Western societies must stop the spread of Marxism

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By Ross McKitrick

Recently in the National Post, Jordan Peterson diagnosed the psychological grip woke activists have on ordinary people, urging conservatives to move beyond the slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” and start fighting the philosophical battles at hand. I would argue his advice should be amended slightly: “It’s the political economy, stupid.”

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Current economic and philosophical problems both originated in the same place — The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — the seminal text of political economy, which became the handbook for bad economics and the woke movement alike. Published in 1888, it opens with the simplistic declaration: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.” In this rigid oppressor/oppressed scheme, which is the heart of woke ideology, everyone is either tyrant or victim — not based on anyone’s choices, mind you, but by the accident of historical circumstances. If you are an oppressor, you can never be anything else.

Most ominously, everything that has contributed to historical oppression, including all customary civil rights and social institutions, must be destroyed and replaced with a new centrally planned society. According to Marx and Engels, “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” To abolish private ownership is to abolish all individuality, replacing it with uniform group identity under the control of a totalitarian state.

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And they didn’t stop there. They called for abolition of all forms of free buying and selling, all rights of inheritance, family structures, religion, private industry, parental control over education, etc. They called for the centralization of banking, industry, agriculture, all means of communication and all forms of transportation into the hands of “the State,” by which they meant themselves and their allies. “In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things … They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions (emphasis added).” What we call “civil rights” and “personal freedoms” were merely the means by which oppressors have historically exercised power.

Marx, Engels and their allies never asked whether the cure they proposed might be worse than the disease. Having declared that society is nothing but oppressors exploiting the oppressed and having appointed themselves advocates for the oppressed, they were duty-bound to destroy society and impose what they called “communism,” an empty word that turned out to mean nothing more than they and their fellow zealots taking charge.

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Once you understand that every institution on which society has hitherto rested, down to motherhood and milk, is a target for overthrow, today’s woke revolution makes sense. The point is not to improve but to destroy. Think of any tradition or institution that has thus far escaped attention from woke radicals and make a note: Within a year you will learn it too is under siege.

The 20th century taught us that Marxist theory is false and toxic, but also that once implanted it is hard to un-root, including in places where people believed “it couldn’t happen here.” From 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 at least half of humanity lived under Marxist dictatorships. Why would such an odious doctrine become popular in so many societies? How can it be stopped once it begins to spread? After the fall of communism, we in the West stopped asking those questions, and forgot how to answer them.

Marxist doctrine spreads because the “oppressed” gain instant status and power without need of personal virtues or accomplishments. The idea holds appeal, but only to our most selfish and cruel instincts. Exempt from criticism, the oppressed come to believe they’re entitled to take everything the so-called oppressors have, by force if necessary, or to burn the whole system down for revenge.

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The only remedy for this cult-like mindset, what Elon Musk called the “woke mind virus,” is to teach people a healthy and proper loathing of victim status. The young must be taught old-fashioned values of self-reliance and individual accountability. Coddled adults who embrace cultural Marxism and its seductive promise of victim status must not be allowed to exploit or misappropriate the compassion all decent people feel toward genuine victims of oppression.

Although Peterson is right that the underlying battles are philosophical and psychological many people will only become engaged when cultural Marxism begins to destroy the economy, as eventually it must. By the time that happens, however, the hour is late. Anyone who wants to prevent another outbreak of the political and psychological horrors of the Maoist and Soviet empires must equip themselves accordingly.

Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, is a senior fellow of the Fraser Institute.

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