Secret Marxist Part II

I hope I can be a little more on topic with this post. I feel that the last one didn't say much of substance, which is fine by me. I'm writing this more because I love to try to explain the things I believe and to investigate how they fit into the world.

What is Marxism?

I repeat that this is not going to be a very academic examination of Marxist principles, especially on the more technical economics side. I also know little about the establishment of Marx-inspired Communist governments and the specific ideologies of other figures like Mao of China.

It should have been clear in my last post that I am by no means a fan of Karl Marx. He was an antisemite and was not particularly influential within his time. I have no reason to believe he was of great moral character. My uncle (same relative I wrote of yesterday) has spoken disparagingly of Marx, saying he lived in his friend's dad's basement and leeched off his wealth to fuel his activist pursuits and dabbling with philosophy.

I really don't care to defend Marx personally, but I think some of his philosophical innovations are helpful in helping us understand the structure of society and basic mechanisms of the economy. You come after my boy Charles Darwin, however, and you will have it coming to you. (Darwin was a brilliant scientific revolutionary who was nearly 100% right, didn't originate ideas of eugenics or social Darwinism, and never recanted his theories, bite me!)

The value theory of labor is probably the first principle of Marx's theory of Communism as written in The Communist Manifesto. Marx pointed out that business- and land-owners, whom he termed bourgeoisie, had the potential to create products with more value than the inputs—the seeds or unassembled parts; however, they could not realize this potential merely on account of ownership. They had to hire people to do labor for them, the proletariat. Marx claimed that since human labor was necessary to produce valuable goods, a product's value came directly from the laborers who produced it.

A society structured around the transfer of wealth from the laborers to the owners is called capitalism. This ithe basis of most western industrialized economies, like that of the United States, Great Britain, or Germany. Marx believed that in capitalistic societies owners take control of all social institutions to maintain power and influence. To Marx this included literally everything: government, businesses, schools, religion, infrastructure, and even families. According to him, all these things would have to be abolished and restructured in a revolution toward a better society.

Marx likely would have agreed with Sigmund Freud that religion is "the opiate of the masses," engineered to manufacture consent among lower classes for oppression. For the record, I do not share this belief with Marx or Freud.

Marx's claims about family are more interesting to me. Marx noted how lower-class children were compelled into the workforce to help support their parents as early as possible. Marx thought capitalist systems would always exploit families to transfer wealth toward the ownership upper class. 

While it's illegal today to send young children to work wages to support their family, having a family is prohibitively expensive for lower classes and you could argue that the mounting costs on raising a family are mechanisms of a capitalist system meant to entrap people within it. I think this is an interesting concept and I'm definitely going to keep thinking about it.

Marx believed that since under a capitalist society business owners were incentivized to pay workers as little as possible, disillusioned laborers of the proletariat would eventually realize the dependence of the bourgeoisie on their labor and use the knowledge to their advantage to improve their wages. This is the basis of labor unions. By denying the business class workers to operate their factories and equipment, the proletariat can extract concessions from industry owners.

Marx further believed that the working class would realize mutual benefit in overthrowing business owners and employers and would take up property and factories in collective ownership so they could share the benefits of their labor. This would grow to an international movement that would sweep the world like wildfire and remove all vestiges of capitalism. He called this hypothetical system communism and he believed its revolution was imminent.

Communist Revolution in Practice

As of today, about 150 years later, a revolution of Marx's description still has yet to occur. Russian Soviets believed that their government had achieved the goals of Marx's Communism, and over the 75 years of their government they made ample efforts to inspire revolution across the world, eventually garnering them such Communist comrades as China, North Korea, Vietnam, East Germany, and Cuba; yet the world resisted a widespread revolution.

The efforts of the United States and its NATO allies played a role in stopping the spread of Communist revolution from the mid-20th century onward. The United States is a unique case because it is a highly industrialized nation that has never developed a dedicated workers party, disproving Marx's thesis that communism as a form of labor movement would be a natural development of all world economies. This was to the dismay of Soviet revolutionaries such as Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

Communist nations, in practice, ban private ownership of land and means of production. The government is in control of everything and if you supervise a system of industry you are merely an agent of the government. This gets a little hazy because under Marxist communism you're not supposed to personally benefit from a position of economic power. However, the Chinese government is a good example of a communist economy implementing free market principles; Chinese companies operate similarly to investor-owned corporations in other parts of the world and the owners are able to profit thereby. Jack Ma, the Chinese multi-billionaire CEO of Alibaba, an Amazon competitior, is a good example. However,  I imagine the Chinese Communist Party reserves the general right to interfere with Alibaba according to its wishes.

