How Was Marx Wrong?

By FORREST ZENG ‘26

The title of this piece might seem strange. It’s normal to ask why someone is wrong. But how? It’s a different question, how someone is wrong. You can be wrong in many different ways. Maybe you are wrong due to a logical fallacy. Maybe because of personal bias. Or maybe due to something benign, like an accidental typo on a data sheet. 

The way Karl Marx was wrong is much more sinister. Marx fell victim to a tantalizing psychological trap. I will show you that Marx is not the only victim of this trap. In fact, every thinker will eventually face this philosophical pitcher plant. This is the trap of historical reductionism.

“A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism” were the chilling words that opened Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” more commonly known as “The Communist Manifesto.” Written in 1848, the manifesto was not a philosophical treatise as many believe—but a history book describing events that had not yet actually happened. See, the “Communist Manifesto” was written as a prophecy, a prediction of an inevitable, world-shattering proletariat revolution that would bring an end to all class divides, once and for all. But although Marx and Engels were so confident in their prediction, they were just as wrong.

Marx was deeply inspired by the German philosopher George Hegel. Hegel is what philosophers call a historical idealist. In other words, Hegel believed that historical forces were primarily the confluences of popular ideas. From this viewpoint, he developed a historical theory called Hegel’s Dialectic. In Hegel’s Dialectic, the interaction of popular ideas forms the bulk of the historical process. In other words, the conflicts and compromises of different ideas are what make up history. He called this complex mesh of ideas “Geist,” German for “thought.”

Hegel believed that eventually, “Geist,” ideas and anti-ideas, would converge into one, singular stable point. At some point, there will have been enough division, enough compromise, enough of history itself. Hegel argued that it was only a matter of time until history itself ended in some perfect, stable state. 

This is where Marx comes in. Inspired by Hegel’s simplification of history, Marx modified Hegel’s ideas slightly, but kept the core elements of his philosophy the same. Like Hegel, Marx believed that history had an endpoint—except Marx believed material factors influenced history. Marx was a historical materialist who reduced history to the conflicts and compromises between material factors. He concluded that history would end with all material resources, including the means of production, distributed equally among all people. And Marx’s argument makes great sense: a classist economic system like capitalism is necessarily unstable. So, capital would eventually spread out, and class divides would disappear. This is what Marx and Engels outlined in their manifesto. 

But Marx and Engels were wrong. See Hegel’s dialectic is a brilliant device—for framing history, not predicting it, as Marx and Engels did. This is because Hegel was a reductionist. Reductionism is the practice of reducing complex phenomena into simple, broad systems. Hegel reduced history to a “dialect” of ideas, as if history was a math problem. By extension, Marx reduced the metaphysical (history) to the physical (material wealth). 

It’s clear that Marx and Hegel were wrong. There has been no lasting communist utopia, and there probably will never be. Plenty of ink has been spilled explaining why Marx was wrong; all explanations center around the factors Marx neglected: human ambition, non-materialist influences, to name a few. The world is a lot more than what Marx’s beautiful theory made it to be. Marxism is a fantasy in the face of the world’s true complexity. 

Any reductionist risks falling into a trap. Reductionism is like the beautiful red pitcher plant, which uses sweet nectar to tempt insects into a deep cavity, where they are digested. Similarly, reductionism makes for a beautiful philosophy. Who doesn’t want to believe that history is as simple and beautiful as math? Which philosopher would shy away from the mystical, the mesmerizing and the poetic? Few, I suppose.

It’s fair to say that historical reductionism is not limited to Marx and Hegel. In the book “The End of History And The Last Man,” American political scientist Francis Fukuyama argued that the end of history was not a Marxian revolution, but a progressive revolution. Just like Hegel, he believed history evolved towards an endpoint. But even though Fukuyama’s end was different from Marx’s end, he still fell into the exact same trap. Modern philosophical discourse has found doubt in liberal democracy’s stability and strength. For example, although it has faced challenges, China’s bureaucratic political system is as effective as America’s liberal democracy. However, the topic of whether Fukuyama is correct is a larger discussion. The point is that history is much more complex than Marx or Fukuyama make it to be. 

In fact, philosophers and historians love making dramatic claims about the end of history. Every time, they say that all previous predictions were wrong. They promise that this time, history really is ending. Marx predicted that communism was the end of history. When that failed, Fukuyama predicted that liberal democracy would be the end of history. Now, some scholars argue that there is only one more step beyond progressive democracy. The philosopher Yuval Noah Harari, for instance, argues that the “true” end of history will be when humans lose “relevance.” He argues that technology, such as artificial intelligence, will eventually know humanity better than humanity does itself. Only then, will history actually end. I have even been a reductionist. I recently wrote an article (“Creativity After AI”) about the advent of artificial intelligence, and made a reductionist claim that AI would destroy all human creativity. Toe the edge of the reductionist pitcher plant and you’ll risk getting caught by the tantalizing philosophical promises it provides. 

Let’s pause for a minute. I just proposed that all historians and philosophers are reductionists, and that reductionism is always a negative thing. An astute reader might realize that that claim about reductionism is actually reductionist in itself! My meta-analysis of philosophy is no less reductionist than Hegel’s meta-analysis of history! Should this ironic and paradoxical article belong in the humor section instead of in the Op-Ed section? That’s up to the reader to decide. 

The conclusion is clear, though. Reductionism might be a good way to analyze a complex phenomenon such as history. It might not be the best way to predict it.