Youth support in for Bernie Sanders, the first openly socialist candidate running in a major-party American presidential race, shows the power of collectivist messaging even here. In the primaries, the Vermont septuagenarian easily outpolled Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump combined. By , these millennials will be the biggest voting bloc.
Left-wing candidates, including some Democratic socialists, did surprisingly well in the most recent primaries. Polls of millennials show consistently that economic issues, such as jobs and college debt, are their dominant concerns.
Issues like transgender rights, or climate change, may motivate the media and denizens of university hothouses, but for most young people more critical are those that impact their lives in a more immediate way. The current ruling oligarchy, centered on Wall Street and Silicon Valley, has no real program to address these concerns outside of occasional proposals to provide guaranteed incomes and subsidies for what they see as increasingly extraneous masses.
The reason was that publishers who were afraid that this volume would cause anger among French leftists did not want to take risks. The closed mindedness of French intellectuals to these facts and different ideas was repeated at different scales in many other countries.
While one set of neglected cases was the hunger, misery, and inequality created by socialism, another set was massacres. Marxism was the womb of the most widespread and brutal massacres ever seen in the countries where it dominated. Unfortunately, cruelty and massacre are evils that are not rare in human history. However, no era of history has seen mass murder on the scale that Marxist regimes committed.
The logic, dimensions, and consequences of these mass murders were addressed by Kolakowski, like many other writers, in many articles and studies. However, information about these murders fell on deaf ears and blind eyes of intellectual circles in the West, and Marxists always managed to find new ways to refresh their belief in Marxism.
Another reason for the attractiveness of Marxism is, not surprisingly, its collectivist and utopian nature. The real strength of Marxism as an idea always resulted from its collectivist and promising character, not from the material foundations of its theses or its conformity with reason and logic.
When Marxism was born, it promised a new world, and it still does. Marxism gains an irresistible attraction when a scientificness is added to its new world promise that is identified with heaven on the earth.
Let us parse the basics of the picture again. Heart first: Pain and hunger should disappear, inequalities should end. Who would not want? Then science: Societies have immutable laws like natural laws. Oh, how beautiful! Then the chosen men: Only gifted intellectuals like in fact only Marx can discover these laws. This is our destiny. What a beautiful destiny! So human-will cannot resist them. Bow to the inevitable And here is the ideal society and world.
The heart eventually met mind and science, and the chosen man completed the picture. We stay on target: Heaven on earth.
The end of history. There is no way beyond. Who would not charmed by this picture? For example, workers do not care much about this wonderful picture. Educated people and those who are proceeding in the education life students petty-bourgeois, in Marxist terminology take the lead among those who are enamored of this picture.
In other words, Marxism is always popular among educated people almost everywhere in the world, but not among workers. The main reason for this is that, in its purest form, Marxism is easy to understand, believe, and follow for educated people. An easy way to solve all human problems. A world, where conflicts between people do not occur, where we can realize our human potential without competition, and where famine disappears.
A communist utopia. A place that does not exist but will be created by Marxism. With this easy nature, Marxist theory serves utopian dreams and bewitches educated people who dream of a new world. It blocks any effective potential rejection from its possible opponents by posing itself as science.
However the main feature of Marxism attracting the educated people is that it promises an effortless good life by addressing human needs. As Kolakowski expresses the power of influence achieved by Marxism is due to its almost prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements rather than its supposedly scientific character.
Marxism is a doctrine of blindfold trust. Marxists thinks that a universal abundance awaits us around the corner. Almost all prophecies of Marx and his followers have proved wrong, but this does not disturb the faithfulness of the believers any more than the failure of religious prophesies disturbs that of radical religious sects. In this sense, Marxism performs a sort of religious function and its usefulness is of a religious nature. However, it is a cartoon and a false religion, because it presents spatial liberation as a scientific system, which even religious mythologies do not claim to be like.
Another feature of Marxism that makes it difficult or even impossible for some, to get rid of or to discard it is its polylogism. Most of the Marxist intellectuals firmly believe in this claim, although they themselves usually constitute the greatest denial of it.
All of these are subjective perspectives, except Marxism. Only Marxism constitutes an objective and scientific perspective. So Marxists impose their ideological concept wordbooks on everyone without intending or realizing that they are doing so. It is impossible to argue with a Marxist with widely accepted concepts of social thought-science. Even if Marxists seem to use these concepts verbally, they attach special meanings to them, and those who are unaware of the Marxist jargon do not or cannot notice it.
This method and jargon lock Marxists up in Marxism. It prevents them from getting light from outside and condemns their mind to darkness. In a sense, Marxism prohibits Marxists from stepping out of Marxism. Therefore, most of Marxists who are in doubt flutter inside their cage, rather than refusing the paradigm and feeling eased. Marx did not want his disciples to think about the basic features of life in the future socialist and communist world.
He did not write much on these issues either. He saw socialism as a critique of capitalism. And his followers followed his footsteps. What will happen when the prophecies of Marxism come true and the socialist and then the communist system is established? How will economic life be arranged? Who will make the production and consumption decisions? Who will be in charge of making investment decisions? Marxists too are not anxious about them.
Consequently, the future Marxist world has been left completely in a vacuum. Marxists either fled away from this issue completely or vaguely filled their personal imaginations and hopes into their personal understanding of Marxism.
The easy-promising and utopian character of Marxism completes its network with two things. First, Marxism produces a strong subculture in society. Marxists create their own jargon, fashion, and style. This culture includes slogans, symbolic words, and general formulas as well as ambitious academic studies. Second, it creates a neighborhood that is narrow within the general society but comparatively wide and tightly-knitted within the intellectual circles.
