Part One

The Spectre of Marx

April 3, 2025

Hello, welcome to new readers, and a special thanks to any returning readers. We stated at the end of the last post that it would be necessary, before moving forward, to give an account of the relative states of the left and right wings at the present moment. We begin here by analyzing the left. As I warned before and as the title of this post should serve to confirm, much of what we are about to discuss is going to be quite difficult for many on the left to digest. But these are truths that the left needs to face if it is ever to have any chance of reforming itself and making productive contributions to political discourse. So, if you would count yourself on the left side of the political spectrum, I ask that you please hear me out. If my words seem harsh, it is not out of some undue hostility toward you or your values, but out of a frustration for the innumerable ways your pursuit of those values complicate the political landscape and impede real progress. I am far more sympathetic to the left than it might appear at first glance. Having lived in Massachusetts all of my life, I have always been surrounded by leftists. Many of the people I have come to love and respect have strong leftist tendencies. For a time, I even would have identified myself as a leftist. Leftists are not necessarily bad people. I quite like living in Massachusetts and I get along well with most of the people around me when it comes to everyday, nonpolitical matters. Leftists are not necessarily bad people, they just have bad politics. Of course, the old saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt.” Perhaps this is why I am so harsh on the left. Perhaps, had I grown up in a heavily right leaning area, I would be far harsher toward the follies of the right, of which there is certainly no shortage.  But, while this dynamic may have some subtle influence on my attitudes, I must say that I have never found the old saying in question to be particularly accurate, besides, I must believe that my objections to leftist politics are founded in real deficiencies in the ideology itself, for a philosopher who can be swayed so easily by such a geographic accident of birth must be a poor philosopher indeed. But I suppose that this is a matter for my readers to judge, so let’s proceed. But first a song to set the mood (I can never pass up a good Dead cover either.)

Now, before examining the theoretical and practical deficiencies that plague the contemporary left, it will be necessary to say what precisely we mean by “the left”. Thus we are met immediately with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. Any attempt to say precisely what the left is, is certain to result in bitter disagreements and controversies. If we take a survey of history, we can find countless groups that either describe themselves or are described by others as being left wing, but when we consider the actual values and goals of these groups, there is considerable variation across time and place. Indeed, there is often even variation between left wing groups in the same time and place. This is certainly the case in the United States at the present. For instance, many would describe the Democratic Party of the United States as a left wing party, including many members of the Democratic Party itself. But there are others, often self-identified leftists as well, who would deny that the United States has any left wing party whatsoever and that, though the Democratic Party is slightly to the left of the Republican Party, it is ultimately a right wing party. The possibilities for confusion are endless. How are we ever to sort all of this out? Perhaps it would be better to retire terms like left and right entirely and speak specifically and plainly about the positions of others. This probably isn’t the worst idea in the world, even if it might at times become cumbersome. That being said, it can, at times, be useful to generalize and the terms left and right do carry with them some degree of utility to this end. These terms then must capture some reality, some impulse, that serves to link those various groups that are described as belonging to the left or right respectively. But what is it that these terms capture? 

If we truly want to understand what is meant by the terms left and right, in their full significance, we cannot confine ourselves to the realm of politics. Instead, we must turn our attention to a far broader and all encompassing realm, namely, that of the occult sciences, for just like the political realm, the occult realm also stands witness to a fundamental distinction between left and right. Indeed, this distinction has been recognized far longer in the occult realm than it has been in the political realm. According to the received history, the distinction between left and right first emerged during the French Revolution as a sort of accident founded upon the fact that the more radical members of the National Assembly sat on the left side of the chamber while the more conservative members sat on the right side of the chamber. On the other hand, it would not be until the late nineteenth century that the terms left and right would enter the lexicon of Western occultism under the influence of Helena Blavatsky. But this division was not Blavatsky’s own invention, rather it is one of considerable antiquity which she had lifted from the occult traditions of the Indian subcontinent. It was there that the left and right hand paths, vamacara and daksinacara, respectively, were first clearly identified and developed as unique spiritual traditions. So, though the distinction between left and right in occultism considerably predates the distinction in politics, it is a distinction that would not have been widely recognized in France at the time of the Revolution. Yet, as we shall see, the division between political left and right tracks rather well with the same division in occultism. It is a remarkable case of synchronicity that a mere historical accident should have served to bring our political conceptions in line with a far older and deeper tradition. 

