Marx in the American Academy: When Will its High Priests Ever Learn?
Eagleton has a brief moment of doubt — very brief. He writes that “radical change…may not be for the better.” Then he drops it, to argue that despite this, it has to be tried. And like Marx, Eagleton too has no blueprints of his own to offer on how we are to create the socialist paradise. What socialism has to offer, he tells us, is “the right to lie around all day in loose crimson garments, sipping absinthe and reading the odd page of Homer to each other.” This kind of “free activity,” Eagleton says, Marx knew “had to be available to us all.”
Sure. It might work for Eagleton, a best-selling author who teaches a light load and has the time to lie around all day — while others do the work he rejects because he believes the Marxist future promises it. As for violence, it does not have to take place. He tells us: “The Bolshevik Revolution itself took place with remarkably little loss of life,” and the birth of the Soviet Union too occurred “with scarcely any bloodshed.” That came later, after they bloodlessly took power in a military coup that overthrew the budding parliament and instituted Soviet rule. Eagleton thinks that all he has to call up is the day of the transfer of power to prove that revolution does not mean violence, as if the decades of bloodshed that followed had nothing to do with Soviet power.
So he hopes to convince readers that the Marxian future means only “pleasurable self-fulfillment.” It is the brother of liberal individualism, in which one realizes one’s own goals by guaranteeing that others at the same time realize theirs. See how simple it is? Under capitalism we work for our own benefit; but under socialism, we work for “the welfare of others.” So, comrades, let us proceed to build the socialist order. Marx is back on the agenda, he concludes, because of capitalism, whose crises of the present “have forced us once again to think of the setup under which we live,” and to return to Karl Marx for the answer.
I wish that instead of printing this drivel, the editors of The Chronicle Review would have reprinted the text of the speech the late Polish philosopher and former Marxist Leszek Kolakowski had given at Columbia University in the late 1980s, which I attended. It was titled, as I recall, “What is Living and Dead in Marx?” Fortunately, a slightly different version of the speech was printed in First Things in 2002, under the title “What is Left of Socialism?”
Now Kolakowski knew more than many others all there was to know about the history and philosophy of socialism and Marxism. His three volume Main Currents of Marxism is widely acknowledged now as a classic. No one has better explained its importance, and that of Kolakowski himself, than PJM contributor Roger Kimball in this essay. Kolakowski, Kimball writes, “carried out a heroic demolition of Marxism.”
Perhaps that is why his work is so ignored today, and a charlatan like Eagleton is given so much space. Indeed, the essay now called “What is Left of Socialism?” is a great answer to the easy bromides of Eagleton. Reading it, one can immediately see the difference in the quality of the argument; the embarrassing polemic of Eagleton is hard to even compare to the serious analysis by Kolakowski. He gets to the essential in his first paragraph:
“That Marx is worth reading is certain. The question is, however: Does his theory truly explain anything in our world and does it provide a ground for any predictions? The answer is, No. Another question is whether or not his theories were useful at one time. The answer is, obviously, Yes: they operated successfully as a set of slogans that were supposed to justify and glorify communism and the slavery that inevitably goes along with it.”
As for Marx’s prophecies, Kolakowski was clear-minded: “All of Marx’s important prophecies…have turned out to be false.” Class polarization receded instead of deepened; the working class all but disappeared and dwindled; and proletarian revolution proved not to be inevitable, which Marx thought it was. One might say the 1981 Polish revolt led by Solidarity was led by the workers. But as Kolakowski notes of his countrymen, it was a revolution “directed against a socialist state, and carried out under the sign of the cross, with the blessing of the Pope.” Not exactly what Marx, or I think Eagleton today, had in mind.
A second error, he notes, is that Marx was wrong about market economies. Kolakowski points out that “[m]arket economies have been shown to be extremely efficient in stimulating technological progress, whereas ‘real socialism’ turned out to be technologically stagnating.” Eagleton argues that Marx was the first ecologist, and the ecology movement today is carrying out Marx’s work. Had he read Kolakowski, Eagleton would find this:
“Instead, there is hardly anything in Marxism that provides solutions to the many problems of our time, mainly because they were not urgent a century ago. As for ecological questions, we will find in Marx no more than a few romantic banalities about the unity of man with nature. Demographic problems are completely absent, apart from Marx’s refusal to believe that anything like overpopulation in the absolute sense could ever occur. Neither may the dramatic problems of the Third World find help in his theory.”
