Every May Day, communists, socialists, and anti-capitalist activists gather to condemn the United States, private enterprise, and the economic system that has generated an extraordinary amount of modern prosperity. Their speeches are familiar. Capitalism is blamed for poverty, inequality, exploitation, environmental destruction, and virtually every other social problem.
Capitalism is not perfect. No serious person should pretend otherwise. Markets can be manipulated, corporations can become corrupt, workers can be mistreated, and wealth can become concentrated when competition and the rule of law are weakened. A responsible defense of capitalism does not require denying these failures.
What it does require is an honest comparison.
Too many Marxist writers judge capitalism exclusively by its shortcomings while judging communism exclusively by its promises. They compare the imperfect reality of market economies with an imaginary socialist society that has never existed. At the same time, they minimize or ignore the famines, political prisons, forced labor, executions, censorship, and economic devastation produced by communist governments.
That is not historical analysis. It is ideological marketing.
May Day has two separate traditions. The maypole originated as part of an old European spring celebration, while International Workers’ Day developed from the nineteenth-century labor movement. The modern political observance is connected to the campaign for an eight-hour workday and the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. In 1889, the Second International, an organization of socialist and labor parties, designated May 1 as an international day of worker protest. The history of May Day therefore predates many of the communist governments that later turned it into a state-controlled spectacle.
Recognizing that history is important. Supporting safer workplaces, reasonable hours, lawful unions, and fair compensation does not make someone a communist. Working people deserve dignity and legal protection.
The problem begins when legitimate labor concerns are used to romanticize political systems that stripped workers of their freedom.
In the Soviet Union and other communist states, May Day became an occasion for enormous government-organized parades. Officials stood above the crowds while workers marched beneath party banners, military equipment, and portraits of political leaders. The celebration supposedly belonged to labor, but the workers themselves were forbidden from establishing independent unions, criticizing the government, negotiating freely, changing employers without restriction, or removing their rulers through competitive elections.
A workers’ holiday had been transformed into a performance for the ruling party.
Marxist critics frequently describe capitalism as a system that creates poverty. History suggests something different. Poverty was not invented by capitalism. For most of human existence, poverty was the normal condition of life.
The relevant question is not whether poverty still exists under capitalism. It does. The question is which economic arrangements have allowed the greatest number of people to escape it.
According to the World Bank’s latest poverty data, the number of people living in extreme poverty fell from approximately 2.3 billion in 1990 to around 831 million in 2025. Much of that decline was driven by strong economic growth in East and South Asia.
This progress cannot be attributed to completely unregulated markets. Public education, infrastructure, healthcare, legal institutions, targeted welfare programs, and international development efforts also contributed. Nevertheless, economic growth, private production, investment, trade, entrepreneurship, and access to wider markets were central to the transformation.
China provides a particularly revealing example. It remains politically controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, but its greatest period of poverty reduction began after the country moved away from Maoist economic policies. Starting in 1978, China permitted greater private initiative, welcomed foreign investment, expanded export manufacturing, and integrated itself into global markets.
The World Bank reports that China’s period of “reform and opening up” helped lift nearly 800 million people out of extreme poverty. This does not erase the role of government programs, but it demonstrates that China’s most dramatic economic progress followed its retreat from rigid central planning.
Capitalism should therefore be judged as it exists at its best: markets operating under law, protected property rights, genuine competition, accountable institutions, social mobility, and safeguards against abuse. Communism deserves the same treatment. It must be judged by what communist governments actually did after gaining power.
Marxist commentators often use smartphones, websites, podcasts, and social media platforms to denounce the same market system that helped make these technologies widely available.
The history of the internet is more complicated than saying capitalism invented everything. The earliest foundation of the modern internet came from publicly funded American research. DARPA’s ARPANET became operational in 1969, while the National Science Foundation later developed NSFNET as an academic network and early internet backbone.
Government research helped establish the foundation. Competitive enterprise then helped transform that foundation into an affordable global consumer system.
Private companies invested enormous sums in telecommunications networks, semiconductors, personal computers, fiber-optic cables, cellular towers, operating systems, browsers, search engines, smartphones, cloud services, and applications. When the internet became increasingly commercialized, competing businesses discovered uses that a small academic network could never have delivered on its own. The National Science Foundation itself describes how the expansion of commercial internet services contributed to its worldwide growth.