So what do these terms, left and right, mean? At their simplest, we may identify the right hand path with that of tradition and its preservation while the left hand path can be understood as that of change and deviation from tradition. Understood in this sense, it becomes clear rather immediately that left and right are largely relative terms; what is viewed as left or right will necessarily vary according to the prevailing traditions of the time and place in question. That being said, it is possible to go beyond this initial association of the right with tradition and the left with change, to other associations with other opposing principles. One is associated with light, the other with dark; one is male, the other female; one dry, the other wet; and so on. In this regard, there is a certain affinity between these Western notions of left and right and the notions of yin and yang in ancient Chinese philosophy. But here we must be careful as it may be tempting to associate the terms of another opposition, namely that between good and evil, with the notions of right and left, but this is a temptation that we must avoid at all costs. Neither the right nor the left are entirely good or entirely evil. The right hand path is good insofar as it promotes order and stability, but when it stands in the way of progress and development, the right hand path can become evil. Likewise, the left hand path is good insofar as change is necessary for progress, however, it becomes evil when it attacks tradition for its own sake and brings about chaos and disorder. The left and right necessarily presuppose and define one another. One cannot be had without the other. Thus we must not locate good or evil in either the right or the left hand paths, but in the harmony, or disharmony, that obtains between the two paths. Furthermore, we must recognize that even in a given time and place, few people will ever fall perfectly neatly on the right or the left. It is more than possible to take an extremely right leaning stance on one matter, while taking an extremely left leaning stance on another. People are complex and we should not be particularly surprised if we should find in a population a significant number of individuals who harbor a large amalgamation of left and right opinions at one and the same time. It is even conceivable that the precise amalgamation of opinions that each individual in such a population holds could vary wildly between individuals. Tranquil and beneficial progress is necessarily the product of the proper interplay between right and left forces. Thus the good cannot be identified with the right or the left alone; it must be identified with the holding of right opinions on the correct subjects to the correct degree at the correct time and with the holding of left opinions on the correct subjects to the correct degree at the correct time. As the Book of Proverbs warns us, “Turn not to the right hand nor to the left; remove thy foot from evil.” 

With this understanding of the distinction between the left and the right, we are now prepared to investigate the dynamics that currently prevail between the two. In the first place, we must recognize that we currently occupy a highly unique period in human history as far as the dynamic between the left and right is concerned. Traditional societies, as the name suggests, demonstrate a strong affinity for tradition and a suspicion of change and innovation. Thus, we might say that in such societies the right predominates. As traditional societies have been dominant for most of history, so too has the right hand path. This is not to say that traditional societies entirely spurn change or that they are incapable of making progress. It is undeniable that human society has changed drastically since the dawn of man and that change did not all occur in modern times. Nevertheless, traditional societies are extremely distrustful of change and the erosion of tradition as they fear that once such processes start they may become difficult, if not impossible, to stop and go so far that they destabilize society rather than improve it. Such societies, therefore, insofar as they recognize that change and innovation is inevitable, implement a number of safe-guards intended to limit the intensity and slow the effects of forces of change. 

Modernity marks a sharp break with all of this. If traditional societies are dominated by the right, the defining feature of modernity is the ascendency of the left. It is this ascendancy we have to thank for the rapid, unparalleled rate of progress that our world has enjoyed since the dawn of modernity. The next logical questions are when did transition from the dominance of the right to the dominance of the left first begin and why did it occur? Admittedly, these questions are a bit beyond the scope of our current concerns. We may be excused for setting the second question aside for the moment to come back to at some later date. But to hazard an answer to the first question, let us tentatively point to the Protestant Reformation, that great upheaval that swept Europe, turning traditional society on its head, ultimately giving way to the calamitous optimism of the Age of Revolution. 