As for the socialist paradise his followers created, they all ended in the draconian totalitarianism of the last century, to which we have become all too familiar. Kolakowski argues that Marx’s theory, the one which Terry Eagleton wants us to adopt, “contributed strongly to the emergence of totalitarianism, and that it provided its ideological form. It anticipated the universal nationalization of everything, and thus the nationalization of human beings.”
So why, then, do so many serious and learned people in the American academy swear by Marx, and urge his theories be adopted? Again, the late philosopher has an answer: “One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy. Indeed, they enjoyed having one key to open all doors, one universally applicable explanation for everything, an instrument that makes it possible to master all of history and economics without actually having to study either.”
I hereby contend that is why Terry Eagleton is so popular, and in such demand. He lives well, has a beautiful home and life, and can write vacuous essays so lacking in intellectual integrity that he provides a good model for his fellow academics. They can write and polemicize, and have the university pay their salaries while they do so. They do not understand the wisdom of Kolakowski, who while acknowledging the imperfections of capitalism, points out the following:
“Capitalism developed spontaneously and organically from the spread of commerce. Nobody planned it and it did not need an all-embracing ideology, whereas socialism was an ideological construction. Ultimately, capitalism is human nature at work—that is, man’s greediness allowed to follow its course—whereas socialism is an attempt to institutionalize and enforce fraternity. It seems obvious by now that a society in which greed is the main motivation of human acts, for all of its repugnant and deplorable aspects, is incomparably better than a society based on compulsory brotherhood, whether in national or international socialism.”
He understands well that the equality desired by the Marxists cannot be created by institutional means. What can be created are new prison systems, in which scarcity is redistributed so that more people have little which they share , and those who rule — the apparatchiks — have what they want and what they take. Those who lived through really existing socialist societies, like Kolakowski did, came to realize that equality was not created. What developed was far worse than anything that had existed in the societies they had replaced.
The early 19th century socialists had, in fact, fought for good things: fair taxation, educational reform, women’s rights, racial equality, religious tolerance, and the like. They represented, Kolakowsi writes, “the best in European political life.” But the socialism of the last century was that of the Leninist-Stalinist tradition. The irony is, and this perhaps is Kolakowski’s greatest insight, that what the reform socialists fought for so valiantly were “in fact realized in democratic countries operating within market economies.” It is in this sense that the historian Martin J. Sklar has continually argued that the United States in its present form is in fact the realization of the socialist dream of old.
So let us reject Terry Eagleton’s entreaties, and with Kolakowski, realize that “fraternity under compulsion is the most malignant idea devised in modern times.” Socialism, as he concludes, “is a kingdom of lies.”
When will the editors of the journals of the American academy realize this, and stop using their presses to continue to lie to us?
Ron,
A brilliant article…not a wasted word. If Karl Marx were alive he would he would agree with you.
If Karl Marx was alive today, I’d be in jail for shooting him
Well then Marx wouldn’t be alive, would he?
Unless you’re a poor shot.
“What’s Really Reactionary?”
Http://Abcdunlimited.com/ideas/reactionary.html
I was absolutely floored by how Eagleton’s essay was so divorced from reality. Sample: “The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism.”
Socialism = Love ???????
This is yet another occasion to trot out my favorite Orwell quote: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
Very True! Orwell also recognized that those in “the intelligentsia” easily fall for this dreck because so few of them have ever spent time in the world outside of a faculty lounge and a hermetically-sealed world of like-minded individuals. At the risk of restating the obvious, this has been perfectly ilustrated by Mr. Obama who has contrived to be of the world but not “in” the world.
I don’t think it’s laziness that attracts academics to Marxism, but rather vanity. The idea of the proletarian vanguard–a uniquely enlightened elite, morally entitled by virtue of their superior understanding to seize power and impose a wise and just totalitarian dictatorship on the rest of the population, for the latter’s own good–fits the typical academic’s self-image perfectly.
Good point. Marxism is the atheist religion of the Enlightenment, and every Marxist gets to be a little Messiah – a hero leading the poor and the ignorant toward salvation. Feels good, don’t it?
Hey, don’t bring us atheists into it. I’m a patriotic, non-god fearing, capitalist American thank you very much.
Sorry, didn’t intend to insult atheists. I meant that for true believers, Marxism is a religion without a deity.
