As a restless, impressionable teenager who was frequently dissatisfied by my own material well-being, I was easily swayed by Marxist ideas. Throughout the years, I have many times been bought over by it, only to have it fizzled out by the irrelevancy to my day-to-day life. As fortune would have it, and I am fortunate, I never lived in a political milieu where I had a chance for Marxist ideas to germinate. In University, the Marxist scholars that I came to know were mostly hopping on the 'hip', radical bandwagon and severely lacking in any rigorous thought or realistic convictions. On many occasions, admittedly, I identified myself with this ilk of people, if for nothing, just to appear 'smart' or 'critical'.
As I started to think, Marxism began to seem like a frightening joke. Besides not making any economic sense (you don't really need any more evidence than to look at the economic fiascoes in North Korea, Russia, East Germany and the likes); its pitch though seemingly a morally right one, is a dangerously wrong one.
Marxism thrives on a very base and powerful emotion - envy. It borders on the genious of emotive language how Marxism cloaks envy with a cape of justice - that everybody should be equal. Instances where real exploitation takes place are given maximum exposure and unfounded generality. Overwhelmed, envy warps the reader's rationality into a lopsided train of thought that makes an imagined sense of justice so distortedly real. For the intellectually unperceptive, it gives highly-charged motive and erroneous justification for unreasonable action. Marxist material fail to mention one thing: as much as inequality is a very sad fact, it is also a very inevitable, natural phenomenon in any society, a Communist one included.
Communism has a very flawed premise. It conceives of Man in the romantic, as a Rousseau-sort benign nobility. Granted Man having such a capacity, it is closer to the exception rather than the norm. I am of the view, as History and experience has shown me, that Man is of the Hobbesian type. In a Communist society, once the high-falutin ideals start to wear off its charm, he will eventually partake in activities that will benefit himself rather than the greater good. And seeing the Hobbesian man benefit, other men including the romantics because of envy or a sense of justice (familiar?) react. If they are opportunistic, they will do like the Hobbesian man did. If they are not, they will find ways to stop and punish the Hobbesian man. Eventually, they resort to a legal social contract to deter and prevent people from such undesirable behavior. When sanctions originally moralistic turn legalistic to keep order, people's actions originally based on altruism turn into fear of punishment. Consequently, Communism loses its meaning and appeal in the hearts and minds of people; and people soon realise they are hopelessly trapped by rules and sanctions (not to mention physical boundaries and violence witnessed in Eastern Europe and North Korea) with little or no freedom. It befuddles me how Communism can work when its assessment of man is so naive, and throws me into despair how people can still believe it with so much evidence of its repercussions.
Yet, Communism did its part in History; not as it intended but laughingly collateral. It galvanised the poor man's sentiment into an actionable voice; the content of it though erroneous, its form powerful. Governments of the world were reminded not to neglect and pay lip service to the poor, for if they don't protect the interest of the poor man, Communism and its attendant emotive garbage would. That is Communism's greatest legacy - a caveat to governments the Pyhrric victory of the neglected, impressionable poor - its own failure.
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