People keep talking about Marxism. Some say we have Marxists in Grant County, including elected officials. No one admits to being a Marxist, but some think others are secret Marxists.
Well, I have some experience with Marxism. Perhaps my personal journey can shed some light on local Marxists.
Unlike most high schoolers, I read “The Communist Manifesto.” I thought if I was to be against communism like everybody else, I ought to know what it was. “The Communist Manifesto” was written by Karl Marx in 1848 about a social situation in Europe that was very different from the American situation in the ’70s. I didn’t understand the words: bourgeoisie and proletarian. I also didn’t get the concept of class struggle. My father ran his own automatic transmission shop. Since he worked with his hands, did that make him a proletarian (a worker)? But he also owned the shop, and hired workers (including me in the summer). That made him what Marx called petite bourgeois (lower middle class). My teenage conclusion — which I still believe — is that Marxism is irrelevant to American society. My next experience with Marxism was in college when, through a series of coincidences — they happen in college — I studied Russian language and culture. Russian literature is some of the greatest. I started with Feodor Dostoevsky, but got to Leo Tolstoy, Alexander Pushkin and others.
Eventually I went on a language exchange program to a country that no longer exists: the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR. This was in 1976, during the depressing Brezhnev years when the Soviet Union started its long downward slide.
I came back with knowledge of socialism, Marxism and communism. The average American wouldn’t know the difference between these concepts that every Russian understood.
My dislike of Marxism was gained firsthand, not learned in school. The “workers’ paradise” treated people with disdain and contempt. I was glad to get home, despite some good times. I’m still in touch with a Russian I met then.
My fi nal experience with Marxism was a visit to China in 1990. I expected the People’s Republic of China to be a sort of Asian USSR. Wrong.
There seemed to be nothing communist about China. Everybody had a capitalist hustle. Four thousand years of capitalism, followed by 40 years of communism. It was like water off a duck’s back.
China is an authoritarian country led by the ruthless Chinese Communist Party. Despite the name, communist philosophy does not account for Chinese billionaires and competition. You don’t have to be democratic or humane to be one of the most capitalist countries in the world. With all this experience, what did I learn? Well, Marxists aren’t liberals or Democrats. In fact, to a real Marxist, there wouldn’t be much difference between a Democrat and a traditional Republican. (I won’t get into Trump Republicans.) Compared to Marxists, both are in the middle of the political spectrum.
You might think that since Marxists and Democrats are both on the left, they must be related. Real Marxists don’t think that. Their only use for liberal parties is to ally with them against conservative parties. After you destroy the conservative parties, the liberal parties are to your right, so you say they are conservative and destroy them, too.
In other words, you exploit the moderates — who you call “useful idiots.” The Soviet Union did this repeatedly in Russia and Eastern Europe. The Nazi Party figured out the trick and did it in reverse.
But a funny thing happened in 1991. The useful idiots defeated the Marxists and put them on what Marxists used to call “the dustbin of history.” Today hardly anybody admits to being a Marxist, and those few who do wouldn’t be recognized by Marx.
That doesn’t stop a few Republicans — who have only a distant prejudice about Marx’s philosophy — from claiming that Democrats are Marxists. To anyone who knows history, they look as foolish as the Democrats who call Republicans fascists.
The reality is that Democrats try to defeat Republicans in elections, and vice versa. They used to even compromise and learn from each other. No American party tries to wipe opposition parties off the face of the earth, as Stalin and Hitler tried to do.
Modern Democrats and Republicans both believe in capitalism and competition. They just disagree on how much it should be regulated. No Democrat — much less the moderate Democrats of Grant County — wants to destroy the free market and control every aspect of economic life.
The only way we’re going to go back to the 1930s struggle between Marxists and fascists is if the ignorant extremists on both sides continue to call each other names they don’t understand. I hope we’re not headed in that direction.
