Criticism of Marxism

Criticism of Marxism has come from various political ideologies, campaigns and academic disciplines. This includes general intellectual criticism about dogmatism, a lack of internal consistency, criticism related to materialism, arguments that Marxism is a type of historical determinism or that it necessitates a suppression of individual rights, issues with the implementation of communism and economic issues such as the distortion or absence of price signals and reduced incentives.
In addition, critics have raised empirical and epistemological concerns, arguing that Marxism relies on vague or unfalsifiable theories, resists refutation through dialectical reinterpretation, and has failed key predictions about capitalist collapse and socialist revolution.

General criticism

Some democratic socialists and social democrats reject the idea that societies can achieve socialism only through class conflict and a proletarian revolution. Many anarchists reject the need for a transitory state phase. Some thinkers have rejected the fundamentals of Marxist theory, such as historical materialism and the labor theory of value and have gone on to criticize capitalism and advocate socialism using other arguments.
Some contemporary supporters of Marxism see many aspects of Marxist thought as viable, but contend that the corpus is incomplete or outdated in regard to certain aspects of economic, political or social theory. They may therefore combine Marxist concepts with the ideas of other theorists such as Max Weber—the Frankfurt School provides one example of this approach.
Conservative historian Paul Johnson in his 1988 book Intellectuals wrote that Marx "developed traits characteristic of a certain type of scholar, especially Talmudic ones: a tendency to accumulate immense masses of half-assimilated materials and to plan encyclopaedic works which were never completed; a withering contempt for all non-scholars; and extreme assertiveness and irascibility in dealing with other scholars. Virtually all his work, indeed, has the hallmark of Talmudic study: it is essentially a commentary on, a critique of the work of others in his field."
He continues: "The truth is, even the most superficial inquiry into Marx's use of evidence forces one to treat with skepticism everything he wrote which relies on factual data". For example, Johnson stated: "The whole of the key Chapter Eight of Capital is a deliberate and systematic falsification to prove a thesis which an objective examination of the facts showed was untenable".
Paul Johnson's criticism of Marx has itself been subject to criticism by Marxian economist Richard D. Wolff. In a 1991 academic paper, Wolff describes Johnson's book as "Criticism as malicious gossip a right-wing tirade of rage is vented against left-wing social critics, intellectuals in general, Jews, women, and most of the others who compose the usual targets of such mentalities."

Historical materialism

remains one of the bases of Marxism. It proposes that technological advances in modes of production inevitably lead to changes in the social relations of production. This economic "base" of society supports, is reflected by and influences the ideological "superstructure" which encompasses culture, religion, politics, and all other aspects of humanity's social consciousness. It thus looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological and, more broadly, material factors as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes, and nations. Law, politics, the arts, literature, morality and religion are understood by Marx to make up the superstructure as reflections of the economic base of society. Many critics have argued that this is an oversimplification of the nature of society and claim that the influence of ideas, culture and other aspects of what Marx called the superstructure are just as important as the economic base to the course of society, if not more so. However, Marxism does not claim that the economic base of society is the only determining element in society as demonstrated by the following letter written by Friedrich Engels, Marx's long-time contributor:

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. More than this neither Marx nor I ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase.

According to critics, this also creates another problem for Marxism. If the superstructure also influences the base then there is no need for Marx's constant assertions that the history of society is one of economic class conflict. This then becomes a classic chicken or the egg argument as to whether the base or the superstructure comes first. Peter Singer proposes that the way to solve this problem is to understand that Marx saw the economic base as ultimately real. Marx believed that humanity's defining characteristic was its means of production and thus the only way for man to free himself from oppression was for him to take control of the means of production. According to Marx, this is the goal of history and the elements of the superstructure act as tools of history.
Marx held that the relationship between material base and ideological superstructure was a determination relation and not a causal relation. However, some critics of Marx have insisted that Marx claimed the superstructure was an effect caused by the base. For instance, Anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard criticized historical materialism by arguing that Marx claimed the "base" of society determined its "consciousness" in the superstructure.

Historical determinism

Marx's theory of history has been considered a variant of historical determinism linked to his reliance on dialectical materialism as an endogenous mechanism for social change. Marx wrote:

At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

The concept of the dialectic first emerged from the dialogues of the ancient Greek philosophers, but it was revived by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in the early 19th century as a conceptual framework for describing the often-opposing forces of historical evolution. Historical determinism has also been associated with scholars like Arnold Toynbee and Oswald Spengler, but in recent times this conceptual approach has fallen into disuse.
Terry Eagleton writes that Marx's writings "should not be taken to mean that everything that has ever happened is a matter of class struggle. It means, rather, that class struggle is most fundamental to human history".
Academic Peter Stillman believes Marx's status as a determinist is a "myth". Friedrich Engels himself cautioned against interpreting Marxism as strictly deterministic, emphasizing that while economic factors are foundational, they are not the sole forces shaping history. On another occasion, Engels remarked that "younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it".
In an effort to reassert this approach to an understanding of the forces of history, Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar criticised what he considered the narrow conceptual basis of Marx's ideas on historical evolution. In the 1978 book The Downfall of Capitalism and Communism, Ravi Batra pointed out crucial differences in the historical determinist approaches of Sarkar and Marx:

Sarkar's main concern with the human element is what imparts universality to his thesis. Thus while social evolution according to Marx is governed chiefly by economic conditions, to Sarkar this dynamic is propelled by forces varying with time and space: sometimes physical prowess and high-spiritedness, sometimes intellect applied to dogmas and sometimes intellect applied to the accumulation of capital. The main line of defence of the Sarkarian hypothesis is that unlike the dogmas now in disrepute, it does not emphasise one particular point to the exclusion of all others: it is based on the sum total of human experience – the totality of human nature. Whenever a single factor, however important and fundamental, is called upon to illuminate the entire past and by implication the future, it simply invites disbelief, and after closer inspection, rejection. Marx committed that folly, and to some extent so did Toynbee. They both offered an easy prey to the critics, and the result is that today historical determinism is regarded by most scholars as an idea so bankrupt that it can never be solvent again.

Suppression of individual rights

Various thinkers have argued that a communist state would by its very nature erode the rights of its citizens due to the postulated violent revolution and dictatorship of proletariat, its collectivist nature, reliance on "the masses" rather than individuals, historical materialism and centrally planned economy. These points have also been debated by various thinkers, who argue that we currently exist in a Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie and that Marxism is not deterministic.
The American neoclassical economist Milton Friedman argued that the absence of a free market economy under socialism would inevitably lead to an authoritarian political regime. Friedman's view was shared by Friedrich Hayek, who also believed that capitalism is a precondition for freedom to flourish in a nation state. David Harvey has responded to such claims by suggesting that socialism enables individual freedom, stating that "the achievement of individual liberties and freedoms is, I argued, a central aim of such emancipatory projects. But that achievement requires collectively building a society where each one of us has adequate life chances and life possibilities to realize each one of our own potentialities." In contrast, Jonathan Chait writes that "Marxist governments trample on individual rights because Marxist theory does not care about individual rights. Marxism is a theory of class justice... Unlike liberalism, which sees rights as a positive-sum good that can expand or contract for society as a whole, Marxists think of political rights as a zero-sum conflict. Either they are exercised on behalf of oppression or against it."
Anarchists have also argued that centralized communism would inevitably create coercion and state domination. Mikhail Bakunin believed Marxist regimes would lead to the "despotic control of the populace by a new and not at all numerous aristocracy". Even if this new aristocracy were to have originated from among the ranks of the proletariat, Bakunin argued that their new-found power would fundamentally change their view of society and thus lead them to "look down at the plain working masses".