Private ownership of the means of production is the fundamental institution of the market economy. It is the institution the presence of which characterizes the market economy as such. Where it is absent, there is no question of a market economy.

Ownership means full control of the services that can be derived from a good. This catallactic notion of ownership and property rights is not to be confused with the legal definition of ownership and property rights as stated in the laws of various countries. It was the idea of legislators and courts to define the legal concept of property in such a way as to give to the proprietor full protection by the governmental apparatus of coercion and compulsion, and to prevent anybody from encroaching upon his rights. As far as this purpose was adequately realized, the legal concept of property rights corresponded to the catallactic concept.

However, nowadays there are tendencies to abolish the institution of private property by a change in the laws determining the scope of the actions that the proprietor is entitled to undertake with regard to the things that are his property. While retaining the term private property, these reforms aim at the substitution of public ownership for private ownership. This tendency is the characteristic mark of the plans of various schools of Christian socialism and of nationalist socialism. But few of the champions of these schools have been as keen as the Nazi philosopher Othmar Spann, who explicitly declared that the realization of his plans would bring about a state of affairs in which the institution of private property will be preserved only in a “formal sense, while in fact there will be only public ownership.”

There is need to mention these things in order to avoid popular fallacies and confusion. In dealing with private property, catallactics deals with control, not with legal terms, concepts, and definitions. Private ownership means that the proprietors determine the employment of the factors of production, while public ownership means that the government controls their employment.

Private property is a human device. It is not sacred. It came into existence in early ages of history, when people with their own power and by their own authority appropriated to themselves what had previously not been anybody’s property. Again and again, proprietors were robbed of their property by expropriation. The history of private property can be traced back to a point at which it originated out of acts that were certainly not legal. Virtually every owner is the direct or indirect legal successor of people who acquired ownership either by arbitrary appropriation of ownerless things or by violent spoliation of their predecessor.

However, the fact that legal formalism can trace back every title either to arbitrary appropriation or to violent expropriation has no significance whatever for the conditions of a market society. Ownership in the market economy is no longer linked up with the remote origin of private property. Those events in a far-distant past, hidden in the darkness of primitive mankind’s history, are no longer of any concern for our day. For in an unhampered market society, the consumers daily decide anew who should own and how much he should own. The consumers allot control of the means of production to those who know how to use them best for the satisfaction of the most urgent wants of the consumers. Only in a legal and formalistic sense can the owners be considered the successors of appropriators and expropriators. In fact, they are mandataries of the consumers, bound by the operation of the market to serve the consumers best. Capitalism is the consummation of the self-determination of the consumers.

The meaning of private property in the market society is radically different from what it is under a system of each household’s autarky. Where each household is economically self-sufficient, the privately owned means of production exclusively serve the proprietor. He alone reaps all the benefits derived from their employment.

In the market society, the proprietors of capital and land can enjoy their property only by employing it for the satisfaction of other people’s wants. They must serve the consumers in order to have any advantage from what is their own. The very fact that they own means of production forces them to submit to the wishes of the public.

Ownership is an asset only for those who know how to employ it in the best possible way for the benefit of the consumers.

Ludwig von Mises

The War on America

BLM and Antifa are determined to bring the country to its knees. We should act accordingly.

In what has since become known as his first “major” speech, Abraham Lincoln famously warned the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois in 1838 about the dangers of “mob rule.” As reprehensible as are the immediate consequences of mob rule, however, Lincoln’s larger strategy in the speech is to use our revulsion at the actions of the mob to draw our attention to the long-term dangers of what he calls “the mobocratic spirit.”

These dangers move in two directions. In the first place, “the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become absolutely unrestrained.” Mob rule, in other words, encourages evil men to run wild. Conversely, ordinary law-abiding people, recognizing that the government can or will do nothing to protect them, “become tired of, and disgusted with” that government.

According to Lincoln, this is the ideal situation for the destruction of free self-government. When the mobocratic spirit rules, “the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people.” Neither the law-abiding nor the lawless have any respect for the government, and therefore neither has any particular stake in preserving it. It is here that revolution is possible; it is here that tyranny can take root.

In our own time, at this very moment, we are experiencing the truth of Lincoln’s old words. Triggered by the death of George Floyd in custody of Minneapolis police, a wave of violence and destruction has broken out in virtually every major American city. As outrageous as the rioting is on its own terms, the broader consequences should be terrifying. As the lawless embark on a wave of destruction, the law-abiding are terrified and appalled, both by the violence and by the pitiful response of local and state authorities. Democratic mayors and governors seem to have little interest in protecting the safety and property of the law-abiding, and in some cases seem to be actively encouraging and abetting the lawless.

In Lincoln’s rhetorical universe, the mob is simply that: a mob. They are agitated by some particular issue, they lash out in violence, destruction, or vigilantism, but then their force is spent and they dissipate. What the mobs in Lincoln’s view do indirectly and unintentionally, contemporary mobs do directly and intentionally: attack the foundations of civil society. The George Floyd riots are part and parcel of that effort, but they are merely the thin end of the wedge, a pretext. The instigators of mob violence are motivated by a revolutionary ideology, which is shared by many more than just the rioters. It is an ideology and a project which despises the American way of life and which, if successful, will bring about the end of free self-government in America. The American Left is trying to revolutionize the United States along the lines of Marxist ideology, and they are presently seeking to force the issue.

Revolution, Interrupted

At the outset of the Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels state that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle.” At the time, Marx and Engels thought the struggle was between industrial workers (proletarians) and those who own the means of production in a capitalist society, the bourgeoisie. The very existence of the proletarians was at the mercy of the bourgeoisie, and to survive, “these labourers, who must sell themselves piece-meal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce.”

The final stage in this struggle was to begin with a proletarian revolution. Eventually the proletarians—impoverished, abused, and disenfranchised—would rise up against the bourgeoisie and the social and economic system they perpetuate. In Marx and Engels’s words, “the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.”

In the Western democracies, however, a funny thing happened on the way to the revolution. The industrial worker acquired a share of the wealth of industrial capitalism large enough to give him a level of comfort and security, which is wholly alien to the oppressed proletarian. Industrialization took the proletariat and turned it into the “middle class.”

This “middle class” worker is a person who does not exist in Marxist theory. He is not bourgeois in any sense. He is not an industrialist, nor is he part of the lesser bourgeoisie: he is neither a small businessman, nor an intellectual, nor a government official. As Greg Calvert of the Students for a Democratic Society noted in 1967, “What we have come to understand is that the great American middle class is not middle class at all…. The vast majority of those whom we called the middle class must properly be understood as members of the new working class.” The American middle-class worker remains a proletarian, but he cannot see that fact.

The archetype of such a worker is my own grandfather. Born to Polish immigrants, raised in desperate poverty in West Virginia coal country, he took whatever job he could find as a teenager in the Great Depression. After service in World War II he worked in a toy factory, and then moved his family to Akron, Ohio to work in the rubber industry. This allowed him to afford a modest home in the suburbs, a couple of cars, and decent food and clothing for his family of five. My grandfather, like most men in his situation, had no interest in Marxist revolution; why would he? The existing order had given him a standard of living which was unheard of in all human history except among the elite.

Consequently, the Marxist historical process has been interrupted in the Western democracies. This fact was the despair of western Marxist intellectuals like Herbert Marcuse, a revisionist Marxist of the Frankfurt School and an icon of the American Left in the 1960s. Marcuse struggled to understand the new reality in works like One-Dimensional Man and “Remarks on a Redefinition of Culture.” The basic problem, he noted in the latter work, is that “social change presupposes the vital need for it, the experience of vital social conditions and of their alternatives.”

Marcuse realized the Western worker’s comfort and security obscure for him his position as a proletarian worker. In One-Dimensional Man he concluded that “The new technological work-world thus enforces a weakening of the negative position of the working class: the latter no longer appears to be the living contradiction of the established society.”

Marcuse concluded that the prosperity of the Western worker was merely a means of making comfortable his enslavement within the capitalist system: “society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable.” Western capitalism has renamed the proletarian the “middle class,” rendered him oblivious to his servitude, and thus preserved bourgeois rule.

Cultural Hegemony and Revolution

In response to this problem, Marxists embraced in the idea that Western culture was as much of an enemy of revolution as was bourgeois capitalism. The connection between economic power on the one hand, and social and cultural hegemony on the other, was already present in Marx’s own work. In The German Ideology (1846) he observes that “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas…. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the expression of the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”

The Manifesto of the Communist Party was even more direct on this point: “Law, morality, religion, are to him [the proletarian worker] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush just as many bourgeois interests.” The entire social and cultural system is a bourgeois attempt to preserve and justify its own dominance.

Marxist theorists like the Italian Antonio Gramsci argued that this bourgeois cultural hegemony was a massive impediment to revolution. Comparing the problem to that of trench warfare in the First World War in his prison notebooks, he said that

the superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems in modern warfare…in the West, there was a proper civil society, and when the state trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The state was only an outer ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks.

Gramsci realized that this hegemony extended beyond the capitalist economic order to the social institutions and cultural values of bourgeois society. These institutions and values, which enjoyed widespread support, were part and parcel of bourgeois society, and provided critical reinforcement to the bourgeois state.

Unlike in Russia, where toppling the czarist regime would upend the whole social order, the Western democracies possess very strong social and cultural systems that support bourgeois domination. In Gramsci’s formulation: “state = political society + civil society, in other words hegemony protected by the armor of coercion.” Any attempt at the immediate overthrow of such a regime would fail because “civil society,” the complex of social and cultural institutions that support the regime, would rush to its defense. Marxist revolution of the Russian variety was therefore bound to fail in a society so constituted.

Returning to the military metaphor, Gramsci advocated a shift from a “war of maneuver” to a “war of position.” Rather than direct political action, Marxist revolutionaries should pursue a long game of infiltrating the social and cultural institutions of Western society—legal structures, Christian churches, cultural organizations, marriage and family—with the goal of undermining them. The values of western society would be assaulted, and the people’s faith in them undermined. Once the institutions and values of bourgeois society were broken down, the state would be weakened and thus made vulnerable to revolution. This “war of position, once won, is decisive definitively.” A society so infected would never recover.

The New Revolutionary Elite

Once the Marxists had identified the problem, they had next to ask: “What Is to Be Done?” In Lenin’s treatise of that name, the future father of the Russian Revolution argues that a Marxist revolution requires a trained and disciplined class of professional revolutionaries. Lenin rejects spontaneous revolutionary action by labor unions and independent terrorist cells, arguing that “without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” The revolutionary proletariat must reach a mature, Marxist understanding of their conditions, the iniquity of those conditions, and the way forward.

In particular, these working radicals must transcend their identity with their trade, their factory, their city, or their province. They must obtain “all-sided political exposure…. These universal political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity.” This exposure will allow workers to become conscious of the whole proletariat as a class, and the exploitation of that class by the bourgeoisie.

This consciousness, however, cannot be obtained by the workers themselves. Lenin argues that “class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers.” This must be the task of a group of professional revolutionaries, a “vanguard,” who can organize the workers, coordinate them, bring to them information about other oppressed groups, and assist in the development of a class-consciousness.

The American Left adopted this theory of a vanguard in their own ideology. In the 1960s they posited the universities as the epicenter of this new vanguard, which would consist of the students and sympathetic faculty. In the 1962 Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society, the authors argue that “from its schools and colleges across the nation, a militant left might awaken its allies, and by beginning the process towards peace, civil rights, and labor struggles, reinsert theory and idealism where too often reign confusion and political barter.”

It was in the universities that revolutionary theories would be transmitted and new revolutionaries trained and sent out into the world. In turn, the revolutionaries would enter the society, disseminate these doctrines, and commence their assault on civil society.

Raising Revolutionary Consciousness

The American Left realized that, in order to restart the revolutionary process, ordinary people had to be led to an awareness of their own oppression. The middle class must come to the realization that the system oppresses them. The difficulty, as noted above, is that large numbers of the middle class have not yet come to this realization; they have what Calvert calls “false consciousness.” They look at their world and see other people, such as indigenous people in Africa or Southeast Asia, blacks in the American South, and the desperately poor everywhere, as oppressed. Ascending to revolutionary consciousness means having the ability to look in the mirror and see that person as oppressed.

