The Cold Dark Night Sky Signals that Marxism Is Disastrously Wrong: Capitalism CAN Recycle "Surplus Value" (Profits) and Make Lives Better—with neither Economic Collapse nor War—via New Information
Part 3 in this series: In trying to shut down capitalism and everything that supports it, political, economic, and social aspects of Marxism wreak havoc, wreck lives, and lead to wars.
Part one in this series explains how our expanding Universe produces the cold dark night sky. Part two explains how and why the cold dark night sky acts as a “heat sink.” This means it drains off thermodynamic entropy (disorder), averts “heat death,” and allows information (order) to rise on Earth. Here I show why this invalidates Marxism and the raging hate and violence it engenders.
Marxism Is Fundamentally Wrong
In Marxist theory, “surplus value” is the profit that business owners make when they charge more for their products than they pay their workers.
In this formulation, workers lack the income to buy all that is produced. In time a backlog of unsold goods develops—the “overproduction” cited in The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels—and companies must either shut down production, causing great suffering, or export excess goods, which leads to wars to secure foreign markets. This completely misunderstands the dynamics of capitalism.
In capitalism, profits get reinvested in efforts to develop new, better, or cheaper products, or better ways to conduct business, with further profits hoped for. (Some inner workings of financial markets may look dicey, but they are just the grease lubricating the wheels.)
Besides investing, affluent people also like to buy and try out new or top-of-the-line products, which are often buggy and/or expensive. That pays for improving the product and raising volumes of production as the products become more widely bought. Eventually, products improve and drop in price so much that lower-income people wind up getting great new products at low prices—Hooray!
Throughout this process, people get jobs and paychecks. In this way, profits—”surplus value”—get back into the economy where people can spend them to buy unsold goods. So the calamities Marxism predicts do not occur, invalidating Marxism as a guiding principle.
All of this requires that new information be created to make new or better products, and that the process can continue. The cold dark night sky, with its siphoning off of entropy, averts “heat death” and signals a key reason that new information can continue being produced and used. (The Cold Dark Night Sky, Entropy, and Us)
Marxism does not see this, so Marxism does not recognize that new information can be created and does not recognize that capitalism can continue making lives better.
To be sure, critics have pointed out for decades that Marxism fails to take “innovation” into account, explaining why capitalism never suffered the calamities Marx predicted. Marxists have acknowledged that capitalism progressed, but they attributed that success to one-off events that can’t continue. As I have shown, the expansion of the universe and our resultant cold, dark night sky visually symbolizes, so everyone can see and be reminded daily, why information can continue to increase and capitalism can continue to make lives better.
The danger actually is not a paucity of new information. Rather, a great many technologies are being developed, but they are currently being developed without public knowledge by governmental military-industrial complexes (Eisenhower’s cautionary warning), by government-based scientific-technological elites (another of Eisenhower’s cautionary warnings), and by government-empowered “experts” who think they know it all but know so little about matters outside their narrow specialities that they are nothing better than “sorcerers’ apprentices,” who also work at cross purposes to each other. (See my “take” on Eisenhower’s warnings in Expert Ignoramuses.)
None of these technologies would be developed anywhere near as dangerously if markets were truly free of big-government distortions. In largely free markets, the actors would be very cautious lest they be held legally or word-of-mouth liable for damages they might do, instead of getting shields of liability and heavy funding from big government (“regulatory” approval, legal shields of liability, infiltration by government agents, “industrial policy,” etc.). (For evidence of some of these technologies, see my Health Alarm posts, starting here.)
Every time a capitalist economy undergoes the recessionary, contracting part of a business cycle, some Marxists at least point and say that now capitalism is collapsing; but in capitalism, recessions are followed by recoveries and expansions, because that is normal in the business cycle.
Indeed, every economy, no matter what kind, even communist economies, suffer business cycles, because “something’s lost but something’s gained in living every day” (Both Sides Now, Joni Mitchell). When the losses accumulate, or the gains change a lot, adjustments have to be made: some things shut down, others ramp up. (Communist economies are great at shutting things down and the worst at recovering, if they ever do recover. Communist Cuba’s economy has virtually nothing new in it for average Cubans, except misery and recurring famines, now being repeated in Nicaragua and Venezuela.)
Marxists have also pointed to wars that continue to be fought to “prove” that capitalism is the culprit, but wars were fought long before capitalism ever existed and by people who don’t practice capitalism. War is a human condition, not a product of capitalism. If anything, capitalism promotes peace as well as prosperity because building creates so much more wealth than can ever be gotten by fighting.
