For Marx, history itself could be viewed as a never-ending sequence of battles between the oppressed and the oppressor. Now Marx was more specific than that, because he took an economic view of history–a deeply materialistic view of history–and believed that people were fundamentally motivated by economic motives.
The basic Marxist ideas–I’m sure most of you know–is that the social world in life itself is a battle between those who have and those who don’t have. And that the reason that those who have have is because they take it from those who do not have. And that that’s the most appropriate way to view history itself, I suppose stemming back as far back as you can imagine. And that it’s also useful to think that way if you want to conceptualize the proper future, because the proper future would be one in which that essentially unjust division would be eradicated so that everyone would be equal in some fundamental way; and so that there wouldn’t be an owning class and a working class let’s say.
The world’s a rough place, you know, and there’s no doubt that some people have it better at some times than other people. And some people have lives that are so unbearably tragic that it beggars the imagination. And other people seem to float through life with nary a worry–although I think that’s also exaggerated, because no matter how well-off you are economically you’re still not really free from the fundamental tragedies of life. Your loved ones still get sick and and struggle through life, and you’re still subject to aging, and eventually to death; so, it’s not like even at the upper end of the distribution you’re necessarily protected against the essential tragedy of life.
And I also think that that’s another problem with the Marxist worldview, that it implicitly makes the case that the cause of human suffering is social injustice. And that’s true in some sense. A social injustice can amplify suffering, but it’s certainly not the cause of suffering. The cause of suffering in some sense is life itself and it’s fundamental limitations. And it’s really important to make a distinction between those two things because otherwise you can easily be tempted to assume that you could bring the utopia in if you only adjusted to sociological conditions properly. And there’s just no reason to assume that that’s a reasonable perspective whatsoever. As far as I can tell, I think it’s actually a form of existential cowardice to assume that. Because it doesn’t grapple with the real problem. And the real problem, as religious people have stated over and over throughout recorded history, is that life itself is is suffering. That’s a fundamental truth. I mean it’s certainly the truth. It’s a Buddhist truth, a fundamental Buddhist truth. And it certainly graphically presented in the idea of The Crucifixion. And that’s a hard pill to swallow. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. And it’s comforting, I suppose, to think that if you just adjusted society properly that all that suffering would go away; but there isn’t really any evidence that that would occur.
Now, I read George Orwell when I was a kid–probably about 17. I read a book called “Road to Wigan Pier”–which if you haven’t read, I would seriously recommend. It’s a great book. It’s in the same line, in some sense, as “Animal Farm” or “1984,” although it’s more journalistic. Orwell went to this coal-mining town in northern UK called Wigan Pier and documented the lives of the working-class coal miners who lived there. I mean to call their lives difficult is not even scratching the surface. They were old by the time they were 40, most of them had no teeth by the time they were 30, they lived in abysmal conditions, and the coal miners themselves–who of course developed black lung quite early in their life–had to crawl through short tunnels three and a half miles just to get to their eight-hour shift–which was wasn’t paid for, that was the commute fundamentally. Orwell, who was a rather tall man said that after 500 yards he could hardly stand up. And I mean that’s just the beginning.
So, you know Orwell, who engaged in the kind of argument that I think it’s Bret Weinstein has coined “Steel Man”. You can make a Straw Man out of your opposition–which is a very bad idea because it weakens your ability to think–but you can also make a Steel Man out of your opponent. So you even amplify the power of their arguments if you can manage it so that when you formulate a rejoinder, the rejoinder is as powerful as it could possibly be. And of course this is exactly what Orwell was doing. He was saying, “look, if you had any sense you’d have compassion for these working-class people because their lives are almost indescribable brutal.” But in the last half of the book–he wrote this for the Left Book Club, which was a socialist book publishing entity that put out I think a book a month–he switched to an analysis of what he saw as the failure of the Labour Party in the UK to attract as much attention and support from the general population as you might predict given the dismal conditions of the working class. And he wrote a line in there that I’ve never forgotten. Orwell said in last half of “The Road to Wigan Pier” that it was obvious that the sort of tweed weary middle-class socialist that was typical of the English socialists of that period didn’t like the poor, he just hated the rich.
And I never forgot that because I had observed that. It seemed to catalyze and fully articulate the intuition I had, that there was something rotten in the state of Denmark and that what might be passing for empathy was actually masking something far darker. And you know one thing you do, if you’re a sensible person, is you kind of view your own positive motivations with a bit of skepticism. So if you’re running around proclaiming that you’re full of empathy for the working class, it’s always worth giving some consideration to whether there’s darker motives underneath your so-called saintly goodness. Because you know saintly goodness actually happens to be in rather short supply. So, if you’re laying out a claim to that, you better be sure you’re right. You better be sure you’ve examined your conscience. And of course people tend not to do that, because it’s a rather dismal affair examining your conscience. And you tend to find out that there’s many dark things going under this under the surface that you’d rather not admit. And that’s certainly the case in our world right now.
I was quite convinced by Orwell’s analysis that there was something other than brotherly compassion motivating the theory that the world could be properly divided into the oppressed and the oppressor, and that all of the suffering of humanity could be laid at the feet of that division. Because there’s something convenient about it, especially if you identify yourself as the oppressed. Because it gives you a more instantaneous moral stature, and it gives you the opportunity to act on that hypothetical moral stature.
The thing you might ask yourself too is, “well, how do you know about the Marxist how do you know if most of them had sympathy for the working-class? You know, maybe that was genuine. And how can you distinguish that from resentment of this successful?”–by however whatever means or along whatever dimension that’s defined.
And I would say by the murders. So that’s how.
This is a case that Solzhenitsyn made very clearly in “The Gulag Archipelago,” which is a book that every high school student in the United States should read and none do. So none of them know about any of this. And that’s an absolute crime. And it’s a consequence of, I would say, the leftist domination of the education system. Because it’s a crucial document, maybe the most crucial document of the 20th Century. And we fought a whole Cold War over those issues. We put the planet at risk to lay that genocidal ideology to rest. And we haven’t done it. And that’s worth thinking about. So, Solzhenitsyn knew that ideas had had other ideas wrapped up inside them in some sense–that an idea had a manner of unfolding in time and space in some sense like a computer program. Once you put it into a computer its internal logic would reveal itself across time and space inevitably.
And when the internal logic of Marxism revealed itself, then hundreds of millions of people died. And you know it’d be okay if it just happened in Russia and nowhere else. But it happened across the Soviet Union, it happened across China, it happened in Vietnam, it happened in Cambodia. It’s like how many damn examples do you need before you think something’s rotten in the state of Denmark? We still got North Korea to deal with. I mean what kind of place is that? Everyone there is starved. It’s a monstrous state and it could still embroil us in an absolute catastrophe.
So, as far as I’m concerned the historical evidence is in and the idea that the Marxist doctrine is genuinely based on sympathy for the working class is a lie. It’s a history itself has shown that that’s false. Now you know, maybe the revolutionaries back in 1917 didn’t know. I mean there was trouble in Russia in 1917. I mean it was an ugly situation. And maybe they had sufficient justification to assume that their utopian vision was a historical possibility. I’m not convinced of that by the way, but I think you could make that case. I think they were motivated by resentment and hatred right from the beginning. But you could make the case that at least they also had the benefit of ignorance. But we don’t have that now. It’s like I don’t know how much proof you need. But if you need more proof than the 20th century provided, then the next layer of proof is going to be the annihilation of everything. Because we came very very close to that a number of times especially in the late 20th century.
