Marxism, which we had all thought over and done with, has returned in new forms among the woke intelligentsia. Antifa, “occupiers” of this and that, antisemitic college mobs, and other American versions of Red Guards keep emerging, each outdoing the last. The slogan “Death to America!” is now heard not only in Tehran, Iran, and Pyongyang, North Korea, but also on campuses across the West.To motivate his argument, he offers the repackaging of what he calls Marxism, but what might be a different focus on the dialectic, with different antitheses confronting different facets of the existing organization of human actions. That's something we called attention to long ago. "There is, however, a dialectic present in the cyclical view of history: the thesis, antithesis, contradiction, and synthesis appear in recursive, rather than convergent, ways." Here's how Mr Morson expands on that theme.
It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”I've objected, previously, to facile characterizations of the construction or deconstruction or sometimes both at the same time of binaries in opposition as somehow Marxian. A Reason article I referred to in that post got closer to what Mr Morson was getting at, noting, "The commitment on the part of today's progressive undergrads to suppressing distasteful speech comes not from a deep understanding of some larger intellectual tradition with a goal of world domination but from a simple (if mistaken) calculus about the morality of hurting people. As frustrating as this attitude can be to civil libertarians, many students genuinely believe that certain expressions seen as hostile to oppressed minorities either directly cause actionable harm to those people or unjustly contribute to an overall atmosphere of danger for them." Dress it up with Erudite-Speak and rationalize it as the Postmodern Will to Power, and off you go! "Of course, today’s 'critical theorists' often sound just as unnatural to ordinary people, perhaps because the ability to write in such an obscure way, comprehensible only to initiates, demonstrates membership in a perspicacious elite."
And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” Just as endless purges shaped Joseph Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, ever new forms of oppression, macro and micro, are discovered, each flaunting its own difficult discourse and forbidden words, so that no one who fails to pay constant attention can speak safely. Despite occasional references to “class,” Marxism endures not primarily as a critique of capitalism but as a template for Manichaean struggle.
That idea appears deep into Mr Morson's essay as "There is nothing surprising about high-minded support of totalitarianism. On the contrary, it is idealists who are most likely to shut out counterevidence." And yes, that sure sounds like Bolshevik or Maoist vanguardism or the Weather Underground or their nonbinary fans of the intifada. But that's also the Jacobin tradition in France, before Marx, and it might be an element of the American Revolution. Harvard historian Jill Lepore's These Truths suggests it's implicit in "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal." Rights inhere in individuals by virtue of their existence. Is that because they are so endowed by God, in which case "high-minded support" of Clerical Authority follows relatively easily. Or is that a truth arrived at by reason and introspection, in which case "high minded support" of Philosopher Kings might follow. But then, it was Adam Smith warned us of the Men of System.
Americans and Europeans, in short, are converging on a version of the Chinese model, which is why [author Sean] McMeekin refers to [in To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism as] “the surprising non-death of Communism,” whose story “is far from over.” It probably never will be. There will always be naive young idealists, “along with ambitious older politicians who may or may not share in the idealism—but are tempted by the promise of an all-encompassing state granting them vast power over their subjects.” Because the commissars of today “often work in the private sector (or for companies aligned with state intelligence),” their forms of control are, though less obvious than those of the NKVD, more “insidious.”Well, the Social Engineering Vice dies hard in some people, and you expose people of modestly above-average intelligence to the idea that the Men of System can arrange the affairs of people as if so many pawns on the chess-board and We'll All Be Better Persons For It, and they might aspire to such work and get frustrated when they don't get their way.
McMeekin wrote his book as a “helpful tonic for keeping despair at bay.” But for the reader it serves as a warning. “Far from dead,” reads the book’s last sentence, “communism as a governing template seems only to be getting started.” Evidence that he is right keeps accumulating.
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