Sorry, Marjorie; Marxism not the bugbear you’re looking for | Opinion | dnews.com

2022-08-12 11:10:11 By : Mr. Andy song

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“Oh mommy, I ain’t no commie.”

— Lyrics from Brewer and Shipley’s “Oh Mommy”

Webster defines “bugbear” as an “imaginary hobgoblin or specter used to excite fear.”

We, as white, American, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, have a long history of bugbears not used to frighten children, but to divert attention away from the real parasites who have always picked the pockets of average folks like you and me.

Remember reading “the only good Indian is a dead Indian?” Ever heard of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882? Or the Jim Crow laws which kept southern Blacks in their places? Or Roosevelt herding Japanese-American citizens into concentration camps for the duration of World War II?

Well, with the exception of the Donald’s race-baiting against our brown-skinned neighbors to the south, overt playing of the race card gradually fell out of favor in the 20th century.

A little more than 100 years ago, corporate CEOs, well-heeled Wall Street titans and the big money that has always fueled the Republican Party found a replacement bugbear: the hoary specter of Karl Marx and his evil beliefs.

There was the Red Scare which broke the back of radical industrial unionism in the first quarter of the 20th century followed by Russia’s Bolshevik revolution which struck terror in the heart of every God-fearing capitalist throughout the civilized world. Papa Joe Stalin was an easy guy to hate until we needed him and his Red Army to whip Hitler’s ass in Europe.

Then came the Cold War and once more, Marx and his communist followers became objects to fear and hate. McCarthyism was the natural outcome.

Today, 33 years after the Iron Curtain fell, communist-identifying nations can be counted on the fingers of one hand and communist cells are but a distant memory. Surprisingly, Georgia’s flamboyant freshman Congresswoman, Marjorie Taylor Green, is out there once again, waving the bloody flag lumping socialists Marxists and commies into one grand bugbear bag.

While part of me snickers at her painfully profound ignorance of things Marxist, another part of me is fearful that her hysterical demonizing will be believed by those, like her, ignorant of what Marxism was really all about and how little it threatens American society today.

To lay groundwork, a good portion of my academic career focused on the writings and politics of Karl Marx. It is true that, in his youth, he was a firebrand. His “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” written in 1848, when he was 30, calls for the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with a communist Garden of Eden wherein the state itself would wither away.

In his dotage, he had grown from fiery rebel into an organizer of labor unions and political parties … all working within the existing system.

This is not to say he wasn’t a dreamer. He remained that throughout his life. He was a stalwart supporter of women’s rights and saw society’s subjugation of women has not a lot different from the exploitation of men’s labor by capitalism.

In his utopian scheme of things, he argued “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Sounds a little like an early Christian commune.

Marx looked ahead to doing “one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” Not a wage slave.

He could also be a realist. He foresaw that revolution in a backward country like Russia or China would result in a feudal despotism as terrible as the system it replaced. The successful communist revolution could only occur when the processes of economic development have brought together a self-conscious working-class, aware of its own strengths and its unique place in history.

With this much said, it also should be noted throughout 60 years of grappling with Marx, I have been a consistent critic.

His materialist universe has no room for independent spiritual notions and all human ideas ultimately trace their origins to one’s relationship to the prevailing modes of production.

As a historian and an economist, Marx had few peers. As a forecaster of why people think and behave the way they do, not so much. If Marx’s theory of ideological formulation were correct, Hitler’s Nazis would never have prevailed in Germany.

When I was young, the Communist Party ran candidates for president. No more. The ghosts of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky are nothing more than waspish phantoms. Red China and Vietnam are key trading partners and resemble Marxist communism in name only.

McGehee, a lifelong activist, settled here in 1973 and lives in Palouse with his wife, Katherine. His work life has varied from bartender to university instructor to wrecking yard owner.

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