The lines of ink of the Communist Manifesto, published 175 years ago today, have led to oceans of blood. Since Karl Marx issued his promise that workers who embrace communism “have nothing to lose but their chains,” regimes inspired by his philosophy have afflicted hundreds of millions of people — including the workers who are supposed to benefit from communism — with things worse than chains: gulags, famines, and firing squads.
Yet defenders of the Communist Manifesto in particular, and communism in general, make excuses for Marx’s harmful ideology. Many of them may be well-meaning but sadly misled by Marx’s vision of a perfect, classless workers’ paradise. This vision clashes so strongly with the reality of communist countries crushing their citizens that Marx’s apologists don’t understand how Marx’s supposedly admirable vision led to such suffering. They insist either that real communism (or socialism, which, in essence, is the same thing) has “never been truly tried,” or that real-life examples of communist brutality don’t constitute “real communism.”
The influential political thinker Noam Chomsky, for example, published a 1986 essay titled “The Soviet Union Versus Socialism,” in which he claimed that the USSR did not have a socialist, but rather, a “state capitalist” system. The Daily Beast has previously claimed that “Cuba Is A Kleptocracy, Not Communist.” And Newsweek, in a 2017 article, cited several thinkers who insisted that North Korea, perhaps the best example of the horrors wrought by Marxism, had “rejected Communism decades ago.”
These excuses are dangerous because they
