Gideon Moore

To understand why it’s crazy to think communism/socialism is a superior alternative to our current market economy, it’s useful to understand the historical context when Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. This was the early/mid phase of the Industrial Revolution. If you looked around, capitalism—which spurred the Revolution—really did make many people’s lives much worse. Workers who had customary rights to farm common lands were forced into factories (read about enclosures and the “double freedom”). Conditions in factories were hellish: non stop work for crazy hours, child labor, unsafe working conditions. It is no surprise that Marx would call these conditions, where workers got a pittance of what their product was sold for, *exploitation*. But then things began to change. Labor slowly gained power which shifted bargaining to workers. Conditions improved (labor won victories for safety, working hours, agency etc), the pie grew, and the *level* of wellbeing for the worker eventually vastly surpassed the feudal baseline. Comparing the market economy now to the 1800s shows that the term “capitalism” is so broad to be almost useless as a point of discussion. When labor has no power and is coerced to work in terrible conditions (in the sense of outside options being even worse), the implications for welfare are vastly different than the current market economy with regulation, a much larger pie to split, etc. Marx’s critique of early capitalism was often right (at least in spirit); his prediction that revolution would reliably produce better institutions was not. If Marx came to the US today chances are he’d say, this is pretty nice compared to the counterfactuals that have been tried. Measured against the outcomes Marx cared about, e.g., material welfare, life expectancy, autonomy, modern regulated market economies dominate the socialist counterfactuals we’ve observed.

It’s nice that liberals have begun to notice the Ivy leagues are kind of a scam.