Professional Marxists

A good friend of mine has recently surprised me by—if I understand him correctly—declaring himself a Marxist. And quite casually, too. He further claimed, and as a founder he should know, that an organization of which I once was president was founded on Marxist principles.

It is a bit surprising that there are still Marxists around. Haven’t they heard? It’s not just that the Berlin Wall has fallen, that the Communist experiment has been declared a failure in Russia, Eastern Europe and, de facto, China. I mean that Marx has been conclusively disproved in theory as well as in practice. Science lives and dies on reproducible results, and Marx claimed to be scientific. And Marx’s predictions have been completely wrong. Wealth has not become more and more concentrated in fewer and fewer hands; the proletariat has not grown larger and larger, and ever poorer. More or less the opposite has happened since his time. In developed countries, the proletariat is now much smaller, the grand capitalist class has disappeared, and it is the professional “middle class” that has grown. A class Marx did not even realize existed.

So why this odd and touching faith, by those who should be well-educated, in a theory that is now about as credible, on the face of it, as the idea that the earth is flat, or that the sun orbits the earth?

But more than that; it ought to be morally difficult to be Marxist. After all, few would admit today to being Fascists, certainly not educated professionals in polite company. Yet Marxism is, as we have pointed out before in this space, more or less the same thing. Fascism was one interpretation of Marx; and in practice, Hitler was quite literally no worse than Stalin, Mao, or Pol Pot. Stalin and Mao killed more people than Hitler did, and Pol Pot holds the record for highest percentage of a country’s population. Hitler is considered evil incarnate; yet people like my friend still seem to remember Mao, at least, quite fondly.

The only real difference between Comintern Marxism and its Fascist variant is that Fascism identified the various classes in racial terms. The grand bourgeoisie was, for the Nazis, essentially Jewish. The Italian race was, for Mussolini, essentially proletarian.

But is it really more moral to kill millions because of their supposed class than for their supposed race?

Indeed, even if it were, the identification of race with class keeps resurfacing. For American Marxists, for example, white Anglo males seem to be racially and sexually “bourgeois,” just as were the Jews. Poor white males are not worthy of the same socialist support as poor black women.

The error is the same, and it is deceptively attractive. Both Fascism and Marxism feign morality by talking of solidarity and of putting away selfish aims. But they limit this supposed altruism to members of one’s own class or race. This is in the end no more moral than pure selfishness—only more harmful. It is merely egotism speaking in chorus, and carrying a bigger stick. And the necessary corollary to its mock brotherhood is the need to crush Samaritans.

True morality, like Christianity, makes clear that one’s solidarity must extend beyond class and race; that all men are brothers.

This same error shows up in many forms. Feminism calls for solidarity only with one’s own sex. Same callousness, same inhumanity, same result: the abortion holocaust. “Islamism” (which is not true Islam) calls for solidarity only with one’s co-religionists. “Kaffirs” one is free to kill. Same error, same inhumanity, same result.

And more: “family values.” Just another form of the same error. An extreme adherence to one’s own family is just as wrong as to one’s race, nation, or class. Nepotism is a serious problem is many parts of the world. For if this is morality, Eve never sinned. She was not thinking only of herself, after all, in taking the apple. She was thinking of Adam as well. She wanted her entire family to “be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Self over other is merely the second generation of the same sin.

Marxism is this same sin. It invites everyone to put the interests of their class ahead of the interests of all mankind. It does this in part by arguing, “this is simply the way things are; everybody else is doing this.” But that is the same argument Fascism uses. Even if true, two wrongs never made a right.

Why does it remain so attractive to a certain group? Because, like fascism, feminism, and “family values,” it is a wonderful alibi. It can allow you to do whatever is best for you and yours while claiming morality—and believing one is moral is, in the end, a basic human need.

Of course, Marxism holds little or no attraction to the proletariat—the “rednecks,” to use the current Marxist slang. Rednecks mostly vote conservative. They are the declared enemy of the modern Marxist. Even if Marxism were true, it would be of no value to the proletariat. They have no power and no influence, and Marxism can’t give it to them even if it wanted to. Being powerless, naturally their main concern is to get government to leave them alone. They dislike Marxism because Marxism is conspicuously against doing this.

Who are the Marxists? The group it attracts is an elite: the educated classes. Indeed, this is the elite, throughout history. Despite Marxist claims, they have always ruled. This, the group my friend belongs to, is the same group that, in India, is called the Brahmins, the highest caste. In China, they are called Mandarins, and they have always run the Chinese government. In ancient Israel they were the scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees; in ancient Greece, the sophists. The well-educated professionals. My Marxist friend is a well-educated professional from a wealthy family. So was Marx himself.

These are the Marxists; and these have always been the Marxists, from Marx through Lenin and Mao and Pol Pot and Che Guevara to my friend and the professional association he helped found.

While useless to the proletariat, Marxism is fantastically useful to this ruling elite. Most importantly, it diverts the finger of blame. It denies that this ruling elite is the ruling elite, and posits instead some shadowy “capitalist class.” Which, if it never actually existed, was always supposed to appear in the near future if we weren’t all very careful. Kind of like global warming. Nothing unites behind the present leadership like a common enemy.

Marxism helpfully gives this elite permission to grab all the power and money they want, while claiming to be the good guys and demonizing their opponents. Professional associations, for example, can pursue the interests of their members against all comers, and claim it is somehow for the greater good. They are merely protecting the unwashed against the evil capitalists. They must be strong and wealthy in order to do that.

It’s a great gig. Too good to give up just because it has been objectively disproved. That’s quite beside the point.

Not that I believe my friend, or most of the folks in the professions who are Marxists, are consciously and cynically doing this. Most of them are perfectly decent people; good Germans. All they know, I suspect, is that by thinking this way they can feel good about themselves, and are getting what they want. They have not thought it through—albeit they may not want to think it through, and may be unreasonably hostile to any suggestion that their theory is false. For if they actually see it to be false, they lose the good feeling that they are behaving morally.

Hence the hostility.