The Wreckage of Marx, &c.

By Jay Nordlinger

Wednesday, June 09, 2021

 

The Cambridge Union, at the university over in England, staged a debate: “This house believes that Marx was right.” Really? Really. Speaking for the proposition — though not wholeheartedly, as he said at the outset — was Slavoj Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher. Speaking against the proposition was Daniel Hannan, the British writer and politician.

 

You can see the debate on YouTube, here.

 

It was not really a fair fight. Žižek was at a disadvantage: English is not his native tongue (though he speaks good English, and he holds a pretty spiffy British position: international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London). What’s more, he had to defend Marx and Marxism (even if not with a whole heart).

 

How could there be such a debate today? After more than a hundred years of experience with Marxism, if you start from 1917? Isn’t arguing for Marx like arguing for a flat earth? Or for smallpox? Yet debate is sadly necessary, for people fall for Marx and Marxism generation after generation.

 

Daniel Hannan does a superb job, and a stirring one. He is morally serious, well informed, and effortlessly articulate. He gives Marx and Marxism a pasting for the ages. It makes you proud to know him, if you do (as I am lucky enough to do).

 

Hannan begins by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, Karl Marx devised the most lethal ideology ever produced by human intelligence. In the grim reckoning of murder, Marxism stands unchallenged.” Yes. Elie Kedourie once gave David Pryce-Jones a piece of advice: “Keep your eye on the corpses.” Under Marxism, there are many corpses — millions upon millions — to keep an eye on.

 

Well, you have to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right? But, as Orwell said, where’s the omelette? The murder and other cruelty aside, what is the material record of Marxism? Poverty, misery, starvation.

 

There was once a joke: “If the Eskimos ever went socialist, they’d have to import ice.” In Cuba, that joke was no joke: Under Fidel Castro, this famously sugar-producing nation had to import sugar.

 

As Hannan says, the world has provided us with some pretty neat comparisons: West Germany and East Germany; Taiwan and the PRC; South Korea and North Korea. Whaddaya like?

 

And people vote with their feet. In the 1980s, Caspar Weinberger made a compelling point: Along the border between West Germany and East Germany, soldiers were facing the same way: east. The West German soldiers were facing east in order to guard against attack; the East German soldiers were facing the same way in order to keep people in — to shoot them if they tried to escape.

 

In Cuba, they have shot them in the water, as people try to get away on homemade rafts or anything else that can float.

 

“Ah, but Marxism has never been truly tried!” people say. “In the past, we have had false Marxism. Next time we’ll get it right!” No one ever says this about fascism, as Hannan points out. No one ever says, “Adolf and Benito and the boys — they weren’t real fascists. You’ll love the real thing, which will bring a delicious tomorrow!”

 

Hannan ends by saying that Karl Marx has become — almost 140 years after his death — the one thing he would have despised above all: “the bearded prophet of a false religion.”