To start off an overly long reply, Chase is correct. Marx was not primarily a theorist of Communism, he was a critic and analyst of Capitalism. He was certainly a Communist, but his theoretical writings were not focused on developing an idea of what Communism would look like or how to achieve it - those came after, with people such as Lenin who attempted to build off of his work to form a revolutionary praxis. His main task was analyzing how Capitalism as a system functions. If you don't realize this, you should not be attempting to argue against his ideas. I'm not going to bother going into why I think Marx is correct since I already have enough to write here but to put it simply no amount of citing atrocities committed under Communist states will do anything to persuade me that his critiques are incorrect, because doing so is a complete non-sequitur. It was a certain interpretation of his works that fueled the Soviet Union and Chinese Revolution, not Marx's direct views.
I'm also not going to attempt to defend the Soviet Union, which was a brutal government that killed vast numbers of people, though I will note that its successes tend to be overlooked and its failures tend to be (slightly) exaggerated. I'm also not going to claim that it wasn't "real Communism", because of course it was an attempt to build real Communism, and an attempt that didn't succeed. What I'll point out is that the Soviets and Mao had specific versions of Communism, ones very different from what most non-psychotic leftists today endorse, and to conflate these two with Communism as a whole and the only way it can be is misguided. It's all an observance of "constant conjunction".
To get to my main point: there is a certain trick Capitalists, and especially libertarians, pull when they're discussing these issues, namely that they elide the entire history of Capitalism's development in order to make it seem like the nice, helpful alternative to the big scary Soviet Union. It's a very clever slight of hand and there are many layers to how they do it.
The first is to paint Capitalism as purely an economic system. It's simply exchanging goods and services for money, what else could it be! No harm could come of that! But this exchange depends on two things, those being the acquisition and maintenance of property. When you start questioning these two dependencies you realize that Capitalism extends far beyond the economic realms and into the political and military systems required to support it, not to mention the individual lives of the wage workers. How is it that land came to be individually owned property? How did these properties end up in certain hands? How were the productive forces on these properties developed? How are the owners of the means of production able to ensure they retain control over their property? Follow the breadcrumbs and you realize that Capitalism is a totalizing, structuring force over every aspect of the society we live in. That leads to certain logical consequences.
Once you begin to look at Capitalism as something that shapes everything around it, and once you begin to look into the history of how it came into being, you realize something that's very inconvenient for Capitalists: that this development was not peaceful, or innocent, or agreed to by all the parties involved. It was imposed through brutal, bloody, hideous force. Enclosure, Encomienda, the genocide of Native Americans, chattel slavery, Jim Crow laws, imperialism in South America, Africa, and the Middle East, the multiple man-made famines in India, Partition, the Opium Wars, Vietnam, funding death squads in Nicaragua, the coup of Chile’s democratically elected government and imposition of Pinochet’s oppressive rule, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the killings of George Floyd and Michael Brown, the damage to the environment that’s developing into an irreversible global death spiral – all of these were directly intended to or an intended consequence of the need to acquire and maintain property. The world we currently live in, the world whose riches Capitalists so loudly boast of, would not exist without any of these things.
But! the Capitalist will claim, that was all in the past, and our world has a great future, because as the market spreads further it will free and enrich people. The first problem with this is that the past leaves unchangeable marks on the present. The same poverty that Capitalists claim they’re trying to fix is a result of their very own plundering. Certainly there was war and conflict before Capitalism – but the specific conflicts taking place now, the wars displacing millions of people across the globe and keeping more millions of people locked in desperate slums, or fueling genocide in Ethiopia and Yemen, are a result of the colonialism and imperialism that drastically refigured their societies in its need to acquire profit. Next the Capitalist (or more specifically, the Libertarian), will try to argue that because these occurred with help of government brutality they weren’t real capitalism, or some sort of pre-capitalist state. Yes, many of these actions occurred before the specific configurations of class and productive forces that Marx would term “Capitalist” had appeared globally. But the issue is that they were central for Capitalism’s development. This is exactly the same argument Communists make when they claim that the Soviet Union wasn’t really Communist because it didn’t achieve a stateless, classless society – it completely ignores material consequences and historical causes. Capitalism emerged from these histories of blood, there’s no denying that. The second problem is the claim that Capitalism will enrich people, and it’s fairly easy to brush that one aside. First, it’s based on manipulated and dishonest statistics that cherry pick what data they show and how they present it. Second, even if they were right that everything has been getting much better it’s completely fine, this wouldn’t follow to the next conclusion they advocate. They imagine that the world has been going in one direction, so it’ll keep going in that direction until everything works out and everyone is living in a happy market world. I’ve already brought up Hume so I shouldn’t even have to explain how fallacious that view is. Complete bullshit peddling.
So this is how I view Capitalism, and I haven’t read anything that convinces me I shouldn’t – a system that came into being by killing everyone who had the stuff it wanted, maintains itself by killing everyone who wants to be free of it, and has disastrous consequences for the people living under it (the current exploitation and alienation of workers under capitalism, especially, as Chase said, in former colonies, is an entirely separate discussion to Capitalism’s history and since it’s late and I have class in seven hours I’m not going to get into it). What’s important here is to understand the failures of the Libertarian viewpoint, and the arguments they use to bolster up their views. What I’m trying to get at here is that one of the many, many failures of Libertarianism – and to a lesser extent economics as a field of study – is that it is a totally isolated, idealist system (in both the sense that it’s opposed to materialism and that it imagines a utopian world too ridiculous to exist). It plays with its little mathematical models and tries to crow about how much they show things will get better if you just let the market play things out, but as soon as you insert it into an actual real, material analysis of the world it completely collapses. It’s useless. And it’s because of the reason, because of its complete blindness to reality outside of itself, that it completely fails to properly compare the histories of Capitalism and Communism, and why it can only shout “80 million dead!” when it comes time to actually argue. This is one of the benefits of Marxism. It looks at everything, it sees the entire system, it sees the connections that create our world.
I’m not arrogant enough to claim I know what a Communist society would look like, or if achieving such a thing is even possible. It’s entirely likely – in fact very likely - I’m advocating for something that can never exist. But I am 100% certain that Capitalism as it currently exists, and as it would exist if the Libertarians had their way, is just as nightmarish as what the Capitalists imagine the Soviet Union was, and I will not stop denouncing it.
This is nowhere near a incomplete essay. There are sources I would need to cite and many points I would need to elaborate on if I wanted to make it as convincing and rigorous as I’d like it to be. But also it’s a Facebook comment that I’m not getting money or a grade for. So uh. Live with it. It’s pretty much the most complete expression of my beliefs about Capitalism I’ve written so far.