Marx in the Post-Modern World

My wife Andrée tells me the State of Connecticut is fortunate to have among us the Blake Center for Faith & Freedom in Somers Connecticut, and not just for aesthetic reasons. The Blake Center is a brick-by-brick replica, of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello home in Virginia once owned by the founder of Friendly’s Ice Cream.

The Blake Center is an outpost of Hillsdale College in Michigan, and Hillsdale is a wonder of the post-modern world, a financially independent college that has promoted for more than 170 years “the diffusion of sound learning” as the best means of preserving “the blessings of civil and religious liberty and intellectual piety.”

On June 26th the Blake Center hosted Professor of Economics Dr. Ivan Pongracic, William E. Hibbs/Ludwig Von Mises Chair of Economics at Hillsdale College who, it was promised, would guide the audience, 120 strong packed elbow to elbow, in “an assessment of socialism’s failure.” Pongracic believes that beauty and good in the world is providential rather than a mere matter of fortune, and those of us who are not, like Karl Marx, aggressive atheists have been called upon to defend both.

He did not disappoint. In one sense, Pongracic’s assignment was a walk-in-the park for any student of history used to traveling through recent history with open eyes. One has only to describe accurately socialism’s way through the world in the 19^th and 20^th centuries to arrive at the obvious conclusion that socialism and its many iterations – communism is one – has been a spectacular failure.

Pongracic began his address by mentioning his father, a man of uncommon courage, and his childhood in Josip Broz Tito’s Yugoslavia. His father, temperamentally unsuited to what Thomas Jefferson earlier characterized as “all forms of tyranny over the mind of man,” ran into the usual problem with the enforcement arm of socialist government and was in danger of being imprisoned. He was saved by the intervention of police who knew him well and later immigrated to America when his son was 14.

Pongracic’s bona fides are impressive: “He earned his doctorate in economics from George Mason University in 2004 and has worked with many economic policy organizations through the years, among them the Foundation for Economic Education, The Independent Institute, Cato Institute, Mercatus Center, Young America’s Foundation, and the Liberty Fund. His book Employees and Entrepreneurship was published in 2009 by Edward Elgar Publishing.”

The man himself is soft spoken, personable, highly intelligent, a close and fervent student of Ludwig von Mises, the Saint Paul of the Austrian school of Economics and the Author of Human Action: a Treatise on Economics.

Don’t be fooled by the many false claims of socialism, Pongracic told his rapt listeners. The so called variants of socialism all have one thing in common: the seizure of the means of production and the enfeeblement of a market economy. The market economy, we all know, is a much better distributor of wants and needs than, say, socialist U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, still honeymooning intellectually with post-Soviet and South American communists such as Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

A state directed economy rarely produces prosperity, Pongracic pointed out, because a market economy in which wants and desires are enforced by purchasers is a precondition of a rational economic system, and these preconditions cannot be met in a command economy that bypasses the market – something socialist Zohran Mamdani, who just won a New York Democrat Party primary contest for Mayor of New York City, might mull over before he creates his network of state owned grocery stores. In socialist and communist counties, state owned or managed grocery stores produced nothing but long purchasing lines and empty shelves.

Just as grocery items disappeared from shelves under the communist regime of Joseph Stalin following the seizure of agricultural production in Ukraine and Russia and the nationalization of businesses, so a once vibrant oil industry in Venezuela all but disappeared following the socialist government seizure of the nation’s oil industry.

Pongracic turned to two Venezuelans in his audience and asked, “Am I right about Venezuela?” under the socialist regime of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, who stole his most recent election though ballot fraud and voter intimidation.”

Their response, heavy with the misery of lost liberty, was emphatic, “You are right!”

A command economy, dependent entirely on force, cannot work in a democratic state in which the departments of governance – executive, legislative and judicial – are separate and independent from each other. The unity of purpose under a socialist system in which everyone is forced to march into an uncertain future under a strongman has been efficient only in the destruction of personal liberty.

Stalin’s strength – he was called “the breaker of nations” – produced in Ukraine, known since Roman times as “the breadbasket of Europe,” a famine, the Holodomor, in which more than four million people starved. The four million statistic may represent an undercount of an additional four million people because population data was unaccountably found missing during the famine years, 1932-33.

“There is no manner of death worse than starvation,” Pongracic pointed out. Communist collectivist had shown themselves super-efficient in collecting seed grain in Ukraine in 1932, which produced a massive famine in 1933.

Walter Duranty, the New York Times’ chief Moscow reporter during the Holodomor, received a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that famines, easily managed, were not unusual in Ukraine. Malcolm Muggeridge, the well-known British writer who also served on the Moscow desk during the famine years secretly took a train into the ravaged countryside, where trees were stripped of leaves by people forced by starvation to eat them, and reported accurately on the famine. His reports were smuggled out of Moscow in British diplomatic pouches. Muggeridge said that Duranty was the worse pathological liar he had met in all is years in journalism.

A lack of wanted goods, a lack of liberty and the rise of tyrannical regimes are the certain historical characteristics of the mature socialist state. Why then are young people here in the United States uplifted by the myths of socialism?

The popularity among young people of avowed socialist Zohran Mamdani, the Democrat Party choice for New York City Mayor, distresses but does not surprise Pongracic, who has witnessed this precise arc of history many times before. Democrat Party leaders, practiced in the art of wrapping extreme leftists in a cloak of moderate invisibility, are up against it this time. Mamdani is boisterously socialist and anti-capitalist. His far left positions on important issues place him squarely in the socialist camp among an assortment of 20^th and 21st century authoritarian tyrants.

Pongracic’s liberating message – especially to young students, Hillsdale’s specialty -- is that socialism has never worked in elevating the proletariat in any nation where it has taken hold.

Marx famously said that philosophers before the advent of Marx were content to explain history, but the prime directive of communist socialists is to change history. And the historic effects of such changes – the terror, the gulags, the deification of God-hating academics and left of center political influencers – are plainly visible, as George Orwell used to say, right under our noses.

How is it we cannot see these economic terrorists wrapped in their rhetorical cloaks of invisibility?

It is part of the mission of Hillsdale College in Michigan and its outpost in Connecticut, the Blake Center for Faith and Freedom, to rip away all political artifice and show the thing as it is and will be. In this battle for the minds and hearts of true democrats, missionaries such as Pongracic are indispensable in securing Faith and Freedom for our future enlightened leaders.