Any Marxist is either a fool or a knave

First, let’s follow the advice of Greek rhetoricians and agree on the terms. This advice is especially valuable these days, when many people think words mean whatever they want them to mean.

For example, what is a Christian? If you read Tolstoy’s musings on such subjects (or, to save time, my book God and Man According to Tolstoy), he defines a Christian as someone who follows the moral commandments of the Sermon on the Mount.

In other words, a Christian to him is basically just a good person, as the notion is understood in Christian morality. But that understanding is false and logically unsound.

A Buddhist, or Muslim or an atheist can be a wonderful chap, a real prince among men. But he isn’t a Christian, is he? ‘Christian’ isn’t just any old word. It’s a term and, as such, narrowly denotes something specific, leaving no room for multiple meanings.

A Christian is someone who believes in the divinity of Christ as laid down in the Creeds. If he doesn’t, he isn’t a Christian, for all the sterling traits he may possess.

Or take ‘fascist’, which these days is used loosely as a way of demonising one’s political opponents.

However, the dictionary defines fascism as “a populist political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual, that is associated with a centralised autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, and that is characterised by severe economic and social regimentation and by forcible suppression of opposition.”

Hence, if a critic of Margaret Thatcher describes her as an awful woman, that’s a perfectly legitimate opinion, wrong though it is. But if he describes her as a fascist, which many do, he isn’t just someone who is mistaken. He is a rank idiot incapable of using words precisely.

However, let’s not be pedantic about it. Under some circumstances, both ‘Christian’ and ‘fascist’ may be used metaphorically, not literally. Thus, a boy may describe his martinet schoolmaster as a fascist, or himself as a Christian if he helps old people across the street.

Both terms leave room for such latitude, though not as much room as many claim for them nowadays. This isn’t the case with the term ‘Marxism’.

It allows no freedom of interpretation whatsoever. It can only ever be used in its dictionary definition: “the political and economic theories of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, later developed by their followers to form the basis of communism.”

Just as the Creeds encompass the whole meaning of Christianity, so does The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels contain the entirety of Marxism. Neither document allows for cherry-picking. A Christian believes every word of the Creeds; a Marxist believes every word of the Manifesto. Everything else, to borrow a phrase from Hillel the Elder, is just commentary.

Since for 70-odd years the most formidable propaganda machine in history was dedicated to spreading Marxism, many feel they know what it’s all about without having to resort to the primary source.

That’s a pity. If more people had actually read The Communist Manifesto, one hopes there would be fewer innocents who echo Marxist propaganda by saying that Marx’s ideals were wonderful but regrettably unachievable; or else that Marx’s theory was perverted by Soviet practice.

In fact, Marx’s ideals are unachievable precisely because they are so monstrous that even the Bolsheviks never quite managed to realise them fully, and not for any lack of trying.

For example, the Manifesto (along with other writings by Marx and Engels), prescribes the nationalisation of all private property without exception. Even Stalin’s Russia in the 1930s fell short of that ideal.

In fact, a good chunk of the Soviet economy was then in private hands (small agricultural holdings, repair shops, construction and other co-ops, some medical care, etc.). And people were allowed to own cottages, clothes on their backs, radio sets, dovecotes, tools – really, compared with Marx, Stalin begins to look like a humanitarian getting in touch with his feminine side.

Marx also insisted that family should be done away with, with women becoming communal property. Again, for all their efforts, Lenin and Stalin never quite managed to achieve this ideal either, much to the regret of those of us who could see an amorous pay-off in such an arrangement.

Then, according to the Manifesto, children were to be taken away from their parents, pooled together and raised by the state as its wards. That too remained a pipedream for the Bolsheviks.

They tried to make it come true by forcing both parents to work, and leaving no place for their children to go but the state-owned crèches, kindergartens and young pioneers’ camps. But that was as far as it went: kindergartens and camps weren’t compulsory, and those fortunate women who could get by without full-time employment were still free to read Pushkin to their children.

