Some thought provoking insights from Yoram Hazony in The Challenge Of Marxism. I’m not inclined to read analysis of anything Marxist, but this moment in history has some uncanny similarities I was not aware of, and Hazony connects the dots from Karl to Kamala (so to speak). He paints a compelling pattern, even if I want to add details and patterns myself. It’s a springboard…
Read it all.
The Marxists have forced out the Conservatives, now the wheel has turned and they’re coming for the Liberals, argues Hazony. The Liberal world thought they were marching through the institutions but the momentum was with the Marxists among them, who have now forged ahead and are turning on their own.
Will the liberals drop their liberalism and adopt marxism, or will they push back?
Anti-Marxist liberals are about to find themselves in much the same situation that has characterized conservatives, nationalists, and Christians for some time now: They are about to find themselves in the opposition.
This means that some brave liberals will soon be waging war on the very institutions they so recently controlled. They will try to build up alternative educational and media platforms in the shadow of the prestigious, wealthy, powerful institutions they have lost. Meanwhile, others will continue to work in the mainstream media, universities, tech companies, philanthropies, and government bureaucracy, learning to keep their liberalism to themselves and to let their colleagues believe that they too are Marxists—just as many conservatives learned long ago how to keep their conservatism to themselves and let their colleagues believe they are liberals.
This is the new reality that is emerging. There is blood in the water and the new Marxists will not rest content with their recent victories. In America, they will press their advantage and try to seize the Democratic Party. They will seek to reduce the Republican Party to a weak imitation of their own new ideology, or to ban it outright as a racist organization.
Language is a weapon, and they shalt not be known publicly as Marxists but by a shifting sea of names:
…they disorient their opponents by referring to their beliefs with a shifting vocabulary of terms, including “the Left,” “Progressivism,” “Social Justice,” “Anti-Racism,” “Anti-Fascism,” “Black Lives Matter,” “Critical Race Theory,” “Identity Politics,” “Political Correctness,” “Wokeness,” and more. When liberals try to use these terms they often find themselves deplored for not using them correctly, and this itself becomes a weapon in the hands of those who wish to humiliate and ultimately destroy them.
But they are Marxists:
The new Marxists do not use the technical jargon that was devised by 19th-century Communists. They don’t talk about the bourgeoisie, proletariat, class struggle, alienation of labor, commodity fetishism, and the rest, and in fact they have developed their own jargon tailored to present circumstances in America, Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, their politics are based on Marx’s framework for critiquing liberalism (what Marx calls the “ideology of the bourgeoisie”) and overthrowing it. We can describe Marx’s political framework as follows:
Hazony goes through the core Marxist concepts and we can see how so much of this framework is at play today: There is class warfare preying on people’s envy, the oppressors and oppressed. There is the invisible unknown hand of oppression that has been “AWoken”.
1. Oppressor and oppressed
“…people invariably form themselves into cohesive groups (he calls them classes), which exploit one another…”
2. False consciousness
“…the liberal businessmen, politicians, lawyers, and intellectuals who keep this system in place are unaware that they are the oppressors,…. even the working class may not know that they are exploited. “
3. Revolutionary reconstitution of society
The oppressed seize control of the state. Revolution or war.
4. Total disappearance of class antagonisms
Everything will be peace and roses again if they just throw out the Orange Man. Like Marx, it’s a wonderful future but no one has any idea how to get back to peace and happiness after the revolution.
I can’t do it all justice without repeating much of it.
Hazoiny argues that Marxists ideas are attractive because there is a little truth underlying the tension. Groups do form. Power relations between them do have different interests and it can resemble a ruler and slave, but in most normal times it is a symbiotic relationship, not pure exploitation. The shallowness of Marxism is the superficial appeal without the principles that go under and around it.
I crave a slightly more biological model — one that uses evolution and an understanding of groups and battles from power. But Hazomy powers through some core contradictions that power the Liberals.
I think the biggest problem with Liberals is that they are not liberal (when the crunch comes) on the most important liberty liberals are meant to defend — free speech. Hazony writes of a group that aims for an impractical Utopia, believes in reason rather than tradition, and thus the Marxists use every admission of failing as a way to control the Liberals.
In 2020 the control has become hidden in plain view as nearly every opinion (other than the permitted one) is delegitimized.
Thus the endless dance of liberalism and Marxism, which goes like this:
1. Liberals declare that henceforth all will be free and equal, emphasizing that reason (not tradition) will determine the content of each individual’s rights.
2. Marxists, exercising reason, point to many genuine instances of unfreedom and inequality in society, decrying them as oppression and demanding new rights.
3. Liberals, embarrassed by the presence of unfreedom and inequality after having declared that all would be free and equal, adopt some of the Marxists’ demands for new rights.
4. Return to #1 above and repeat.
Liberals and Marxists are locked in this endless dance.
I know that many liberals are confused, and that they still suppose there are various alternatives before them. But it isn’t true. At this point, most of the alternatives that existed a few years ago are gone. Liberals will have to choose between two alternatives: either they will submit to the Marxists, and help them bring democracy in America to an end. Or they will assemble a pro-democracy alliance with conservatives. There aren’t any other choices.
(Read it all). https://quillette.com/2020/08/16/the-challenge-of-marxism/