An excellent example of the new model of transformation is second-wave feminism. Second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s sought to go beyond the feminism of the 19th and early 20th centuries, with its demand for equal political rights, such as voting. Second-wave feminism attacked the basic structures of American civil society: marriage, pregnancy, childrearing, division of labor within the household, and women’s role in the larger society.

Central to this effort was the attempt to cast ordinary American women everywhere as brutally oppressed by the patriarchal social and cultural structures of American society. In their seminal 1965 essay “Sex and Caste: A Kind of Memo,” Casey Hayden and Mary King assert that “there seem to be many parallels that can be drawn between treatment of Negroes and treatment of women in our society as a whole…. It is a caste system which, at its worst, uses and exploits women.”

Similarly, Gloria Steinem wrote that “the parallel between women and blacks—the two largest second-class groups—is one of the deepest truths of American life.” The radical feminist Redstockings groups claimed that “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives.”

This established, the second-wave feminists had to cultivate consciousness among women of their oppression, and of the fact that this oppression was systemic. Both the importance and the difficulty of this consciousness cannot be understated. It is important because, in the words of Robin Morgan, “to become a true revolutionary one must first become one of the oppressed…—or realize that you are one of them already.” It is difficult because, as Shulamith Firestone noted in The Dialectic of Sex (1970), “sex class is so deep as to be invisible.”

Barbara Susan argued that consciousness-raising is accomplished in part through communication among women because “unless we talk to each other about our so called personal problems and see how many of our problems are shared by other people, we won’t be able to see how these problems are rooted in politics.” In this analysis, the sexism of American society is so pervasive that it requires dedicated effort to recognize it.

The true radicalism of the feminist movement, and its connection to those thinkers discussed above (Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and Marcuse), is evident in second-wave writings. Morgan describes the feminists as “revolutionaries.” Firestone explicitly cites Marx and Engels as important to the feminist project, claiming that “for feminist revolution we shall need an analysis of the dynamics of sex war as comprehensive as the Marx-Engels analysis of class antagonism was for the economic revolution…. In creating such an analysis we can learn a lot from Marx and Engels.”

The ultimate goal is to instigate a social revolution analogous to the economic revolution articulated by Marx and Engels: “Unless revolution uproots the basic social organization,” writes Firestone, “the biological family…the tapeworm of exploitation will never be annihilated.” This connection between Marxist theory and social revolution continues in the thought of the American Left today. Recently The Nation ran an interview with feminist theorist Sophie Lewis on her new book. The title of the interview was “Want to Dismantle Capitalism? Abolish the Family.”

American Kulaks

Second-wave feminism is a microcosm of the leftist project that began in the 1960s. The Left, while acknowledging the formative influence of Marx, sought to move beyond mere economic oppression into the realm of social and cultural oppression. From there, they sought to turn ordinary Americans into revolutionaries by convincing them that they were members of an oppressed class, and that American culture and institutions were to blame.

The middle class must be constantly reminded that they are simply proletarians who’ve been bought off if cultural Marxism is to succeed. Most of the economically affluent must be convinced that they are the victims of a system that is built to “privilege” a few. That all, or nearly all, are oppressed by the cultural institutions of Western civilization.

The importance of this effort cannot be overstated. Greg Calvert asserted in 1967 that “if White America is mostly middle class, and if being middle class means not being oppressed, then there is no possibility for finding the resources upon which a radical movement can be built in white America.” It was imperative that the university-trained revolutionary elite accomplish their goal of revolutionizing middle America if they were going to transform the country. If they failed, then revolution would fail in America.

The American middle class, however, has proven to be particularly intransigent. The middle-class worker of the 1960s, raised in the Great Depression and refined in the fire of the Second World War, generally looked with scorn on the arrogant, privileged would-be revolutionaries in the universities. These are the people who embodied the “silent majority” of Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign acceptance speech.

Nixon claimed to represent “the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators” who “work in America’s factories” and “run America’s businesses.” In what would be a mortal sin in our society, he declared that these people “are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.”

While the Left has seen success in some quarters, particularly in urban, coastal, and university enclaves, they have basically failed in their quest to revolutionize the American middle class. Even though their families, churches, businesses and communities have been under constant assault from the Left, they have mostly tried to live their lives normally, in the way Americans have lived them for generations.

As a result the American middle class, in the eyes of the modern Left, are to their revolutionary aspirations what the kulaks were to the revolution in Russia. “Kulak” was a term used to describe Russian peasant farmers, who had acquired enough wealth to purchase their own land and even hire labor for their farms. After the Russian Revolution and particularly during the reign of Stalin, “kulak” became a pejorative term: landowning peasants were class enemies who profited from the misery of their neighbors, who refused grain requisitions and resisted the collectivization of their farms. In short, they refused to be part of the revolution, and for their trouble they were mercilessly liquidated by Stalin.

The contemporary Left has largely abandoned its efforts to revolutionize ordinary Americans, and as a result their contempt for such people is now open and undisguised. The Left disdains them precisely because they are trying to retain elements of traditional American culture like faith and self-reliance. They are deplorable because they have refused to join the revolution. They are America’s kulaks.

Privilege and Oppression

The incorporation of cultural transformation into Leftist ideology in America, and the abandonment of the hope of revolutionizing the middle class, has led to a shift in the strategy and tactics of the American Left. The Left’s attitude toward “white America” has been reversed. Instead of seeing ordinary Americans as sublimated proletarians in need of education, the Left now sees them as part of the oppressor class. In orthodox Marxist theory this would make no sense: Marx defined the oppressor class, the bourgeoisie, in strictly economic terms. But thanks to the theoretical work of men like Gramsci, and the practical example set by activists like the second-wave feminists, the oppression of Western society is now defined in non-economic terms such as race and sex. In our time, this neo-Marxism has become the animating doctrine of the American Left.

Perhaps no one work has done more to advance this argument in the mainstream of American culture than Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. The Marxist historian’s magnum opus was a best-seller, and its reach has been heightened by the incorporation of the work and its themes into Advanced Placement U.S. History courses in high schools across America.

Zinn depicts many events in American history, such as the American Founding and industrialization, in terms of economic class struggle between the wealthy and the masses. But he also suffuses his work with themes of the crimes of the elite—which was white and male in addition to property-owning—against Native Americans, Africans, and women. For Zinn, “the history of any country” is the story of “fierce conflicts of interest between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.” America, in particular, is defined by the struggle between those whom the system privileges, and those whom the system oppresses.

These structures of privilege and oppression are all-pervasive, suffusing every aspect of society. Beyond overt racism and state-sponsored discrimination, there is the American “system” itself, which was built by the dominant group for their own sakes and incorporates endless hidden benefits for members of that group.

In “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which has become gospel in the social justice movement, Peggy McIntosh lists dozens of examples, such as “I can chose blemish cover or bandages in ‘flesh’ color and have them more or less match my skin” and “I can think over many options, social, political, imaginative or professional, without asking whether a person of my race would be accepted or allowed to do what I want to do.” McIntosh sees racism everywhere, and it isn’t enough for individuals to cease thinking racist thoughts and doing racist things. The whole “system”—political, legal, economic, cultural, social—was purpose-built for the benefit of whites.

None of this is hyperbole. The Smithsonian Institution recently posted a graphic, now deleted, entitled “Aspects & Assumptions of Whiteness and White Culture in the United States.” In Katz’s view, “whiteness” includes such values as “self-reliance,” “the nuclear family,” “objective, rational linear thinking,” “hard work is the key to success,” “delayed gratification,” and “be polite.” A recent article in Teen Vogue covered the founders of “Black Power Naps,” an initiative which claims that sleep deprivation is evidence of “systemic racism.”

Put it all together, and we get the New York Times’ 1619 Project. The lead author of the 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones, writes that “Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country” and “The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie…the white men who drafted [the Declaration of Independence] did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst.”

Hannah-Jones’ arguments are so dubious that her own fact-checker advised her not to publish them, and an army of experts from across the political spectrum criticized them, but she received a Pulitzer Prize anyway. The 1619 Project has been adapted as a curriculum, and it is already beginning to see adoption in schools.

The very choice of 1619 for the title, the year in which the first African slaves arrived in the thirteen colonies, indicates Hannah-Jones’s desire to convey the belief that pervasive, systemic racism is the central truth of America, past and present. If this is the case, then we must demand thoroughgoing critical analysis of every aspect of American life, leading to the complete destruction and reconstitution of our institutions and cultures.

McIntosh said as much in “White Privilege,” and an entire cottage industry of “anti-racist” educators has emerged to help people cleanse themselves of their privilege. The most prominent today is Robin DiAngelo, whose White Fragility has suddenly become a runaway bestseller. “Race” has replaced economic class as the fault line between privileged and oppressed in the neo-Marxist revolutionary struggle.

Importing Revolution

To ensure the success of their project, the contemporary Left has abandoned all pretense of concern for American sovereignty and the integrity of America’s international borders, and has embraced a policy of unlimited mass migration, combined with the demand that America accept countless refugee migrants from the undeveloped and developing world. Concerns about drug trafficking, human trafficking, infectious diseases, gang violence, and terrorism are swept aside with arguments that any attempt to limit entry into the United States is racist and un-American.

This being the case, any non-Western migrants will serve the purpose equally well, be they from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Syria, or Somalia. As Thomas Jefferson predicted in Notes on the State of Virginia, importing foreigners at random and without any effort to assimilate them results in a massive underclass, almost none of whom has any understanding of, or affinity for, our way of life. Instead they try their level best to establish replicas of the countries they left in their local enclaves in America. They funnel money back to their home countries. They show no interest in integrating into American culture. Many of them come pre-loaded with Marxist ideologies such as postcolonialism or liberation theology, which are widespread in the undeveloped and developing worlds.

This realization clarifies several aspects of the modern Left which might otherwise appear nonsensical. First, the Left is adamant about placing these masses, not in friendly sanctuary cities around the nation, but in states like Minnesota, Ohio, Arizona, and Texas. Depositing them in Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Portland has little prospective political benefit for the Left. Nothing triggered leftists so much as Trump’s tweeted plan to fly migrants to liberal sanctuary cities in Democrat-controlled states. Once these states have been flooded with migrants and refugees, they can register to vote and turn red states blue.

It explains why the Left and their media allies work so hard to whitewash the bad behavior of their new revolutionary class. When someone like Ilhan Omar makes one of her many indefensible comments, her party rushes to her defense. The leftist media earnestly works to bury unflattering news about migrants and refugees: the Philadelphia police shooter, the American Airlines mechanic who sabotaged an airliner, or the fact that Somali refugees have made large parts of Minneapolis unsafe for ordinary people and MS-13 has undertaken a violent crime spree in Montgomery County, Maryland.

It explains why the Left is unconcerned about the threat of radical Islam to the country at large, but also to the other elements of their own constituency, such as feminists and the LGBT community. Whatever their differences, these groups share a common goal: the deconstruction of American culture and institutions.

As for what comes next: apparently they will cross that bridge later. The American Left is now avowedly revolutionary, and they even have violent thugs in the form of Antifa to do their dirty work. We can only understand them if we recognize their revolutionary nature. Hordes of migrants and refugees are, they believe, allies in their revolutionary project, which is nothing less than the complete destruction and reconstitution of American civilization, in their own words, “by any means necessary.” This has always been the goal, and mass immigration is simply the newest attempt to achieve that goal.

Corrupting the Political Process

Even the “Great Awokening” and the mass importation of new leftist voters may not be enough to ensure victory. Something more is needed, and the Left knows it. Before the 2016 election Michael Anton argued in “The Flight 93 Election” that the Left was rapidly growing tired of pretending to value the democratic political process. Elections, he claimed, were a nuisance, which the Left was ready to abandon. This readiness has become obvious since Trump’s election, and especially so since the beginning of the coronavirus lockdowns. The Left is now openly seeking to cement their own perpetual rule through the corruption of the electoral process.

