Panic Attack

by Robby Soave

  Capitalism was the next-to-last step in the grand historical march toward communist utopia, according to Marxist thinking. It was an important historical development, mainly because history needed to get through capitalism to progress to communism. Capitalism would sow the seeds of its own destruction as rapacious bourgeois capitalists waged war on each other in pursuit of greater profits, reducing rivals to destitution. The pace of this destruction would accelerate, and the entire capitalist system would eventually collapse on itself. A classless society would rise in its wake, enduring in perpetuity.

  Marx studiously avoided the matter of how this utopian society would function, organize itself, or be governed. He was disinterested in such practical questions as who would decide how much food each person gets. It was just going to happen: the capitalism system would collapse, the workers would overthrow whatever members of the bourgeoisie remained, and then there would be no more class-based antagonism—everyone would now belong to the same class. Since class-based antagonism is the root cause of all human strife, the establishment of a class-based society would bring about utopia. World-spirit completely incarnate.

  In practice, Marx’s magical thinking has not worked out well, either because the theory is bunk or because human beings aren’t yet capable of carrying it out. In the century and a half since Marx’s death, socialist revolutions guided by Marxist ideals have failed to abolish class; instead they always end up empowering a new ruling class consisting of the revolutionaries who seized power (known as the vanguard). In nearly all cases of actually occurring communism, this new vanguard proved to be at least as brutal and repressive as whatever had held power before it. See Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and countless others for historical examples of this.

  An important feature—and not incidental to the repression that occurs in its name—is that Marxism does not recognize individual rights, such as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, or the right to vote. Whatever rights are being enjoyed by the oppressors—the bourgeois capitalists—should be trampled underfoot. Restrictions on political rights and the seizure of private property can always be justified on orthodox Marxist grounds, since the world-spirit is just working its way toward a classless society.

  It’s important to recognize how different Marxist socialism is from liberalism. Liberalism comes in many flavors: New Deal liberals support social and political freedom, but think the government has a strong role to play in smoothing out the kinks in the economy (kinks like the Great Depression of the 1930s); classical liberals, also called libertarians, consider New Deal liberalism a departure from true liberalism and think the government should generally respect people’s social and political freedoms, as well as their economic freedoms; neoliberals, also called market liberals, fall somewhere in between—like New Deal liberals, they want the government to intervene in economic matters when necessary, but like classical liberals, they recognize that market forces can work when government fails. But all kinds of liberals are generally at odds with leftism, and the dislike is mutual. Conservatives pillory liberals for not being conservatives, but the left thinks liberals are too conservative. Liberalism, you will remember from Chapter Three, is synonymous with white supremacy for a certain kind of far-left radical.

  The Marxist left, of course, has almost no real political power. Even Sanders, the most prominent socialist-sympathetic politician, is something of a faux Marxist. When asked to describe his ideal government, he has pointed to countries like Denmark, which provide a generous social safety net to citizens while maintaining fundamentally capitalist, market economies—a prime example of neoliberalism rather than socialism.

  But there is one sector of American society where Marxism’s influence has continued to grow, and its adherents have seized some tangible power: the university. For nearly a hundred years, academia has kept Marxism alive and thriving.

  In the 1930s, a group of European Marxist thinkers, Herbert Marcuse among them, developed something they called “critical theory.” Critical theory was heavily inspired by the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian sociologist and Communist Party leader. (Gramsci was arrested by Benito Mussolini’s fascists and died in prison in 1937.) While Marx had held that the proletarian revolution was inevitable, by the early twentieth century his acolytes had grown despondent waiting for their version of the rapture. Gramsci was chief among the Marxists who came up with an explanation: the bourgeoisie did not just hold economic power—they also held cultural power, and they used this power to shore up capitalism. According to Gramsci, the workers shared the same cultural values as the capitalists and would never rise up against them until there was a broad cultural shift throughout society. It was not enough for the abolition of class to be in the economic interests of the oppressed; the oppressed had to first realize their oppression was illegitimate and capitalism was wrong and backward.

  And so the new Marxists invented critical theory. Despite its name, critical theory isn’t a theory at all—it’s a methodology, an approach, or a lens for evaluating social phenomena. The point was to offer a critique of society as it was organized, rather than a simple explanation for how it had come to be so. Critical theorists set out to expose the root conflict—class struggle—at the heart of various social interactions, and denounce it under the guise of social science. The purpose of critical theory was to promote social justice—economic equality based on the overthrow of the ruling capitalist class—by preaching the wrongness of capitalism and the rightness of Marxism and socialism.

  In subsequent decades, critical theory spread like wildfire through the academy, hitting the liberal arts, social sciences, and humanities the hardest. Most people know that professors are more left-leaning than the average American; what they might not realize is that many professors teach from an explicitly Marxist perspective, or at the very least apply critical theory to the subjects they teach.