Now, as we said, the left is neither wholly good nor bad, but at these early stages of the left’s ascendency, the effects it had on society were overwhelmingly positive. By having the courage to break from tradition, Europe enjoyed an intellectual gold rush, with revolutionary new ideas emerging, first in the realm of religion, then the natural sciences, and, ultimately, in political and economic life. This is not to say that the period was perfectly tranquil. Quite the contrary. The ascendency of the left was met with violent opposition from those who remained loyal to tradition and the left itself gave rise to many a perverse aberration. Moreover, the process was anything but smooth. Wherever left hand forces succeeded in eroding some aspect of the traditional order, right hand forces immediately came into play, crystallizing those sediments that had been carried away into a new formation that would serve as the new tradition which, in short time, the reinvigorated forces of the left would be obliged to sweep away once again. As time went on, this pattern accelerated and expanded to just about every area of life. In time, the forces of the left, which had first been awakened in response to very real cases of oppression and injustice, became an end unto themselves. Now, while the erosive force of the left might be necessary from time to time in order to crystallize new and more beneficial traditions, it should be quite clear that if such a process is allowed to continue unchecked in perpetuity, eventually all sediments will be washed away, leaving no material to even begin to form a foundation on which a new tradition can be built. The inevitable result is a shallow and transient culture which, with nothing to moor it down, drifts aimlessly along with the prevailing currents; complete and utter desolation. 

The question that now confronts us is, when did this ascendency of the left begin to run away on itself? At what point did the optimism and progress of the early modern period give way to the desolation we hurtle toward today? The point at which leftist energies began to degenerate and become destructive is somewhat harder to pinpoint than the starting point of their ascendency, however, we can point to two candidates that tower over the rest. The first candidate we must point to is the chaos of the French Revolution in which it first became clear just how destructive the desire to uproot tradition can become if allowed to run wild. In Revolutionary France legitimate frustrations over economic strife and government corruption and mismanagement boiled over into an indiscriminate bloodthirsty rage from which nothing with even the slightest connection to the Ancien Regime was safe. Even the King’s blood was not enough and the Revolution began to eat itself. Robespierre installed a dictatorship that frequently attacked the very rights that the Revolution had been meant to secure. But not even Robespierre was safe when the jaws of Revolution at last saw fit to lock around his throat. To be sure, the French Revolution did not mark the end of legitimate progress won by the left, but this violent eruption of revolutionary energies did serve as a warning of what was to come if this leftward march were to be allowed to continue indefinitely with no resistance. 

The second cause of the left’s lurch toward degeneracy that we might point to is none other than Karl Marx. Indeed, it might be said that as Calvin was to Luther in cementing and amplifying the ascendency of the left, so Marx was to Robespierre in cementing and amplifying its degeneration. At this point, we must tread carefully. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of political matters knows that Marx is a figure of the utmost controversy. One unmeasured comment about Marx, in whatever direction, is liable to alienate large swaths of one’s potential audience in an instant. 

