Common myths against Socialism and Marx disproved

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Myth of Western nations as the vehicle of socialism:

"Socialism would therefore come first to the richest countries, and first of all to North America, in the view of Marx..."

Source: European Proponents of Sociology Prior To World War I, Hans L Zetterberg, 1993.

This myth has been promoted by enemies of socialism to try and refute Marxism, that is if Marx predicted that the socialist revolutions would first appear in the West yet they came chiefly from non-Western nations (the German working class was forced to submit to the Soviet proletariat in the form of the Red Army), yet Marx did not see England or the United States as the vanguard of socialist revolution. This myth comes along with its twin myth that Russia should not of had a socialist revolution because it was underdeveloped and contrary to Marxism. Yet from Marx's own writings he made it clear that he did not view the U.S. or England as the land of proletarian revolution.

"The Communists turn their attention chiefly to Germany, because that country is on the eve of a bourgeois revolution that is bound to be carried out under more advanced conditions of European civilization, and with a much more developed proletariat, than that of England was in the seventeenth, and France in the eighteenth century, and because the bourgeois revolution of Germany will be but the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution."

The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels, 1847

Germany at the time was not yet a bourgeois country according to Marx -- yet Marx predicted it would become the country to first have a socialist revolution!

"Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe."

"If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."

Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, 1882.

Marx saw Russia as the vanguard of the socialist revolution and just 35 years later he was proven to be precisely right.

"You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies."

Engel's letter to Karl Kautsky, 1883.

Engels believed that the English working class was bourgeois and certainly not a class to have a socialist revolution. Lenin later developed this theses and claimed that the highest stage of capitalist can turn whole nations into bourgeois and therefore parasitic.





Marxism puts forward slogans of "workers' self-government" and "factories to the workers"

Marxism has never put forward these slogans and it is contrary to the fundamental of Marxism socialism. Marxists refuted this anarchist and bourgeois nonsense long ago, it is sheer deception to claim this is what Communists call for.

"The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State... "

Communist Manifesto, Marx.

""The proletariat seizes political power and turns the means of production into state property."

Anti-Dühring, Engels.

[D_Bokk]

Marxism puts forward slogans of "workers' self-government" and "factories to the workers"

Marxism has never put forward these slogans and it is contrary to the fundamental of Marxism socialism. Marxists refuted this anarchist and bourgeois nonsense long ago, it is sheer deception to claim this is what Communists call for.

How is that, in any way, "bourgeois nonsense"?