Think election fraud is a myth? The Heritage Foundation has compiled and maintains a database of documented and proven recent election fraud cases. As of this writing the count of incidents stands at 1,296 cases.

In the early days of the coronavirus shutdown, stock markets crashed and millions of workers were laid off as the economy ground to a relative halt. To mitigate the effects of the shutdown, Congress worked to enact an economic relief bill. Republican and Democratic senators were on the verge of a compromise when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi arrived in Washington with a 1,400-page bill draft of her own. Conservatives mocked the mountain of pork spending in the bill, but the real scandal lay in a series of provisions that would have transformed our election system.

Pelosi wanted to institute a national system of voting by mail. Every voter would receive a paper ballot by mail and would return it by mail. The potential for fraud, corruption, and sheer incompetence here is staggering. A West Virginia postal employee was recently caught manipulating mail ballots. Twenty-eight million mail-in ballots are unaccounted for in the last four election cycles. Mail-in ballots are often mysteriously found after polls close on election night. Recently the New York Times was forced to admit that New York’s vote-by-mail primary had been an unmitigated disaster. Universal voting by mail would be paired with something called “ballot harvesting,” which allows third parties to collect ballots and deliver them to polling places. This is nothing but an invitation to corruption. Pelosi’s bill failed, but it indicates what the Left will do if they get into power.

Having failed in Congress, the Left is using other means to corrupt the electoral process. In Michigan, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson mailed absentee ballot applications to every registered voter in the state. This is a clear violation of Michigan election rules, according to which absentee ballot applications may only be mailed pursuant to an oral or written request by the voter. Left-wing groups in numerous states, including Alabama, Florida, and Texas, have sued to loosen state laws protecting the integrity of the voting process.

During the course of the coronavirus relief bill discussion, House Majority Whip Representative James Clyburn (D-SC) allegedly said that the coronavirus relief bill was “a tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” Suffice it to say that their vision goes beyond $25 million appropriated to the Kennedy Center. If the Democrats ever gain control of all the elected branches of government at the same time, it could easily be the last free and fair election in American history.

The Impending Crisis

In 1858, Abraham Lincoln accepted the Republican nomination for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. In his acceptance speech, better known as the House Divided Speech, Lincoln began by asserting “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” Charles Kesler recently termed our situation a “cold civil war.” Whatever it was then, it is more than that now.

In 2020, the cold civil war has become hot. Rioting, looting, organized campaigns of hate and intimidation, open subversion of law, rule by arbitrary and extemporaneous decree, open warfare against every aspect of the American way of life. Make no mistake—we are in the midst of an open, avowed neo-Marxist revolution.

If anything, the situation is even more dire than it was in 2016. Had Hillary won, we would have continued down the painful but relatively gradual path toward woke progressive oligarchy that we had been traveling since at least the end of Reagan’s presidency. If the Left gets control now, they will move to consolidate their victory immediately. We have seen it already in the Commonwealth of Virginia, where the Left gained control of the state government and immediately set about transforming Virginia on a broad front. It will be the final end of free self-government in America.

The electoral coalition they are trying to build, combined with open subversion of the electoral process, will lock them into power indefinitely. Organized repression of dissent, through both violence and intimidation, will ensure that they cannot be effectively challenged. In the Black Lives Matter riots and the coronavirus shutdowns they have shown us what they intend to do, and how they intend to rule. We should believe them.

In 2016, the Left was asleep at the switch. They thought Trump was a joke. They believed their own reportage and polling. They assumed the “arc of history” was bending in their direction. They were insulated from the growing discontent in middle America. They took counsel of their own hateful prejudices about ordinary Americans. They aren’t going to be caught napping this time. The electoral fraud machine is already gearing up in states across the country. The Biden campaign has already hired 600 attorneys for the election. They’re trying to stretch the lockdowns out until after the election.

They’re also desperate, and afraid. Everything they’ve done since Trump’s election speaks of fear and desperation: Obamagate, the Flynn persecution, the Mueller investigation, Ukraine, impeachment. Unending shutdowns and BLM riots are just the latest manifestation. They are desperate to do anything to remove Trump from office.

They’re getting more desperate, because they’re afraid. In doing so, they’ve tipped their hands. The Left’s paramilitary arm, Antifa, derives its name and symbolism from the German Communist Party of the Weimar period. A Portland Antifa organizer recently declared that their objective is “the abolition of the United States as we know it.” One of the founders of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, describes herself and her fellow organizes as “trained Marxists.”

They have adopted the raised fist salute, which has been identified with the radical Left since the Spanish Civil War, when it was the salute of the “Popular Front,” an alliance of socialists, communists, anarchists, and syndicalists. Today’s fist-raisers define everyone who opposes them as “fascist.” Though race may be the issue du jour, they are open Marxists and have made that plain for us all to see.

Just because they are desperate, however, does not mean they have been defeated. Conservatives and Republicans have for too long labored under the delusion that winning an election meant that they had won the war. The Gingrich Republicans thought they had won the war after 1994. Defenders of traditional marriage won election after election in the states; even California voted to limit marriage to one man and one woman. We know how that turned out. Re-electing Trump, of itself, will only kick the can down the road another four years. A Trump victory is a necessary condition of ultimate victory, but far more will be necessary.

We can begin by accepting that what is happening to our country is a violent neo-Marxist revolution, and that victory by the Left will mean what Marxist takeovers have always meant: unending misery and oppression. Once we understand that, then we can begin to understand what to do, and how to do it.

If these are Marxist revolutionaries, then they must be utterly defeated. We cannot temporize, compromise, or negotiate with them. They cannot be conciliated or reasoned with. They will accept nothing short of total victory, and therefore neither can we. They must be smashed. Their control over our institutions and culture must be wrecked beyond repair. Their ability to use threats and intimidation to cancel their opponents must be broken.

Their violence must meet with overwhelming power. Their subversion of American civilization must be ruined and reversed. We need a coalition of the sane, which sees the radical Left for what it is and is willing to act accordingly. Only then can reasonable and decent people from both parties disagree and deliberate, and do all the things that free, self-governing people do.

We’re at war. They neo-Marxist Left knows it, and it’s high time the rest of us accepted it, too. At stake is nothing less than liberty, self-government, reason, faith, and our way of life. “The struggle of today,” Lincoln told Congress in 1861, “is not altogether for today. It is for a vast future also.”

It’s nearly impossible to have even a short conversation with a college administrator, politician or chief executive without the words diversity and inclusion dropping from their lips. Diversity and inclusion appear to be the end-all and be-all of their existence. So, I thought I’d begin this discussion by first looking up the definition of diversity.

According to the Oxford Dictionary, diversity is “the practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.” The definition gratuitously adds, “equality and diversity should be supported for their own sake.” The standard definition given for inclusion is involvement and empowerment where the inherent worth and dignity of all people are recognized.

Here’s my question to those who are wedded to diversity and inclusion: Are people better off the less they have in common with one another? For example, women are less likely to be able to march 12.4 miles in five hours with an 83-pound assault load. They are also less likely to be able to crawl, sprint, negotiate obstacles and move a wounded comrade weighing 165 pounds while carrying that load. Would anyone argue that a military outfit would benefit from diversity by including soldiers who can and those who cannot march 12 miles in five hours while carrying an 83-pound load?

You say, “Williams, the military is an exception!” What about language? The International Civil Aviation Organization has decreed that all air traffic controllers and flight crew members engaged in or in contact with international flights must be proficient in the English language as a general spoken medium. According to UNESCO, there are about 7,000 languages in the world. The International Civil Aviation Organization could promote language inclusiveness by requiring language rotation. Some years, Cebuano (of the Malayo-Polynesian language family) and in other years Kinyarwanda (of the Niger-Congo language family) could be the language of pilots and air traffic controllers. Keep in mind that it is claimed that the great benefit of diversity and inclusiveness is that it promotes and fosters a sense of belonging. It values and practices respect for the differences in the talents, beliefs, backgrounds and ways of living of its members.

Another issue is what should be done when people who should know better praise nondiversity and noninclusiveness? Civil rights leader Rev. Jesse L. Jackson said, “I applaud commissioner Adam Silver’s commitment to diversity and inclusion within the NBA.” During the 2018-2019 season, more than 33% of NBA teams had head coaches of color. The number of assistant head coaches of color was over 42%. The number of black NBA players was 82%. In the face of these statistics, Oris Stuart, the NBA’s chief diversity and inclusion officer said, “Diversity, inclusion and equality are central to every aspect of our game and our business.” I would like for Jesse Jackson and others who claim that there’s racial diversity and inclusiveness in professional basketball to make their case. The same question can be asked about professional football where 70% of NFL players are black, and 9% of team head coaches are black. The thornier question and challenge is what can be done to make professional basketball and football look more like the American population?

Most of the diversity and inclusiveness insanity has its roots in academia. An example is a paper titled “Equilibrium Grade Inflation with Implications for Female Interest in STEM Majors,” written by Naval Postgraduate School professor Thomas Ahn, Duke University economics professor Peter Arcidiacono, Duke University researcher Amy Hopson, and James R. Thomas of the Federal Trade Commission. The authors argue that science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs at colleges and universities lacking female enrollment can be attributed largely to harsh grading policies in these fields. Their solution to increase the number of women’s involvement in STEM is to standardize grading curves, in order to grade less “harshly.” The insanity of this approach is to not only weaken standards for women but to weaken standards across the board. This is more evidence that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate webpage at http://www.creators.com.

It is an astonishing fact that a philosophy like Marxism, which attacks the whole social system, remained for many decades more or less unattacked and uncontested. Karl Marx was not very well known in his lifetime and his writings remained practically unknown to the greater part of his contemporaries. The great socialists of his age were other men—for instance, Ferdinand Lassalle. Lassalle’s agitations lasted only a year because he was killed in duel as a result of a private affair, but he was considered a great man in his age. Marx, on the other hand, was more or less unknown. People neither approved, nor criticized, his teachings. He died in 1883. After his death, there appeared the first part of Böhm-Bawerk’s critique of the economic doctrines of Karl Marx.[1] And later in the 1890s, when the last volume of Das Kapital was published, there appeared the second part of this critique, which completely killed Marx’s economic doctrines.[2] The most orthodox Marxians tried to revive and restate his doctrines. But there was practically no sensible critique of the philosophical doctrines of Karl Marx.

Marx’s philosophical doctrines became popular in that people became familiar with some of his terms, slogans, and so forth, although they used them differently from the way they were used in the system of Karl Marx. Such simplification happens to many doctrines. For instance, Darwinism became known as the theory based on the idea that man is the grandson of an ape. What remains of Nietzsche is not much more than his term “superman,” which later acquired popularity in the United States without any connection to Nietzsche. Regarding Marx, people know his terms but they use them very loosely. But by and large, Marxian ideas have little or no opposition.

One of the reasons why the doctrine of Marx was so diluted in the public mind was the way Engels tried to explain Marxian theory. See his statement at the graveside of Marx: “Marx discovered the law of mankind’s historical evolution, i.e., the simple fact, hitherto hidden beneath ideological overgrowths, that men must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing before they can pursue politics, science, art, religion, and the like.”[3] Yet no one ever denied this. But now if someone says something against Marxian doctrine then they can be asked: “How can you be so stupid as to deny that one must first eat before one becomes a philosopher?”

Again there is the theory of the material productive forces. But no explanation is offered for their formation. Dialectical materialism states that the material productive forces come to the world—one doesn’t know how they come, nor where they come from—and it is these material productive forces that create everything else, i.e., the superstructure.

People sometimes believe that there has been a very sharp conflict between the various churches and Marxism. They consider Marxism and socialism as incompatible with the teachings of all Christian churches and sects. The early communist sects and early monastic communities were based on a peculiar interpretation of the Bible in general, and of the book of Acts especially. We don’t know much about these early communist sects but they existed in the Middle Ages and also in the early years of the Reformation. All these sects were in conflict with the established doctrines of their churches or denominations. So it would be absolutely wrong to make the Christian church responsible for them. I mention this to show that, at least in the minds of some groups, most of which the church considered heretical, there is no absolute conflict between socialism and the teachings of the church. The anti-Christian tendencies of the socialist forerunners of Karl Marx, of Karl Marx himself; and later of his followers, the Marxians, must first of all be understood within the whole framework which later gave rise to modern socialism.