My own relationship with Marx is somewhat complex and has evolved considerably over the years, but perhaps it is best to start there so that my readers might have a better chance of understanding where I’m coming from. I do not recall when I first heard the name Karl Marx. Doubtless it was relatively early in my life. What stands out to me about my earliest recollections of hearing his name is the way that it was always said in a manner that approximated a whisper, as if his very name were a dirty word that we must not be caught talking about. I remember being reassured that his ideas were dangerous, destructive, and disconnected from reality and that decent people should not waste their time reading the works of such a mad man. Now, as a child, still susceptible to perfectly black and white conceptions of the world, this characterization was relatively easy to accept. I quickly fell in line with the opinions of my elders, writing Marx off as some sort of nut to whom I should pay no mind. But, ever the contrarian, the condemnation of authority figures would not keep me away from Marx for long. So, by the time I reached high school, teenage rebelliousness along with a principled contempt for all forms of censorship convinced me to see what all of the controversy was about and I began to read Marx for myself. With that decision, all the fears of those who had warned me of the dangers of Marxism came to fruition almost immediately. I quickly ate up all that Marx said about the exploitative character of capitalism and became convinced of the necessity and inevitability of a revolution in which the masses would rise up against the rich and powerful in order to institute a more just and perfect world in which everyone’s needs would be met (I submit myself as exhibit A in the case against lowering the voting age). Fortunately, I was also a student of history and I could not ignore the track record of Marx’s ideas in all the places they had been implemented throughout the twentieth century. I tried to entertain the arguments of communist apologists for as long as possible, but ultimately found them wanting. I slowly began to drift away from Marx, coming to regard his thought as well intentioned, but susceptible to authoritarian corruption. Still, I clung to a hope that a more perfect economic system than capitalism might be possible, and I began to seek out new thinkers, eventually finding new inspiration in the more explicitly anarchist thinkers of the communist tradition, such as Proudhon, Bakunin, and especially Kropotkin, whose vision I still have a certain soft spot for (it must be the beard). Fortunately, I was soon to be introduced to libertarian thinkers who would shake me from my communist delusions. I have since come to regard communism as a deeply misguided system of thought that is both contrary to economic principles and to human liberty and the more I have learned about Marx himself, the more I have felt the need to question his own motives for advancing such a system, but this is not the place to get into that.

So much for my personal feelings about Marx. Having gotten that out of the way, let us get on with examining his actual thought. In the interest of fairness, let’s start with the positive. Marx is without a doubt at his best when he speaks as a utopian. It is quite hard to find fault with his vision of a society in which people have been liberated from arbitrary authority and in which all of their needs are met. Of course no utopia can be spoken into existence. But we also cannot entirely dismiss his criticisms of capitalism. Capitalism certainly is not perfect and it was even less so in Marx’s time. Capitalism, without question, has produced some intolerable and repugnant conditions over the course of its history, and few of those conditions compare in their brutality to those that Marx witnessed himself in nineteenth century England. Nor can we deny that, in many ways, capitalism incentivizes a way of life that serves to distract us from deeper, more meaningful aspects of life such as family, spirituality, and other personal projects. 

But just because we can agree that capitalism has its faults, and even more than that, that we should make active efforts to correct those faults, it doesn’t follow that we must follow Marx in entirely condemning capitalism. The Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek edited an excellent little volume by the name of Capitalism and the Historians, consisting of a series of essays addressing the very sorts of complaints about the conditions brought about by capitalism that motivated Marx’s arguments. There is no need to relitigate the case made in that volume here. I encourage everyone to take a look at it for themselves. But it will suffice to summarize the overarching point made there. While we can agree that the nineteenth century was witness to some incredibly deplorable conditions, those who blame capitalism are missing the bigger picture. The rise of the capitalist mode of production is responsible for the greatest improvement in technology and the quality of life that the world has ever seen. Beyond that, it fueled a population explosion the likes of which the world had never seen before. While those populating the industrial slums may have had it hard, condemning capitalism for those conditions misses the crucial question; compared to what? Without capitalism, there would not have been adequate resources to have sustained so great a population. The vast majority of them would have been doomed to waste away with nothing to sustain them. Or more likely, without the access to the improvements in medical technology and techniques that capitalism facilitated, they would have died long before that, in childhood, or at birth. Moreover, as history eventually proved, capitalism itself would ultimately work to remedy many of the ills its early iterations produced. In other words, Marx would have done well to listen to Muddy Waters.

Now to be fair, the above argument doesn’t answer all of Marx’s complaints about capitalism. In particular, while capitalism has consistently worked to improve the average person’s material quality of life, it has not necessarily improved the average person’s quality of life in other, more important areas, such as family, community, and spiritual life. Arguably, as technology has made it possible to work greater distances from our homes, and to be increasingly connected to work at all hours of the day, in many cases, capitalism has only worked to exacerbate these problems. This is the largest bone that I am able to throw to any Marxist readers who might still be with me. However, I must be perfectly clear that while I agree that there are substantial problems in these areas that we must vigorously pursue solutions to, any solution to these problems must be consistent with free market principles as it is my firm conviction that free market capitalism is, ultimately, the only viable economic model and the only one consistent with universal liberty. 

