Requiem for Marx

After the fall of communism, and certainly after this wide-ranging demolition of Marxism by Austrian scholars, who can possibly defend Marxism? Plenty of people, many of them smart but uneducated in economics. Requiem for Marx is the antidote, covering the whole history of this nutty and dangerous system of thought.

The book begins with an alternately hilarious and tragic introduction by the editor, Yuri Maltsev. He describes in vivid detail life in the Soviet Union, and points out that, contrary to myth, the Soviet project was indeed an attempt to realize Marx's vision. He describes a society in which nothing works, ethics and morals collapse, and absurdities abound in every aspect of daily life. It is a priceless firsthand account.

Next come sweeping essays by David Gordon and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, which get into the guts of the Marxian system and show where it went wrong from philosophical and economic perspectives. Hoppe in particular shows how Marx took classical-liberal doctrine on the state and misapplied it in ways that contradicted all logic and experience.

Gary North provides a devastating look at Marx the man, while Ralph Raico zeros in on the Marxian doctrine of class. Finally, and triumphantly, Murray Rothbard offers a wholesale revision of the basis of Marxism. It was not economics that motivated the Marxists, he says. It was the longing for a universal upheaval to overthrow all things we know about the world and replace it with crazed, fantastical, almost religious longings. Rothbard finds all this in the unknown writings of Marx and his postmillennial predecessors in the history of ideas.