Marxist Rage and Hate
Thinking that capitalism is the root of all evil, Marxists set out to eliminate capitalism and all the social practices that support it. These include private property, individual identity, individual merit, and nuclear families, with schools usurping parental rights, sexualizing young school children, and exerting power over children’s bodies at very young ages.
Marxists corral people into collective—group—identities, using “identity politics” in the name of favoring some groups and punishing others. Quality of life declines, then collapses inevitably, as merit is discarded and replaced by goose-step loyalty to this or that supposed group right or “intersection” of supposed rights; i.e., to what is “politically correct,” the mantra of mass-murdering Joseph Stalin.
Some people call this “cultural Marxism.” I prefer “social Marxism,” as complement to political and economic aspects of Marxism, because there is no degree of higher culture about it.
Especially, and most destructively, Marxists—and people who practice Marxist principles without saying so—divide people into oppressor vs oppressed classes (the opening emphasis in Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto), which they call “class struggle.”
Let’s look at how powerful and brutal the logic of class struggle is once Marxists deny that profits can be reinvested in new products.
They say in effect that fortunes aren’t made, they’re stolen. People thus-influenced are led to adopt a “we was robbed” mentality, with stoked anger and rage. After all, the logic goes, if people have more than you because they stole it from you, you are entitled to take it back and punish them for it. (In my play Penelope and Odysseus, the suitor Agelaus reproaches Odysseus’s son Telemachus in words like this.)
At the same time, people who are pushing this rage puff themselves up with inflated pride, anoint themselves as saviors of the oppressed, and self-righteously feel compelled to rule our lives.
Critics call this “virtue signaling.” I prefer “virtue posturing” or “virtue impostering,” since there is nothing virtuous about it at all.
Between the “oppressed” on the bottom and the ruling class on the top, live particularly enraged people who act as storm troops for the revolution; new “Red Guards,” if you will (analogous to Mao’s Red Guards, which he fomented in Communist China’s “Cultural Revolution,” in the latter 1960s). The motivations vary, including racial and religious bitterness—which never help the great majority of people being identified as oppressed.
Consider something new that has entered the turmoil: Some students who attend “elite” colleges have for most of their lives been made to feel guilty and deserving of demonization: white is evil; rich is evil; American is evil. For people who have been heavily emotionally traumatized by such “woke” terrorisms, how better to relieve themselves of their guilt and restore their sense of self worth (if not “Pride”) than by acting in the name of the oppressed.
I emphasize “in the name of” because communists, led by Stalinists and Maoists, claimed to be the “vanguard of the working class” and claimed to rule in the name of the working class, but were oppressors of the working class and peasantry.
Right now in the U.S., storm troops are trying to take over college campuses in the name of Palestinian freedom. Actually, they are supporting Hamas, which has recently gone public with what was obvious before: desirous of, and benefiting from, Gazans’ suffering.
Further, Hamas kills LGBTQ+ people on sight and suffocates women’s freedoms. (Isn’t it interesting that neither gay pride groups nor feminists nor the media call this out?) And behind Hamas and some of these rioters is Iran, which declares Israel the “little Satan” and the U.S. the “great Satan,” and which arms Hezbollah and the Houthis.
The main targets of the shock troops in the U.S. for the present are religious Jewish people on campus plus people who are socially Jewish—not just Israelis. Partly, what they wear makes them visually identifiable, and Hillel centers on college campuses are well known. Also, partly, even though Arab/Muslim nations increasingly want to bring their economies into the 21st century, and recently sought to normalize relations with Israel because of its advanced economy (the Abraham Accords), decades of their past funding of colleges, when Arab-oil nations were opposed to Israel, have left a clear anti-Jewish mark, and Iran is viciously exploiting that now.
Worse, all this organizing of shock troops expands and adds experience to cohorts who could be mobilized for terrible terrorist attacks, and to groups supporting them; especially with four years of the Biden administration’s open-border-policy. Large numbers of terrorists and other opponents of America can very reasonably, indeed presumptively, be expected to have come in and are waiting for opportune times to attack.
But all that doesn’t explain the current outbreak of broader hatred of Jews in particular by non-Arab, non-Muslim students and faculty. Marxism does.
Jewish religion and culture have survived for well over 3,000 years (or is it 5,000+ years?) by evolving many strong religious and personal connections, with very strong family dynamics. Marxism hates religion as a competitor, calling religion “the opiate of the masses.” As noted, Marxism hates personal identity and strong family structures. Jewish religious culture also has a dimension that, when practiced, promotes questioning everything, but in a context of a strong sense of order. This makes it an incubator for creating new information and fostering capitalism. And, as noted, Israel’s capitalist economy is a leader in the 21st century. For Marxists, what’s not to hate?
