Are Liberals Just Commies???

Ben P at MyDD has laid down a challenge. In explaining why liberalism is in the intellectual hole it is in, he suggests that the culprit is Karl Marx. Because socialism was the central animating force of the left in the 20th century, the discrediting of Marx leaves liberals without a leg to stand on. This is why an emphasis on class politics (a la Thomas Frank) is doomed to failure. Instead, liberals need to re-ground their ideology, purged of its Marxist influences.

This is just slander. The liberal tradition is far more deeply rooted in American, and indeed Western, history than Ben suggests. Twentieth century liberalism was indisputably influenced by socialism, but its essential foundation is as red white and blue as you could like. To say that liberalism is just an alien form european socialism grafted onto America is to buy into conservative hype and divide us from our own historical roots.

Until recently I agreed with Ben - I though liberalism was just an American variant of democratic socialism. But I was wrong. Liberalism has a real respect for private property not because liberals realized that the abolition of property wouldn't sell, but because we thought private property was a good and useful thing. Modern liberalism has its American origins not in Marx, but in Jefferson and Jackson. The defense of the forgotten middle and the downtrodden poor is a constant theme in American politics. It is only the method for pursuing that objective that has changed. Nineteenth century liberals distrusted the government as a tool of eastern elites. Twentieth century progressives and populists, who were scarcely socialists, refined the basic liberal conviction by deciding to use state power to regulate what they saw as their true enemy, Corporate America. U.S. liberalism is primarily the descendent of William Bryan and Woodrow Wilson, not Marx and Engels.

Something else that needs to be clarified: Marx was no socialist. Yes, technically he was part of the socialist movement, but in reality he founded communism, which is a very different thing. As we all know, communism developed into a statist philosophy under Lenin. But even in its early stages Marxism fought battles with the democratic socialists of western europe. It is a bizarre tendency in America to conflate socialism with communism. We all seem to forget that the socialists hated the communists and were some of our best allies during the Cold War. Or has everyone forgotten about NATO? And tying the two to liberalism is the basic smear of the left by conservatives. To concede this point is to concede the game.

To believe that class politics is the creation of Marx is to betray a real ignorance about history. Marx himself was inspired by Aristotle, who wrote extensively about class divisions in his Politics. The fight between rich and poor for control of the community is as old as popular government. It is in fact the key challenge for popular government, hence Plutarch's comment that the oldest and most fatal ailment of republics is the gap between rich and poor. Marx just had a particular formulation of this very old dispute.

To say that Marx has been intellectually discredited is to belabor the obvious. A friend of mine once said that academia is to communists what Latin America was to fascists. Marx's solution to the problems of capitalism was deeply flawed, and his conception of human nature essentially bankrupt. But as I grow older and watch the development of the global economy, I find myself remembering Marx's analysis of the contradictions of capitalism. The emergence of a global elite, the commodification of labor, and the proletarianization of professionals and independent proprietors; all of these phenomena are very familiar to anyone who has read Marx. Perhaps his cure is ineffective, but his diagnosis of the disease seems ever more appropriate.