Ameritopia_ The Unmaking of America - Mark R. Levin [34]
The proletarians never rose up to overthrow their capitalist systems. Nor did they join together across national boundaries in a global revolution. They clearly rejected Marx’s rallying cry—“Workers of the world, unite!” (64) In fact, in 1989 in Poland, the communist regime was driven from power by popular strikes and protests led by Lech Walesa, leader of the anti-Soviet Solidarity union, among others. Soon Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania would follow. In 1991, the Soviet Union itself collapsed, resulting in more countries throwing off communism. A form of autocratic pseudo-capitalism has been adopted in China, lest its people starve as in neighboring North Korea. Marx was also wrong when he predicted that larger and larger industrial enterprises would consume so much available capital that they would crowd out smaller businesses. In America, small businesses are vital to the economy. In 2010, 98.2 percent of businesses had fewer than 100 employees, 89.3 percent had fewer than 20 employees, 78.6 percent had fewer than 10 employees, and 60.8 percent had fewer than 5 employees.5
Having dealt briefly but adequately with Marx-Engels’s “prophecy,” what of historic materialism—that is, the proposition, generally stated, that history can only or primarily be viewed through the lens of material class struggle? Of course, economics and materialism have played a significant role in the course of history, but so have religion, war, nationalism, law, and politics. In some societies, they have been and are inextricably linked; in others, less so. The demarcations are not always evident or uncomplicated. Missing from The Communist Manifesto’s flawed arguments are the inalienable rights of the individual. Man is dehumanized and his actual identity is lost in the communist utopia. If he is “wealthy,” such as a landowner, business owner, or landlord, he is part of an evil group, whether he is evil or not. If he does not divest himself of his wealth, it will be confiscated from him, by force if necessary. If he is “not wealthy” or a laborer, he is part of a good group, whether he is good or not. Only the latter group survives. The individual’s fate is sealed by a fiction based largely on an economic classification assigned to him by political philosophers and, in the end, a workers’ paradise that is said to be inevitable.
This approach of predestined pigeonholing of the individual is closer to the utopias in the Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan than may appear on the surface. First, some of the distinctions: The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are top-down tyrannies, with wisdom concentrated among a handful of rulers—the omnipotent philosopher-king, the Prince, and the Sovereign, respectively; Marx and Engels describe their communist utopia as a bottom-up economic liberation movement in which “the people” become the rulers as a requisite to the state withering away. The Republic, Utopia, and Leviathan are not only grandiose ideals, but their authors also describe in mind-numbing detail the mechanics of their societies; Marx and Engels avoid the mechanics almost completely and condemn those who try to develop them, concentrating almost exclusively on the supposed historical, material, and political case for their dogma and its inescapability.
In all four utopias, the individual and his family are subservient to the state. Society, however, would be a far better place if only man would change his nature to accommodate the utopian ideal. Since, left to his own devices, man will not oblige, he must be made to do so. Yet out of this same riffraff, the masterminds are born—both the revolutionaries and the rulers.