Mr Mayo – you must mean agnostic. You sound too intelligent to be an “atheist.” It’s a big universe. He may just be somewhere you haven’t looked yet.
Psalm 14:1 The fool says in his heart, There is no God.
Many, if not most, atheists have looked more widely than you.
And, if I may, far more widely than you can, thank you very much.
The saving grace of your Christian culture is not mere surety- Marxists have an excess of that- but focus and consistency (along with a great deal of goodness and effort).
Mr. Bugs, I do appreciate your gracious reply.
I quite agree; throughout history, the new religion must cast down the old
in order to take it’s place.
The ‘face of the father of the people’- that will come in time, for sure.
Thank you for this excellent exposition on the mind of the Marxist “scholar”, indeed all high priests in their faith, arrogant in their surety of intellectual superiority, lolling in their tenured affluence. Marxism as a cause is long dead.
Eagleton is a neo-communist, as are Ayers and Obama and cling to the lenin/Stalin denomination of the post-Marxian religion.
This President, in my perception, is a great admirer of Mao, and sees China as the exemplar of successful Communism, the Socialist Republic that Stalin strived for but failed to achieve. Now that the great eader has gone. it is ruled by a cadre. with a compliant, strictly policed proletariat. What it has done is what Stalin failed to do: abandon management of industry and commerce and permit entrepreneurial types to run them and personally profit from them so long as they pay the tribute and remain deferential to the Party, Today their government is building enclaves of mini-palaces, many o them designed by American architects, to reward high performers. There does not appear, unfortunately for Eagleton’s ilk, to be comparable pampering of academics.
Obama is infatuated by it all. That is why he is so deferential to them. That is why his daughters are learning Mandarin. He believes this is the Chinese Communist Century. His dream is to shape our Republic in its model.
It probably totally escapes him that he is not the type that they would reward. They are looking for achievers. In their priesthood he might not even make monk.
And thank you for introducing me to Kolakowski.
“his daughters are learning Mandarin”- What!?!
I knew it. China was raised to replace a fallen USSR.
Investor’s Business Daily did a series exposing the opportunistic hard Marxist, Bill Clinton, as China’s Number One spy- and the unnoticed, backwater Arkansas fiefdom as home to over 1,000 Chinese front companies.
I believe he raided the various government pension funds in order to give the Party their seed money- Phil Gramm, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, and the Chicago “New Party” Democratic Socialist Alliance that ruled the Pelosi/Reid Congress then hired GoldSachs types to reflate the depleted funds using mortgage-based derivatives schemes.
apologies- correction: “The DSA that Came To rule the Congress”-
as with all closet communists, the mutating New Party’s fortunes were advanced in conjuction with the rise of China- San Francisco, Pacific trade, Wall St. leverage, Treasury bond sales, Pelosi’s husband’s banking ventures in China, Q-class nuclear secrets, etc.
I honestly don’t believe China vaulted ahead because of scientific socialist management of the economy- industrial espionage, theft, corrupt Democrats and ‘eager’ Republicans seem just a tad more likely.
Excellent article. Thank you so much! It’s such an important, on-going discussion because it underlies so many other important discussions.
Read the late John Roche’s superb and slim book, The History and Impact of Marxist-Leninist Organizational Theory, to learn more along the lines Ron Radosh explained.
In Daniel Gardner’s terms, Eagleton and his fellow academics would be called “hedgehogs.” They know “one big thing” – Marxism – that they believe explains everything and provides the answer to every problem. It doesn’t matter that every implementation of Marx’s ideas in the real world has resulted in misery and ultimate failure. The idea, the vision, is still Platonically pure in the Marxist’s mind. THAT is reality, not the chaos and disappointment of the real world. It must be defended, its failures explained away. Otherwise…what have you got?
“the failure of capitalism to attain justice and prosperity for all”. Trying to achieve that unobtainable goal always results in misery, death and destruction. Always.
“Marx in the American Academy: When Will its High Priests Ever Learn?” You might better ask why they never learn? Follow the the money!
Hate is a very powerfill emotion.Mr. Radosh you know in your heart of hearts how this will end,and it won’t be pretty. We have passed the tipping point,let it burn.
“When will its high priests ever learn?”
Ron,you know the answer better than anyone.
Never.
These Marxists are genocidal religious fanatics, willing to destroy their institutions rather than lose power in them.
