One wonders why socialism, Marxism and communism is surging in popularity these days, if you look at the pre-printed signs carried in “spontaneous” protests, you will notice most of the websites listed at the bottom of the signs are links to communist organizations. Sort of indicates the commies are not so much interested in the ideologies or causes, just in using these useful idiots and fellow travelers. Their only interest is in the opportune conflict directed at Western culture and the capitalism upon which it is based.
The progressive movement believes it has integrated itself into the American republic to the point it now is covered in a patina of legitimacy. It now seems to think it is also safe to come out of the shadows and, for the first time in a very long time, the discredited philosophy of Marxism is attempting to go mainstream.
Collectivism has been lurking for a while waiting to burst free from the American breast like the infant xenomorph from the 1979 movie Alien.
It is hardly a surprising trend. A decade ago the New York Times published “A Young Publisher Takes Marx Into the Mainstream” and the Guardian in the UK went with “Why the ideas of Karl Marx are more relevant than ever in the 21st century” were writing puff pieces about ole Karl’s skeleton. For the record, the Guardian is a leftist rag and the New York Times is the home of communist China loving Tom Friedman (a theater critic turned political expert), Malthusian economist Paul Krugman and to add icing on the cake – was home to the noted Pulitzer Prize winning Soviet apologist, Walter Duranty, who covered up Stalin’s “man-caused disaster” famine in the Ukraine and the forced resettlement of the Ukrainian people as punishment for dissent.
The arrogance of Obama and his Renfield, Joe Biden, gives the proglodyte movement its hope the opposition is dead – but this perception is less of a national consensus and more of an urban phenomenon. Marxism plays well in cities and universities where people are forced to live in a bubble, where collective services for things like sanitation, security and transportation are the order of the day. As a pro-socialist ex-acquaintance of my used to say, they want “government to take care of the mundane things”, but this idea is something driven due to population density, not to ideological superiority.
We all know, especially the people from small towns in flyover country, what works in New York City does not work in small town America - or in most of the suburban and rural areas of the US. That is why collective policies may make some sense in urban centers but will never be accepted in the South, the Midwest, or the west in states like Utah, Montana, or Wyoming – largely because those policies make no sense in these areas.
History argues against collectivism in all its coercive forms.
Marxism, for all the “My Little Pony” treatment it is gets, is inexorably and historically linked to autocracy, tyranny, repression, oppression, and deprivation. While voluntary collectivism does work – people selectively band together all the time to solve problems of mutual concern – Socialism, Marxism and communism have never existed in the history of the world without authoritarian rule and that is something in direct contradiction to the very reasons for the founding of America.
It seems that we can never have a conversation about the right spectrum of politics without invoking the evils of fascism, Nazism, nationalism or anarchy…but if that can be considered a valid methodology, when we speak of the left, we must also discuss how Chairman Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” killed over 45 million Chinese in less than four years and how Stalin killed an estimated 7-10 million Ukrainians in the Holodomor (the Great Famine) in one year (1932/1933).
Somehow, I doubt that all these people went to their deaths by choice for the glory of the state – and there is no way a totalitarian leader starves or kills 55 million people if those people had a means to protect themselves with, I don’t know, maybe like a constitutional right to bear arms? Perhaps the best window to this idiocy is presented by Friedrich A. Hayek in two of his seminal works The Road to Serfdom (1944) and Individualism and Economic Order (1948). Hayek witnessed in real time the rise of collectivism in England in the post-WWII years and his conclusions have proven uncannily accurate in the almost 80 years hence.
If you reduce collectivism to its central factors, there are two – equity and coercion. Equity provides the goal and coercion provides the method of achievement of that goal. Some would say the goal is power, but that is simply an output. I don’t think most true communist radicals want power for themselves, what they know is that power is necessary to coerce any population into a state of equity where all outcomes are equal. In the beginning, they know someone is needed at the top to make this happen and they don’t care – until it is too late, and they realize that communism isn’t really a viable socioeconomic system without a permanent state of coercion.
With so much evidence against collectivism, why are young adults embracing it?
Ironically, it seems a natural, possibly generational, cycle perpetuated by the prosperity of capitalism.
Communism strives to reach its goals by taking from those who have and giving it to those who have less (while skimming some off the top for themselves), so they are always playing with other people’s money.
When kids grow up and their parents give them everything they want, the kiddies, who have no idea how hard their parents worked to give them that life, come to see their parents as the evil bourgeoisie. When they see a world in which competition is the rule and there are winners and losers matched against their own upbringing where everybody deserved a trophy and to which every wish was catered, they can easily be convinced the life they have led was stolen by their parents from those who didn’t have that life.
I theorize that sort of self-loathing and guilt is why we see so many children of wealthy, upper class, white families gravitate toward any form of anti-capitalist activism.
We walked ourselves into this and our children must necessarily walk themselves out of the catastrophic situations they, themselves, have wrought. At this point, I can’t see how it stops, I fear
the boom and bust cycle must completed itself.
I sure hope you’re right that collectivism won’t take hold in smaller towns in flyover country. Noting the immigration from population centers on the coasts (plus Chicago) to our cherished rural havens during cov!d makes me nervous, especially when locals who chafe at the influx can’t be bothered to speak up in “polite” company or to their reps. Time will tell...
Joseph Schumpeter nailed it on the head: capitalism produces a critical state of mind that destroys its predecessor feudalist and prebendalist systems. Unfortunately the critical state of mind turns upon its own system and the progressive ideologies then seek to destroy the very system which made their own freedom and prosperity possible.