The states, the governments, the conservative parties, were not always opposed to socialism. On the contrary; the personnel of a government has a tendency or a bias in favor of the expansion of government power; one could even say that there is an “occupational disease” on the part of government personnel to be in favor of more and more governmental activities. It was precisely this fact, this propensity of governments to adopt socialism—and many governments really did adopt socialism—that brought Marxism into conflict with the various governments.

I have pointed out that the worst thing that can happen to a socialist is to have his country ruled by socialists who are not his friends. This was the case with respect to Karl Marx and the Prussian government. The Prussian government was not against socialism. Ferdinand Lassalle attacked the liberal parties of Prussia, which were at that time fighting a great constitutional battle against the Hohenzollern kings, headed by Bismarck. The majority in Prussia at that time was against the government; the government couldn’t get a majority in the Prussian Parliament. The Prussian government was not very strong at that time. The King and the Prime Minister ruled the country without consent, without the cooperation of the Parliament. This was the case in the early 1860s. As an illustration of the weakness of the Prussian government, Bismarck, in his Memoirs, reported a conversation he had with the King. Bismarck said he would defeat the Parliament and the liberals. The King answered, “Yes, I know how that will end. Here in the square in front of the palace. First they will execute you and then they will execute me.”

Queen Victoria [1819–1901], whose oldest daughter [Victoria, 1840–1901] had married the royal prince of Prussia, was not very pleased by these developments; she was convinced that the Hohenzollerns would be defeated. At this critical moment Ferdinand Lassalle, who was at the head of a labor movement which was then still very modest, very small, came to the aid of the Hohenzollern government. Lassalle had meetings with Bismarck and they “planned” socialism. They introduced state aid, production cooperatives, nationalization, and general manhood suffrage. Later Bismarck really embarked on a program of social legislation. The greatest rival of the Marxians was the Prussian government, and they fought with every possible movement.

Now you must realize that in Prussia, the Prussian Church, the Protestant Church, was simply a department of the government, administered by a member of the Cabinet—the Minister of Education and Affairs of Culture. One of the councilors in the lower levels of the administration dealt with the problems of the church. The church in this regard was a state church; it was even a state church in its origin. Until 1817, there were Lutherans and Calvinists in Prussia. The Hohenzollerns didn’t like this state of affairs. The Lutherans were in the majority in the old Prussian territories, but in the newly acquired territories there were both groups. In spite of the fact that the majority of the whole Prussian people were Lutherans, the electorate of the Brandenburgs had changed from Lutherans to Calvinists. The Hohenzollerns were Calvinists, but they were the head of the Lutheran Church in their country. Then in 1817, under Frederick Wilhelm III of Prussia, the two churches were merged to form the Prussian Union Church. The Church was a branch of the country’s government.

From the seventeenth century on in Russia, the church was simply a department of the government. The church was not independent. Dependence of the church on the secular power was one of the characteristics of the Eastern Church at Constantinople. The head of the Eastern Empire was in fact the Superior of the Patriarch. This same system was to some extent carried over into Russia, but there the church was only a part of the government. Therefore, if you attacked the church, you also attacked the government.

The third country in which the problem was very critical was Italy, where the nationalist unification implied the abolition of the secular rule of the Pope. Until the second part of the nineteenth century the central part of Italy was ruled independently by the Pope. In 1860, the king of Sardinia conquered these states. The Pope retained only Rome, under the protection of a detachment of the French Army until 1860, when the French had to withdraw to fight Prussia. Therefore, there was a very violent feud between the Catholic Church and the Italian secular state. The struggle of the Church against the ideas of the Marxians concerning religion is something different from their struggle against the socialist program. Today it is complicated even more by the fact that the Russian Church, the Oriental Orthodox Church, came as it seems, to some agreement with the Bolsheviks. The struggle in the East is to a great extent a struggle between the Eastern Church and the Western Church—a continuation of the struggle that originated more than a thousand years ago between the two churches. Therefore, the conflicts in these countries, between Russia and the western boundaries of the Iron Curtain, are very complicated. It is not only a struggle against totalitarian economic methods for economic freedom; it is also a struggle of various nationalities, of different linguistic groups. Consider, for instance, the attempts of the present Russian government to make the various Baltic nationalities over into Russians—a continuation of something that had been started by the Tsars—and the struggle in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and so on, against the attempts of the Russian Church to bring them back, as they say, to the Oriental Creed. To understand all these struggles one needs a special familiarity with these nationalities and with the religious histories of these parts of the world.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there were changes that expanded the size of the territory in which the Pope’s supremacy was acknowledged. Therefore, there existed a Russian Church, the Orthodox Church, and a Ukrainian or Russian Catholic Church which acknowledged the supremacy of the Pope. All these things together constituted the great religious struggles of the East. However, one must not confuse the events happening in these nationalistic and religious struggles with the fight against communism. For instance, the politicians fighting against the Russians today are not always, or at least not in most cases, fighters in favor of a free economic system. They are Marxians, socialists. They would probably like to have a totalitarian police state, but they don’t want it to be governed by the Russians.

From this point of view, one cannot say that there is any real opposition to the social teachings and social programs of Marxism. On the other hand, it is important to realize that there isn’t necessarily always a connection between anti-Marxism, an ideological philosophy, and economic freedom.

One of the outstanding contemporaries of Karl Marx in Germany was a philosopher, Friedrich Albert Lange [1828–1875]. He wrote a famous book, The History of Marxism, considered for many years, not only in Germany but also in English-speaking countries, one of the best introductions to philosophy. Lange was a socialist; he wrote another book about socialism. In his book he didn’t criticize Marx, but rather materialism. Marxian materialism is a very imperfect materialism because it traces all changes back only to something which is itself already the product of the human mind.

It is important to stress the fact that the critiques of Marxism were sometimes very wrong. I want to point to only one typical example. This is the popular propensity of anti-Marxians to consider dialectical materialism and Marxism as something belonging to the same group of ideas as Freudian psychoanalysis. I am not a psychologist, but I only have to point out how mixed up these people are who believe that materialism in general and Marxian materialism in particular have some connection with Freudian psychoanalysis.

Before Sigmund Freud [1856–1939] and Josef Breuer [1842–1925], who opened up this whole method of thinking, began to develop their doctrines, it was the generally uncontested assumption among all doctors that mental disabilities were caused by pathological changes in the human body. If a man had something that was called a nervous or mental disease they looked for some bodily factor that brought about this state of affairs. From the point of view of the doctor who deals with the human body this is the only possible interpretation. However, sometimes they were absolutely correct when they said, “We don’t know the cause.” Their only method was to look for a physical cause. One could give many examples. I want to cite only one. It happened in 1889, just a few years before the first book of Freud and Breuer was published. An eminent man in France committed suicide. For political reasons and because of his religion, the question was raised whether or not he was sane. His family wanted to prove that it was a mental disease. In order to prove his mental disease to the Church, they had to discover some physical cause. There was an autopsy by eminent doctors, and their report was published. “We discover certain things in the brain,” they said; “there is something that is not regular.” At that time, people thought that if a man doesn’t behave like other people has no physical sign of abnormality in his body, he is a malingerer. Sometimes this is unfortunate, because one can only discover whether or not a person is a malingerer after he is dead. In this regard, psychoanalysis brought about a great change. The case of Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria [1858–1889], who committed suicide at Mayerling, raised similar issues.[4]

The famous first case was that of a woman who was paralyzed. Yet nothing could be discovered in her body to explain her situation. The case was written up by a man who followed the advice of a Latin poet: wait nine years with your manuscript before you publish. Breuer got the idea that the origin of this bodily deficiency was not physical but that it was in the mind. This was a radical change in the field of the natural sciences; such a thing had never happened before—a discovery that mental factors, ideas, superstitions, fables, wrong ideas, what a man thinks, what he believes, can bring about changes in the body. This was something that all the natural sciences had denied and contested before.

Freud was a very conscientious and cautious man. He didn’t say, “I have completely discredited the old doctrines.” He said, “Perhaps one day, after a very long time, the pathological doctors will discover that ideas are already the product of some physical external bodily factor. Then psychoanalysis will no longer be needed or useful. But for the time being you must at least admit that there is a temporary value in Breuer’s and my discovery and that, from the point of view of present-day science, there is nothing that confirms the materialist thesis that every idea or every thought is the product of some external factor, just as urine is a product of the body. Psychoanalysis is the opposite of materialism; it is the only contribution to the problem of materialism vs. idealism that has come from empirical research in the human body.”

We have to deal with the ways some people abuse psychoanalysis. I do not defend those psychoanalysts who try to explain everything from the point of view of certain urges, among which the sex urge is considered the most important. There was a book by a Frenchman dealing with Baudelaire [Charles Baudelaire, 1821–1867]. Baudelaire liked to spend money, but he didn’t earn money because publishers didn’t buy his poems during his lifetime. But his mother had money; she had married money and her husband died and left it to her. Baudelaire wrote his mother a lot of letters. This writer found all sorts of subconscious explanations for his letters. I don’t defend this attempt. But his letter writing doesn’t need any further explanation than that Baudelaire wanted money.

Freud said he didn’t know anything about socialism. In this regard he was very different from Einstein [1879–1955] who said, “I don’t know anything about economics, but socialism is very good.”

If we follow how Marxism became the leading philosophy of our age, we must mention Positivism and the school of Auguste Comte. Comte was a socialist similar to Karl Marx. In his youth, Auguste Comte had been the secretary of Saint-Simon. Saint-Simon was a totalitarian who wanted to rule the whole world by world council and, of course, he believed he would be the president of this world council. According to Comte’s idea of world history, it was necessary to search for the truth in the past. “But now, I, Auguste Comte, have discovered the truth. Therefore, there is no longer any need for freedom of thought or freedom of the press. I want to rule and to organize the whole country.”

It is very interesting to follow the origin of certain terms which are today so familiar that we assume they must have been in the language from time immemorial. In French, the words “organize” and “organizer” were unknown before the end of the eighteenth century or the beginning of the nineteenth century. With regard to this term, “organize,” Balzac[5] observed “This is a new-fangled Napoleonic term. This means you alone are the dictator and you deal with the individual as the builder works with stones.”

Another new term, “social engineering,” deals with the social structure. The social engineer deals with the social structure or with his fellowmen as the master builder deals with his bricks. Reasoning in this way, the Bolsheviks eliminate those individuals who are useless. In the term “social engineering” you have the idea of planning, the idea of socialism. Today we have many names for socialism. If a thing is popular, then the language has many expressions for it. These planners say in defense of their ideas, you must plan things; you cannot let things act “automatically.”

Sometimes “automatically” is used in a metaphorical sense to apply to things that happen on the market. If the supply of a product drops, then they say prices go up “automatically.” But this doesn’t mean that this is done without human consciousness, without some persons bidding and offering. Prices go up precisely because people are anxious to acquire these things. Nothing in the economic system happens “automatically.” Everything happens because certain people behave in a definite way.

Also the planners say, “How can you be so stupid as to advocate the absence of planning?” But no one advocates the absence of plan. The question is not “Plan, or no plan.” The question is “Whose plan? The plan of one dictator only? Or the plan of many individuals?” Everyone plans. He plans to go to work; he plans to go home; he plans to read a book; he plans a thousand other things. A “great” plan eliminates the plans of everybody else; then only one plan can be supreme. If the “great” plan and the plans of individuals come into conflict, whose plan is to be supreme? Who decides? The police decide! And they decide in favor of the “great” plan.

In the early days of socialism, some critics of socialism used to blame socialists for their ignorance of human nature. A man who must execute the plan of somebody else only would no longer be a man of the kind we call human. This objection was answered by those socialists who said, “If human nature is against socialism, then human nature will have to be changed.” Karl Kautsky said this many years before, but he didn’t give any details.