One of the best and clearest analyses of Marxism was the book by that title by Thomas Sowell. Sowell points out that Marx never defined one of his key terms, “class”.
Milton Friedman, though, refuted Marx in an even more concise way. Marx wrote that the advance of capitalism inevitably reduces the working class, the people whose income depends primarily on their labor, because the only way the capitalist class can increase its profits is by reducing wages. Result: Inevitable misery for the workers. Did that work in practice, in a highly capitalist country, the U.K., in the 19th Century? Obviously not, Friedman said, since the British working class was vastly better off in wealth, health, education and standard of living in 1900 than in 1800. Marx had predicted the immiseration of the working class under capitalism and what happened was the exact opposite.
And yet – not sure why – leftists, liberals, the unions do insist that the workers ARE immiserated. Or, at the very least, that without constant vigilance and agitation from the left, the workers WILL BECOME immiserated. As far as I can tell, the source of the misery is no longer basic living and working conditions – it’s *unequal* living and working conditions. There doesn’t seem to be much talk about the political classes that Marx defined. Instead, it’s “the rich” and “big business.”
[Eagleton] also brags that Marxists warned “of the perils of fascism” while the leaders of the “so-called free world” where whitewashing Hitler.
It would be more correct to say that the nazis warned of the perils of communism while the New York Times whitewashed the Holodomor.
It would also be correct to say that the Western whitewashers of Hitler were mostly academics like Terry Eagleton.
So why, then, do so many serious and learned people in the American academy swear by Marx, and urge his theories be adopted?
THIS is where Marxist class analysis comes in handy: the plain fact is that Marxism serves the class interest of the intelligentsia.
(I understand it was the anarchist Machajski who first applied Marxist class analysis to Marxism.)
“When will the editors of the journals of the American academy realize this, and stop using their presses to continue to lie to us?”
They realize perfectly well that Marxism is a tyrannical and brutal system in all its guises and they don’t care. They are like the old Southern plantation owners who saw slavery as in the best interest of their slaves. In my opinion, all Marxists are egomaniacal sadists.
i have been spamming some vintage milton friedman youtube videos lately and it’s sort of twilight zonish
first of all, there are several clips of a bunch of snotty students (one was michael moore btw) and friedman calmly and utterly makes mincemeat of their arguments
the problem (what we are experiencing at this very second) is that these snot nosed twerps didnt even listen to friendman and now they all have positions of power in our government, schools, and every other walk of life applying their misguided ideology
they are in a state of permanently arrested development refusing to see reality or, even worse, existing in a parallel universe where up is down
is strongly suggest a rehash of all these clips of friedman as their relevance can not be understated
(should have linked this to 12 lack olson)
Aren’t you afraid that in this despotic country that we live in, that you will be jailed for such a radical opinion?
not afraid, because once despotic we are authorized by the constitution to kick some statist ass
“Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality?”
Because they define the bar, and it always moves. By the standards of even 50 years ago, there is no poverty in free-market economies.
Maybe Karl Marx beleived in marxism, but he’s about the only one. To everybody else, it’s the perfect tool to rule the world because it’s a great con to trick the rubes into supporting you. Stripped of the high-falutin bs, marxism in a nutshell is “Support us marxists and we won’t jail you for rolling the rich guys, or the jews, or the white guys, or whoever it is you would like to roll.” In other words, it formalizes barbarism in return for political support. Of course, after the power is acquired, everybody but the commissars better run for the hills, because the next peaceful commissar you meet will be the first one who has ever lived.
Today’s Brownshirts wear Black Hoodies…and call themselves Anti-Fascists.
Here is my own theory for Mr. Eagleton to ponder:
Some people are smart and some people are stupid.
Some people work hard and some people are lazy.
This is called ‘Occam’s Razor’ and you don’t have to run all over town like Sherlock Holmes or create dizzy philosophies the masses like cuz it explains why they are the masses and not individuals who can think for themselves without leaning all over a Civil War era intellectual like a drunk hooker at a miniature golf course.
A few weeks before, the Chronicle Review had essays on “The Dismal Future of Capitalism.” The cover stories tend to be so anti-capitalist, anti-American and anti-freedom that I read them with a sense of unreality.
Of course, I’m just a nonprofit worker, not an academic.
Perhaps one has to live in a world of unreality sustained by the very young to accept that lunacy flows with the fountains.
