It is interesting how, in perhaps the most prosperous of times in America, there seems to be a resurgence of collectivist thought.
Marxism’s origin story begins with poor agrarian (manual labor intensive) societies demanding their “fair” share from the bourgeoisie – the “rich”, the business owners, the merchants. It seems that today, the idle rich, the children of prosperity, are fomenting the “revolution”.
Webster defines Marxism as” the political, economic, and social principles and policies advocated by Marx; especially: a theory and practice of socialism including the labor theory of value, dialectical materialism, the class struggle, and dictatorship of the proletariat until the establishment of a classless society.”
Marxism isn’t socialism, but socialism is one of the necessary components of Marxism.
One can stare at the contemporary revival of Marxism Lite – the flirtation with so-called “democratic socialism” with a mixture of wonder and revulsion, and not because this flirtation is exciting and new – or ever represents something profound – but because what is happening now is completely antithetical to what Marx prophesied.
Marx was nothing if not materialistic. If you view Marxism is a three-legged stool, dialectical materialism – along with the labor theory of value and class struggle – is one of the legs of the stool upon which Marxist thought rests.
Dialectical materialism is the fusion of Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic thought with the materialism of Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach, it states that all things that happen or exist have an explanation in logic and nature. It rejects any possibility that there are any supernatural reasons for anything; essentially it states that there is no God. Marxists defend this position by stating that it is a desire to live strictly by logic, but my understanding and opinion is that it is used to remove any possibility of allegiance to anything but the state. Since the state controls all things, owns all property, controls all social activities, dialectical materialism leads to the “state” being the alpha and omega, the question and the answer to all. The people must look to the state for everything.
According to this definition, Marxism is supposedly based on hard, cold reality. If it can’t be weighed, measured or counted, it doesn’t apply.
But that’s not what the contemporary Marxist idealists, useful idiots and fellow travelers are doing now.
After a steady dose of postmodernism (force-fed to America’s youth for the past half century), these pretend Marxists are now basing their motivations on warm, fuzzy unreality rather than cold, hard reality. Their ideas have no basis in materialism at all because there is literally nothing that can be weighed, measured or counted because everything is now measured in emotional terms – how someone feels, who is offended or how someone “identifies”. Actually, this is the exact opposite of dialectical materialism, a sort of dialectal etherealism based on a false, ephemeral sense of altruism.
This isn’t Marxism, at least the way Marx defined it. It is worse.
It is some kind of Star Trek, United Federation of Planets fantasy that not only doesn’t exist in reality, it can never exist simply because it has no foundation at all.
There is a belief called “Breatharianism”, through which adherents shun food and claim to live off “the energy of the universe”. Scientifically, we know this to be impossible – people starve and die if they don’t eat. That’s reality.
This new form of Marxism is political and economic Breatharianism.
The Rio Norte Line 