Just when everyone at the monastery has heaved a sigh of relief that the repulsive villain of The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Pavlovich, has at last gone home after behaving scandalously, he reappears. “They thought I had gone, and here I am again,” he chortles maliciously, devising fresh disgraceful actions. In much the same way, Marxism, which we had all thought over and done with, has returned in new forms among the woke intelligentsia. Antifa, “occupiers” of this and that, antisemitic college mobs, and other American versions of Red Guards keep emerging, each outdoing the last. The slogan “Death to America!” is now heard not only in Tehran, Iran, and Pyongyang, North Korea, but also on campuses across the West. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaiming that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead. History did not end, it just had taken a brief nap.
Refurbishing the old ideology was easy. It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”
And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” Just as endless purges shaped Joseph Stalin’s Russia and Mao Zedong’s China, ever new forms of oppression, macro and micro, are discovered, each flaunting its own difficult discourse and forbidden words, so that no one who fails to pay constant attention can speak safely. Despite occasional references to “class,” Marxism endures not primarily as a critique of capitalism but as a template for Manichaean struggle. History repeats itself, as Marx himself said, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
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Author: Gary Saul Morson
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