For some real laughs read the reviews and comments at Amazon. They are acting like Eangleton is their log awaited Messiah; that finally someone has come to explain what they never really could.
There is a very simple explanation of the genesis of Singleton’s nonsensical crap.
A PARASITE will attach ITSELF to any ideology or religion that will allow IT to live ITS PARASITIC LIFE at the expense of the HUMAN OF SMART AND HONEST WORK.
The vomit he produces: “The right to lie around all day in a loose crimson garments” speaks for itself.
What deranged mind of a PARASITE is eternally incapable of grasping is the fact that someone else has to work DOUBLE to provide a PARASITE with that kind of lesurely style of life, he believs he deserves.
The roots of that self delusion lie in the fact that the PARASITES are simply quasi-humans who still linger mentally and “intellectually” in the world of animals.
One of the elements of animal’s struggle for survival is the opportunity to steal other animal’s food, lair or female.
Some quasi-humans who chose to act like predators will brak into our homes, mug us at the autobank, pick-pocket us or the more cuning will resort to fraud.
All those sub-human activities are liked to a considerable risk though; If you break to my home, I shall give you a welcome with a few unces of a lead into your hooded head.
Or at best the thief will end up in a prison.
A human PARASITE who is cuning and patient enough will be working eternally and determinetly on the creation of a socio-political construction that will enable IT to live a premanent life at the expense of the PEOPLE OF A SMART AND HONEST WORK without taking any risk of being held accountable for their criminal activities.
Marxism is just that, a perfect ideology of PARASITISM.
Transfered onto the American ground, Obama is just that; a PERFECT PARASITE who has NEVER did a single day of honest work.
In order to avoid being held accountable for the theft of some 10 trilion dollars he is busy with working on a deformed and degenerated “legal construction” that shall protect him and his cronies.
One can only hope that the American people shall hold him accountable for his crimes against America and her Constitution.
My wife and I visited Vietnam last month. At one point, our guide said, “After reunification in 1975, we were socialist. You know what socialism means? It means if I work hard and someone else doesn’t, we get the same thing. So why would anyone work hard? No one did. About 20 years ago, the government allowed us to keep what we earned. Things are much better now.”
There are two basic categories of people who support Marxism/socialism:
1. People who what something for nothing and think everyone else should provide for their leisure. These are the primary parasites you describe.
2. People like academics and bureaucrats who believe they’ll be in the ruling elite and get to tell everyone else how to live.
Neither of these groups can be trusted. We’re seeing in the Obama administration what happens when the second group is given positions of power.
There’s a simple way to get through to people like Eagleton. Point out that some college teachers get a lot of pay, while others don’t. This inequality has a simple, egalitarian solution:
1. Pool all the earnings of every college teacher.
2. Divide by the number of college teachers.
3. Distribute to each teacher his or her equal share.
Would Eagleton be in favor of this? Of course not.
The egalitarianism of Marx went underground and re-emerged as progressivism. Progressivism has taken over almost every institution in the West.. it is far from being unsuccessful.
How do you counteract the easy slogans and ideas of equality? It is so attractive to appeal to a one-size-fits-all solution, i.e., just make everybody and everything equal. There don’t seem to be any equally easy slogans and memes for liberty and free enterprise. Those things are never the easy way out, nor do they lend themselves to easy descriptions.
I wish I knew how, but until conservatives and traditionalists can fight with pithy slogans and memes, we will continue to lose ground against egalitarians and redistributionists such as the vile Obama.
Marx was rather a writer the the economist.His brillian aphorisms are known better than his theory of value.Today`s marxists have nothing with the science.They are often the fashionable writers demonstrating their “bleeding hart”.These talkers are absolutly irresponsible and don`t see any Marxist guilt in 20th century terrible crimes.
No one social structure provoke more hate than the “capitalism”, though money and the capital is the eternal good for all.This paradise for parvenus,the abundance alternating with poverty, the yesterdeys schoolfellow becoming the emplouer! The permanent challenge of our human collectivistic and traditionalistic nature!But what the great fruits!
Re: “When will the editors of the journals of the American academy realize this, and stop using their presses to continue to lie to us?”
