The Challenge of Marxism
written by Yoram Hazony
Published on August 16, 2020

This well written and insightful article lays out the fundamental problem that ‘liberal-society’ has with Marxism, it is fundamental and insurmountable without stepping back and being able to address the core intellectual attraction of Marxism.

The article also points out clearly that the challenge to the liberal-capitalist society today is a dispersed network of Neo-Marxist follow ons not the International Communist Marxism of the soviet era.

The current rag bag liberal street agitation groups espouse Neo-Marxism in the form of defining the world as made up of human association groups (once classes now identity groups) who have natural affiliation and self awareness, organized in society into a hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. Where the oppressors form a web of custom, law and history that supports this oppression largely hidden from most of the oppressed.

• In this theory:
  • there is nothing but oppression and
  • that when seen this can and should be attacked in all ways possible up to and including direct violence. That there is
  • one true view of the world, that of the woke (or Marxist, SJW, etc) and
  • any other view is false and that
  • defending other views is violence and
  • can be addressed with physical violence up to and including death.

The basis of liberalism are enlightenment values of freedom, liberty, human worth… which can be argued are actually conservative values expanded to the masses without much of a rational argument.

The Marxist analysis of class, oppressor and oppressed is clean, rationale and expansive enough to cover most situations if the area of regard if defined clearly. The liberal while depreciating the marxists’ absolutist tendencies can understand the analysis and is forced to agree since they rarely have a good counter argument that does not require them negating marxist truisms and engendering attacks on their racism, classism, elitism, misogyny, etc. Over time one article of liberal faith or piece of history, has it’s context distorted to the Neo Marxist account and is then pulled down by the rabble no one can deny.

And so the Marxist cadre, not calling themselves that but acting in swarming semi accord have captured the elite institutions which were largely liberal and now are largely controlled by Neo-Marxists with the reins of power in their hands.

• So I say that the Marxist analysis makes sense right?
• No I said that the Marxist analysis is clean and rational.
  • But it purposefully limits the definition of ‘the problem.’
• The basic analysis of self aware human groups is true.
  • But the abstraction of the definition is taken to extremes to sharply define a ‘class’ such as mobility, demographics, etc are limited
  • The other abstraction; of oppression, also goes to extremes to ignore countervailing facts, social cohesion, economics, even the availability of violence to both sides
• In Marx’s time, while the Imperial Russian autocratic-oligarchy vs serf appeared to have some relationship to the Owner-Manager vs worker in capitalist free holds like Victorian England, the reality was that in all cases each side had its risks and its pains as well as advantages and pleasures.
  • And at the end of the day the masses always had the pitchfork and torch if things got bad enough. While peasant rebellions rarely ended well for the rebel leadership it usually had a positive long term effect on the survivors because the upper class wanted to avoid reoccurrences.

Ok so I have wandered on for some time, and off topic really, the article is very good, much better than my rough handling of a few of it’s very clear points. Read it.