Thread: The left hides its Marxist ideology behind rhetoric and rationale

A very well written article that clearly explains many of the reasonings of the left.


Any good leftist will adamantly deny these charges ... because they HAVE to, or they themselves are in a state of denial about their belief systems and worldview and where they originated.

--------------------------------------------


If Marxist rhetoric were outlawed from today's political discourse, many progressives would be rendered mute. Consider President Obama's recently unveiled 2012 election slogan, "Forward!," which has a clear consonance with socialist ideologies of the interwar era.

....


Undeniably, "forward" has established a place in the socialist idiom. Was this known to the Obama campaign beforehand? In a recent article for this publication, Paul Kengor unearthed intriguing connections between key Obama advisers and early Soviet sympathizers, suggesting that the campaign might well have been aware of the historical use of the term.

What's also possible, however, is that today's progressives are simply at home with much of the rhetoric of earlier authoritarian regimes.

The degree to which Marxist rhetoric -- the most militant of all modern socialist ideologies -- pervades Western public policy and discourse is shocking. It is both amusing and disturbing to see so many politicians, conservatives, and progressives, but mostly the last of these, make a show of rejecting doctrinaire socialism and then, in the next breath, draw upon explicitly Marxist frames to support their socialist or socialistic agendas.

First, progressives who argue against capitalism or its proxies -- e.g., Wall Street, Big Oil, the top 1% of income-earners -- often do so by employing the Marxist trope, illustrated below in a quotation taken from the Marxist bible, The Communist Manifesto, that suggests that acquisition of the fruits of a capitalistic system makes for a zero-sum game (emphasis added):

You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths.1

Second, the idea that capitalism is an irredeemably antagonistic system that pits the bourgeoisie against the proletariat2 (i.e., the 1% against the 99%) is central to the Marxist (and progressive) narrative, as is the idea that workers are habitually exploited3 by a capital class that is determined to appropriate more than it "needs" and possesses a values system that makes it incompatible with society at large4.

.......

Suffice it to say that much of the modern progressive idiom owes quite a bit to Marx and Engels. Not to quasi-Marxists or Neo-Marxists, but rather classical Marxist theory.

However, while many are willing to employ such rhetoric to decry capitalism, most understand that open support of socialist ideologies remains a losing strategy. These self-styled technocrats reject the extremists of the left and right and instead advocate a "third way," a non-ideological midpoint between capitalism and socialism that emphasizes realism, pragmatism, and "what works."

President Obama has repeatedly been given credit for staking out such a position. See this

Fareed's Take: Defending Obama's pragmatism – Global Public Square - CNN.com Blogs,

this Who is Obama? Pragmatism makes him tough to define - USATODAY.com

and this http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/wo...licy.html?_r=1



However, this "third way" approach also has its root in classical Marx. In other words, when progressives seek to deflect charges of socialism, very often their principal defense is yet another invocation of Marxist thought. Ludwig von Mises in The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality explains:

When Marx and Engels ... advocated definite interventionist measures, they did not mean to recommend a compromise between socialism and capitalism. They considered these measures -- incidentally, the same measures which are today the essence of the New Deal and Fair Deal policies -- as first steps on the way toward the establishment of full communism.12

Here is the relevant quotation from Marx and Engels (emphasis added):

The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e., of the proletariat organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible.

Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.13

So when The Washington Post's Harold Meyerson writes that "American capitalism is about to be supplanted not by socialism but by a more regulated, viable capitalism," he is chronicling and indeed cheering on an explicitly Marxist game plan.

A February 2009 cover of Newsweek observed that "We Are All Socialists Now." Most are unaware that the phrase was first uttered in 1888 by Sir William Harcourt, who lamented the imposition of inheritance taxes in Britain. Over the last century, a socialist rhetoric has insinuated itself into the Western cultural, political, and economic fabric. It is now virtually indistinguishable from mainstream thought.

In sum, Marxism sought to lend rigorous scientific and empirical backing to an ancient ideology. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels presented a dramatic narrative of the evolution of the productive function and society through class conflict. In Capital, Marx introduced theory and analysis in support of this narrative. The latter work, as Sowell explains, fails to hit the mark:

Despite the massive intellectual feat that Marx's Capital represents, the Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed ... Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing.14

What of Marxism remains? Only its narrative and, above all, its seductive rhetoric, which is deployed frequently, often unwittingly, and to great effect by many on the left. But these are merely the glittery fragments of a pre-modern, utopian, ultimately magical ideology that has been thoroughly discredited because it has failed to offer, at its core, an economic system that can -- in the real world and according to its own standards -- outperform capitalism.


read the ENTIRE writing here ---> Articles: Forward. Just, well...Forward!

Originally Posted by USCitizen

The third way represented by which candidate?

Most everybody could be damn near equal ... if we could just give prosperity to the poor. We do that don't we? China got its social welfare at the expense of prosperity. We call it free trade = socialism.

Then we can just ask Alan Greenspan for other socialist ways to level the playing field. Like import labor ... to make us more equal.