The same pattern can be seen in mobile communications. Motorola made the first public handheld cellular telephone call in 1973. Decades of competition among telecommunications and technology companies then reduced costs, improved quality, and placed extraordinary computing power into billions of hands.
This is one of capitalism’s defining strengths. It does not merely reward the original invention. It creates incentives to improve, manufacture, distribute, and make that invention useful to ordinary people.
Marxists are free to criticize the corporations operating these platforms. That freedom is essential. But there is considerable irony in using commercially manufactured devices, privately operated networks, and advertising-supported platforms to insist that markets have contributed nothing to human progress.
Before seizing power from the Russian Provisional Government in 1917, the Bolsheviks presented themselves as defenders of industrial workers, soldiers, and peasants. They promised bread, land, peace, and political power through workers’ councils known as soviets.
These promises appealed to a population exhausted by World War I, food shortages, political instability, and centuries of autocratic rule. Many workers and peasants genuinely believed the revolution would give them greater control over their lives.
The reality was drastically different.
Once the Bolsheviks consolidated power, they dissolved the elected Constituent Assembly, suppressed rival socialist organizations, restricted freedom of the press, expanded political policing, and subordinated the soviets to Communist Party authority. Instead of transferring power to workers, the revolution transferred power to a centralized political organization claiming to speak in their name.
Economic control soon followed.
Between 1918 and 1921, the Bolshevik government imposed a collection of policies commonly known as War Communism. Russia was fighting a devastating civil war, and several competing armies seized food and resources. That wartime context must be acknowledged. It does not, however, excuse the brutality or economic irrationality of Bolshevik policy.
Under War Communism, the government nationalized major industries, attempted to eliminate private commerce, requisitioned agricultural produce, centralized distribution, and imposed increasingly severe labor discipline. Currency lost much of its practical value as inflation and shortages pushed the economy toward barter.
The Communist Party claimed these measures were necessary to feed the cities and the Red Army. For peasants, however, requisitioning frequently meant armed detachments arriving to seize grain and other produce, sometimes leaving families without sufficient food or seed for the following season.
The result was predictable. When peasants knew that surplus production would be confiscated, they had little reason to produce beyond their immediate needs. Agricultural output fell. Black markets expanded because official distribution could not meet basic demand. Industrial production collapsed, cities lost population, and workers abandoned factories in search of food.
The International Encyclopedia of the First World War documents the economic decline, punitive labor laws, loss of authority by factory committees, peasant rebellion, and worker unrest that accompanied War Communism.
Food was not simply a humanitarian resource. In a rationed economy controlled by the state, access to food could become an instrument of political discipline. Workers depended on official ration cards and employment classifications. Those considered more valuable to the regime could receive priority, while politically suspect groups faced exclusion, arrest, or worse.
Communist propaganda presented the Bolsheviks as the unquestioned voice of the working class. Actual workers were not always convinced.
Strikes and demonstrations emerged in Petrograd and other industrial centers as food supplies deteriorated and political repression intensified. The government that claimed to rule in the name of labor responded by restricting protest, closing factories, making arrests, and deploying security forces.
Peasants also resisted grain requisitioning. One of the largest uprisings occurred in the Tambov region, where rural communities fought against Bolshevik confiscation and political control.
Then came the Kronstadt rebellion of March 1921. The sailors at Kronstadt had previously been among the revolution’s most celebrated supporters. By 1921, many were demanding freer elections to the soviets, greater civil liberty, and relief from coercive economic policies.
The Bolshevik government did not treat these revolutionary sailors as workers with legitimate grievances. It portrayed them as counterrevolutionaries and crushed the rebellion militarily. Survivors were imprisoned, exiled, or executed. Some were sent to early forced-labor camps that anticipated the later Soviet Gulag system.
This was the central contradiction of Bolshevik rule. Workers were praised when they obeyed the Communist Party and condemned when they attempted to speak independently.
The Russian famine of 1921 and 1922 did not have a single cause. World War I, revolution, civil war, drought, damaged transportation networks, disease, and economic collapse all contributed. Any serious account must include those factors.
It must also include War Communism.
Years of grain requisitioning had weakened agricultural production and destroyed trust between peasants and the government. According to Stanford’s account of the crisis, the famine was exacerbated by mass government requisitioning of grain.
