I overheard a conversation between two high school English teachers concerning one of their students’ written journals on class discussions and reflection. The student had voiced in writing pro-Trump remarks decrying socialist and Marxist ideologies that he claimed were virulent in American political ideologies.
Especially among leftists and Democrats— the big-D signifying party members, as opposed to the small-d variant that promotes – at least on the surface – actual democracy. One of these teachers exclaimed that Marxism isn’t even a real thing. Well, this illustrates the total cluelessness of the common educator in the United States and, more broadly, in the global West.
Of course, Marxism is a very real thing.
Karl Marx was an economist and is often cited today as a revolutionary figure and father of communism. The leaders of our world, whether they acknowledge it publicly or not, are mostly all Marxists. Some may not even know it. How has this come to be, and what exactly is Marxism?
It is an ideology based on the writings of Marx and Engels and their ideological offspring, of which there are many hailing from all parts of the world— many in France, Russia, and, most prominently, China. In fact, it is possible to receive advanced academic degrees, including postgraduate degrees, in the field of Marxist Thought, which means, essentially, totalitarian one-party socialism. This is a nefarious form of government that totally centralizes power and authority in a defined group that inevitably becomes a higher, wealthier class and dominates national society intergenerationally.
Today at the planetary level, an international communist collective exists— these are people who are proponents of whatever keeps them in power, and they are happy to wield ideas alongside weapons with no holds barred. They infest a collective of organizations, including the Trilateral Commission, the WEF, WHO, UN, IMF, and a bevy of international organizations. Their champions are folks like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, and George Soros. They subvert anything to continue to enrich themselves and their network, with little or no concern for anyone else who does not sycophantly fall in line with their worldview and ideas.
Marxism itself, as a term, is evidence of its subversive nature. Marx, like John Meynard Keynes, was a political economist whose life’s work has been manipulated in a way so that his name has largely disassociated with the scope of his collected magnum opus. Marx wrote widely on the nature of many aspects of how markets, governments, and corporations interact. His treatise Das Kapital, a tome of ramblings about how money works in an economy, is a fascinating and titanic text on capitalism— the study and practice of building and deploying capital. Of course, he usually is not well known for this text. He is more broadly associated with his later piece, The Communist Manifesto, one of the most misunderstood and abused texts in recent human history.
The Communist Manifesto, which became nearly required reading for American high schoolers in the latter half of the twentieth century, is a text about a prediction common among European intellectuals, sociologists, and political economists concerning the forecast for class relations in national societies worldwide following the industrial revolution of the 19th century. That era saw the increasing dominance of corporatized manufacturing and the emergence of the factory as the main workplace. Marx et al. theorized correctly that the working class would revolt and overthrow the capitalists, establishing what they envisioned to be a communist state.
Of course, this was written at a time when the republic was not a widespread form of government. Most states were autocracies. The Westphalian model had not yet taken hold worldwide, and national borders were not set in the way they became following the 1945 armistice establishing a post-World War peace. Since then, most countries have adopted legislative or parliamentary-style governments modeled after the United States and United Kingdom’s examples. Democracy has flourished and is practiced in some form or another on every highly inhabited continent. The Communist Manifesto is not exactly relevant today.
Yet, communism remains popular, and many people support it. But what is it exactly?
Communism is based on the idea of the commune, best exemplified by a monastic community, such as that practiced by a Buddhist or Christian order. In such communities, there are social hierarchies that are totally separate from political and economic responsibilities, which are typically shared. Labor, productive tasks like gardening, farming, cooking, and cleaning, rotate ny an often ad hoc and continuously fluxed system. Who is in charge of cleaning one week might be in charge of office duties the next and tasked to maintain food supplies the following. The system balances naturally without highly formalized or institutionalized economic controls. It is an attractive model for the relatively easy and adaptable day-to-day lifestyle of the community’s members. The aim of communists is to apply this model to the national state level.
As it so happens, the application of small-scale monastic communism to the state is all but impossible. This is almost entirely due to the nature of sociopolitics in larger groups. Without a widely agreed upon and understood designed system, the law is that of the jungle. The strongest win and consolidates power, and only by power can they be replaced. Such is always the tendency of large civilizations, cory-states, and societies, and defining the nature of how power shifts from group to group and by what means is inherently difficult to theorize and understand fully. That is why communism as an ideology has been easily appropriated and weaponized against civil society in today’s age.
Today, Marxism is considered a revolutionary ideology. In practice, it has evolved from Marx’s theory of class struggle. Today, it is an ideology of political blocs. It requires its practitioners— who are typically highly educated, well-connected, well-networked, and well-financed— to create, amplify and take advantage of identity blocs within society. This is very remotely connected with economics, production, trade, and manufacturing. It has everything to do with how people identify and how those people are manipulated to give political support to political figures. This ideology seeks to create and force political change in order to lift the leaders of its movement into positions of power. It does not serve any other purpose. And that is the long-term problem.
Marxist communism has no real solutions to most issues that plague societies, particularly to building and nurturing prosperity for the citizens of a society. It is thus easy for Marxist leaders to find themselves in positions of power and bring total catastrophe to their country. They typically are so selfishly pursuing their own personal power and that of their network that they hold a conflictive stance towards their own countrymen and countrywomen. Look no further than the modern US Democrat Party, who decry and demean their Republican opponents in every way conceivable in order to maintain their power, yet they do not seem able to address or even comprehend the scale of inadequacy and degradation of the economic landscape in their own country.
In the years since Biden and the US Democrats took power, homelessness and crime have skyrocketed, illegal immigration is unchecked at record levels, the US manufacturing base has been crippled, and US industry is sinking quickly with little hope of innovation. Like typical socialists, they propose all sorts of solutions. But since they only know how to manipulate people in order to solidify their own personal power, they have no grasp of how to build a prosperous society. They only know how to destroy a society in order to empower themselves.
This is the essential understanding conveyed by Frederick Hayek in his Road to Serfdom, which posits that socialist leaders inevitably slip towards authoritarian and totalitarian political and economic systems until they collapse or are replaced.
Socialists, of whom Marxist communists are a unique breed, attempt chiefly to redistribute societal wealth from the economically successful— that is, the capitalists who have served the market most appropriately— to everyone else, especially and foremost themselves and their connections. Anyone who does not politically support the socialists is sh!t out of luck.
A country can best, most peacefully, be saved from such a fate if it has institutionalized a republic as its form of government. Only then can the country have a chance to peacefully transition to a different government, ideally one with a more capitalist understanding of the world, that can bring the country back toward prosperity.
