On Marxism

Andrew Dobbs

(I should clarify that I am speaking here of Marxist parties/activists and not Marxist thinkers necessarily.  I find a lot of stuff the Frankfurt School put out to be very useful and there are a number of other Marxist thinkers that I really enjoy.  The guys selling newspapers on college campuses or waging the brave struggle on message boards, etc. are the subject here.  Photo credit).

Marxists who say of the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, North Korea, Cambodia and every other socialist revolution that they "weren’t really" Marxist, weren’t true proletarian revolutions remind me of those parents who told of some misdeed on the part of their children reflexively insist "not my kid." No evidence will convince them—they reject the plain explanation that yes little Johnny is in fact a drug dealer/father of little Suzie’s bastard child/car thief or whatever, preferring to think some grand conspiracy is afoot and their beloved is innocent.

It is a bit like the scene in The Squid and the Whale where the estranged couple played by Laura Linney and Jeff Daniels is told that their youngest son was discovered masturbating in school and wiping his discharge on a locker. The principal notes that the boy had apparently been doing this habitually, a number of such sensitive janitorial jobs having arisen of late. The father argues they have no proof his son was responsible for the earlier incidents, to which the principal—a woman—retorts "Well I suppose it is possible that there are two boys masturbating at school and smearing their semen on school property, but…"

At least Daniels’ snobbish, pathetic cad—an English professor—has the humility to drop the issue. Marxists see literally dozens of independent socialist revolutions led by self-determined Marxists—most of whom had read more of Marx and Marxist thought and understood this work more thoroughly than any of the protest warrior clowns in question—and yet they refuse to acknowledge that maybe Marxism per se was implicated in the fact that each and every one of these experiences was bloody, vicious, inhuman and bleak. "Not my kid" they say—the dog must really have eaten the homework; despite the fact that Marxist after Marxist has been given a shot at organizing a society as they wish and governing a country, managing an economy as they wish Marxism has never been tried. It is a delusion and a stubborn, pathological refusal to face facts.

But this condemnation may in fact be too hasty. Calling Marxism a religion is cliché and as old as the school itself (older perhaps). However, like most clichés there is some useful truth to the notion. The open, active Marxism on offer in the US (and Australia too it seems) nowadays is not merely a religion. It is most aptly designated a cult—a tiny, obscure, irrelevant little branch of bizarre totalitarians speaking in a specialized mumbo jumbo, promising an answer to every question and an end to all suffering, metabolizing its captives’ lives and resources that it might perpetuate itself in its dank little niche on the lunatic fringe, that ecology of anachronistic political elements which finds a shaky purchase in our democratic political life (think NeoConfederates, neonazis and LaRouche).

Scientology—a religious/psychiatric cult—is certainly more relevant and culturally significant than the political cult of party Marxism by an order of magnitude or two in today’s US, but their method of operating might be of some explanatory value here. Among the more frequently articulated ridicules of the Church is its supposed cosmology, centered on a trillion-year-old act of ethnic cleansing undertaken by an evil space god named Xenu (or Xemu). See Bill Maher, South Park. Now Church spokespeople deny this is an element of their thought, or they’ll say "I’ve never heard anything about this stuff." The first statement—Scientology doesn’t teach anything about Xenu and his shenanigans—is false, the second may actually be true—the individual spokesperson hasn’t heard anything of Xenu, yet. The Xenu narrative, according to apostate Scientologists, comes during the "Operating Thetan" levels of the practice and is kept secret to the initiate until then—a process which may take years. The speaker may not be at that level yet, so she may not have heard of Xenu yet. In the same way, I’m not sure if the party line that each and every socialist revolution wasn’t really Marxist at all, that Marxism’s never been given an honest chance yet isn’t actually a line fed to the public, but something fed to potential recruits and young Padawans while their inner party steeps in a sadistic cynicism, not only aware of the crimes but proud of them and thirsty for more.

