The word “Marxist” has become a general purpose epithet. The president says judges who disagree with him are “Marxist.” The speaker of the house applies the label to the entire Democratic Party. Neither of them appears to have the slightest idea what the term really means.
Ironically, it is the total absence of true Marxists on the American political scene that allows them to make these laughable misrepresentations. Because there are none, the general public has no idea what the term really signifies. So a politician can use the term for whatever the politician does not like.
A look at the most authoritative statement of Marxism reveals that not only are there no proponents of its principal demands on the American political scene today but that, in certain minor respects, it is the MAGA philosophy that somewhat resembles it.
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published the Communist Manifesto in England in 1848. When they looked at political life, they saw a class struggle. The working class, which they called the “proletariat,” was locked in a battle with the capitalist class, which they called the “bourgeoisie.” They said the bourgeoise exploited the working class and so must be “swept away” and new state created in which all property was held in common by the state. Its revolutionary cry was characterized as being “Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
Among its demands were the abolition of private property in land, ownership of factories by the state, centralization of credit in the hands of the state, state ownership of the means of communication and transport, and the disappearance of class distinctions. They believed in economic determinism, or that economic arrangements were the source of political and even religious belief, and so they characterized morality, religion, and even the family as being mere “bourgeois prejudices” that would no longer exist after the bourgeois class was abolished.
The Manifesto bitterly attacked “socialism,” or the belief that administrative reforms such as changes in prison conditions would benefit the working class without the abolition of private property. Reforms, they reasoned, merely stood in the way of the needed revolution.
No one in the Democratic Party or in any other major political party today is calling for any of these defining demands of Marxism. There is no cry for the abolition of private property, state ownership of factories, the elimination of private banks, state control of the news media or airlines, or the disappearance of morality, religion or the family.
To be sure, there is a debate about the proper role of government generally. One way to put it is to ask whether certain things are what economists call “public goods” that can be best purchased and held collectively because, left alone, individuals could not effectively purchase them without including others. The best example is national defense. Another is national parks. Still yet another is public education, which benefits society as a whole. The interstate highway system is owned by the government but it falls far short of the Marxist idea that all “transport” should be owned by the state.
A relatively recent article in Fortune chided President Donald J. Trump for actions that it saw as smacking of Marxism. By demanding a controlling share in a steel company created by a merger, or by demanding a government share of profits made by a computer chip company, the president inched toward government control of private enterprise.
To be sure, those steps were extremely modest. More disturbing is a recent account in The New York Review of Books, whose publisher is Rea Hederman. The account identifies the Claremont Institute in California as the “most radical and disciplined intellectual force on the MAGA right.” The article’s author, Columbia University professor Mark Lilla, says Claremont was behind the strategy that led to the January 6, 2020 Capital riot and Claremont’s current writings carry a tone of “apocalypticism.” He quotes a call for an American Ceasar to ignore the courts and overthrow the “managerial class” which dominates the media, universities, Hollywood, Washington and “woke capitalist” boardrooms. That, he says, is the very opposite of traditional conservative belief in following the law and preserving institutions.
The idea that society is divided into “classes” and that revolution is needed to overthrow a ruling class is an echo of Marxist thought.
Karl Marx was wrong about almost everything. The capitalist system did not lead to the ever-increasing poverty of the working class. Voters do not simply respond to their own economic best interests. And “classes” are far from united in their conditions and outlook.
But that did not prevent Marxism from being used to justify revolution and totalitarian government in Russia and China.
It remains to be seen what effect “Trumpian apocalypticism” will have in the United States.
Luther Munford is a Northsider.