The details were provided by Behaviorism and by [Ivan] Pavlov [1849–1936], the psychologist mentioned in every book by a Marxist. The explanation was offered by Pavlov’s conditioned reflex. Pavlov was a Tsarist; he made his experiments in the days of the Tsar. Instead of human rights, Pavlov’s dog had canine rights. This is the future of education.

The Behaviorist philosophy wants to deal with human individuals as if there were no ideas or no faults in men. Behaviorism considers every human action as a reaction to a stimulus. Everything in the physical and physiological nature responds to certain reflexes. They say, “Man belongs to the same realm as animals. Why should he be different? There are certain reflexes and certain instincts that guide men to certain ends. Certain stimuli bring about certain reactions.” What the Behaviorists and the Marxists did not see was that you cannot even discredit such a theory of stimuli without entering into the meaning that the individual attaches to such stimuli. The housewife, when quoted the price of an object which she is considering buying, reacts differently to $5 than she does to $6. You cannot determine the stimulus without entering into the meaning. And the meaning itself is an idea.

The Behaviorists’ approach says, “We will condition the other people.” But who are the “we”? And who are the “other people?” “Today,” they say, “people are conditioned for capitalism by many things, by history, by good people, by bad people, by the church, etc., etc.”

This philosophy doesn’t give us any answer other than the answer we have already seen. The whole idea of this philosophy is that we must accept what Karl Marx told us because he had the great gift—he was entrusted by Providence, by the material productive forces, with discovering the law of historical evolution. He knows the end toward which history leads mankind. This leads eventually to the point where we must accept the idea that the party, the group, the clique, that has defeated the others by force of arms, is the right ruler, that he is called by the material productive forces to “condition” all other people. The fantastic thing is that the school which develops this philosophy calls itself “liberal” and calls its system a “people’s democracy,” “real democracy,” and so on. It is also fantastic that the Vice President of the United States [Henry Wallace, 1888–1965] one day declared, “We in the United States have only a civil rights democracy—but in Russia there is economic democracy.”

There was a socialist author, valued highly by the Bolsheviks in the beginning, who said the most powerful man in the world is the man in whose favor the greatest lies are told and believed. (Something similar was said by Adolf Hitler.) Here is the power of this philosophy. The Russians have the power to say, “We are a democracy and our people are happy and enjoy a full life under our system.” And other nations seem to be unable to find the right answer to this idea. If they had found the right answer, this philosophy wouldn’t be so popular.

There are people living here in the United States, at an American standard of living, who think they are unhappy because they do not live in Soviet Russia where, they say, there is a classless society and everything is better than it is here. But it seems that it is not very much fun to live in Russia, not only from the material point of view, but from the point of view of individual freedom. If you ask, “How is it possible that people say everything is wonderful in a country, Russia, in which everything is probably not very wonderful,” then we must answer, “Because our last three generations were unable to explode the contradictions and the failures of this philosophy of dialectic materialism.”

The greatest philosophy in the world today is that of dialectical materialism—the idea that it is inevitable that we are being carried toward socialism. The books that have been written up to now have not succeeded in countering this thesis. You must write new books. You must think of these problems. It is ideas that distinguish men from animals. This is the human quality of man. But according to the ideas of the socialists the opportunity to have ideas should be reserved to the Politburo only; all the other people should only carry out what the Politburo tells them to do.

It is impossible to defeat a philosophy if you do not fight in the philosophical field. One of the great deficiencies of American thinking—and America is the most important country in the world because it is here, not in Moscow, that this problem will be decided—the greatest shortcoming, is that people think all these philosophies and everything that is written in books is of minor importance, that it doesn’t count. Therefore they underrate the importance and the power of ideas. Yet there is nothing more important in the world than ideas. Ideas and nothing else will determine the outcome of this great struggle. It is a great mistake to believe that the outcome of the battle will be determined by things other than ideas.

Russian Marxists, like all other Marxists, had the idea that they wanted to nationalize agriculture. That is, the theorists wanted to—the individual worker did not want to nationalize the farms; they wanted to take the big farms, break them up, and distribute the land among the small farmers. This has been called “agrarian reform.” The social revolutionaries wanted to distribute the farms to the poor peasants. In 1917, Lenin coined a new slogan, “You make revolution with the slogan of the day.” Therefore, they accepted something that was against Marxism. Later they started the nationalization of farm lands. Then they adopted this idea in the new countries they took over; they told every man that he would get his own farm.

They started this program in China. In China they took the big farms and abolished the rights of mortgage banks and landlords and freed the tenants from making any payments to the landlords. Therefore, it was not philosophy that made the Chinese peasants communistic, but the promise of a better life; people thought they would improve their conditions if they could get some farm land owned up to then by wealthier people. But this is not the solution for the Chinese problem. The advocates of this program were called agricultural reformers; they were not Marxians. The idea of land distribution is entirely un-Marxian.

In a piece published today in The Atlantic, John McWhorter writes that he is getting as many as 50 emails a week from academics who are living in fear that their careers could end at any moment. Their fear isn’t the coronavirus it’s the creeping leftist orthodoxy which treats any disagreement as cause to hound someone out of their job. McWhorter labels it a new form of Maoism on campus, complete with struggle sessions straight out of the Cultural Revolution:

A statistics professor says:”I routinely discuss the fallacy of assuming that disparity implies discrimination, which is just a specific way of confusing correlation for causality. Frankly, I’m now somewhat afraid to broach these topics … since according to the new faith, disparity actually is conclusive evidence of discrimination.”

The new mood has even reached medieval studies; an assistant professor reports having recently just survived an attack by a cadre of scholars who are “unspeakably mean and disingenuous once they have you in their sights,” regularly “mounting PR campaigns to get academics and grad students fired, removed from programs, expelled from scholarly groups, or simply to cease speaking.”…

Overall I found it alarming how many of the letters sound as if they were written from Stalinist Russia or Maoist China. A history professor reports that at his school, the administration is seriously considering setting up an anonymous reporting system for students and professors to report “bias” that they have perceived. One professor committed the sin of “privileging the white male perspective” in giving a lecture on the philosophy of one of the Founding Fathers, even though Frederick Douglass sang that Founder’s praises. The administration tried to make him sit in a “listening circle,” in which his job was to stay silent while students explained how he had hurt them—in other words, a 21st-century-American version of a struggle session straight out of the Cultural Revolution…

Especially sad is the extent to which this new Maoism can dilute the richness of a curriculum and discourage people from becoming professors at all. One professor has stopped teaching James Baldwin’s “Going to Meet the Man” after Black students claimed that it forced them to “re-live intergenerational trauma.” I have heard from not one but two philosophy doctorates who left academia. One explained that he was driven out by the “accelerating creep of what felt to me a pretty stifling orthodoxy. The hiring market was dominated by a concern for diversity statements, the ability to teach fairly ideologically-slanted courses on philosophy and critical race theory or philosophy and gender, etc.; and more generally it felt progressively less like a profession where I could opt out of those trends while still being a competitive job applicant.”

McWhorter points out that most of the people he’s hearing from are not conservatives. Most consider themselves left-of-center. But in academia today being on the left doesn’t really matter unless you hold all of the same views as the far left.

How widespread is this? It’s hard to say but McWhorter points to a poll of 445 academics carried out by the Heterodox Academy. Asked how they would feel expressing their views on a controversial issued at work, more than half said they would be “very concerned” or “extremely concerned” that it would hurt their career. That’s obviously not a great situation for having people discuss different points of view about contentious topics. With numbers like that self-censorship is guaranteed. And that only ensures that the cultural revolutionaries have de facto control of what is said and taught on campus.

I’ve said before that as bad as the situation has been on some campuses, the far left is still a minority of the student body. But reading this piece you have to wonder how much longer that will be the case. How long before the meltdown at Evergreen State College is being replicated everywhere? If I had to guess, I’d say it will happen a lot sooner than anyone expects.

As I was writing this, Rod Dreher posted this example. Professors at Northwestern law school were apparently expected to denounce themselves as racists. I wonder if anyone was brave enough to refuse?

John McWorter/John Sexton

Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx’s life and have never read his three-volume “Das Kapital.” Volume I was published in 1867, the only volume published before Marx’s death in 1883. Volumes II and III were later edited and published in his name by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels. Most people who call themselves Marxist have only read his 1848 pamphlet “The Communist Manifesto,” which was written with Engels.

Marx is a hero to many labor union leaders and civil rights organizations, including leftist groups like Black Lives Matter, antifa and some Democratic Party leaders. It is easy to be a Marxist if you know little of his life. Marx’s predictions about capitalism and the “withering away of the state” turned out to be grossly wrong. What most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and an anti-Semite.

When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: “Without violence nothing is ever accomplished in history.” Then he asked, “Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?” Friedrich Engels added: “In America we have witnessed the conquest of Mexico and have rejoiced at it. It is to the interest of its own development that Mexico will be placed under the tutelage of the United States.” Many of Marx’s racist ideas were reported in “Karl Marx, Racist” a book written by Nathaniel Weyl, a former member of the U.S. Communist Party.

In 1887, Paul Lafargue, who was Marx’s son-in-law, was a candidate for a council seat in a Paris district that contained a zoo. Engels claimed that Paul had “one eighth or one twelfth nigger blood.” In an April 1887 letter to Paul’s wife, Engels wrote, “Being in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Marx’s anti-Semitic views were no secret. In 1844, he published an essay titled “On the Jewish Question.” He wrote that the worldly religion of Jews was “huckstering” and that the Jew’s god was “money.” Marx’s view of Jews was that they could only become an emancipated ethnicity or culture when they no longer exist. Just one step short of calling for genocide, Marx said, “The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.”

Marx’s philosophical successors shared ugly thoughts on blacks and other minorities. Che Guevara, a hero of the left, was a horrific racist. He wrote in his 1952 memoir, “The Motorcycle Diaries”: “The Negro is indolent and lazy and spends his money on frivolities, whereas the European is forward-looking, organized and intelligent.”

British socialist Beatrice Webb griped in The New Statesmen about declining birthrates among so-called higher races, which would lead to “a new social order” that would be created “by one or other of the colored races, the Negro, the Kaffir or the Chinese.” The Soviets espoused the same “Jewish world conspiracy” as the Nazis. Joseph Stalin embarked upon a campaign that led to the deaths of Jewish intellectuals for their apparent lack of patriotism. By the way, the Soviet public was not told that Karl Marx was Jewish. Academics who preach Marxism to their classes fail to tell their students that his ideology has led to the slaughter of tens of millions of people.

White liberals are useful idiots. BLM, antifa and other progressive groups use the plight of poor blacks to organize left-leaning, middle-class, college-educated, guilt-ridden suburbanite whites. These people who topple statues and destroy public and private property care about minorities as much as their racist predecessors. Their goal is the acquisition and concentration of power and Americans have fallen hook, line and sinker for their phony virtue signaling.

Parts of America are descending into chaos. Innocent lives and private property are being sacrificed hourly. It’s a civil war, not yet throughout the whole country but in major portions of major cities. Portland stands out, but it’s happening in nearly all cities run by Democrats.

It’s not simply incompetence. These Democratic mayors and governors KNOW what they’re doing. They’re permitting the violation of laws and the resulting state of anarchy for political reasons. What other motive could they have? And even if we can’t prove their motives — what these mayors and governors are doing is CRIMINAL. They are literally at war with the citizens of their own states and cities. They took oaths to protect the lives and property of all the citizens they represent. When those citizens happen to be Trump supporters, or anyone else they dislike, those citizens are not accorded the same individual rights of others. That’s reason enough to arrest and detain these mayors and governors, so far as I’m concerned. Morally if not legally (you can debate the legality), they already are war criminals, in my book, for brazen and clearly deliberate negligence against the individual rights of citizens in their states and cities.