There are some factions within the broader party Marxist element which openly endorse these regimes, and even some who endorse communism’s crimes. Most common are those who "stand in solidarity" with Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela lately or the old Soviet Union. They will claim that—say—Castro’s crimes are exaggerated, mythical, no different or even better than the US’ prison system (this may almost be true) and/or outweighed by the benefits of universal health care and literacy accompanying the regime’s costs to human freedom. Some Communist Party stalwarts even claim that none of Stalin’s supposed crimes (the Ukrainian Hunger, the purges, the show trials, the gulags) actually happened, they are nothing more than capitalist propaganda. Two things about this: first, this is the Left equivalent of the Right’s Holocaust denial. Corporations/Jews control all the media, Zionists/the Bourgeoisie control the state schools and there is a concerted, conscious deception being carried out by this elite cabal in order to besmirch the noble Nazi Germany/Soviet Union. The second point follows: this inane fantasy is nothing more than the expression of subconscious guilt on the part of these retrogrades, a projection of their own pathology onto the liberal order they oppose themselves to. With the same brazen efficiency with which the Communist Party convinced Soviet schoolchildren and newspaper readers that Stalin invented the airplane and was more central to the Bolshevik Revolution than Trotsky—a minor figure in that October they said—the US concocts these crimes of the Man of Steel. Marxists may say they believe this, they may even believe they believe it, but they know what they are dealing with, they know subconsciously at the very least that Marxism is guilty. And yet they persist.

Less common, but more entertaining are those elements which acknowledge and embrace the failures and evils of Marxism. The internet vanguard of Maoist insurrection may represent little more than a pitiful text-based MMORPG (if they are anything more, they are hysterical, enthralled by a narcissistic delusion), but they at least possess the integrity to not only acknowledge such things as reeducation camps, mass rape by invading Red Army soldiers, "liquidations" and other such crimes, but to also advocate bringing them all back. In the unintentionally and suffocatingly hilarious Maoist Movie Reviews The Maoist Internationalist Movement suggests Britney Spears be shot for her decadence, in other places prominent net Maoists have argued that Russian soldiers who raped German women at the end of World War II were engaging in legitimate revolutionary actions. Feminists (their view gives a whole new dimension to the "feminazi" slur) who get all high and mighty about rape qua rape take things out of context. They ignore the fact that on one side was the bourgeois "First World," privileged by sake of birth and by this condition guilty of repressing the proletariat "Third World"—those on the other side. They support proletarian, Third Worldist resistance to the bourgeois First World, therefore soldiers raping little girls is justified (encouraged? necessary?).

These deviants form the southernmost pole of a field of Marxist psychosis resulting from and in regards to Marxism’s inherent criminality, its foundational inhumanity. The Trotskyist/Luxembourgian end which denies that Marxism ever actually happened (and thus we can’t judge the idea of deficient) forms the northernmost pole (and yes I’m putting North at the top—get over it) of this field whose mean, its norm is a basic dishonesty regarding the available evidence as to Marxism’s value in the hope of suckering the naïve or the desperate into signing on with the cult.

Another significant fact needs to be stated here. There are different cults for different classes. There are proletariat cults: Jim Jones’ People’s temple attracted poor folks with its "Christian Socialism," the MOVE people in Philadelphia seem to have drawn from the same crowd. There are also bourgeois cults: Scientology is pricey and associated with wealthy celebrities, Transcendental Meditation likewise appeals to yuppie White folks plagued by ennui. Some draw from both—the Branch Davidians, for example. I mention this to make this point: Marxism is a bourgeois cult. Even when it was far more relevant and less sickly—less a cult, more of a Church if you will—Marxism was thoroughly bourgeois. Marx himself was a university educated journalist who—so says a party Marxist FAQ I saw recently—drew upon German metaphysics and historical analysis, French socialism and revolutionary thought in general and English economics and materialism to develop his ideas. What is more bourgeois than an educated professional cobbling together Hegel, Saint-Simon, Comte, Ricardo and Hume and publishing weighty reflections on such? And the most prominent interpreters of his thought, the most noted enactors of his program were all themselves of the bourgeoisie: Lenin, Trotsky, DeLeon, Castro, Luxembourg, Mao and on and on—all were born in socially secure families, all were well-educated in standard institutions, they were cosmopolitans and elites.

At least these figures hustled working folks, peasants and the poor into giving the so-called proletarian philosophy a proletarian face; contemporary Marxist "revolutionaries" go for college kids, college professors, guilty White hippie holdouts and other patently bourgeois types. If an honest to god prole came to your typical Marxist meeting—think a mojada chambermaid or white trash unemployed fast food employee—I don’t know if they’d show the patronizing giddiness of a kid who has gotten a new puppy for Christmas or discomfort and disgust. It would certainly be a surprise—they’d want to solve the mystery of how a real working person even heard about them.