  Critical theory programs are now offered at a host of universities. Ph.D. students at the University of California at Berkeley can earn a certificate in critical theory while applying those insights to their main concentration.9 University of Arizona graduate students can minor in “social, cultural, and critical theory.”10 Northwestern University hosts a critical theory project that involves academics from all over the globe.11 There’s a critical theory program within the School of Humanities at the University of California at Irvine, and also one within the Department of Comparative Literature at the State University of New York–Buffalo.12 Literature, history, and political science are often taught through the lens of critical theory. Since the 1980s, fields that focus on a specific group’s marginalization—women’s studies, queer studies, African American studies—have proliferated, and these frequently involve a Marxist perspective. Critical theory’s application to race even has its own name, critical race theory.

  Marx-friendly sociologists have worked tirelessly to keep critical theory relevant to the activist left, and significant intellectual efforts were made to reconcile the class-based model of oppression with the other kinds of oppression more immediate and familiar to intersectional young people. For instance, George Ciccariello-Maher, the former Drexel University professor mentioned in Chapter Two, told me in an interview that the history of white supremacy in America—slavery, Jim Crow, and so on—easily fits into a Marxist worldview.

  “White supremacy structured on the basis of slavery has been hugely important to maintaining the power structure, and that is in many ways a Marxist understanding, in the sense that race and slavery were used to divide the poor into white and blacks so that they would not unify,” Ciccariello-Maher told me. “This is the underlying theme of what I think is the essential text or understanding of U.S. history, which is W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, about the aftermath of the Civil War.”

  Ciccariello-Maher was referencing Du Bois, a black sociologist who wrote during the early and mid-twentieth century. Thus racism, a monumental source of oppression throughout
the United States’ history, could be cast in Marxist terms as well. And historically, that’s exactly what happened. As I mentioned in Chapter Two, the Black Panthers—a radical leftist identity group active in the 1960s and ’70s that favored racial separation—was explicitly Marxist in its outlook.

  Recall that previously I said young activists frequently share famous quotes from activists of yore on social media. I once saw a young racial justice activist at Reed College post a picture of Stokely Carmichael and an accompanying quotation on her Facebook wall. Carmichael was a civil rights activist and eventually the leader of the Black Panthers. Here is the quote: “If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem. If he’s got the power to lynch me, that’s my problem. Racism is not a question of attitude; it’s a question of power. Racism gets its power from capitalism. Thus, if you’re anti-racist, whether you know it or not, you must be anti-capitalist. The power for racism, the power for sexism, comes from capitalism, not an attitude.”

  Capitalism, not racism or sexism or any other ism, is the ideology that powers evil. This is the sentiment of an important activist who in 2017 is revered, remembered, and even retweeted.

  Some data to back up my assertion that Marxism endures: According to the Open Syllabus Project, a database that tracks information from publicly available syllabi, The Communist Manifesto is one of the most frequently assigned economic texts on college campuses, beating out Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and Paul Krugman’s Economics.13 That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing—students should learn why Marxist ideas are economically unsound, impractical, and out of date. But Phil Magness, a historian and adjunct professor of public policy at George Mason University, dug into the Open Syllabus Project’s data and found something revealing: The Communist Manifesto wasn’t being assigned as an economics text. Most of the data points—more than 97 percent, by Magness’s calculation—came from syllabi being used “in fields that venture far astray from economics, with the highest concentrations coming from the humanities.”14

  In a 2007 survey, just 3 percent of college professors self-identified as Marxists. But that number rose to 5 percent when only humanities professors were counted (another 19 percent described themselves as radicals). In social science, it was worse: a whopping 18 percent of social science professors described themselves as Marxists. Bryan Caplan, a professor of economics at George Mason University, lamented that this was akin to finding out 18 percent of biologists described themselves as creationists.15

  Within the field of social science, the most Marxist-sympathetic concentration was, unsurprisingly, sociology: a quarter of surveyed sociologists described themselves as Marxists.16

  Caplan suspects that the number of self-avowed Marxists in academia has dipped since 2007. But the ideological position of the average academic has continued to drift left in recent years. Some professors might deny being outright Marxists but instead teach an extremely Marx-friendly worldview, like critical theory. There are many ways for academics who are essentially Marxists to define themselves other than Marxist.

  It would be silly to think that illiberal Zillennial activism is solely or even predominantly the result of classroom indoctrination. As I’ve written previously, my conversations with activists suggest that activist students are more likely to radicalize each other, and that many activists were radicalized before they even entered college. But Marxist academics provide a culture, a vocabulary, and an intellectual defense of activist tactics—a base of support the most well-read and well-studied young radicals can summon when needed. Zillennial activists are speaking the language of Marx and Marcuse, whether they realize it or not. For instance, when I interviewed Haik, a student at the University of California, Santa Cruz, about his disruption of a College Republicans meeting, he disagreed with me that it was about the College Republicans’ free speech. “It’s not about free speech, it’s about the institutional power,” he told me.

  Haik, who used the word “comrade”—the term of endearment favored by Marxists—to describe his friends and fellow travelers, hoped to disrupt the institutional power being wielded by conservatives who support “economic policies that subjugate people across the lines of race, class, gender sexuality, etc.” Peel away the layers of intersectionality, and anti-capitalism, grounded in Marxist theory, is what remains.

  Socialism, but Democratic

  Today’s anti-capitalist activists differ from their immediate predecessors in two important ways: they are intersectional and they are democratic. They are intersectional because they are sensitive to forms of oppression that doctrinaire Marxists would have considered distractions from the real issue, class struggle. They are democratic in order to distance themselves from the horrible repression that occurred under authoritarian socialist regimes in Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

  The DSA is not a political party and does not run candidates of its own. It endorses candidates from other parties—most notably the Democratic Party and the Green Party—in cases where those candidates’ goals align with DSA goals. Compared with the haphazard activism discussed in previous chapters, the DSA is remarkably organized. The DSA has elected leaders, chapters, and working groups that focus on specific issues.

  The founder of the DSA, the socialist writer and political scientist Michael Harrington, was staunchly anti-communist. He believed the failures of communist countries proved that socialism needed to be fully democratic to work. In fact, during the drafting of the Port Huron Statement in 1962—the political manifesto produced by the leftist group Students for a Democratic Society—Harrington argued that the statement did not denounce the Soviet Union in strong enough terms.17 Twenty years later, after breaking with the Socialist Party, Harrington merged with the New American Movement, the vanguard of the New Left, to start the DSA.

  Unlike so many of today’s leftists who view liberals as essentially in league with fascists, Harrington was committed to working with the liberals and winning them over. “I share an immediate program with liberals in this country because the best liberalism leads toward socialism,” he once said.18

  In practice, democratic socialists do not always do a very good job describing what their beliefs are, or how they differ from socialism. On MSNBC, Ocasio-Cortez defined democratic socialism as “democratic participation in our economic dignity” and “the basic elements that are required for an economic and socially dignified life in the United States,” a vague description that prompted mild criticism from left-of-center news anchor Chris Hayes.

  Pellitteri defined democratic socialism as a system that gives ultimate power back to the people. “It’s just practical for the workers to own the means of production,” he told me. “And for the workers to be able to control the profits that they make as a result of their labor. That is one of the few ways that a worker can truly have power in society.”

  “Workers controlling the means of production” is the textbook definition of plain old socialism. Democratic socialism, then, does not seem to differ all that much from socialism in terms of goals; rather, it differs regarding the means of achieving them. It also differs in terms of its intersectional emphasis. Members of the DSA frequently talk about the full range of oppressions visited on marginalized people because of exploitative capitalism.

  “The idea is that you cannot be free unless everybody is free,” Pellitteri told me, “[that] we cannot have peace unless everyone has peace, is very present in DSA. We try to change the entire system that affects everyone as opposed to changing separate parts of that system which might affect individual people.” Consequently, the DSA directs its energies to combating not just economic inequality but also criminal justice inequities, environmental problems, and other issues.

  Immigration has occasionally emerged as a divisive issue. When Vox, a left-of-center news site that often takes a neoliberal perspective on economic issues, asked candidate Sanders about adopting a more globalist perspective on inequality, Sanders vehemently denounced the idea of open
-borders immigration, calling it a right-wing Koch brothers proposal that “essentially says there is no United States.”19 The Koch brothers (disclaimer: David Koch sits on the board of the Reason Foundation, which publishes the magazine I write for) are to Sanders’s left on immigration—as an older socialist, Sanders believes immigrants take jobs from blue-collar workers and undermine the bargaining position of organized labor.

  But younger socialists are less tied to the idea of organized labor as the backbone of their revolution, in part because blue-collar workers tend to be more socially conservative and thus at odds with intersectional requirements. It is thus no surprise that Trump successfully courted the labor vote, winning upset victories in rust belt states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania.

  “While I still like [Sanders], I still admire him, I’m definitely more to the left of him,” said Pellitteri.

  In the era of Trumpian attacks on the dignity of immigrants, “Abolish ICE”—as in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has become an important slogan for younger democratic socialists, including Ocasio-Cortez, who ran on this issue explicitly. The person most directly responsible for the widespread adoption of this message by DSA types is Sean McElwee, a twenty-five-year-old activist and researcher, who first tweeted the phrase “Abolish ICE” in February 2017. He eventually changed his name on Twitter to “Abolish ICE” as well. Fortuitously for the movement to abolish ICE, immigration issues captured the public’s attention in the year that followed. The media began paying a lot of attention to the Trump administration’s practice of detaining and separating immigrant families caught crossing the border illegally, a policy that was begun under the Obama administration but accelerated by Trump. The federal government’s mistreatment of very young children has made ICE deservedly unpopular. (As a libertarian who favors smaller government, I would shed no tears if ICE was abolished.)