Thus, Marxist regimes have in fact been logical extensions of his doctrines. Of course Juncker is right that Marx – who died 34 years before the Russian Revolution – was not responsible for the Gulag, and yet his ideas clearly were.
In his landmark three-volume study Main Currents of Marxism, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski, who became a leading critic of Marxism after having embraced it in his youth, notes that Marx showed almost no interest in people as they actually exist. “Marxism takes little or no account of the fact that people are born and die, that they are men and women, young or old, healthy or sick,” he writes. As such, “Evil and suffering, in his eyes, had no meaning except as instruments of liberation; they were purely social facts, not an essential part of the human condition.”
Kołakowski’s insight helps to explain why regimes that have embraced Marx’s mechanical and deterministic doctrine inevitably must turn to totalitarianism when confronting the reality of a complex society. They have not always fully succeeded; but the results have always been tragic.
For his part, Xi views China’s economic development over the past few decades as “cast iron proof” of Marxism’s continued validity. But, if anything, it is exactly the other way around. Remember that it was the China of pure communism that produced the famine and terror of the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.” Mao’s decision to deprive farmers of their land and entrepreneurs of their firms had predictably disastrous results, and the Communist Party of China has since abandoned that doctrinaire approach.
Under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, the CPC launched China’s great economic “opening-up.” After 1978, it began to restore private ownership and permit entrepreneurship, and the results have been nothing short of spectacular.
If China’s development is being held back by anything today, it is the remnants of Marxism that are still visible in inefficient state-owned enterprises and the repression of dissent. China’s centralized single-party system is simply incompatible with a modern and diverse society.
Two hundred years after Marx’s birth, it is certainly wise to reflect on his intellectual legacy. We should do so not in celebration, however, but to inoculate our open societies against the totalitarian temptation that lurks in his false theories.
Carl Bildt was Sweden’s foreign minister from 2006 to October 2014 and prime minister from 1991 to 1994, when he negotiated Sweden’s EU accession.