When the Secular Saints Go Marx-ing In.

“Fox News is not conservative. It is, in fact,
much less conservative than Theodor Adorno and Herbert Mar-
cuse, leaders of the Frankfurt
School“.

By Jason M. Morgan.
The New Oxford Review.

Alexander Riley, in a review of Mark Levin’s recent bestseller American Marxism, charges the radio and television star with failing to understand his subject. Levin characterizes some left-wing hooligans in the United States as “Marxist anarchists,” thus glibly combining two movements that, historically, have been bitterly at odds. Riley, a Bucknell University sociology professor, writes, contra Levin, that “any competent Marxist understands that Marx’s worldview and that of the anarchists are fundamentally incompatible. Any serious critic of Marxism and anarchism should certainly know this, too” (Chronicles, Aug. 2022). Riley explains:

The incompatibility of the two political philosophies — Marxism and anarchism — has to do with their opposite views on the organizational forms and composition of the revolutionary movements they desired. Marxists saw the organized industrial working class as the agent of revolution. The state was ultimately to be destroyed, but it would need to be operational for a time in the dictatorship of the proletariat until capitalist society had been wholly transformed. Anarchists rejected the centrality of the working class. They focused instead on “propagandists of the deed” drawn from the alienated middle class and underclass. These radicals would destroy capitalism not by seizing the factories and the state, but through violent uprising and terrorism. They championed spontaneity, while the Marxists preached party discipline and organization. Both philosophies fail when faced with the crude facts of reality, but a “Marxist anarchist” is a contradiction in terms.

Earlier, at the magazine’s website, Paul Gottfried, Chronicles editor-in-chief and a highly respected expert in the history of fascism, took Fox News to task for claiming to be conservative while celebrating Pride Month, featuring a transgender announcer, and employing an on-air personality whose personal life is marked by affairs, divorces, multiple remarriages, and children sired out of wedlock. Contrast this to the Frankfurt School, a group of early-20th-century cultural Marxists who set up shop in the United States after being run out of their native Germany and who “never endorsed gay marriage or celebrated transgendering.” The Frankfurt consensus, Gottfried writes, “seems to have been that homosexuality is a psychiatric disorder.” Yet today’s so-called conservatives who “lash out against cultural radicals are well to the left of the first generation of the Frankfurt School…. In comparison to Fox News producers and many of their stars,” Gottfried writes, those early cultural Marxists “were paragons of bourgeois virtues” (“Faux Conservatism at Fox News,” June 14).

Riley and Gottfried are right, of course. Fox News is not conservative. It is, in fact, much less conservative than Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), leaders of the Frankfurt School. And Levin is no scholar of Marxism. That much is clear from his book.

But Riley and Gottfried are wrong — about Marxism.

Yes, as Riley insists, Marxism and anarchism are theoretically different. In Japan in the 1920s, Bolsheviks (a species of hyper-statist Marxists) warred in the streets with anarchists, who rejected the need for a party to effect global revolution. Similar scenes played out in other countries, and not just between Bolsheviks and anarchists. Stalin had Trotsky murdered in Mexico City because Trotsky, a Menshevik-turned-Bolshevik who was Leninist to his core, was not sufficiently devoted, in Stalin’s view, to the Communist Party. And we often forget that Mao Tse-tung and his mortal enemy, Chiang Kai-shek, were both tutored by Soviets in the early days of the Chinese civil war. These distinctions are important to make in historical analysis.

And yet, I find Riley’s hairsplitting to be as disingenuous as it is fastidious. What Levin means by “Marxism” is something much bigger than chapter-and-verse from The German Ideology or Das Kapital. Levin’s understanding of “Marxism” is very close to The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels’s bombastic broadside that famously called on the workers of the world to overthrow the capitalist system and the governments that support it.

On this reading, “American Marxism,” as a concept and handle, is intelligible to the average man in the streets — or, more accurately, not in the streets. Over the past few years — indeed, the past half century — we have witnessed a multipronged onslaught against the “American way of life,” much of it playing out in riots and other street-level mayhem. While academics like Frances Fox Piven and her husband, Richard Cloward (1926-2001), wrote for The Nation about “The Weight of the Poor” (May 1966) — arguing for using the impoverished of the earth to overload the welfare system and thereby bring the U.S. government to its knees — thousands took to the streets to loot, kill, and commit arson in support of a vague “revolution.” Maybe Students for a Democratic Society and the Weather Underground were not technically “Marxist” in the doctrinaire sense. Maybe they were socialist or anarchist or just plain criminal. It makes little, if any, difference. When the layman calls these people and their terrorism “Marxist,” we all know what he means.

To take another, more contemporary example, Antifa and Nancy Pelosi are, theoretically, on opposing teams. The latter is a leader in government, the very government the former is trying to overthrow. But how different are they? Both support, for example, same-sex “marriage” and transgender ideology. Or, to put it more starkly, how different are Antifa and Fox News? The latter, like the former (and like Pelosi), also actively advocates for the normalization of same-sex “marriage” and transgender ideology. Black shirts on one side, pearl necklaces and crewcuts on the other.

But, underneath, the same dark tide rushes in.

Molotov cocktails thrown by Antifa activists have proven much less effective at advancing a revolution in the American way of life than has the imposition of same-sex “marriage” and transgender ideology by our established cultural and political institutions. And these, let’s be honest, have been less effective still than the pandemic of divorce and remarriage. Serial heterosexual polygamists ought to take serious stock of the wasteland that long preceded Obergefell. One may make theoretical distinctions all day long. In the end, they mean little to the shape and form of the broad cultural revolution we are experiencing.

Marxism — however conceived — aims to overturn an existing society. (What comes next depends on which strain of “Marxist” wins the ensuing and inevitable internecine bloodbath.) Anarchists of the Antifa variety — in a highly ironic upending of anarchist theory as advanced by mutual-aid social-conscience advocates such as Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) — aim for the same thing. Only, instead of infiltrating institutions as is the cultural Marxists’ wont, Antifa prefers to reduce those institutions to ashes.

The labels might be different, but the end goal is the same.

Meanwhile, those opposed to “Marxism” of the burn-it-all-down variety often share a strange feature. That is, they have trouble saying what they are for, or even why burning it all down is a bad idea in the first place…. Read it all.

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— Peter Herbeck on Overcoming Dark Emotions in Our Time