Now, having gotten the good out of the way, we must turn to the bad. Marx is at his worst when he’s trying to work out solutions to the faults he finds in capitalist society. He fantasizes that the masses will suddenly rise up and seize the means of production. Even more fantastically, he imagines that the masses will not only have the skills and knowledge necessary to maintain and manage the means of production, but that they will be able to do so even better than their current owners, seeing to it that no one shall want. Worse still, he attempts to portray his fantasy as scientific by constructing an economic theory as an edifice on which to support it. But as the imminent marginal revolution in economics would quickly demonstrate this edifice was not constructed on solid ground. In the following decades the heirs of this revolution would drive the final nails in the coffin of Marxist economics.

But as impressive as the dismantling of Marx’s economic thought was, as eloquent and learned were the attempts of the economists to bury it once and for all, Marxism proved resilient, for there is an aspect of Marxism, even more damaging than its fallacious economics, which allowed it to claw its way back out of the grave. This aspect can perhaps be most succinctly summarised in the term “dialectics.” This is a term that has a very long history in philosophy. Any first year philosophy student should be aware that none other than Plato himself championed the use of a method he referred to as dialectic in his own practice of philosophy. For Plato, dialectic referred to a method of interrogation in which, by posing a series of questions, a teacher is capable of leading a student from their vulgar understanding of the world all the way up to the contemplation of the very ideas which serve as the building blocks of all existence. Marx’s conception of dialectics is considerably different than Plato’s, but there is, nonetheless, still a faint connection between the two conceptions. The crucial link in the chain connecting Marx’s conception of dialectic to Plato’s is to be found in Marx’s master Hegel, for in many ways, the violence that Marx did to the conception of dialectic and the disaster that was thereby set in motion, had their beginning with Hegel. Whereas Plato conceived of dialectic in a limited sense, as a mental exercise intended to perfect individual souls by helping them to gradually ascend to ever higher levels of understanding, Hegel vastly expands the scope of dialectic, seeing it as a grand process that plays out all around us all the time, most evidently on the stage of history, gradually working to perfect the world itself. Now, as much as I love Schopenhauer, not least of all for his hostility toward Hegelianism, I cannot, in good faith, say that Hegel’s understanding of history is entirely baseless. There is certainly a sense in which ideas enter into history, interact with one another, and through their interaction institute new paradigms, which often retain some of the distinctive features of the initial ideas whose tension served to bring about the new paradigm. But even if we can admit that Hegel is on to something regarding the fundamental nature of historical processes, we must continue, with Schopenhauer, to chastise Hegel for always taking this too far and helping himself to far more than he is entitled to. Even if history can be characterized in terms of this sort of interplay of ideas, it by no means follows that this interplay should have any sort of beneficial or progressive character such that we should expect the new ideas that emerge out of this interplay to be more perfect than those from whence they came, or even that the general trend should be in favor of perfection rather than degeneration. Nor should we expect, even if history operates in much the way Hegel suggests, to be able to clearly discern the precise nature of the process, for instance, which ideas are involved to what extent, and, even less so, what novel ideas might emerge from this process. But Hegel takes it as an article of faith that this is possible. Indeed, one of the most crucial concepts at the very heart of Hegel’s philosophy is that of the world historical figure; a truly remarkable person who is able to discern the general directions of historical flows and act on those flows in such a way as to make them give birth to new ideas and paradigms. Worse still, Hegel asserts that such a figure is not bound by conventional morality and that we must withhold our moral judgments when such a figure transgresses conventional moral bounds in trying to drive the historical process forward.