Of course, that would immediately escalate a civil war that, at least in these cities, has already begun. So one has to be careful. But also remember: These leftist mayors and governors — and the Democratic, far left voters who cheer them on from their homes, as I am CERTAIN they’re doing — started this fire. They are the perpetrators, and they are the victimizers. Even putting a “Black Lives Matter” sign in your front yard as a form of virtue-signaling is not an innocent mistake. You can’t be that ignorant. YOU virtue-signaling leftists are the people responsible for the death and destruction taking place, and whatever else may yet come. And so are your terrorist elected officials.

Keep this in mind as President Trump goes to Wisconsin. Democrats want the results of elections to matter when they are elected. Once they are elected (even via fraud), members of their party are allowed to do literally anything. When people they dislike are elected — President Donald Trump, most of all — why, his mere presence and existence is “unconstitutional”. This is dictatorship. The Democrats, in 2020, have shifted from the mentality and psychology of dictatorships (it started under Obama) to actual dictatorship. First they used COVID as an excuse, an illness responsible (at most) for the death of about 9,000 people (according to their own politically-driven CDC). Now they are using chaos and anarchy in certain city streets as an excuse to blame President Trump and enhance their standing with radical, Communist leftists at the same time. It’s truly monstrous, and nothing this evil has ever happened in the United States; not since slavery itself.

We are at a crossroads. There’s nothing we can do about it now, other than fight back in any way we can, including voting for President Trump’s reelection. The savages in the streets speak for the mayors and governors who let them run wild. They have declared war on our civilization, our Constitution, and the rights of anyone who does not share their far-left, collectivist, socialist, fanatical government views. Democrats are poised to vote for Biden, because they hate President Trump more than they care about anyone’s life. Remember that.

Liberals stressed the importance of the individual. The nineteenth-century liberals already considered the development of the individual the most important thing. “Individual and individualism” was the progressive and liberal slogan. Reactionaries had already attacked this position at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The rationalists and liberals of the eighteenth century pointed out that what was needed was good laws. Ancient customs that could not be justified by rationality should be abandoned. The only justification for a law was whether or not it was liable to promote the public social welfare. In many countries the liberals and rationalists asked for written constitutions, the codification of laws, and for new laws which would permit the development of the faculties of every individual.

A reaction to this idea developed, especially in Germany where the jurist and legal historian Friedrich Karl von Savigny [1779–1861] was active. Savigny declared that laws cannot be written by men; laws are developed in some mystical way by the soul of the whole unit. It isn’t the individual that thinks—it is the nation or a social entity which uses the individual only for the expression of its own thoughts. This idea was very much emphasized by Marx and the Marxists. In this regard the Marxists were not followers of Hegel, whose main idea of historical evolution was an evolution toward freedom of the individual.

From the viewpoint of Marx and Engels, the individual was a negligible thing in the eyes of the nation. Marx and Engels denied that the individual played a role in historical evolution. According to them, history goes its own way. The material productive forces go their own way, developing independently of the wills of individuals. And historical events come with the inevitability of a law of nature. The material productive forces work like a director in an opera; they must have a substitute available in case of a problem, as the opera director must have a substitute if the singer gets sick. According to this idea, Napoleon and Dante, for instance, were unimportant—if they had not appeared to take their own special place in history, someone else would have appeared on stage to fill their shoes.

To understand certain words, you must understand the German language. From the seventeenth century on, considerable effort was spent in fighting the use of Latin words and in eliminating them from the German language. In many cases a foreign word remained although there was also a German expression with the same meaning. The two words began as synonyms, but in the course of history, they acquired different meanings. For instance, take the word Umwälzung, the literal German translation of the Latin word revolution. In the Latin word there was no sense of fighting. Thus, there evolved two meanings for the word “revolution”—one by violence, and the other meaning a gradual revolution like the “Industrial Revolution.” However, Marx uses the German word Revolution not only for violent revolutions such as the French or Russian revolutions, but also for the gradual Industrial Revolution.

Incidentally, the term Industrial Revolution was introduced by Arnold Toynbee [1852–1883]. Marxists say that “What furthers the overthrow of capitalism is not revolution—look at the Industrial Revolution.”

Marx assigned a special meaning to slavery, serfdom, and other systems of bondage. It was necessary, he said, for the workers to be free in order for the exploiter to exploit them. This idea came from the interpretation he gave to the situation of the feudal lord who had to care for his workers even when they weren’t working. Marx interpreted the liberal changes that developed as freeing the exploiter of the responsibility for the lives of the workers. Marx didn’t see that the liberal movement was directed at the abolition of inequality under law, as between serf and lord.

Karl Marx believed that capital accumulation was an obstacle. In his eyes, the only explanation for wealth accumulation was that somebody had robbed somebody else. For Karl Marx the whole Industrial Revolution simply consisted of the exploitation of the workers by the capitalists. According to him, the situation of the workers became worse with the coming of capitalism. The difference between their situation and that of slaves and serfs was only that the capitalist had no obligation to care for workers who were no longer exploitable, while the lord was bound to care for slaves and serfs. This is another of the insoluble contradictions in the Marxian system. Yet it is accepted by many economists today without realizing of what this contradiction consists.

According to Marx, capitalism is a necessary and inevitable stage in the history of mankind leading men from primitive conditions to the millennium of socialism. If capitalism is a necessary and inevitable step on the road to socialism, then one cannot consistently claim, from the point of view of Marx, that what the capitalist does is ethically and morally bad. Therefore, why does Marx attack the capitalists?

Marx says part of production is appropriated by the capitalists and withheld from the workers. According to Marx, this is very bad. The consequence is that the workers are no longer in a position to consume the whole production produced. A part of what they have produced, therefore, remains unconsumed; there is “underconsumption.” For this reason, because there is underconsumption, economic depressions occur regularly. This is the Marxian underconsumption theory of depressions. Yet Marx contradicts this theory elsewhere.

Marxian writers do not explain why production proceeds from simpler to more and more complicated methods.

Nor did Marx mention the following fact: About 1700, the population of Great Britain was about five and a half million; by the middle of 1700, the population was six and a half million, about 500,000 of whom were simply destitute. The whole economic system had produced a “surplus” population. The surplus population problem appeared earlier in Great Britain than on continental Europe. This happened, first of all, because Great Britain was an island and so was not subject to invasion by foreign armies, which helped to reduce the populations in Europe. The wars in Great Britain were civil wars, which were bad, but they stopped. And then this outlet for the surplus population disappeared, so the numbers of surplus people grew. In Europe the situation was different; for one thing, the opportunity to work in agriculture was more favorable than in England.

The old economic system in England couldn’t cope with the surplus population. The surplus people were mostly very bad people—beggars and robbers and thieves and prostitutes. They were supported by various institutions, the poor laws,[1] and the charity of the communities. Some were impressed into the army and navy for service abroad. There were also superfluous people in agriculture. The existing system of guilds and other monopolies in the processing industries made the expansion of industry impossible. In those pre-capitalist ages, there was a sharp division between the classes of society who could afford new shoes and new clothes, and those who could not. The processing industries produced by and large for the upper classes. Those who could not afford new clothes wore hand-me-downs. There was then a very considerable trade in secondhand clothes—a trade which disappeared almost completely when modern industry began to produce also for the lower classes. If capitalism had not provided the means of sustenance for these “surplus” people, they would have died from starvation. Smallpox accounted for many deaths in pre-capitalist times; it has now been practically wiped out. Improvements in medicine are also a product of capitalism.

What Marx called the great catastrophe of the Industrial Revolution was not a catastrophe at all; it brought about a tremendous improvement in the conditions of the people. Many survived who wouldn’t have survived otherwise. It is not true, as Marx said, that the improvements in technology are available only to the exploiters and that the masses are living in a state much worse than on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Everything the Marxists say about exploitation is absolutely wrong! Lies! In fact, capitalism made it possible for many persons to survive who wouldn’t have otherwise. And today many people, or most people, live at a much higher standard of living than that at which their ancestors lived 100 or 200 years ago.

During the eighteenth century, there appeared a number of eminent authors—the best known was Adam Smith [1723–1790]—who pleaded for freedom of trade. And they argued against monopoly, against the guilds, and against privileges given by the king and Parliament. Secondly, some ingenious individuals, almost without any savings and capital, began to organize starving paupers for production, not in factories but outside the factories, and not for the upper classes only. These newly organized producers began to make simple goods precisely for the great masses. This was the great change that took place; this was the Industrial Revolution. And this Industrial Revolution made more food and other goods available so that the population rose. Nobody saw less of what really was going on than Karl Marx. By the eve of the Second World War, the population had increased so much that there were 60 million Englishmen.

You can’t compare the United States with England. The United States began almost as a country of modern capitalism. But we may say by and large that out of eight people living today in the countries of Western civilization, seven are alive only because of the Industrial Revolution. Are you personally sure that you are the one out of eight who would have lived even in the absence of the Industrial Revolution? If you are not sure, stop and consider the consequences of the Industrial Revolution.

The interpretation given by Marx to the Industrial Revolution is applied also to the interpretation of the “superstructure.” Marx said the “material productive forces,” the tools and machines, produce the “production relations,” the social structure, property rights, and so forth, which produce the “superstructure,” the philosophy, art, and religion. The “superstructure,” said Marx, depends on the class situation of the individuals, i.e., whether he is a poet, painter, and so on. Marx interpreted everything that happened in the spiritual life of the nation from this point of view. Arthur Schopenhauer [1788–1860] was called a philosopher of the owners of common stock and bonds. Friedrich Nietzsche [1844–1900] was called the philosopher of big business. For every change in ideology, for every change in music, art, novel writing, play writing, the Marxians had an immediate interpretation. Every new book was explained by the “superstructure” of that particular day. Every book was assigned an adjective—“bourgeois” or “proletarian.” The bourgeoisie were considered an undifferentiated reactionary mass.

Don’t think it is possible for a man to practice all his life a certain ideology without believing in it. The use of the term “mature capitalism” shows how fully persons, who don’t think of themselves as Marxian in any way, have been influenced by Marx. Mr. and Mrs. Hammond, in fact almost all historians, have accepted the Marxian interpretation of the Industrial Revolution.[2] The one exception is Ashton.[3]

Karl Marx, in the second part of his career, was not an interventionist; he was in favor of laissez faire. Because he expected the breakdown of capitalism and the substitution of socialism to come from the full maturity of capitalism, he was in favor of letting capitalism develop. In this regard he was, in his writings and in his books, a supporter of economic freedom.

Marx believed that interventionist measures were unfavorable because they delayed the coming of socialism. Labor unions recommended interventions and, therefore, Marx was opposed to them. Labor unions don’t produce anything anyway and it would have been impossible to raise wage rates if producers had not actually produced more.

Marx claimed interventions hurt the interests of the workers. The German socialists voted against [Otto von] Bismarck’s social reforms that he instituted circa 1881 (Marx died in 1883). And in this country the Communists were against the New Deal. Of course, the real reason for their opposition to the government in power was very different. No opposition party wants to assign so much power to another party. In drafting socialist programs, everybody assumes tacitly that he himself will be the planner or the dictator, or that the planner or dictator will be intellectually completely dependent on him and that the planner or dictator will be his handyman. No one wants to be a single member in the planning scheme of somebody else.

These ideas of planning go back to Plato’s treatise on the form of the commonwealth. Plato was very outspoken. He planned a system ruled exclusively by philosophers. He wanted to eliminate all individual rights and decisions. Nobody should go anywhere, rest, sleep, eat, drink, wash, unless he was told to do so. Plato wanted to reduce persons to the status of pawns in his plan. What is needed is a dictator who appoints a philosopher as a kind of prime minister or president of the central board of production management. The program of all such consistent socialists—Plato and Hitler, for instance—planned also for the production of future socialists, the breeding and education of future members of society.

During the 2300 years since Plato, very little opposition has been registered to his ideas. Not even by Kant. The psychological bias in favor of socialism must be taken into consideration in discussing Marxian ideas. This is not limited to those who call themselves Marxian.

Marxians deny that there is such a thing as the search for knowledge for the sake of knowledge alone. But they are not consistent in this case either, for they say one of the purposes of the socialist state is to eliminate such a search for knowledge. It is an insult, they say, for persons to study things that are useless.