Death estimates vary because the country was in chaos and reliable records were limited. Five million deaths is the figure most frequently cited, although estimates range substantially. What cannot be disputed is that millions of human beings died from starvation and associated disease while the Bolshevik economic experiment collapsed around them.
An enormous international relief operation, led by Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration, eventually fed millions of Russians. The capitalist United States, routinely portrayed by communists as the enemy of humanity, played a major role in preventing the catastrophe from becoming even worse.
By 1921, Lenin was forced to retreat. The New Economic Policy restored a degree of private trade and permitted small businesses and farmers to operate with greater freedom. It was an implicit admission that the attempt to abolish normal economic incentives had produced disaster.
Political control remained firmly in Communist Party hands, but limited market activity was allowed to repair some of the destruction caused by War Communism.
The events in Russia were not an isolated historical accident. Later communist governments repeated the broader pattern of ideological economic experimentation, coercion, censorship, forced labor, and mass death.
During Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, forced collectivization, unrealistic production targets, inflated harvest reports, and excessive grain procurement helped create one of history’s deadliest famines. A peer-reviewed historical assessment published through the National Institutes of Health estimates that approximately 30 million people died, although scholarly estimates vary.
Between 1975 and 1979, Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge attempted to create an agrarian communist society through forced relocation, collectivization, labor camps, political persecution, and execution. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum reports that nearly two million people died.
North Korea developed another variation of the same model: one-party rule, state-directed economic activity, political prison camps, restricted movement, censorship, and chronic food insecurity.
These regimes were not identical, and their crimes did not occur under identical circumstances. What connected them was the concentration of political and economic authority in institutions that could not be questioned, challenged, or peacefully removed.
Critics of capitalism have every right to discuss corporate misconduct, inequality, financial crises, environmental damage, and exploitation. Those debates are necessary in a free society.
But they do not erase communist history.
One injustice does not excuse another. The existence of poverty in a market economy cannot justify political prisons. Corporate corruption cannot excuse forced collectivization. Unequal wealth cannot be answered with grain confiscation, censorship, executions, or one-party dictatorship.
The most reliable economic system is not one that assumes business owners are always virtuous or government officials are always corrupt. It is one that recognizes human fallibility and divides power accordingly.
Competitive markets divide economic power. Constitutional government divides political power. Independent courts, elections, property rights, unions, a free press, and civil society create additional restraints. When those safeguards are functioning, neither corporations nor governments are supposed to possess unlimited authority over human life.
Communist governments abolished those restraints in the name of equality. The promised workers’ paradise repeatedly became a state in which workers could neither choose their employers nor challenge their rulers.
So, when Marxist writers dance around the political Maypole and denounce capitalism, they should be asked to confront the complete historical record. Not merely the slogans, manifestos, and promises, but the confiscated farms, silenced workers, labor camps, suppressed rebellions, and mass graves.
History does not become false simply because it is inconvenient.
In Part 2, we will examine how collectivization and central planning produced catastrophe in Maoist China, Cambodia, and other communist states, as well as why modern defenders of Marxism continue to insist that these failures somehow “do not count.”
It will not leave Marxism as a theory. It relates concepts to real pain, lost freedom, and historical fallout, making the subject pressing, personal, and impossible to ignore today.
And readers should buy it. It provides you with a clear background, with a strong historical emphasis and a digestible way through complicated concepts without bogging you down with theory. It makes political history easy to grasp and question.
It is for those who are interested in politics, history, ideology, freedom and power. It also provides a resource for anyone wanting to grasp the influence of Marxism without being lost in academic language or heavy theory.
Yes, it talks about Marxist regimes and history, especially the role of the Soviet Union in demonstrating how the promises of the ideology often translated into control, terror, repression and brutality even for ordinary people.
It is relevant now as current debates reflect the ancient promises of equality, power and social change. The book lets readers compare those promises with the harsher lessons of history and the implications today.
Summary
Discover why Murderous Marxism by William Johnson stands out among books about Marxism, offering readers a thought-provoking perspective.
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Every May Day, communists, socialists, and anti-capitalist activists gather to condemn the United States, private enterprise, and the economic system that has generated an extraordinary
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Discover a thought-provoking perspective on Marxism, power, and history in William Johnson’s Murderous Marxism.
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About The Author
William Johnson is a historian and a political author who wrote Murderous Marxism to show the dangers and violence caused by communist regimes. He also warns about modern political ideas he believes are influenced by Marxism in his book.
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