In a Conservative Mood

Marxism, which sees present circumstances as having developed naturally out of those which preceded them, and which predicts that future circumstances will unfold naturally out of those which exist now, sits uneasily side-by-side with a Leninism that holds that a vanguard party, by means of its actions, will bring about a change that will not happen but for that action. The one sees the communist future as unfolding naturally in accordance with the logic of history, and the other sees the future as needing a push.

It is a fool’s errand to try to reconcile the two doctrines, and this is why the Soviet Union came to call its national ideology Marxism-Leninism. Marxism provided an opportunity, by virtue of its existence as a theory about how things work, for Lenin to step in, add his own suggestion into the mix, and make Marxism the doctrine of the state he brought into existence by his action. The Leninists and the Trotskyites spoke truly in imagining the Bolshevik Revolution a harbinger of a revolution that would sweep the world, but they obscured the violence of Lenin’s seizure of power in so doing, as there is technically no room for the human will in determining what the world will look like. One does not construct the revolution, for this suggests it can be deconstructed, and that there is something underlying the ideology that is seized upon as the revolution’s justification. Rather, one makes the revolution, an accomplished turning in a movement that effects a permanent change, from which there is no return.

Capitalism is just nature. Marx took over undigested from Adam Smith the doctrine that individuals are self-interested, and so on the Marxist system, it is natural that an individual push for his financial advantage. The idea that legislation can change human nature is foolish; if the revolution came to pass, what would the future look like? Stalinist collectivization produced famine; it is quite clear that the revolutionary future is modelled on the messianic, and that there are no practical policies to be implemented that will bring about a world-change that is theological in nature.

Marx did a good job of describing how the present had developed from out of the past, but his insertion into the narrative of a prediction about the future had no validity. Study of the classics is foreign to a revolutionary nature because it teaches us about the eternity of injustice, whether social or personal. It is quite out of keeping with reality to suppose that the immiseration of a class of people is unknown to previous civilizations, or to suppose that it is something that can be permanently overcome in favor of a just order. Injustice is woven into the fabric of life.

Particular policy prescriptions, such as education that teaches about human difference and respect for difference, can cause generations to be raised that will be more tolerant than they might be otherwise, and seeing someone in financial impoverishment might then be no reason to think that the person is somehow of a different class in the sense of being less deserving of health and well-being. It is unclear that national differences can be wished away.

Bourgeois democracy is better than the dictatorship of the proletariat, and there is anyhow no longer a Western proletariat to be found. Even at the stage of mechanized industry that produced a reserve army of labor, anyone educated knew better than to think that the world could be so neatly broken down into classes of oppressor and oppressed as Marx pretended it could be, and that Marx was doing anything other than rabble-rousing. History has demonstrated that if there is to be a revolution, it will come from the right, and that the workers are far from being progressive. Authoritarians mobilize the uneducated against governing elites for the sake of their own power, and pretend an unmediated connection between themselves and the people that representative government, designed by elites, is intended to circumvent. The Electoral College system put in place by the Constitution of the United States is demonstrated to be toothless by the rise of Donald Trump to the presidency, since it is precisely the accession of a leader such as him that it is designed to prevent. This, of course, is before the universal dissemination of the franchise. One of the things about which Marx was right is that the legitimacy of mass democracy is now a universal prejudice. The mob having once gotten the right to vote, they have developed a taste for it, even if it is only for the thrill of abdication of the rule of law, so long as they are the ones to do it, and thumb their noses at the founders of the country whose work they tear down and destroy.