“Ideas have consequences,” says Prof. Paul Kengor of Grove City College in a new video for PragerU. “Sometimes good. Sometimes bad. And sometimes catastrophic … like the ideas of Karl Marx.”
With the popularity of socialism on the rise in the United States, Kengor takes a few minutes to unpack the “cataclysmic” legacy of the theorist who helped popularize communism and call out those who try to defend it by claiming it’s never really been implemented.
“Born in Trier, Germany in 1818, Marx didn’t invent communism,” says Kengor. “But it was on his ideas that Lenin and Stalin built the Soviet Union, Mao built communist China, and innumerable other tyrants, from the Kims in North Korea to the Castros in Cuba, built their communist regimes. Ultimately, those regimes and movements calling themselves ‘Marxist’ murdered about 100 million people and enslaved more than a billion.”
Kengor breaks down how Marx and his patron Friedrich Engels blamed capitalists for all of the world’s woes, calling for a “worker’s revolution” to overthrow their alleged oppressors. This would eliminate privately owned means of production, transportation, and credit, giving total control of virtually everything to the state.
“Wherever Marx’s ideas were practiced, life got worse,” says Kengor. “Not by a little; but by a lot. There is not a single exception to this rule. Not the Soviet Union, not Eastern Europe, not China, not North Korea, not Vietnam, not Cuba, not Venezuela, not Bolivia, not Zimbabwe. Wherever Marxism goes, economic collapse, terror and famine follow.”
Prof. Kengor explains how history does not remember communist and socialist regimes in a good light, but Marx never lived to see how his theories nearly tear the world apart.
“If you’re still a fan of Marxism after all the death, suffering, and destruction it’s caused, that’s your right,” he says. “But own up to it. Don’t hide behind the ‘it’s never really been tried’ line.”
You can watch the video below: