The following are the issues with Marx’s doctrines:
One of the issues of Marxism is the idea of redistribution of wealth. He claimed that wealth needs to be equally redistributed to the entire population so that no one is poor. The problem with this idea however is that one acquisition of wealth is one of the main reasons that people work hard in the first place. So if their wealth is going to be taken from them and redistributed, there would be no reason for anyone to work hard and become wealthy. This also means that there would be less wealth generated in the entire economy and the entire society would eventually suffer from poverty. And thus as a result, many of the countries that tried the socialist experiment eventually fell into severe poverty.
Second issue with Marxism is that a lot of the problems pointed out by Marx about capitalism are actually not problems of capitalism itself but problems of human hierarchies in general. So, when human beings are allowed to freely express their talents to earn resources, there are going to be some who are going to be better and efficient at it than others. Thus as a result, a small minority of any population would be involved in the creative work and a small minority of the people would get most of the benefits of the hierarchy, while the remaining population would get disproportionately less of benefits and become dispossessed. Thus this is a problem that is true of any human hierarchy involving creative production. However Marx blamed this on capitalism.
Another issue with Marxist economics is his idea of economic value. He claimed that the economic value of a product is based on the amount of labour going into it. So, in a capitalist system, since the workers are doing all the work, they have more value than their employers. And so when the workers earn less money than their employers, Marx describes it as exploitation. However this idea of value is not true. Value of any commodity is determined by its utility. And as a result, anything which is less in number but has more utility is going to have more value. Thus, while workers are doing all the work of production, it is the business owner that is taking a risk by starting a business without knowing if it will work, and he is also taking the responsibility of its failure or success. As a result, he has more value in terms of utility and thus is going to earn more capital.
One issue with Marx’s idea is that the concern for the sufferers often turns into hatred for the non sufferers. And this is something that has often repeated itself in the countries that tried to adopt Marxism throughout history, which is that whenever the working class formed a revolution against the bourgeoisie, it was usually done through extreme violence and terror. In fact many of the leaders of these countries believed violence and terrorism as necessary to end the class struggle.
The final issue with his idea is that the proletariat revolution almost never led to a classless society. Instead what it led to was a proletariat dictatorship, with dictators such as Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong, who led to the deaths of millions of their own citizens.
So in conclusion, what I believe is that while Marx was right in many of his criticisms of capitalism, he failed to understand human nature. And as a result, the solutions provided by him never worked.
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