Oh, I do not know…. may be when they become honest and read a very short booklet named “Communist Manifesto” using elementary math. thinking. Let me elaborate: there 2 parts, the 1-st part ANALYSES than existing society and the analysis is precise description of than existing facts. The 2-d part PROJECTS this contemporary analysis into the future and comes with a single static “solution” which is to break it up and build something artificial. It is classic interpolation vs. extrapolation problem: while using one’s chosen function the interpolation can be made as precise as one wants (e.g. fits all available points), the extrapolation usually fails and the more precise the interpolation the more spectacular is failure of extrapolation. The problem is that one NEVER learns the mechanism of any process by interpolating existing measurements. Unfortunately for M&E (Marx & Engels) they did not (actually could not and it is not their fault) anticipated the dynamic nature of human society and the fact that capitalism unleashed technology that increased productivity so much that human conditions can be dramatically improved without any drastic changes (aka revolutions). In other words, their description of how society works turn out to be wrong.
PS. But many of their works are interesting. I particularly liked (when I was young) the “Anti-During” and the “Origins of family, society and state”. Both are written by F. Engels.
Having had to put up with too many of these self centered jerks in academia and out, I think the primary ingredient of all Marxists is first a blind level of personal narcisism and second a strong dislike for all those “lesser” peons who fail to realize their superiority.
One reason to advocate Marxist governments is their proven efficiency in controlling population growth.
Just imagine how many more humans would be alive today if Mother Marx had smothered the little creep in his crib. None of his followers would have managed to murder and eliminate via famines the 20th century’s 100 million.
The problem with all those Marxist idiots, oh, sorry, intellectuals, is that they did not even learn the early history of the Marx’s theory implementation: the Bolshevik Russia BEFORE the Stalin’s machine of mass murder has been ignited.
Lenin HIMSELF acknowledged that Bolshevism as the purest Marxism implementation failed. That’s why he introduced so-called “NEP” (in Russian – НЭП: New Economic Policy), which had swiftly dragged out Russia from the deadly morass of Communism.
When Stalin came to the power, he dismantled that NEP, and the famines started again, as before NEP.
Not knowing or ignoring that history is nothing but IDIOCY of a medical nature. Therefore, we have all rights to call those “intellectuals” imbecile idiots.
Forget about the [im]moral side of Communism with its dozens of millions of murdered COMPATRIOTS (not even foreign enemies!)
I forgot to add: mass murder in Russia started not with Stalin, but with and by Lenin and his accomplices.
The concentration camps were built long before Hitler’s and Stalin’s camps: by a Trotsky’s order in May 1918. So, please, please, stop mumbling about 1937 and Stalin’s purge! It’s a bullshit invented by morons like this Terry Eagleton and the likes.
And the number of Chinese murder by Mao and his satraps is also not 30 Million, but roughly 70 Million. Any honest person can easily check and prove it: the only thing needed is honesty, which this country is in a drastic deficit.
“The concentration camps were built long before Hitler’s and Stalin’s camps: by a Trotsky’s order in May 1918.”
In time the camps and the slaves in them became an integral part of the economy. Hitler’s V2′s were built by slave labor. Many things in Hitler’s Germany were produced by slave labor. You must know that the Gulags became an integral part of the Soviet economy. In the U.S. slaves were used to the same end. The only difference was that one didn’t have to accuse somebody of high treason to get a slave. Slaves could be easily bought from the Arab “black ivory” traders. But I digress. The truth is clear: when a society institutionalizes inequality (=”you work hard, I won’t work and enjoy the fruits of your labor”) then something’s gotta give and the bodies to do the hard work sooner or later appear. It’s the “invisible hand” that has moved every economy since the dawn of history.
Now it’s illegal aliens, before it was Gulag, Treblinka, docile American aboriginals, African men and women, all the way back to and beyond the Roman Empire when they used prisoners of war.
The best lesson in Economics I got it from St. Paul: “If man will work, he may eat; if he do not work, he neither can eat, nor should he eat.” (2nd Thessalonians, 3) The beneficiaries of schemes to avoid the harsh reality of work simply pass the back to someone. For each one of us who does not carry his own weight someone has to carry twice the weight by working for half the money or double the time. Eventually some kind of violence erupts and after enough people die we start all over again.
That’s the game we are born in. Our Founding Fathers devised a system to prevent that evil as far as it is humanly possible. It served us well for a while until the Progressives arrived.
Now we are screwed. AGAIN!
I meant to write “pass the bUck”. My apologies.
“The only difference was…..”
No, the MAIN difference was that camps under Commies (and under Nazis but more concerning specifically Jews) were used as a twofold function: to use slave labor AND to murder by fully exhausting a person.
