Ruth E. R.’s Reviews > American Marxism > Status Update

Jean Anyon 1970s - 2010s. ML: She trumpeted the usual bourgeoisie (property-owning capitalists) versus the proletariat (wage-earning laborers) class warfare struggle, as if a complex world and complicated relationships are so easily broken down into such a caste system… Obviously, [Marxism] rejects…all evidence of economic and social mobility that exists in capitalist societies, and especially the United States.

The revolutionary is intolerant of differing beliefs or ideas, of intellectual challenges or opposition. He demands conformity, which he declares as unity & communality. “[m]illennialists…live in an enchanted and exciting world, and they want nothing more than to bring the rest of us into it. Or, if we refuse, they will bring it to us. And if we still resist…they will strike us down as the apocalyptic enemy.”

Richard Landes, 2011:”Revolutionary ideologies only begin to appeal to large numbers (i.e. the meme spreads widely) when people feel themselves close to the moment of transformation…Only in those relatively rare moments when large numbers are convinced and mobilized by the conviction that at last the time has come, does millennialism become a movement that has entered the apocalyptic vortex.” E.g., summer 2020.

ML: there is a theological-like aspect to Marxism. A promised fundamental transformation of society and the purification of man’s nature through a rebirth of society…a “collective salvation” found in communal egalitarianism.

ML: “…having failed to actually overthrow the existing society, there are now serious cracks in its foundation….the tenets of Marxism are being used in numerous ways to attack American society and culture on myriad fronts, making these movements much more difficult to confront and challenge… with their constant exploitation of societal imperfections and individual dissatisfaction…

Marcuse (1979): “The stability of capitalism has been upset, and indeed on an international scale…It is from this point that protest grows and spreads, even if it is…still without any evident socialist aims…it appears as well in the struggles of oppressed social minorities and finally, in the women’s liberation movement. It is obvious that there is a general disintegration of worker morale…”

ML on Herbert Marcuse and the New Left (1960s to 1970s): The individual is fulfilled and free from want and struggle? The government will eventually wither away? Is this how Marxism has worked throughout the world or anywhere? Of course not. For example, is there a Marxist regime any place on earth that is not a police state? China, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela?

Weaver 1948: “The separation of education from religion, one of the proudest achievements of modernism, is but an extension of the separation of knowledge from metaphysics….But the education which best accomplishes their purpose is the systematic indoctrination from day today of the whole citizenry through channels of information and entertainment.” Thus we have lack of meaning in learning, increased suicide.

Weaver 1948: “Finally came psychological behaviorism…a reduction to absurdity of the line of reasoning which began when man bade a tearful goodbye to the concept of transcendence. There is no term proper to describe the condition in which he is now left unless to be ‘abysmality.’ He is in the deep and dark abysm, and he has nothing with which to raise himself.” Thanks Freud et al.

Weaver, 1947: “The great pageant of history thus became reducible to the economic endeavors of individuals and classes; and elaborate prognoses were constructed on the theory of economic conflict and resolution. Man created in the divine image, the protagonist of a great drama in which his soul was at stake, was replaced by man the wealth-seeking and -consuming animal.”