Now, as dangerous as Hegel’s application of dialectic to the historical process might have been, it is with Marx that the power of dialectic is truly allowed to run wild. It is important to note here, before proceeding with the rest of our discussion, that though Plato saw dialectic as a vital tool in the shaping of a philosopher, he was incredibly paranoid about the possibility of this profound tool falling into the wrong hands, as he saw that, when wielded by immature or ill-intentioned minds, dialectic could actually do considerable harm, both to the individual and society at large. Indeed, according to Plato, no one under the age of 35 should be permitted to engage in arguments at all, and this only after passing a series of preliminary tests, and no one should be regarded as proficient in argumentation until at least the age of 50, as he explains in the following passage from the Republic (539c-540c), which I will quote at length for there is much relevant there, both to our current discussion, and to discussions to come, 

We hold from childhood certain convictions about just and fine things; we’re brought up with them as with our parents, we obey and honor them. 

Indeed, we do. 

There are other ways of living, however, opposite to these and full of pleasures, that flatter the soul and attract it to themselves but which don’t persuade sensible people, who continue to honor and obey the convictions of their fathers. 

That’s right. 

And then a questioner comes along and asks someone of this sort, ‘What is the fine?’ and, when he answers what he has heard from the traditional lawgiver, the argument refutes him, and by refuting him often and in many places shakes him from his convictions, and makes him believe that the fine is no more fine than shameful, and the same with the just, the good, and the things he honored most. What do you think his attitude will be then to honoring and obeying his earlier convictions? 

Of necessity he won’t honor or obey them in the same way. Then, when he no longer honors and obeys those convictions and can’t discover the true ones, will he be likely to adopt any other way of life than that which flatters him? 

No, he won’t.

And so, I suppose, from being law-abiding he becomes lawless. 

Inevitably. 

Then, as I asked before, isn’t it only to be expected that this is what happens to those who take up arguments in this way, and don’t they therefore deserve a lot of sympathy? 

Yes, and they deserve pity too. 

Then, if you don’t want your thirty-year-olds to be objects of such pity, you’ll have to be extremely careful about how you introduce them to arguments. 

That’s right

And isn’t it one lasting precaution not to let them taste arguments while they’re young? I don’t suppose that it has escaped your notice that, when young people get their first taste of arguments, they misuse it by treating it as a kind of game of contradiction. They imitate those who’ve refuted them by refuting others themselves, and, like puppies, they enjoy dragging and tearing those around them with their arguments. 

They’re excessively fond of it. 

Then, when they’ve refuted many and been refuted by them in turn, they forcefully and quickly fall into disbelieving what they believed before. And, as a result, they themselves and the whole of philosophy are discredited in the eyes of others. 

That’s very true. 

But an older person won’t want to take part in such madness. He’ll imitate someone who is willing to engage in discussion in order to look for the truth, rather than someone who plays at contradiction for sport. He’ll be more sensible himself and will bring honor rather than discredit to the philosophical way of life. 

That’s right. 

And when we said before that those allowed to take part in arguments should be orderly and steady by nature, not as nowadays, when even the unfit are allowed to engage in them – wasn’t all that also said as a precaution? 

Of course. 

Then if someone continuously, strenuously, and exclusively devotes himself to participation in arguments, exercising himself in them just as he did in the bodily physical training, which is their counterpart, would that be enough. 

Do you mean six years of four? 

It doesn’t matter. Make it five. And after that, you must make them go down into the cave again, and compel them to take command in matters of war and occupy the other offices suitable for young people, so that they won’t be inferior to the others in experience. But in these, too, they must be tested to see whether they’ll remain steadfast when they’re pulled this way and that or shift their ground. 

How much time do you allow for that? 

Fifteen years. Then, at the age of fifty, those who’ve survived the tests and been successful both in practical matters and in the sciences must be led to the goal and compelled to lift up the radiant light of their souls to what itself provides light for everything. And once they’ve seen the good itself, they must each in turn put the city, its citizens, and themselves to order, using it as their model. Each of them will spend most of his time with philosophy, but, when his turn comes, he must labor in politics and rule for the city’s sake, not as if he were doing something fine, but rather, something that has to be done. Then, having educated others like himself to take his place as guardians of the city, he will depart for the Isles of the Blessed and dwell there. And, if the Pythia agrees, the city will publicly establish memorials and sacrifices to him as a daemon, but if not, then as a happy and divine human being. 