Eagleton like all Professors of Cultural Theory does not understand quantity. All things exist to some extent.They do not properly understand this and are almost without exception innumerate.
Someone ought to send Eagleton, a Salford Irishman, a selection of Marx’s writings about the Irish. The Irish have had their revenge for it is Irishmen like Archbishop Mannix and Senator McCarran who have drummed the Marxists out of power.
It’s a waste of time trying to convince those faithful to the secular religion of Marxism that they are wrong. It’s likely trying to convince a Muslim Jihadist that he should convert to Judaism or like trying to convince Bill Press and Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow to become Evangelical Christians.
maybe we could try to initiate a “pilgrimage” or “mission” for the devout statists to go to their holy lands then change the locks on their way out
Truly one of the great wonders of the age is how a political philosophy could result in brutal impoverishment, sole-crushing despotism, and tens of millions of needless deaths, and still find support among the “intelligentsia”.
Mr Radosh paraphrases and quotes Eagleton thus:
“Fascism, resulting from capitalism, he reminds readers, was fought and defeated by ‘the self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union.’”
It is my understanding that Fascism was the brain child of long-time Socialists such as Mussolini, and that their idea of it was National Socialism, as in the German Nazi Party. They took control of industry, but did not most industrialists and the upper class disdain street thugs like Il Duce and Hitler. Wouldn’t it be more correct to say the the Soviet Union helped defeat the racist, anti-Semitic National Socialists?
Says TG, “Wouldn’t it be more correct to say the the Soviet Union helped defeat the racist, anti-Semitic National Socialists?”
No.
Let me bring to you an example:
You see a dead man. One passer-by says the man was hit by a brick fallen from the roof. Another passer-by says the man was shot by a thug who just escaped.
Is there any difference? The man is dead, right?
But any sound person would say there is a huge difference, even though for the dead man there isn’t.
A stupid parallel, but this is approximately what happened with the USSR versus Germany. More precisely: with Stalin versus Hitler and vice versa.
The USSR not just “helped defeat”, as you said (what a shocking illiteracy in the history of the WWII! Or, more precisely, what a shameless American mythomania regarding the WWII: the USA lost 480,000 military and the USSR – over 8 Million military {I don’t count civilians}. So, who helped whom?). The USSR has carried out the biggest and heaviest part of the fighting labor.
But the most abominable part of the entire WWII story was that the very war has been prepared and provoked by Stalin because of his monstrous plan to establish hios personla rule over the entire Europe.
And as you probably know, he did succeed: he established Communist system in Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Albania, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and quasi-Communism in Greece. Moreover, he implanted his agents-of-influence all over the rest of Europe. Remember: even Monrach England became a “monarch Socialist” country with its 90% taxation of anybody slightly above the survival level.
Stalin forced us to fight not AGAINST National Socialism (he was even in “friendly” relation with “Uncle Adolf”), but FOR his personal power over the World.
Do you smell the difference?
Interesting points, Constantine. However my main point was that fascism was not a natural outgrowth of capitalism, but rather a nationalist-socialist takeover of the means of production. As you note, Uncle Joe was monster, and it makes one wonder why the intellectual class in Western Europe sided with the USSR after the war, and turned on the US, which protected it from becoming citizens of another Soviet satellite state. Also worth noting is that WWII was not on American soil, as it was on the USSR’s. How many other countries, at that time would and could have made the massive effort to go so far abroad to fight the fascists? – Best, TG
Dear TG, if I have to explain my points, this is it:
1. Soviet Socialism and National Socialism are actually twins in their methods and final goals, even though purely philosophically they have some differences. Not very significant, though.
Both are so-called “workers movement”, which is clearly expressed in the very name of both the Lenin’s and Hitler’s Parties:
in Germany – Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, abbreviated NSDAP; or in English: The National Socialist German Workers’ Party, commonly known as the Nazi Party, which is an abbreviation of Nationalsozialist. (It was known as the German Workers’ Party (DAP) prior a change of its name in 1920);
in Russia – Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party.
The main difference I see between these two monstrous human inventions is that German Socialists were “National”, while Soviet Socialists were “International.”
By the way, the further spread of that brain cancer proves my point of view.
2. The USSR did not “help defeat”, the USSR was the MAIN fighter against Germany, starting from June 22, 1941.
The USA were fighting mostly against Japan from December 7, 1941. On the European theater, the USA appeared only on June 6, 1944, D-Day.