Modern slave labour, such an endearing feature of both Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, also derives from Marx – and again Lenin, Stalin and Hitler displayed a great deal of weak-kneed liberalism in bringing his ideas to fruition.

Marx, after all, wrote about total militarisation of labour achieved by organising it in “labour armies”, presumably led by Marx as Generalissimo and Engels as Chief of the General Staff. Stalin came closer to this than Hitler, but again fell short.

No more than 10 per cent of Soviet citizens were ever in enforced labour at the same time. The rest could still more or less choose their professions, and for some it was even possible to choose their place of employment.

The only aspect of Bolshevism and Nazism that came close to fulfilling the Marxist dream was what Engels called “specially guarded places” to contain aristocrats, intelligentsia, clergy and other vermin. Such places have since acquired a different name, but in essence they are exactly what Marx and Engels envisaged.

Here Lenin and Stalin did come close to fulfilling Marx’s prescription, but they were again found wanting in spreading concentration camps to a mere half of the world. So where the Bolsheviks and the Nazis perverted Marxism, they generally did so in the direction of softening it.

However, even if neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis were faithful to the chapter and verse of the Manifesto, they accurately followed its tonal quality. Every line of that repulsive booklet sputters venomous resentment and hatred, and the two monstrous creeds honoured that fine tradition in spades.

This brings me back to the uncompromising title above. What kind of person would be attracted to Marxism?

If he has no idea of what Marxism is really about, hasn’t read a single line by either Marx or Engels and simply parrots the ambient noises, he is a fool. If he is an intelligent, literate person who has read the Manifesto and even, God forbid, Das Kapital, and still is a Marxist, he is a knave. I can’t think of another possibility.

Marxism is unique among political doctrines in that it can pass neither theoretical nor empirical tests. Everywhere it has been tried, it has caused nothing but misery, in direct proportion to how literally it has been applied. And yet Marxism is arguably the most widespread political doctrine of modernity.

It may be consumed full-strength or diluted, but there isn’t a European government today that doesn’t practise some aspects of Marxism.

Even worse, Marxist terminology has penetrated all languages, and many people who’d detest the Marxist soubriquet being applied to them still happily bandy about terms like ‘capitalism’, ‘class struggle’, ‘base and superstructure’, ‘hegemony’, ‘proletariat’, ‘lumpenproletariat’, ‘surplus value’ and so forth.

Whoever controls the language controls the mind, and Marxism has scored a considerable success in this glossocratic undertaking. The question is why.

Marxism clearly answers post-Enlightenment modernity’s need to find a justification for its visceral (and formative) hatred of Christendom, with its every cultural, political, social and economic tradition. One might think that this battle was won long ago, but iconoclasm always perseveres even after all the icons have been smashed.

If knowledge is the post-rationalisation of something already felt intuitively, then modernity learned from Marx much of what it needed to know. So a warm feeling of gratitude will never leave modern hearts, no matter how many academics decide that their careers can now be advanced by abandoning Marxism, or how many Marxist governments now use ‘ex’ as their first name.

Hence rumours of the demise of Marxism are exaggerated. True, for the time being the world’s first Marxist state has erased the bearded faces from its banners. But Marxism has become so widespread not because its home was in Russia but because it’s in the modern breast. So it’ll persevere for as long as modernity does.

The supply of fools and knaves will never abate – this is one well that’ll never run dry. That’s why from time to time, crypto-Marxists or the unvarnished kind will gain power in a Western country, such as today’s Britain.

That wouldn’t happen if more people learned how to recognise the Marxist wolf hiding underneath the sheep’s clothing of ‘income redistribution’, ‘social justice’, ‘equality of opportunity’, ‘sharing and caring’, ‘fairness’ and so forth.

Then perhaps they’d realise how true the title above is and stop voting in the likes of Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron. But I’m not holding my breath: the knaves in academe and the mass media are adept at churning out fools.