Allow me to once again submit myself as an example of the dangers of entrusting youth with more power and responsibility than their maturity can accommodate. I may not be the most outrageous example, but I cannot deny the fact that when I first tasted of arguments and began to get my footing in the art of dialectic, I was often compelled by ego to exercise that art in an abusive way in order to ridicule and embarrass others and to suggest my own superiority. I see now that such a use of dialectic can only lead us to ruin. Now, keeping Plato’s restrictions on the practice of dialectic on the bases of age and experience in mind, it becomes clear in what ways Marx’s philosophy does far more violence to the notion of dialectic than Hegel could have dreamed. Insofar as the question of who ought to guide historical dialectical processes is concerned, we can admit that Hegel is far more faithful to Plato than Marx. Indeed, if Hegel had been correct in his interpretation of the scope of dialectical processes and their effect on history, we would have to admit that Hegel’s account of dialectic is not only in line with Plato’s, but that it completes and perfects Plato’s account, for Hegel recognizes that not just anyone can be trusted to haphazardly take hold of the reins of history and to lead the world where they will without thinking. Hegel is an aristocratic thinker. His philosophy is constructed with the express intent of providing a theoretical basis on which to justify the Prussian monarchy. Hegel did not construct his philosophy with the hope that the average person would take it up and attempt to influence the course of history with it, or even with the intent to make it accessible to the average person, as Hegel’s rightfully maligned use of language attests. His philosophy was constructed for use by highly skilled and educated agents of the Prussian state, most especially, the king.  In Marx, all of this changes. He famously declares that in Hegel all things are stood on their head and that it, thus, must be his task to set it right side up once again. This is no less the case as far as Hegel’s intended use of historical dialectic. For Hegel, the manipulation of the course of history is a task specifically suited to the elite and enlightened few; he has no interest in handing the tools of historical dialectic to the masses and would most assuredly look on any proposal to do so as the height of madness that cannot end but in disaster. Marx does not hear the protests of either Plato nor his master Hegel. He either does not recognize the potential dangers of entrusting the vulgar and unrefined with the awesome power of dialectic, or he simply does not care what disasters might result. He is steadfast in his commitment to handing the reins of history over to the proletariat so that they might rise up and take the place of the aristocracy as the driving force behind history and has little concern of what consequences might follow as a result. Indeed, the doctrines he imparts to the masses all but ensure disaster. (It is perhaps worthwhile to point out here that this site will attempt to perform a sort of balancing act in regards to the opposing attitudes of populism and elitism. On the one hand, insofar as our goal is to create a world in which all people may be free and prosperous and in which no one must submit themselves to the will of any other, this site most certainly has a populist orientation. But on the other hand, insofar as we recognize that, in many cases, people will have to undertake considerable efforts in order to improve their characters so that they might be prepared to live in a world of such radical freedom without bringing harm to themselves or others, we must admit to harbour a degree of elitism. Thus, ultimately we must take no great issue in the prospect of imparting the art of dialectic to all people. Dialectic is an immense good, capable of improving people’s souls and leading them to the greatest intellectual pleasures imaginable. If we wish for all people to experience life’s greatest pleasures, then introducing all people to dialectic is not just permissible, but absolutely essential. Our ultimate goal must, therefore, be to see to it that all people ultimately become well versed in dialectic. But if we are to avoid unnecessary pain in the pursuit of this goal, we must adopt a certain degree of elitism in our teaching of dialectic, and be quite careful to only impart those lessons that the student is prepared to learn and which are unlikely to cause harm.)

Marx is not content to merely identify areas where capitalist society leaves much to be desired or even to provide means of making up for those deficiencies, but insists on going further and declaring that these flaws are inherent to capitalism itself. Therefore, if these flaws are to be corrected, capitalism itself must be overcome. But rest assured, for Marx, capitalism is only a transitionary system. It is destined to be replaced with a new system, communism, that will correct these insufficiencies. The time of the proletariat is just arriving. Marx filled the eschatological void left by his condemnation of the opiate of the people by instilling in his followers a dogmatic faith that a revolution that would institute a new world in which all people would live in peace, harmony, and prosperity was just around the corner. 