Emotional ties and stakeholder relations, as well as the idea companionship, develop within these circles. If you write a book as a Marxist, your comrades buy, praise, and promote it. They give rewards to your work so that you can in time make a fame. They also provide an environment of socialization. As age advances and Marxism occupies more of the mind cells, it becomes harder to resist the domination of the neighborhoods neighborhood pressure.
Getting old makes it difficult to restore the life or create a new circle of friends when the paradigm changes; the closed mind cells make understanding and perceiving alternative ideas an insurmountable task, an unnecessary and risky burden. One of the most effective ways for Marxism to be attractive is not just to inject the ideas and hope that all human needs will be met equally, effortlessly and forever; It also resorts to the tendency of the banditry of human kind.
Nowadays, Stalin and Stalinism are not very popular, but many Western intellectuals had praised Stalin and Stalinism in their past. They praised such a terrible mass murderer and his efforts to dominate the people that recognized no limit known to humanity. Violence and brutality created by Marxism are not an accident happening to Marxism, but an integral part of it; a natural result of what the ideology demanded.
Marx never believed in democracy in the meaning of controlled, participatory, and limited government after the age of He argued for the dictatorship of the proletariat. Such an understanding of political power is called as despotism in political theory. In , Lenin had the opportunity to actually show what this type of authority he previously described on paper would mean. In this system that institutionalizes the limitless authority, as observed by Kolakowski from inside, any criticism of the system was considered as a counter-revolutionary activity namely: crime which requires punishment ranging from imprisonment to execution at the discretion of the misgiving by the central or local representatives of the authority party center administrators or local party and police chiefs.
In fact, Marxists are neither inventors nor pioneers of this understanding. It was the French Revolution and Robespierre that created this terrible mentality.
Terror without virtue is fatal, and a virtue without terror remains powerless. Terror is nothing more than prompt, severe, and inflexible justice, therefore it is an emanation of virtue.
It is not so much a special principle but a consequence of the general principle of democracy adapted to the most urgent needs of our country. Lenin and other Marxists followed the footsteps of Robespierre, institutionalized terrorism, and perfected the machine of terror.
When we get rid of the influence of slogans and take a closer look at the essence of Marxism and what the intellectuals find in this essence, it is understood that there is no paradox. Marxism is already an ideology that sees violence as a legitimate and necessary tool. As Roberts points out, there is no humanist inside Marx.
Marxist concept of freedom is to negate spontaneous or individual autonomy. This means that society is absolutely free saved from autonomous forces — a freedom that will come by means of the ability of society to control its own destiny. Revolutionary intellectuals are the ones who do not accept people and human societies as they are and have projects to transfer them completely and eternally.
Marxism is a strong refuge and a good guide for those intellectuals who like the idea of social engineering. For this reason, every intellectual who has a revolutionary transformation project meets, sooner or later, Marxism, and some of them easily anchor on Marxism or use Marxism as a stop and then slide to other totalitarian directions.
The example of the former is the Marxist writers we know, and the latter is the fascist philosophers. Marxism is the most advanced one of revolutionary theories that legitimate violence, but the mainspring of all revolutionary transformation theories is the same. Robespierre, Lenin, and Hitler wanted to change human beings and society from top to down. This crazy desire of authoritarian, despotic leaders corresponds to exactly what revolutionary intellectuals wanted to do: the desire to recreate new peoples and societies.
However, revolutionary intellectuals, inevitably, are aware of their limitations. No new human and new society can be created by developing a theory on the paper.
It requires using extensive violence and a well-organized machine of force that will operate perfectly. Political leaders, namely states, are the ones who are in the position to have the ability and capacity to use, if they see a need, unlimited violence and to control the machine of force. Therefore, intellectuals are attracted by the political leaders whom they see having the light of creating a new human and a brand new society, as the butterflies are attracted by the light.
They make gain from this in two ways. First, they try to use power as a subcontractor in the realization of their community projects. Secondly, they believe that the political power will do what is necessary to reward them by acting differently from the society that denies the reputation and material gains they believe they deserve. Of course, there are the dogmatists in the few remaining Communist countries such as China andCuba, who continue to cling onto his sclerotic ideas.
But there are also, closer to home, intellectuals and academics who purvey versions of Marxism in the humanities departments of many college campuses. He pronounces statements in an apodictic manner, laying claim to an unquestionable sense of truth, with no opportunity to doubt. He is therefore always on the attack as he decimates opponents with unyielding polemic—and he was a master of polemical style, to be sure. Meanwhile there is no self-reflection, no interrogation of his own views, and no sense that he might possibly be wrong.
All history? Was there really nothing else than conflicts between different economic groups? For Marx, apparently, there was never any other dimension of human experience worthy of independent consideration: no history of technology, of ideas, of culture, or faith.
He comes to this one-dimensional schema by deflating the philosophy of history he had found in his teacher, the German philosopher G. Perhaps the kindest judgment on Marx is that he was just one more economist who thought he could predict the future.
His delusion about his own predictive capacities is what made Marx so distasteful to a thinker like Friedrich von Hayek, who recognized that humans can get things wrong, so best not to endow any single human with too much power, and certainly not the government.
Not so Marx, who claimed direct access to incontrovertible insights into the logic of history. For that reason he could conclude his Manifesto with a series of crushing verdicts on competing radical movements, denounced and condemned, without a shadow of doubt.
On the long list of victims of Marxism, companions on the left figured prominently. While we might associate Marx with politics, in fact he lacked any real appreciation for a political sphere in which one would interact productively with advocates of varying programs.
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