very difficult to change, at least with adult ideological Marxists.
It’s fairly common, though, for adults to repudiate youthful Marxism. This is the basis for the aphorism, “If you’re not a Communist at 20, you have no heart; if you still are at 40, you have no head” (or a similar formulation; incidentally, this is so universal an idea that it is quite unclear where it originates).
The banal narrative around this process is that it’s easy to advocate redistribution in your impoverished youth, when you personally would be a redistributee, but as one accumulates more wealth and moves into the redistributor class, it’s a tougher sell. I’m sure that’s part of it.
There are also, however, a few more interesting conversions – Whittaker Chambers, David Horowitz, Malcolm Muggeridge, Thomas Sowell, etc. These tend to be caused by coming face to face with either the inevitable horrors of totalitarian Marxism (as in the cases of Chambers, Horowitz and Muggeridge) or the reality of economic facts (as in Sowell’s case). I’m very much afraid that the current generation of young Marxists has been inoculated against the former by the repeated incantation of “I’m not a Communist, just a Democratic Socialist.” The latter argument (facts) can still work today, if it’s not blunted by “woke” postmodernism (“Those may be your facts, but mine are different.”).
It’s worth rehearsing here the outline of Thomas Sowell’s conversion from Marxism. Probably the most complete discussion of this is in Jason Riley’s Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell (which is recommended for many reasons, not only for his account of this episode), but it’s been covered many other places as well. The short version of Sowell’s ascent from Marxism is this:
Sowell grew up reading Marx (checked out from the public library) and found that it explained a lot of what he saw through his growing up (and later) in Harlem – the sharp contrast between the conditions where he lived, and the conditions a few blocks away toward Riverside Drive seemed to be consistent with Marx’s writings. Through his service in the Marine Corps, undergrad degree from Howard and Harvard, master’s degree from Columbia, then his initial year of doctoral work at UChicago (including a course under Milton Friedman), he remained a Marxist. The following summer, he worked as an intern with the Department of Labor, studying minimum wage laws in Puerto Rico and their effect on unemployment, specifically in the sugar cane industry. He found data that showed unequivocally that the application of the minimum wage to the industry had reduced employment (rather than a series of hurricanes having done so, which explanation the union preferred). He expected to be congratulated for figuring this out, since clearly everyone wanted the working poor to do well, but found instead that his peers were rather horrified, since a third of their budget came from administering wage and hour laws. They simply weren’t interested in whether the law had its intended effect. They chose to believe that it was benign at worst, and avoided any scrutiny that might tell them otherwise. That was the beginning of the end of Sowell’s Marxism.
As far as how to make the fact-based argument against Marxism (and indeed leftism in general – see here for what I mean by the political “left”), Sowell recommends a calm, questioning approach. When a Marxist suggests that some particular policy prescription is needed in response to a societal problem, ask these three questions:
- Compared to what?
- At what cost?
- What hard evidence do you have?
These questions deal effectively with many progressive/Marxist “solutions” which appear to be based on what I call the Standard Progressive Government Syllogism:
- Something must be done
- This is something
- Therefore it must be done
It should be pointed out, though, that Sowell throughout his life has had an unusual affinity for facts. Riley’s biography mentions that Sowell, in discussing a significant leftist economist whose most prominent work alleged a theorem for which there were several obvious, readily-accessible counterexamples, says, “I got no sense that [he] actually investigated these theories of his and compared them with anything that actually happened. I myself, of course, started out on the left and believed a lot of this stuff. The one thing that saved me was that I always thought facts mattered. And once you think that facts matter, then of course that’s a very different ball game.” Postmodernism has, sadly, led to many of our fellow citizens being unwilling to play the “facts matter” ball game.
I would add one other bit of advice to Sowell’s 3 questions – in dialogue with a Marxist (indeed, any leftist), insist on clear and stable definitions of terms. Slippery or vague definitions are a common rhetorical device of the left. These definitions are largely responsible for much of the precipitous decline in useful civic discourse. The two sides are using the same vocabulary list, but not the same dictionary. Definitions of “Marxism,” “Socialism,” and even “racism” and “Critical Race Theory” are altered and shifted as the left has need to do so. The only way to win this game is not to play – insist that your interlocutors define their terms and stick to the definitions. If they wish to define Marxism purely in benign, academic terms, then it has no place in political and economic reality; if they wish to support Democratic Socialists for public office, then it is fair game to oppose this based on the bloody, tyrannical history of (at least officially) Democratic Socialist governments throughout the last century or so. Don’t allow them the rhetorical device of substituting the image of “Karl Marx in the library” for “Stalin’s troops executing the kulaks” or “Pol Pot in the killing fields.”