Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [32]
For Marx and Engels, their divination—that is, communism and the workers’ paradise—is preordained. The history of man is a history of class struggle over materialism, where the feudal lords, landowners, and finally capitalists rule over the working class. Communism is the natural and final endpoint resulting from the motion of modern society. It is not an invention, discovery, or reform; its ultimate certainty cannot be obstructed by law or politics. It is the truth (35). Not only would Marx and Engels denounce any attempt to label their fantasy a utopia, but in The Communist Manifesto they are extremely critical of what they call Utopian Socialism and Communism. “[A]s the modern class struggle develops and takes definite shape, this phantastic standing apart from the contest, these phantastic attacks on it lose all practical value and all theoretical justification.… They therefore, endeavor, and that consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class antagonisms. They still dream of their experimental realization of their social Utopias … they are compelled to appeal to the feelings and purses of the bourgeois. By degrees they sink into the category of the reactionary socialists.…” (57) As such, only a complete break from the past and a cleansing of modern society can set the stage for the classless state, where there would be no need for politics or government. They insist there can be no compromise with bourgeois history or standards. There can be no remnants of what was and is.
However, in their denunciation of Utopian Socialism and Communism as “violently oppos[ing] all political action on the part of the working class,” Marx and Engels demonstrate the fanaticism of their utopianism (57, 58). After all, the half measures expose communism as not inevitable but impracticable and impossible. It is one thing to espouse views about man’s historic class and economic struggles and predict the future—the inevitable workers’ revolution leading to an ultimate egalitarian nirvana. It is another to make the fantasy tangible and develop the institutions and mechanics to institute it. As Karl Popper noted, Vladmir “Lenin was quick to realize [that] Marxism was unable to help in matters of practical economics. ‘I do not know of any socialist who has dealt with these problems … there was nothing written about such matters in the Bolshevik textbooks, or in those of the Mensheviks.’… As Lenin admits, ‘there is hardly a word on the economics of socialism to be found in Marx’s work.…’”2
Man’s nature and history are not neatly defined through economic classes, whose members are easily categorized. To say that man exists in essentially one of two conditions—a bourgeois or capitalist/landlord class or a proletariat or working class, with the former perpetually exploiting the latter and the latter perpetually exploited by the former—is simply erroneous. French philosopher Raymond Aron observed half a century ago, “To declare flatly that a worker in a capitalist factory in France or the United States is by definition exploited and that a worker in a Soviet factory is not, is not an example of synthetic thought, it is pure nonsense. It is merely a convenient way of substituting verbal gymnastics for a painstaking investigation of reality.”3 Moreover, as I discussed in Liberty and Tyranny, applying this notion to American society makes obvious its incoherence. “[W]ho populates this [working class]? Is the twenty-five-year-old female paralegal who graduated from college, works at a large law firm, earns $85,000 a year, is unmarried and without children, lives in an apartment in Manhattan, and rarely attends church in the same [working class] as the fifty-seven-year-old male auto mechanic who did not graduate from high school, works at Pep Boys, earns $55,000 a year, lives in