I think one of the most concerning aspects of communist societies is the high degree of internal control and punishment of dissent. The Soviet Union—from the beginning but especially during the government of Josef Stalin—severely punished opposition parties and institutions. There is no freedom of expression or meaningful protection from government abuse. All modern communist governments have been dictatorships.

There's a lot more to Marxist philosophy than this. Like I said, I don't think I've represented the socioeconomic and political sides of it very well. I'm a chemical engineer by education and a scientist by trade; economics is a difficult field for me to grasp.

Slavery, Segregation, and Marxism

What matters is that Marx theorized that oppression of the lower classes was facilitated by the more privileged groups using every possible social structure and institution to prevent the lower classes from rising against them. Last night I realized that American history has something almost exactly like that. 

It's chilling to learn the history of slavery and subsequent policies of segregation and dehumanization of Black people in the United States. In every way that Marx saw bourgeoisie dominating the proletariat, middle and upper-class white men—American bourgeoisie, if you will—dictated the lives of Black men, women and children. Black people were disposable and they were appraised as property. Their lives and labor were assigned monetary value—which they had no ability to benefit from. They could be raped or killed or stolen from with no social consequences unless their oppressor so willed it. Everything in slave culture worked to keep them exactly where they were.

Slaves could self-organize in religion, tradition, and family, but these were subject to the whims of their landowner and could be broken up or punished according to his whims. 

White slave-owning landowners had a considerable influence on colonial and later state politics. When the Constitution was written they used their influence to ensure that they could protect against the abolishment of slavery and the ability of the new federal government to interfere with their slaves. They augmented their political power against states without significant slave economies through the 3/5ths compromise; they would have counted each Black person as a full person but only to increase their political power; Black people were not citizens and would never be able to vote, after all.

They introduced Fugitive Slave Acts twice to ensure that slaves would always be seen as their property, even in defiance of the laws of other states. The state of Missouri banned the admittance of any free Black people for fear that they would radicalize enslaved peoples and agitate an uprising or mass exodus to neighboring Illinois, which was less likely to honor property claims of their oppressors.

When uprisings did occur, the white elite petitioned the full force of the Federal government against them to slaughter them all. As with Nat Turner's rebellion and John Brown's attempt to begin a violent campaign of abolition throughout the South, slaveowners and their allies were able to exert violence and power to keep things how they liked them.

The Southern Succession and formation of the Confederacy was the ultimate expression of this power. That power continued even after the Civil War and Reconstruction; white people retained the ability to control Black people, to kick them out of positions of power and self-determination, and to discourage them from ever banding together to overthrow the systems of their oppression.

If you can't see parallels with Marxism here, I don't know what to tell you.

I'm going to stop there for now. Next time I'll go more into segregation, Black liberation, Black nationalism, and how Marxism found a place in minority civil rights movements in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Secret Marxist Part I

I recently learned that one of my relatives expressed to my mom that they worry I have Marxist beliefs. I've talked to this relative periodically via personal messaging, answering questions as they grill me on how much of a "leftist" I am.

Of greatest concern to this family member is the idea that I support Marxist activism developed on the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. This is also apparently whispered about my sister-in-law who grew up on the Texas border and is also sensitive to issues of race and social justice.

Both of us still think positively of Black Lives Matter, a movement founded between 2014 and 2016 in response to police killings of Black men. This movement, of course, kicked into the mainstream American conscience in 2020 with the murder of George Floyd and the death of others like Breonna Taylor to police violence.

At one point in 2020 the sentiment that Black Lives Matter had majority support in America; this was helped by the fact that Floyd's death appeared to be from particularly brutal police handling and seemed to be motivated by his race. Conservative personalities have since been able to push back public regard for Black Lives Matter, initially by character attacks on George Floyd as a feeble drug addict who crumbled to typical and appropriate police tactics. They then more successfully drew attention to leaders of the actual Black Lives Matter organization, some of whom had raised credentials as "Marxist organizers" and had visited with authoritarian leaders such as Nicolas Maduro, the de facto president and dictator of Venezuela.

The demands of many progressives to "defund the police" also seemed to contribute to the backlash against Black Lives Matter. Many left-leaning personalities contemplated the possibility of significantly decreasing police funding and funneling the balance of money to alternative public services to address mental and social health crises. Some individuals proposed abolishing police departments altogether. Republican strategists worked hard to frame the latter as a Democratic Party priority in the 2020 presidential election.

A lot of liberal columnists pointed out that "defund the police" was poor political messaging, as crime is one of the most important issues for white and middle class Americans. Even communities of color like Blacks and Latinos repeatedly poll as desiring *far more* policing. Political commentators have noted this tendency of Black Americans to feel that police do not address crime in their communities enough, even though they are wary of police action.