3. The USA have provided an invaluable aid to the USSR in form of lend-lease.
I still remember American tinned stew, without which my family wouldn’t probably survive.
David Hume, in the chapter on Justice, in his Inquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, described the effects of Marxism in a few paragraphs: the principle of justice that all goods be distributed equally, leads to poverty – since it takes away incentives to produce – and tyranny – since those who will enforce this principle will be tyrants.
Marxists like Eagleton are snobs who want power.
Thank you for the reference, I am keen to read it!
Why do the Marxists in academia, media, law and government have to learn anything. They have successfully gulled for the past half century otherwise thinking people, ie. ordinary practical and ingenious Americans, with their fairy tale of the free lunch to feed off the trough of unearned benefits. Have insinuated into pivotal position is ALL civic institutions in the USA, even if you can believe it the otherwise feet on the ground military. AND consolidated their positions and theft of the Rights of Americans into “Law” in vacuous entirely unnecessary race and gender “amendments”. Have played class cards eg elite/best and brightest versus racist, sexist, astro-turf, gunhappy cowboys and “Christians”.
A textbook practice in undermining a society of free citizens by pitting one against the other. The icing on their cake of political/social rubble, the “economic catastrophe”. Copying the end in Weimar Republic even with the Leni-Riefenstahl like photo-essays in the Media. Current media stars/comedians in all but brown-shirt uniform and videos of triumphant progress through Europe, a socialist stronghold. Before their “New Kennedy”, their “Messiah’s” election. We need not be reminded of the effects of that chapter in the history of the West, Nor that it was a prime example to undermine/overthrow a civilised and generally coherent social structure/people. The Germans were one of the most civillised and cultured
people in the world at that time. The costs of that destruction are still paid in money and blood by the West, especially the American West.
And now Libya on the template of Vietnam a la Kennedy the First / Johnson. With the same behaviours from establishment Media and a craven Congress which does not as in the 1960s fight their own corner in demanding that WAR may be made, a la the Constitution of the USA, ONLY with advise and consent of Congress. War whatever Kennedy the First and this New Kennedy call it still requires the sacrifice of young – non-elite/ordinary/common – men, and now women in combat. A “rose by any other name…”
Where are the brave “representatives of the People”, insisting on their prerogative. We are inured to their continual failure to Uphold and Defend the Constitution in protection of Rights of “common” Americans. But that they do not even protect and fight for their own rights is simply incredible. What a brave, trustful, truthful lot of people the Americans elect to represent them to themselves and the world. Effects ? of the past 50years of these Marxists insinuation into the civil affairs of the nation. Do these persons in Congress REALLY represent those generally admirable and ingenious people the world has admired for 2 centuries until the hyenas of Marxism targeted them as the most juicy prey in the international jungle.
How Americans have failed to heed those first admonitions to beware entanglement in foreign affairs. But things CHANGE, don’t they?
Attribute every human failing and imperfection to the “capitalist system” and you must advocate its destruction. The oppression, the cultural vandalism, the butcher’s bill, the environmental degradation, the economic dogmesses arising from Marxist experiments are all mere mistakes which can be corrected if we put our faith in Marxism—not Marxism as practiced, but the opposite kind.
“Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality?”
Very simple. Capitalism is a system for individuals, not for masses. No one invented capitalism. It is the natural outgrowth of human nature engaging in commerce.
The one fundamental problem with Marxism, and the reason it and idiots like Eagleton should be ignored is that it assumes a false concept of human nature. Human will not sacrifice for the good of society as a whole, exept for national defense and similar threats. On a day to day basis, people want to own what they produce or they will simply not produce. People will not sacrifice hard work so others can be lazy.
The problems with capitalism are the problems of human nature. And it is governments, not capitalism that have created the problems we face today. There is nothing inherent is capitalism that requires the enormous borrowing our government undertakes. It is politicians distorting capitalism with Marxist goals of “economic and social justice”.
Let capitalism be capitalism. If people want economic and social justice (whatever those things are) they can work as hard as they want to achieve them and not expect someone else to give it to them.
Thank you for these essays. Thank you for the solid, substantial education in leftism.
Quite. My first reading of Radosh. Well done!
And these commentors- first rate!
I wanted to reply to each one!
(With slight apology to Mr. Yangottago-
we fools can be a bit sniffy, old chap)