T. Belman. Another tool in the revolutionary kit, is the break down of law and order. Thus organizers of revolution advocate for lawlessness and defunding the police.
How communism fails as economic theory
For decades, academia has popularized communism as an economic theory. Students can likely recall lectures in which professors would compare and contrast Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, (or Thomas Hobbes) debating asset ownership, price controls, redistribution of wealth, and government spending. Other provocative questions along this line would include, should the community share equal ownership of all of a societies’ goods and property, and who should own the means of production?
While these questions are necessary and should be debated, the most unsettling component missing from these discussions is that in actuality, communism, as it is derived from Marxism, is not, as James Lindsay has explained, an economic theory, but rather a pretext and vision for a revolutionary theory.
The underlying fundamental goal of communism is to manufacture a revolution and the Marxist loyalists will use whichever social inequity (class, race, gender) they believe at that moment in time will achieve a class consciousness reckoning. Marxism is a theory of social stratification, of social conflict, in which there is some dynamic that divides society into two groups.
The mainstream perspective is that Marx offered an economic theory, and while he did integrate economic principles, the intent remained steadfast: to launch a revolution. Economic subjugation was just a tactic to light the fuse. In recognizing during his time that economic subjugation was in fact the most receptive form of activism to jumpstart a revolution, Marx played on the abysmal working conditions workers endured in order to trigger a mass rebellion of the proletariat. To reiterate, Marx purposely dressed up his call for a revolution in economic terms.
Marxian Theory seeks to raise the consciousness of an exploited group by making them fully aware of the extent to which society is exploiting them. Thereby energizing them to rise up and overthrow the current system. Marx anticipated that when the revolution is fully forged, the proletariat themselves will take over and a Dictatorship of the Proletariat will ensue.
Amidst all this talk about a revolution, it helps as a reference to think of a revolution as a means of purging the society of the “Four Olds,” which entails eradicating society of customs, culture, habits, and ideas. During the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s unwavering goal was cleanse society of its centuries-old traditional elements. During the early years of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, an article circulated throughout the nation that revealed the revolutions truest intentions:
The proletarian cultural revolution is aimed not only at demolishing all the old ideology and culture and all the old customs and habits, which, fostered by the exploiting classes have poisoned the minds of the people for thousands of years, but also at creating and fostering among the masses an entirely new ideology and culture and entirely new customs and habits — those of the proletariat.
As Chairman Mao sought to demonstrate, communism seeks to topple the prevalent system by wielding all possible methods to separate society based on social identities, privilege categorizations, and instilling a culture of hatred resulting in an inescapable splintered society.
Sound familiar?
Unlike Marx, who referred to the working class as the proletariat, present-day neo-Marxist’s consider the “new proletariat” to be minority or oppressed classes. That is to say, Marxism today, commonly referred to as neo-Marxism, all but ignores class struggles while alternatively severing society into two opposing racial blocs including privileged (white) oppressors, versus marginalized (black and brown) victims of oppression. This is central to Critical Race Theory (CRT) which makes race the central construct for understanding inequality. Marxists today seek to rouse “racial consciousness,” opposed to an alienated “class consciousness.”
With his underlying goal of forging a revolution, Marx intended on rousing class consciousness to awaken the working class to their purported victimization under a Capitalist society. Today, Marxism is rooted in identity politics with the proletariat consisting of marginalized victims of oppression within a “white supremacy” dominated society. Race consciousness has replaced class consciousness, but the goal remains the same; use whichever social inequity at the time is most divisive in order to usher in a revolution.
J.B. Cohle is a graduate student
@Frank No, the manifesto was a blueprint. Bourgeois revolution was a stage. When the European bourgeoisie, sensing the proletariat waiting in the wings, made an accomodation with the autocracies, it became incumbent upon Communists to establish a proletarian dictatorship to finish the bourgeoisie’s task for them. Marx would call. for militarization of labor in city and country and the principle of from each according to his ability and ti each according to his work in the transition phase. After the crushing of the Paris Commune, he called for a second edition of the German Peasant Wars to accompany the next one. Engels, who lived in to the 1890s predicted it woulld ge in Russia because of the concentration of labor there.
The author is correct. In the 60, the New Left despaired of winning over factory workers so they made students one of the groups who would be the vanguard. Marcuse had a lot to do with that. When student rebellion died down after Vietnam, they had to continually reorient.
@ Frank Adam
Thanks for your comment.
The idiocy of the comments by those triggered by the word “communism” is amazing.
Even more amazing is the fact that nobody gets triggered by the words like “fascism”, “Nazism”, “absolute monarchy”, etc.
Maybe they think that kind of ideology is not really evil and is easy to correct by non-violent (of course!) means such as in WWI and WWII.
The hilarity in this piece and comment is that The Enlightenment as made real by the creation of the US then the French Revolution was a revolution and the US refers to the 1776 – 1787 as the “Revolutionary Era/Epoch” because it created a new legitimacy for government by and for the people endorsed by elections as distinct from the Ancien Regime of rule by God appointed Kings and other wealthy families approved by the abuse of office clergy. King and Queen pardoning medieval spelling are cognate (linguistic siblings or cousins) of KIN as in: kith and kin. Those were the real “right wing” who ran a rough rearguard till World War I if not 1945.
No modern American is further right than the centre left of the full spectrum inclusive of inherited or imperial [military] monarchy – and none of you would like the sort of real right Tsarist authoritarianism or Iranian sectarianism enforcing its variety of religion that our ancestors fled Poland, Russia and after 1948 the Middle East.
Re-read the Communist Manifesto and note it can be read as revolution will happen UNLESS things change – but Marx saw the millmasters as boneheaded and did not expect them to change. However they did – slowly – as British reformers, Bismarck and French Popular Front all achieved to some degree. Even in the mere Manifesto it is clear that Marx and Engels (a lapsed Calvnist) the basic secularised Calvinism of Montesquieu and the US Constitution dividing powers ie division of labour applied to civil government that is The Enlightenment’s answer to arbitrary authoritarian monarchies is to be transferred to the economic sphere and workplace equal respect. What actually happened was that as work became technical rather than simple labouring, the bosses had to treat the workforce with ever more respect.
The current social dissatisfactions are that those still left out of the charmed circle of respect – largely as left overs from ropey pre-Enlightenment, pre-industrial bias and religion assembled without modern maths and science and then misused – which is why so many migrated to the US – want in. What you fear as “Communism” is – like cholera – very easy to deal with if you are willing to spend on public health and education and stop being cynical about politics but instead sort out the informal and economic barriers to giving everybody fair opportunities.
Communism, like Islamism, is a replacement ideology. The globalist elite are using the communists, leftists, and Islamists, as anti-American useful idiots to collapse America. The globalist elite must collapse America to impose its own planetary supremacist replacement ideology. Globalism is the enemy of every nation state, and every competing ideology. Globalism’s totalitarian Unistate is the objective of Covid political medicine, and every United Nations effort to impose Agenda 30.