People practicing Christian values are also under increasing attack; not as virulently in the U.S., but deadly elsewhere.
On top of all this, we find that war is making strange bedfellows: TikTok, heavily embedded in Communist China, is reportedly loaded with anti-Jewish messaging. Why? Few Jewish people live in China (if any). Rather, China is primarily interested internally in suppressing other religious interests (Christian, Falun Gong, Buddhist Tibet, Islamic Uyghurs).
Here are several reasons for Communist China’s spreading of anti-semitism globally: It serves China’s 30-year-old stated strategy of weakening the U.S. from within, by sowing divisions and internal conflicts in America. It links up with Iran’s Islamist agitations to weaken the U.S. and attack Israel. (Islamist refers not to the entirety of Islam but rather to what is sometimes called political Islam—a totalitarian worldly philosophy.) And China links up with Russia, which is aided by Iranian weapons, in the war with U.S.-supported Ukraine.
To what end do Marxists—and others—push the oppression mantra?
One clue: Saul Alinsky opens his book Rules for Radicals (the “bible” of “community organizers”) with “an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical....who rebelled against the establishment....he at least won his own kingdom —Lucifer.” It’s as if saying that their plan is to turn life on Earth into a living Hell. (Two people who openly admired him were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.)
They pit people against each other to divide and rule, usually to ruin. While a few from the “oppressed” group are raised to wealth and power, large numbers of the “oppressed” not only do not benefit, but they are kept oppressed and suffering to keep alive the story of “oppressor vs. oppressed.” To borrow from an old song, this ruling class—be it composed of Marxists, “limousine liberals,” fascists, religious totalitarians, WEF rich and powerful, or whatever—always hurts the ones it claims to love.
Or worse: The Cloward-Piven strategy was conceived decades ago to overwhelm a system until it breaks down so that it can be replaced—by what? Marxism. (“Never let a crisis go to waste”—Rahm Emanuel.)
Current examples of the Cloward-Piven strategy include inviting the whole world to enter the U.S., giving free social services and “welfare” and special subsidies to the “newcomers,” piling up government debt until the country goes bankrupt and can’t afford to buy all those imports (dollar collapses in value, inflation skyrockets), radically ramping up electrical use while shutting down fossil-fuel use until the electric grid collapses, letting criminals run free while disarming law-abiding citizens and “handcuffing” police, etc.
To be sure, other “social engineers” and socialists also exist, such as Malthusians (who have said and been wrong for over 200 years that the Earth couldn’t support population growth; more recently, they have included Paul R. Ehrlich and Henry Kissinger), climate-change grifters (Solyndra, $7.5 billion for 8 EV charging stations, etc.), power-hungry control-freak politicians and bureaucrats, rich and powerful people who want to keep the Earth solely for themselves (World Economic Forum), sociopaths, etc. They have all implicitly or explicitly invoked the notion of disorder (relentlessly rising entropy) to justify suppression and crushing of prosperity and growth.
While not necessarily being Marxists themselves, these would-be social dictators find Marxism to be useful in expanding big government bureaucracies that “work around” democracy (such as “administrative law,” hopefully weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court’s reversal of “Chevron”).
In this post I have focused primarily on social aspects of Marxism. Political and economic aspects of Marxism do even more damage (subject a later post.)
In these ways Marxists today are pushing societies and nations all over the world toward all sorts of ruinous actions. To the extent they are empowered, they would destroy everything we hold dear in life—as they already have done in many communist countries. (Over 100 million people killed plus billions suffering; satellite pictures show N. Korea has darkness at night as well as “Darkness at Noon;” Venezuelan and Cuban famines, etc.)
The irony, tragic folly, and horror is that theirs is a revolution that eats its own, as well as “eating” the rest of us: The more they take and destroy, the less is left for future taking, so the ruling class shrinks even as its composition changes as factions fight among themselves, and their own lives become less secure and poorer. How well will they live when terrorism wreaks havoc in America from open borders? (One is almost tempted to shout “Repent! The day of judgement is coming!” But the hard core power seekers and the emotionally traumatized won’t listen. The task is to convince the broader base.)
Next in this series: The U.S. Is on the Verge of a Marxist President, with Disastrous Possibilities, and Part 4, An Undying Drive for the Best that Is in Us.
Still to come:
the political and economic aspects of Marxism and fascism; and
how bureaucracy is the ruling class of all big-government socialisms, via its control of existing information (that includes social organization), and how this creates great tension with capitalism, the producer of new information.
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Good Health to You!