This all goes to the fundamental error of Marxism. Marx’s analysis is right in a number of respects: the first several pages of the Manifesto are eerie in their perspicacity. He may be right that the central struggle of our time is the class struggle, he may be right that capitalism is both self-destructive and exploitative, and he may be right that the proletariat offer the only hope of liberating humanity by doing away with class, smashing bourgeois capitalism and the liberal political order it entails. Marx may be right, but the Marxists are certainly wrong. We’ve seen the first level of their error—conceiving of themselves as THE Proletarian Movement when in fact they are fundamentally and functionally bourgeois. This is a function of another, deeper level of error. Marx understood capitalism and the liberal order as well as anyone. The inaugural moment for the European liberal order was in 1789—the French Revolution. It didn’t achieve complete hegemony over the Western World until the last absolutist monarchs got run out of Dodge following World War I, taking their aristocracies with them. And the bourgeois merchant class had been at work long before then, undermining and displacing the feudal order in fits and starts for centuries. Yet Marx was declaring the eminent collapse of this order in the 1840s, a spare 60 years after its inauguration. Indeed, there was a Marxist state in Europe promising the worldwide overthrow of the bourgeois system even before all the nations of Europe has a bourgeois state to overthrow (not the least of which was the very country in question—previously Czarist Russia).

So capitalism takes hundreds of years to succeed, it takes feudalism that long to give way, but socialism will win in a few decades? Capitalism will only last less than a century? This seems absurd, and it is if you take Marxism as an antagonist to the bourgeois order. But if instead we posit that socialism and capitalism are in fact collaborators in the broad bourgeois project of industrial production, that rather than opposites and enemies they are in fact two complimentary processes for expanding the hegemony of industrialized production as opposed to individual or "organic" creativity, then the early arrival and seemingly hasty projects of Marxism make sense. Marxism isn’t a response to capitalism, it came up alongside it—two theories of bourgeois power, two processes of furthering, exploiting, taming and directing the Industrial Revolution, two strategies for securing a productive economy as opposed to a creative economy. Is it any wonder that virtually every state in the world is a mixed system, the most powerful being either liberal states which found use in social democratic reforms and planning apparatuses or former socialist states which have liberalized?

So now we have the first clues to guide the search for an authentic proletarian alternative. First, the enemy is not capitalism in particular, but the hierarchical, disciplinary system of production. This goes to another folly of Marx: it may be the case that capitalism is unsustainable, that internal contradictions will demand its collapse, but the prophetic notion that this will necessarily generate a classless society and the emergence of the socialist End of History is mere superstition. More likely there won’t be any classes or History because it will take down human civilization, perhaps the entire species with it. Socialism offers no alternative to this danger, it is a party to the environmental destruction which does imperil human lives and the development and proliferation of apocalyptic weaponry which threaten to do us all in. There are the stories of Eastern European drivers needing their headlights during the day to peer through the smog, and then there’s the Aral Sea. Socialism claimed to industrialize better than capitalism, to more thoroughly exploit our finite resources, to be more productive. This, it now seems, is the very problem and so socialism offers less a cure to capitalism but rather a distinct etiology for the same general syndrome.

Production must be smashed by creativity. Corporations, states and gangs seek to—each in their own way—organize people into machines for production. Individuals and organic, egalitarian, mutually supportive coalitions of people must build a new framework for coordinating and maximizing creativity. Not only must we do away with the distinctions of employers and employed, bosses and the bossed—the bourgeois class must be overthrown—we must do away with the distinction between consumers and producers. "From each according to his ability to each according to his need" must be taken seriously as each individual is freed to develop his or her creative talents and devote themselves to the joyous composition of beautiful and useful things while sustaining themselves on the creations of others. In short, we must do away with work, with the division between what we do and what we want to do, between making a living and living our lives.

This is all starting to get a little mystical, if only because I’m not sure what this order would look like or how we would get there. Not only this, but I’m not sure that these are even reasonable questions or if they have any answers—I’m even less sure that this process isn’t in itself the source of oppressive innovations in the deployment of power. But what is clear is that Marxism isn’t capitalism’s enemy, but its rival, a co-conspirator with selfish designs or a competitor playing the same game. They are two distinct elements in the bourgeois system of industrialized production and popular states. This is why contemporary party Marxism goes after only the privileged and patronizes or forgets about the poor, the working class, the uneducated and marginalized. And to better ensnare these oh-so-trusting and desperate children they have concocted a tapestry of denial, an ideological shield from these truths and the truth of why Marxism was so quickly drained and discarded by the liberal order—its violent excesses were far too inefficient.

If an authentic proletarian alternative is possible, if this effort can be built on a human scale we must figure it out, and soon. Such seems to be the only hope for freedom from the bourgeois dilemma on offer today, and from the potentially dire consequences of its hubris.

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