Now I want to discuss the meaning of the ideological distortion of truths. Class consciousness is not developed in the beginning, but it must inevitably come. Marx developed his doctrine of ideology because he realized he couldn’t answer the criticisms raised against socialism. His answer was, “What you say is not true. It is only ideology. What a man thinks, so long as we do not have a classless society, is necessarily a class ideology—that is, it is based on a false consciousness.” Without any further explanation, Marx assumed that such an ideology was useful to the class and to the members of the class that developed it. Such ideas had for their goal the pursuit of the aims of their class.

Marx and Engels appeared and developed the class ideas of the proletariat. Therefore, from this time on the doctrine of the bourgeoisie is absolutely useless. Perhaps one may say that the bourgeoisie needed this explanation to salve a bad conscience. But why should they have a bad conscience if their existence is necessary? And it is necessary, according to Marxian doctrine, for without the bourgeoisie, capitalism cannot develop. And until capitalism is “mature,” there cannot be any socialism.

According to Marx, bourgeois economics, sometimes called “apologetics for bourgeois production,” aided them, the bourgeoisie. The Marxians could have said that the thought the bourgeoisie gave to this bad bourgeois theory justified, in their eyes, as well as in the eyes of the exploited, the capitalist mode of production, thus making it possible for the system to exist. But this would have been a very un-Marxist explanation. First of all, according to Marxian doctrine, no justification is needed for the bourgeois system of production; the bourgeoisie exploit because it is their business to exploit, just as it is the business of the microbes to exploit. The bourgeoisie don’t need any justification. Their class consciousness shows them that they have to do this; it is the capitalist’s nature to exploit.

A Russian friend of Marx wrote him that the task of the socialists must be to help the bourgeoisie exploit better and Marx replied that that was not necessary. Marx then wrote a short note saying that Russia could reach socialism without going through the capitalist stage. The next morning he must have realized that, if he admitted that one country could skip one of the inevitable stages, this would destroy his whole theory. So he didn’t send the note. Engels, who was not so bright, discovered this piece of paper in the desk of Karl Marx, copied it in his own handwriting, and sent his copy to Vera Zasulich [1849–1919], who was famous in Russia because she had attempted to assassinate the Police Commissioner in St. Petersburg and been acquitted by the jury—she had a good defense counsel. This woman published Marx’s note, and it became one of the great assets of the Bolshevik Party.

The capitalist system is a system in which promotion is precisely according to merit. If people do not get ahead, there is bitterness in their minds. They are reluctant to admit that they do not advance because of their lack of intelligence. They take their lack of advancement out on society. Many blame society and turn to socialism. This tendency is especially strong in the ranks of intellectuals. Because professionals treat each other as equals, the less capable professionals consider themselves “superior” to non-professionals and feel they deserve more recognition than they receive. Envy plays an important role. There is a philosophical predisposition among persons to be dissatisfied with the existing state of affairs. There is dissatisfaction, also, with political conditions. If you are dissatisfied, you ask what other kind of state can be considered.

Marx had “anti-talent”—i.e., a lack of talent. He was influenced by Hegel and Feuerbach, especially by Feuerbach’s critique of Christianity. Marx admitted that the exploitation doctrine was taken from an anonymous pamphlet published in the 1820s. His economics were distortions taken over from [David] Ricardo [1772–1823].[4]

Marx was economically ignorant; he didn’t realize that there can be doubts concerning the best means of production to be applied. The big question is, how shall we use the available scarce factors of production. Marx assumed that what has to be done is obvious. He didn’t realize that the future is always uncertain, that it is the job of every businessman to provide for the unknown future. In the capitalist system, the workers and technologists obey the entrepreneur. Under socialism, they will obey the socialist official. Marx didn’t take into consideration the fact that there is a difference between saying what has to be done and doing what somebody else has said must be done. The socialist state is necessarily a police state.

The withering away of the state was just Marx’s attempt to avoid answering the question about what would happen under socialism. Under socialism, the convicts will know that they are being punished for the benefit of the whole society.

The third volume of Das Kapital was filled with lengthy quotations from the hearings of British Parliamentary Committees on money and banking, and they don’t make any sense at all.[5] For instance, “The monetary system is essentially Catholic, the credit system essentially Protestant. . . . But the credit system does not emancipate itself from the basis of the monetary system any more than Protestantism emancipates itself from the foundations of Catholicism.”[6] Utterly nonsensical!

Of the 5 million black and Hispanic students who enter U.S. public high schools each year, approximately 2.2 million will drop out before earning a diploma. Of the 2.8 million who manage to graduate, at least 2.4 million are unable to perform proficiently in mathematics, and at least 2.56 million are unable to

In America’s public high schools, 45% of black students and 43% of Hispanics (as compared to 22% of whites) drop out before their classes graduate. Dropout rates are especially high in urban areas with large minority populations, including such academic basket cases as the District of Columbia (57%), Trenton (59%), Camden (61.4%), Baltimore (65.4%), Cleveland (65.9%), and Detroit (75.1%).

Of those black and Hispanic students who do manage to earn a diploma, a large percentage are functionally illiterate. Black high-school graduates perform, on average, at a level that is four academic years below that of their white counterparts. Of all graduates in the class of 2011, only 11% of blacks and 15% of Hispanics were proficient in math, as compared to 42% of whites. Similarly, just 13% of blacks and 4% of Hispanics were proficient in reading, versus 40% of whites. As political science professor Lydia Segal notes in her book, Battling Corruption in America’s Public Schools: “It is in cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Philadelphia where the largest numbers of children cannot read, write, and compute at acceptable levels and where racial gaps between whites and blacks and Latinos are widest. It is in large cities that minority boys in particular, trapped in poor schools, have the greatest chance of flunking out and getting sucked into the downward spiral of crime and prison.”[1]

These failed schools are run entirely by Democrats and progressives who, as author Jonah Goldberg points out, have “controlled the large inner-city school systems for generations.” Indeed, the powerful teachers unions overwhelmingly support the Democratic Party and its left-wing agendas; the bureaucrats at the Department of Education overwhelmingly hold progressive political and social views; and the ideological orientation of America’s teacher-training colleges is decidedly leftist. All of these factors have combined to create the proverbial train wreck that is public education in the United States today.

Progressives claim that the major problem afflicting U.S. public schools is a lack of funding. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, for one, calls for greater “investment” in education at every level. Congressional Progressive Caucus member Maxine Waters laments that “educational systems … are failing” because “we don’t really invest” in them. Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman suggests that increased spending on education today would relieve society of the much greater burden of having to pay the costs associated with incarcerating uneducated prisoners later on: “It’s better to invest up front than to invest more as a result of our neglect … Our states at the moment are spending on average three times more per prisoner than per public school pupil. That’s about the dumbest investment policy I can think of.” President Barack Obama, pledging to “continue to make education a national mission,” likewise called for increased education expenditures in his presidential budgets. The highly influential Center for American Progress (CAP) urges “continued investment in education in order to grow our economy and rebuild the middle class.” And the Economic Policy Institute has derided policymakers at federal, state, and local levels “for not devoting more resources to education.” Not surprisingly, this rhetoric has filtered its way into the public mind; polls indicate that many Americans view a lack of resources as one of the chief problems facing public schools.

But expenditures are far from modest and are rising steeply at the same time that student achievement-test scores have dropped. American taxpayers already spend some $600 billion per year on public elementary and secondary schools, with average per-pupil expenditures nationwide currently at an all-time high of $10,905—the latter figure representing a nearly fourfold increase (in constant present-day dollars) since 1961. Further, the federal government in recent decades has poured hundreds of billions of extra dollars into Title I schools targeting mostly poor minority children, with no positive results to show for those financial outlays.

Between 1973 and 2008, the performance of 17-year-old high-schoolers on the math and reading portions of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (a massive, federally mandated initiative that seeks to quantify the academic competence of fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students) were essentially unchanged. Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) reading scores for the high-school class of 2011 were the lowest on record; the combined reading and math scores of that same class declined to their lowest point since 1995. According to the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), an evaluation of 15-year-old students in 34 countries which belong to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. today ranks 25th in math literacy, 17th in scientific literacy, and 14th in reading proficiency. African-Americans have been particularly shortchanged by the public-education system’s inadequacies. If black and Hispanic students in the U.S. were counted as self-contained “national” groups, their average PISA reading scores would rank them 31st and 33rd, respectively, among the 34 OECD nations.

Clearly, dismal academic failure is not a problem that can be solved by merely throwing money at it. Consider, for instance, that the per-pupil cost of a public elementary and high-school education in Washington, D.C. is an astronomical $16,408—among the highest figures for any city in America and far above the national average—yet DC’s public schools are the worst in the country; the city’s high-school students score lower on the SAT than do their counterparts anywhere else in the United States.

Another academic disaster area, Detroit, spends about $15,945 per public-school pupil. In the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a U.S. Department of Education standardized test, fourth- and eighth-graders at Detroit Public Schools read at a level that is 73% below the national average and register reading scores lower than those of students in any other urban school district in the country. Similarly, the reading skills of Detroit’s eighth-graders are 60% below the national average, and their math scores in 2011 were the lowest ever recorded in the 40-year history of the exam.

The news is no better in New Jersey’s capital city of Trenton, whose population is more than 80% black and Hispanic. With expenditures of $20,663 per public-school pupil, the citywide high-school graduation rate is a mere 41%. And Camden, New Jersey, where nearly 90% of all residents are black or Hispanic, spends an astounding $23,356 per pupil, but only 38.6% of them ever obtain a high-school diploma. These enormous expenditures on the education of nonwhite minorities are by no means unusual. The per-pupil spending on black public-school students nationwide is actually 5% higher than the corresponding figure for white students, while the figure for Hispanic students is 1% higher than for whites.

There is compelling evidence at the state level, as well, that public spending on education is not correlated with student achievement. Indeed, numerous states in the Northeast spend between $14,000 and $19,000 on the education of each public-school student, yet those pupils invariably register SAT scores that are below—and in some cases far below—the national median.

The failure of public schools to properly educate American students—particularly nonwhite minorities—can be attributed largely to the policies and priorities of the teachers unions. Most significant are the 3.2 million-member National Education Association (NEA) and the 1.5 million-member member American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Devoted to promoting all manner of left-wing political agendas, these unions rank among the most powerful political forces in the United States.[2] Fortune magazine routinely ranks the NEA among the top 15 in its “Washington’s Power 25” list of organizations that wield the greatest political influence in the American legislative system.[3]

The NEA derives most of its operating funds from the member dues that, in almost every U.S. state, are deducted automatically from teachers’ salaries. In 2009, these dues accounted for $357.5 million of the union’s $376.5 million in total revenues. Because member dues constitute the very lifeblood of the teachers unions, the unions have made it enormously expensive and time-consuming to get a tenured teacher fired for incompetence. In New York City, for instance, the process of eliminating a single bad teacher costs taxpayers, on average, $163,142. In New York State overall, the average is $128,941. In Illinois, a school district must spend an average of $219,504 in legal fees alone to move a termination case beyond all the union-created obstacles. Ultimately, the unions strive to keep as many teachers as possible on the payroll—including those who are wholly ineffective—so as to continue to collect their union dues which, in turn, can be applied to political ends. Even in school districts where students perform far below the academic norm for their grade levels, and where dropout rates are astronomically high, scarcely one in a thousand teachers is ever dismissed in any given year.

In most states, teachers are automatically awarded tenure after only a few years on the job. The Los Angeles Times, for example, reports that fewer than 2% of that city’s schoolteachers are denied tenure during the two-year probationary period after they are hired. Once tenured, even the most ineffective and incompetent instructors can have long and relatively lucrative careers in the classroom if they wish to stay in the field of education. As one Los Angeles union representative said in 2003: “If I’m representing them [tenured teachers], it’s impossible to get them out. It’s impossible. Unless they commit a lewd act.” This was not hyperbole; between 1995 and 2005, just 112 of the 43,000 tenured teachers in Los Angeles lost their jobs, even though 49% of the students in their school district failed to graduate from high school.

