{"id":84401,"date":"2025-08-05T06:00:11","date_gmt":"2025-08-05T10:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/?p=84401"},"modified":"2025-08-02T12:20:23","modified_gmt":"2025-08-02T16:20:23","slug":"the-persistence-of-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/geneveith\/2025\/08\/the-persistence-of-communism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Persistence of Communism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In 1991, the vast communist enterprise known as the Soviet Union was dissolved, along with its evil empire.\u00a0 This was due\u2013in addition to the heroism of its opponents\u2013to the failure of its economic system, the hatred of its citizens for its totalitarian repression, and the fact that nearly everyone in Russia and Eastern Europe stopped believing in Marxism.<\/p>\n

Communism collapsed, with the important exception of China, which kept it alive only by changing it by incorporating elements of free market capitalism.<\/p>\n

And yet today, Marxism, with its economic-political manifestation known as communism,\u00a0 is making a comeback.\u00a0 Antifa street protesters and their leftwing allies are agitating for a revolution.\u00a0 The \u201cpost-Marxists\u201d who have substituted out Marx\u2019s economics-based class struggle for other kinds of class struggles based on race, sex, gender, et al., are still very much Marxists.\u00a0 And they reign supreme on university campuses and other intellectual centers, enforcing ideological conformity just as their counterparts did in the Soviet Ministries of Education and Culture.\u00a0 Today Democratic Socialists\u2013that is, Marxists who believe in ushering in the revolution through political action rather than violence\u2013are poised to get elected to run New York City and Minneapolis.<\/p>\n

\n

During the Cold War, conservatives worried about communist infiltration of the government and other institutions, a concern that would be mocked as paranoid, though post-Soviet discovery of documents proved that quite a bit of infiltration was, in fact, going on.\u00a0 But today even many conservatives<\/em> sound as if they have been infiltrated, echoing the Marxist party line that workers are being oppressed by free market capitalists.<\/p>\n

Why is communism persisting, despite its failures and its record? I like historian Gary Saul Morson\u2019s comment:\u00a0 \u201cKarl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto<\/em> (1848) proclaiming that \u2018a specter is haunting Europe\u2014the specter of Communism,\u2019 but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

That comes from Morson\u2019s essay for the Free Press<\/em> entitled Why the Revolution Never Ends,<\/a> a review of \u00a0two new books about communism from the same mainline publisher, Basic Books.<\/p>\n

Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism<\/em><\/a> by historian Maurice Isserman is a sympathetic account of the American Communist Party, whose members he portrays as idealistic social justice warriors who were betrayed by their Soviet handlers.<\/p>\n

In contrast,\u00a0To Overthrow the World: The Rise and Fall and Rise of Communism<\/em><\/a> by historian Sean McMeekin.\u00a0 The reviewer Morson, who calls this book \u201cthe best short history of communism that I know,\u201d summarizes his thesis:<\/p>\n

For McMeekin, the essence of communism, and the source of its endless appeal, lies not in its outdated economics but in its totalitarian imperative to destroy utterly the old world, reject all traditional values, and completely remake both individuals and society.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That strikes me as a brilliant insight, explaining why communism has been and still is so popular among alienated intellectuals, young people, and the power-hungry rich.\u00a0 And why China is still communist, despite its free market reforms.<\/p>\n

Thus, Chairman Mao\u2019s \u201ccultural revolution\u201d in China mobilized young people to destroy\u00a0\u201cthe four olds\u201d:\u00a0 \u201cold thought, old culture, old customs, and old habits.\u201d<\/p>\n

The strategy of the mass-murdering, culture-destroying Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, says McMeekin was\u00a0\u201cstripping away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, structures, and forces which have guided an individual\u2019s life,\u201d until each person \u201cis left an atomized, isolated individual unit; and then rebuilding him according to party doctrine.\u201d<\/p>\n

McMeekin quotes Lenin:<\/p>\n

Far from pretending otherwise, Lenin scorned anything but force, which was to be used not as necessary but whenever possible. The fundamental fact about Soviet coercive power, he insisted, is that it was and always would be unlimited. Soviet schoolchildren learned Lenin\u2019s definition of \u201cdictatorship of the proletariat\u201d as \u201cnothing more nor less than authority untrammeled by any laws, absolutely unrestricted by any rules whatever, and based directly on force. The term \u2018dictatorship\u2019\u00a0has no other meaning but this<\/em>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lenin sought to employ law as an instrument of terror.\u00a0 \u201cThe law should not abolish terror,\u201d he told the People\u2019s Commissar of Justice who was drawing up the new Soviet legal code.\u00a0 Rather, terror \u201cshould be substantiated and legalized in principle, clearly, without evasion or embellishment.\u201d<\/p>\n

This mindset is evident in communism from its very founding.\u00a0 \u201cTerror was supposedly capable of accomplishing what Engels called \u2018the leap from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom,\u2019 that is, to a world in which humanity no longer submits to laws of nature but alters them as needed.\u201d\u00a0 Freedom requires altering the laws of nature<\/em>!\u00a0 Sound familiar?<\/p>\n

McMeekin gives much more evidence in this vein, some of which Morson brings up in his review.\u00a0 But that \u201cit\u2019s the economy, stupid\u201d does not really apply to the far left\u2013though it is doubtless a good bait to attract idealists and a good cover to hide the real agenda\u2013explains a great deal, from its antagonism to the working class to its embrace of the transgender cause.<\/p>\n

Until the apocalypse, there will always be those with a \u201ctotalitarian imperative to destroy utterly the old world, reject all traditional values, and completely remake both individuals and society.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Illustration:\u00a0 Propaganda poster depicting Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin<\/a> via Wolfman5678, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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