But when it comes to describing what we should expect this revolution or the society it will produce to look like, Marx is frustratingly vague and even contradictory. Whether or not this obfuscation was deliberate, this feature of Marx’s thought has almost undoubtedly played a crucial role in propagation and resilience of Marxist strains of thought. Through his vagueness, Marx has, in some sense, managed to become all things to all people. For instance, early on, there emerged a division between the radicals, who believed an immediate revolution in which the proletariat would rise up and seize the means of production, violently, if necessary, and parliamentarians, who favored a more gradual and peaceful approach to revolution, to be achieved through legislative reform, rather than violent uprising. Marx himself often wavered on this issue, giving each camp ammunition against the others. (As much as Marx apologists love to malign his treatment of Marx, Popper’s analysis really is excellent on this point. What will utopia look like? How will the revolution be achieved? Who can say? Dylan puts it best, “the answer is blowing in the wind.” Or did Jerry Jeff put it better?) Moreover, a crucial point in Marx’s doctrine is that the revolution can only come and be successful when the material conditions permit, but what exactly these material conditions are is unclear. This gives Marxists of all camps a convenient excuse when their predictions inevitably fall short, providing them an escape route so they might regroup and revise their analysis, perhaps even wavering between camps, all the while retaining a faith in the core doctrines of Marxist thought. They may even, eventually, renounce the name of Marx, but their basic ends remain fundamentally the same. Indeed, it is those groups who, sensing the tides, wholeheartedly embraced parliamentarianism and renounced Marx, all the while retaining the general outline of Marx’s eschatological views as their ultimate end, who have proved to be the most successful of those strains of thoughts who can trace their lineage to Marx. And by far the most successful amongst these are those who have pinned their hopes on Keynesian liberalism. Marx’s true significance lies in the fact that he has set the agenda for all factions of the modern left. As many divisions and subgroups as might be located on the left, they are all united under a few common ideas, in particular, the idea that capitalism is a flawed, but impermanent system that perpetuates oppression and exploitation and, therefore, must be overcome, whether through gradual legislation, violent revolution, or some combination of the two. Marxism demands perpetual hostility toward established traditions and institutions and, consequently, can hardly be separated from the pure spirit of leftism as we have defined it above. By facilitating the propagation of this attitude across the left, Marx was able to elevate it to the status of orthodox leftist doctrine. But the notion of orthodoxy is a decidedly right oriented notion. Thus, for the leftist, Marx has succeeded in transforming even the right into the left. The committed leftist, then, has no true tradition to cling to when leftist energies become too erosive. The only option left open to them, if they are not to entirely forsake their leftist identity, is to continue on this erosive path. It is this unholy marriage between the energies of the left and right, consecrated by Marx, that is to blame for the destructive force that lies behind Marxist thought. Consequently, the spirit of Marx’s thought spreads over the modern left like a dense smog that smothers and chokes everything in its path. Marx is the spectre that haunts Europe and which now envelops the entire world. Always has been.

Now, we should acknowledge that there are those who will vehemently deny that Keynesian liberalism can trace its lineage to Marx or that it is even a leftist ideology. We need not settle this dispute now. At the very least, I think most of us, excepting of course those still clinging to that dismal ideology, can agree that it is becoming increasingly clear that Keynesian liberalism is an untenable and desolate ideology. We will have much more to say on this matter in the days to come. For now, we will focus on those strains of thought that few will disagree are decidedly on the left, especially those that remain consciously indebted to Marx. 

But this post is getting a bit long. We have covered decent ground, analyzing the left-right dichotomy and identifying the principal cause of the modern left’s desolation. It’s also been nearly two weeks since my last post and I don’t want to be forgotten. Plus, one of my stated goals with this site was to work on brevity, right? So, I’m going to exercise my authorial discretion and break this post into two parts. This controversial cliffhanger seems as appropriate a point as any to take a rest, digest what has been said, and prepare ourselves to explore the effects Marx has had on the left down to our own time. So, until next time!

An Introduction to Revolutionary Restraint