The story has been much the same elsewhere. In the 2006-2007 school year, New York City fired only 10 of its 55,000 tenured teachers, even though a mere 19% of the city’s eighth graders could read with proficiency. Between 2005 and 2008 in Chicago, where only 28.5% of 11th graders demonstrated academic competency on Illinois’ standardized tests, only 0.1% of teachers were dismissed for performance-related reasons. And during a ten-year period in Newark, New Jersey, where the high-school graduation rate was just 30.6%, only one out of every 3,000 tenured teachers in the city was terminated in any given year.

The teachers unions’ selfish priorities made bold headlines in 2010, when it was reported that New York City had established a number of so-called “rubber rooms,” formally called Temporary Reassignment Centers, where hundreds of public-school teachers who had been accused of gross incompetence or misconduct sat idly each day, drawing their full salaries (and thus paying their full union dues) while waiting for their cases to be reviewed. Some teachers had been there for several years. The city not only spent between $35 million and $65 million annually on their salaries and benefits, but also had to bear the additional costs of hiring substitutes to teach the classes once taught by the idle instructors, renting space wherein the reassignment centers could be housed, and employing security guards to monitor those facilities. Under the heat of public outcry, these “rubber rooms”—whose name derived from the notion that it would be difficult not to go mad after spending day after day in a spartan, windowless room where there was nothing to do—were finally shut down in the fall of 2010.

The closure of the rubber rooms, however, did nothing to address the even costlier Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool which, to this day, consists of some 1,800 New York City teachers who lost their jobs not because they were accused of incompetence or wrongdoing, but because of budget cuts and school closures. Though these instructors are mostly inactive, they can be called upon periodically to substitute or do other jobs in local schools. In the meantime, they continue to draw their full salaries (averaging $82,000 per year) and collectively cost the city more than $100 million annually—generally while making very little effort to seek full-time employment. According to the Department of Education (DOE), 59% of the teachers in the ATR pool have neither applied for any jobs through the DOE’s job-recruitment system nor attended any job fairs. Some of them have been in the pool for several years.

In addition to aggressively defending the rights of incompetent instructors, the teachers unions have likewise objected to merit-pay proposals that would reward good teachers and punish bad ones. When Florida legislators in 2009 called for a merit-pay system, the head of the state teachers union accused the lawmakers of “punishing and scapegoating teachers … and creating more chaos in Florida public schools.” When Governor Chris Christie suggested a similar arrangement for his state in 2010, New Jersey teachers unions asserted that “his effort is intentionally designed to demean and defund public education.” In Chicago, union officials have argued that “merit-pay programs can [undesirably] narrow curricula by encouraging teachers to focus on testing.” And after Florida passed a merit-pay law in 2011, the Florida teachers union filed suit against the state, contending that the new legislation violated the right to collectively bargain for wages, contracts, and promotions that was guaranteed in the state constitution.

The teachers unions likewise oppose voucher programs that would enable the parents of children who attend failing, inner-city public schools, to send their youngsters instead to private schools where they might actually succeed academically. Progressive Democratic politicians, who derive so much financial support from the teachers unions, oppose voucher programs as well.[4]

While millions of impoverished black and Hispanic youngsters are herded into substandard urban classrooms where they learn little or nothing, and where their tragic destinies of poverty and underachievement are set in motion, the 266,000 people who work in public elementary and secondary school administrative posts are very well compensated for their efforts. These individuals earn, on average, some $84,000 apiece in annual salaries (not including healthcare and pension benefits). School superintendents are the highest paid of all administrators, earning an average of $161,992 per year; deputy and associate superintendents earn $138,061. Classroom teachers, by contrast, are paid an average of $54,220.

Unfortunately for American taxpayers, public-school administrators’ ride aboard the gravy train does not come to an end when they stop working. Indeed, many thousands of former administrators collect more money during retirement than most people earn during their entire working careers. In California alone, the number of education professionals receiving $100,000-plus annual pensions rose by 650% (from 700 to 5,400) between 2005 and 2011.

Discover the Networks, an organization founded and led by David Horowitz

We have spoken previously about what the attacks on statues and churches that have been taking place as part of the so-called “anti-racism” protests reveal about the true nature of this movement. They show that these protests are not actuated by a desire to bring about racial justice, but by an aversion toward Western culture. It is not the elimination of non-existent racism that is the objective of this crusade. Its real goal is the destruction of liberal democracy.

Beneath the crass attacks on the physical artifacts of Western tradition, however, a less obvious but far more destructive assault is being launched: It is an assault on the core values and principles of Western civilization. It is an onslaught on the very values that have made its accomplishments possible. The Western miracle came about because certain ideas and principles gained hold in the occidental psyche, and it was these ideas and principles that enabled the Western mind to create a civilization that has advanced, flourished and excelled in ways unmatched by any other.

One of the quintessential, and arguably the most important, among these values is freedom of expression. The Western achievement could not have taken place without it. Conversely, it is the lack of this freedom that is the main reason for why other civilizations lag behind in almost every metric. It is not difficult to see why, since it is through an open exchange of ideas and sympathetic consideration of differing points of view that true learning and progress take place. Similarly, by giving room to creative individuals to express the innermost stirrings of their souls, great works of art are created.

It is freedom of expression that lies behind the West’s spectacular attainments in the arts, architecture, literature, science, music, technology and nearly every other area of human endeavor. Freedom of expression – particularly in its manifestation as free speech – is the essential prerequisite for one of the West’s crowning achievements: the liberal democracy. Western democracy, as some may know, is the only form of societal organization that grants and guarantees equal rights to all people living within it. It is also the only form of government capable of generating freedom and prosperity for the common man. Needless to say, like the marbles of Michelangelo, the symphonies of Beethoven or the paintings of Rembrandt, liberal democracy is a singularly Western achievement.

Freedom of expression has had a long tradition in Western culture. It can be traced more than 2,500 years back to ancient Greece. It is clearly seen at work, for example, in the great dialogues of Plato where participants openly and freely exchange their views and ideas. And even though its scope of permissiveness has fluctuated through the centuries, it has always run like a continuous thread through western history. We can get a sense of the value of this freedom and the kind of wide-ranging beneficial dialogue it engenders from an observation made by the late Sir Roger Scruton:

“All of the great scientists of our time, when you look back at Einstein and Freud and Piaget, and all those people, they were highly cultivated… And for them the intellectual development could have never been confined to something like a laboratory. It was a form of dialogue with civilization as a whole.”

Given that the current protests are being actuated by an anti-Western animus, it would only be natural to expect that those who take part in them would turn against this foundational western value. This they, in fact, do, and they do it with great enthusiasm and fervor. We have seen a startling manifestation of it recently in the rapid rise of the cancel culture which has taken over many of our important public institutions with astonishing speed. And we also see it in the extreme forms of political correctness which is being practiced and advocated by the social warriors of today.

Political correctness is the instrument of choice for those on the political Left in their drive to do away with freedom of expression. What political correctness does is to prevent the articulation of facts that are plainly obvious but inconvenient to those who seek power by illicit and undemocratic means. As most people have noticed by now, in an environment ruled by political correctness truth must not be spoken. Instead one must either stay silent or say the opposite of the truth. Those who cross the bounds of acceptable discourse are condemned and penalized.

Every oppressive society in history without exception has had its own form of political correctness. In every such society you were not allowed to state the obvious about the nature of that society and the relations within it. If you did, you would be promptly punished. In dictatorial societies political correctness is enforced directly by the State, and it is called censorship.

In the socialist society I grew up in, we had our own strain of strict political correctness. Although its language may have superficially differed on some points from the language of today’s western progressives, the principle was exactly the same: We were not allowed to say the truth; we were only allowed to say the opposite of the truth. In our case the truth was that we were an economically backward country and a vasal of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union itself was a deeply impoverished nation held together by a brutal police state operating under the banner of a convoluted kind of collectivist ideology which officially called Marxism-Leninism.

We were, however, not allowed to say what a bad situation this was. Instead we had to say that we lived in a very prosperous and free country and that the Soviet Union was our great benefactor. As for the Soviet Union itself, we had to agree that it was the freest and most affluent country in the world. All people in the Soviet Union were supremely happy individuals because of the abundant prosperity and the freedoms they enjoyed. There was no place on earth or in heaven more excellent than the Soviet Union. Thanks to the great work of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, mankind’s long dream of Paradise had at last come true in the great country of the USSR. And guess what was the worst place on earth? It was the United States of America, which was, so were we told, a land of tyranny where people had no real freedoms and where everyone was poor, miserable, oppressed and depressed. As an aside, it is remarkable to observe on how many points the views and rhetoric of the former communists and today’s progressives are virtually identical.

The communist politically correct rhetoric ran in complete contravention of reality, but we all had to pretend that it was true. Most people did not believe it, but there were some who did or wanted to. That something like this could take place in real life may seem unbelievable to reasonable people now, but lies of similar depth and magnitude are quite commonplace in many Western circles today.

Consider this politically correct lie: Western societies are oppressive toward women. This is about as obviously absurd a statement as the claim that the Soviet Union was a free country. To everyone with the eyes to see it is quite plain that women are not oppressed in Western democracies. On the other hand, women are almost invariably oppressed in non-Western societies. This truth, however, is not allowed to be articulated and most attempts to do so are met with severe consequences, especially for those involved in public institutions such as media, universities, government and even many corporations.

Here is another politically correct lie: In Western democracies minorities are oppressed. To every reasonable person the falsity of this is immediately evident. Rather than being oppressed, racial minorities in the United States and most western countries enjoy more protections and privileges than the majority. This is exactly the reason why minorities from non-western societies are so eager to come and live in western societies. So much so that we have to expand considerable efforts and resources to keep them out for fear of being overrun. Conversely, we do not see minorities living in Western democracies running away from their oppression to live in those wonderful non-Western cultures and societies of which multiculturalists are so fond. Why do you think this is? The reality of the situation and the behavior of people themselves completely disprove the official PC narrative. Any intimations of the obvious, however, immediately draws the ire of the politically correct organs and can result in prompt cancellation.

The cancel culture is the executory arm of political correctness. Things have become so extreme in recent months that people are now being cancelled for making even the most innocuous comments. The forms that cancellation can take at this time range from being publicly shamed through removal from platforms of public discourse and having one’s reputation destroyed to being dismissed from employment. Because of its nature, today’s social justice movement must inevitably position itself as an irreconcilable enemy of free speech. The social warriors’ position has its roots in a deep illiberal impulse that goes directly against the best principles of Western culture.

Suppression of free expression has been invariably practiced by totalitarians and tyrants of all ranks and species, whether they emerged from the West or from other civilizational streams. Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Mao Tse-tung, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro, Kim Jong Un were all sworn enemies of free speech exactly as are today’s anti-racism activists. All these tyrants instituted their own kind of political correctness and cancel culture. Today’s social justice warriors are thus firmly rooted in the tradition of those Leaders. The politically-correct, cancel-happy progressives who march through the streets of Western cities and lord it over the social medial platforms are the true heirs of these Leaders’ intolerant, illiberal impulse, which is deeply anti-Western in nature. Needless to say, all the Great Leaders mentioned above have thoroughly ruined their societies and left a deep trail of misery and corpses in their wake.

Free expression and free speech are, of course, not the only core Western values that have come under attack from the progressives. Others include the concept of private property, the idea of equal rights and equality before the law among others. Like their tyrannical predecessors, social justice warriors of today are not interested in constructively addressing the real problems in the society in which they live. Carried along by a destructive instinct, they want to bring down their society. Most of them have no clear conception of what should replace it. What they know, however, is that they want nothing to do with the principles of free speech, tolerance of dissent, respect for private property, etc., on which free and affluent societies are built. The main problem with this approach is that societies not based on these values are not good places to live. Just ask the people of Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Nazi Germany, Kim’s North Korea, Castro’s Cuba or Pol Pot’s Cambodia.

Vasko Kohlmayer