There is Marxism that’s permitted and Marxism that’s not. The iteration of Marxism that’s permitted in general public discourse is a modified form. Just because the other form isn’t permitted doesn’t necessarily mean it’s completely repressed in our culture, at least not in the manner that repression is usually understood. Our culture is more like Brave New World than 1984. This means that the same New York Times that spews war propaganda from the front page often also runs (or used to run, I haven’t read them for some time) stories about what’s really happening (and sometimes even retractions of past “errors” [i.e. lies] contained in headlines) but only on page 14 with an unassuming title easily missed and sandwiched between inane articles. No need to repress what you can simply drown out in a sea of irrelevant garbage.
In an analogous way if you go to your average used bookstore you’re likely to find a slew of books questioning certain aspects of our American iteration of capitalist culture but you rarely find any of Lenin, Bukharin, Mao or Che Guevara’s applications of Marx’s critiques aimed at the heart of the capitalist system itself. This disparity didn’t occur to me until 5 or 6 years ago when I started looking for these authors in an attempt to read the primary sources as I was taught to do in school.
The Marxism that’s permitted in mainstream media, or the things that are labeled Marxism, often have no apparent relation to any of Marx’s actual critiques of capital and capitalist culture. If class is ever touched on in the mainstream media it’s always in the sociological sense of lower, middle, upper as degrees of wealth and never with reference to the dynamics of class power. This creates broad confusion on what Marxism actually is.
There is a reason why Adorno died an honored professor and Gramsci died in prison. Adorno and his ilk offered soft critiques of non-essential aspects of the capitalist system while living comfortable lives within it. Gramsci made genuine critiques of the injustice hidden at the heart of capitalism and gave real, practical suggestions on how it might be overcome.
One might object that Gramsci actually is widely acceptable now and this is true but it’s important to understand that this is only so because he’s dead. Lenin describes this pattern in the following passage from the beginning of his work The State and Revolution:
“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred, and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their deaths, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names, to a certain extent, for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes, and with the object of duping the latter, while, at the same time, robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge, and vulgarizing it.”
I’ll never forget reading this passage for the first time and realizing how accurately it describes what has continued to happen with genuine socialists like Antonio Gramsci. This has often been my experience reading revolutionary Marxist thinkers like Lenin. They pull back the curtain on lies many of us have unknowingly lived with our whole lives.
Some Marxist thinkers can’t be posthumously converted in the way Lenin describes. I theorize that this is the reason we often hear these writers condemned as self interested, murderous liars unworthy of our attention and why their writings are scarcely ever encountered or read even by the well educated. The ruling class doesn’t want us to read them because they know how powerful the truth is. Of course this is just a theory on my part.
At one point I attempted to disconfirm this theory by reviewing the actual historical source documents as objectively as possible and applying the same standards so often casually used on people like Lenin and Mao (death tolls, the presence of self interest, elitism, etc.) to lionized western leaders like Churchill and Teddy Roosevelt. The results were devastating. In many cases the admired good guys of history were actually worse on almost every level than the supposed bad guys. Learning, for example, that Churchill was knowingly responsible for millions of unnecessary famine and war deaths and by some reckonings could be considered to have killed more people than Stalin shook me to my core.
This doesn’t necessarily mean we’re obligated to idolize flawed revolutionary leaders or, by contrast, to condemn long admired western political figures of the past but it should alter the way we hear everything we encounter in academic publications, documentaries, the news, etc. going forward. It should forever and irreparably damage our trust in the political and historical narratives that come to us from the various institutions enmeshed in what has been called the industrial military academic complex.
It can be painful to realize and accept that perosnally important, long held beliefs are actually false. For me there were / are lurking feelings of self accusation for how I could have failed to see the truth so long. This is in addition to the general feeling of simply being lost and without a familiar foundation. I try to balance these valid feelings with the equally real sense of genuine relief and mental clarity that comes from knowing the truth even though the truth has inverted much of the historical and political understanding of the world I held as a young man.
