This is the kind of Marxism we need today. People who really want to work, make things, build families and communities and dig deep roots—Unite!

How Red (State) Is Marx?

By PATRICK J. DENEEN

May Day, 2014

Not since the 1960s has Marx’s name been so widely invoked as a guide and sage. Except in a few academic outposts—mainly “culture studies,” not in the disciplines in which Marxism was once most vital, political science and economics—Marx had almost wholly disappeared as a serious contender of our attention. By the early 1970s, Rawls had replaced Marx as the main object of the devotions among those on the Left, by which time the Marxist experiments in Russia, China, Vietnam, and elsewhere seemed to have left it wholly discredited. The American Left had made its peace with liberalism, and while it remained egalitarian, redistributist, and enamored of centralization, it largely made its peace with capitalism.

With the publication of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Marx is back in vogue, though—as is the case with Piketty as well—likely more invoked than read. In the backdrop of a range of statistics showing that economic inequality has deepened over the past several decades and accelerated since the Great Recession of 2008, and the broader anxiety felt nearly everywhere that the nation is heading in the wrong direction, Piketty’s argument is riding high on the wave of the Zeitgeist. Critiques of capitalism are in vogue in salons and academe and in the media, and calls for radical rethinking are the order of the day.

But as in early-20th century, those who most ardently embrace Marx tend not to be the dispossessed, but educated and wealthy elites. The revolution—such as it is—once again seems to be the cri de coeur of the nation’s educational, media, and even business liberal elites. The object of their critique would seem to be—themselves. As Matt Continetti recently documented, those most likely to be in the 1 percent (or at least 5 percent) today are documented liberals.

But, read your Marx: Marx knew that the revolution of the proletariat was not likely to be advanced by the proletariat: it would, in fact, be the enlightened segment of the bourgeoisie who would lead the charge in transforming of society. They would constitute the “vanguard” who would act on behalf of the dispossessed workers, and then rule on their behalf until society was sufficiently transformed that true equality could be established and the “State” could finally wither away.

In fact, the lower classes on whose behalf the enlightened would act could not be trusted: they were in the grip of “false consciousness,” deceived about the nature of their true condition, likely to “cling” to their religion and other backward beliefs. Marx was clear who constituted the true opposition: not the wealthy, from whom the enlightened were to be drawn; it was the lower-middle class, the “conservative” element of society. As Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto,

The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionaries, but conservative. Nay, more they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history.

The elites would invoke the anxieties of these classes—wrought above all by the dislocation of capitalism—to justify the displacement of the old aristocracy with their replacement by the temporary dictatorship of the enlightened. The enlightened would rule for an unspecified time until the “reactionaries” could be re-educated, and then all divisions would cease: no more war, no more countries, no more religion, no more possessions. Imagine!—it’s easy if you try.

The story of the rise of conservatism and the defeat of communism in the 1980s was in large part “the revolt of the masses” against their enlightened saviors. In Eastern Europe, ordinary people rose up against their Soviet occupiers, throwing off decades of brutal rule that had been justified in the name of and for the benefit of the working classes. This past Sunday’s canonization of John Paul II in part recalls and honors his role in combatting communism in Poland, acting with the ordinary Polish workers—Solidarity—who sought to reclaim basic human dignity and freedom, including the freedom to worship God without oppression and interference.

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