In 2022, it's really easy to lose sight of where we were in 2020. There had just been a novel pandemic and society was thrown into chaos; public health officials demanded sweeping policy to prevent death and hospitals from being overwhelmed while politicians waffled the one way or the other, concerned about how much they should or should not intervene in a Presidential Election year. The economy was thrown into chaos with most of the country having to adjust to work from home to avoid personal gatherings, with others completely fired from their jobs or left unemployed as their businesses or employers failed. Perhaps the energy that went into the racial justice protest was amplified from the insecurity of the global pandemic.

I see the 2020 racial justice protests as a period of nationwide excitement and concern motivated in part by the social uncertainty around the pandemic. People came out in droves to protest; naturally with a large percentage of the population agitated by something there was a degree of violence in public demonstrations even though the vast majority of the activity was peaceful.

Insurers have reported that some $2B+ of insurance claims by businesses and property owners were made relating to damage from rioting during the protests. I think it's tragic that so many people suffered economically and that the extent of property damage was as bad as it was. I worry, however, because political opponents of the racial justice protests often sought to smear the whole movement, including the peaceful protests, with the worst actions perpetuated by agitators, opportunists and the overzealous.

There were some things that happened in 2020 that were seen overall as stupid or cringy. "Defund the police," for me, was one. So were efforts of occupied protests and police-free zones like CHAZ/CHOP of Seattle. In Salt Lake City agitators flipped over police cars and vandalized them. Later, at a protest held at the Salt Lake District Attorney office, red paint was thrown across the building's entrance and facade, leading to blanket arrests for vandalism and gang charges. In Provo, Utah, the city I lived at the time, protestors stood in the way of one of the major intersections and someone fired a gun at a driver who tried to force his way through the blockade.

Today, it's easier to dismiss reports of apparent injustice as we've adjusted to the pandemic and national attention has moved to other issues, like the more than 6 months of rapid fire inflation and the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Even still, police misconduct continues and seems seldom held to account. Perhaps the only meaningful thing that stemmed from the racial justice protests aside from accountability for Floyd's murderer was the increasing awareness of injustice. Perhaps the protests only hastened the fracture of American society. But I definitely understand the desire to restructure the system we live under. 

Some of the most celebrated aspects of American history were the acts of overthrowing preexisting institutions or norms. I count in that category the Revolutionary War, the drafting of the Constitution, the democratic revolution under Andrew Jackson, Manifest Destiny, much of early Mormon History, the Civil War and subsequent abolition and 13th-15th Amendments, the suffragette movement, the New Deal, the entrance into WWII and the efforts of the Manhattan Project, the Berlin Airlift, the space race and moon landings, the establishment of 20th century Israel, the Civil Rights movement, and so forth.

These things were motivated by passionate people striving for deeply-held beliefs. In every case there were people who went too far and overstepped the bounds of what was deemed appropriate at the time. Many of them we would even condemn today. But nearly all of those things stick with us as times that Americans became better and did more, and I sincerely believe that we're better off today because they happened. I want to have more of those moments.

America has long been characterized by social movements calling for improvement of the treatment of oppressed groups. Early in the nation's colonial history, there were leaders who hoped to improve relations with indigenous peoples. William Penn was one of the first of these. He sought to treat native people fairly and to respect their lands. He was also very mindful of the needs of religious Christian minorities. 

As a Quaker, Penn had been a religious minority in England. In establishing Pennsylvania, he hoped to secure freedom from bigotry for his faith and to share it with others of varying beliefs.

It's interesting to note William Penn in contrast with another person with a special interest in oppressed groups, Karl Marx. In the Communist Manifesto, Marx along with his partner Friedrich Engels posited that history was established on the basis of class struggle.

Unlike Penn, Marx didn't think much about religion as a factor in oppression . He was ethnically Jewish through his father, but his father had converted to Christianity and Marx had no cultural ties to Judaism. Marx was a vocal critic of Jewish society and religion and a frequent antisemite. It's ironic to me that Marx was so close to one of the most oppressed groups in history and thought about oppression often yet he ignored how religion could serve as a target for oppression by those in power.

I think this is because Marx focused more on economic status as an indicator of power. I don't know much about Marx's philosophy beyond the excerpts I've read from the Communist Manifesto. Next time I'll go more into my takeaways about what Marx said, examine how his theories were implemented in later Communist and Capitalist societies, think about why activists for oppressed groups use his theories to describe non-economic social groups, and deconstruct how conservatives worry about Marxism in modern politics.