We have previously discussed the role of Motte and Bailey
tactics in leftist revolutionary thought. Words like critical thinking,
education, racism, oppression, and genocide do not mean what most people think
they mean. Specifically, they have nothing to do with physical violence, teaching
people to read and think for themselves. Instead, these words are simply
reduced to matters of whether you support the leftist revolutionary agenda. If
you do not, then you are guilty of racism, oppression, and genocide. If you are
a parent or teacher, you are guilty of failing to educate children and teach
them critical thinking skills. Because of this, leftist revolutionaries are
justified in using violence against you.
Here, I would like to turn to the word “people.” Within
classical liberal thought, people are important in the sense that everyone
should have equal rights and be equal before the law regardless of their birth
or personal wealth. For leftist revolutionaries, while they pretend to support
the masses, in actuality the People are those who support leftist
revolutionaries as opposed to the vast majority of individuals who live in a country
who are alienated from themselves and suffer from false consciousness. This has
important implications for democracy. Democracy, for leftist revolutionaries, is about not elections and rule by
the majority of voters. On the contrary, a country like North Korea is a true people’s
democracy as Kim Jong Un represents the true consciousness of the People. This
notion of the people goes back to Rousseau, who had even greater contempt for
the masses than even Plato.
Much of the story of leftist revolutionary movements can be
seen as a search for the People. Leftist revolutionary intellectuals can never
be more than a small percentage of any society. In order to seize power, they
have needed to hold up some larger group and pretend to rule in their name. This
has meant finding a group that not only is physically oppressed and demands reforms
but is so alienated from the rest of society that their needs can only be
satisfied through a complete revolution.
Consider the example of the French Revolution. The French political system in 1789 was in need of reform such as the elimination of feudal privileges and that the monarch should share power with a national assembly. These were things for which there was widespread support throughout French society. The problem for the French Revolution was what to do after the low-hanging fruit was dealt with in the summer of 1789. There was no national consensus for any truly revolutionary changes. As such, the radicals of the revolution ran into stiff opposition not just from aristocrats who fled abroad and supported foreign invasion to restore the ancient regime, but also from peasants.
This challenge to the Revolution helped bring about the Reign of Terror. Robespierre
was faced with the problem that for all his talk about the People, the majority
of actual people in France were quite counter-revolutionary. As a Rousseauian,
Robespierre’s solution was simply to define the People as those who supported
the Jacobins, with himself then as the embodiment of the will of the People. He
could then commit mass murder against Frenchmen in the name of the People and turn himself
into a dictator. As the majority of Frenchmen lacked a revolutionary consciousness,
they did not count as the People. As such, they needed to be reeducated or
killed in order for the real people to come into themselves.
One of the main ways that the French Revolution influenced
classical Marxism is that it taught Marxists to distinguish between peasants
and urban workers and assume that only rural workers counted as the People. Peasants lacked a revolutionary consciousness. They still clung to
Christian beliefs and the land that they worked on. Allow for some basic land
reform to turn peasants into small landowners and peasants would turn into the
staunchest defenders of the establishment. By contrast, Marxists assumed that
urban workers could be turned into a properly revolutionary class. By moving to
the city, workers could be assumed to have dropped their Christianity and their
dreams of owning some land or a small business. Trapped under the heel of a
capitalist boss, the worker would have no choice but to embrace a total
revolution of society.
The main threat to urban workers developing a revolutionary
consciousness was nationalism. Workers, having abandoned their precocial
identity as living in a village or province, might, upon moving to large
cities, choose to identify with the nation and believe that they could improve
their lot by engaging in national politics instead of a global revolution. As such, nationalism needed to be denounced. Those who believed in their nation could not be the People.
The classical Marxist opposition to the bourgeoise, religion, and nationalism helps explain the deeply seeded anti-Semitism within Marxism and
the wider left. Historically, Jews have functioned as an economic class, a
religion, and as an ethnicity. All three of these manifestations of Judaism
were problematic from a Marxist perspective. Obviously, Marxists could not
accept the role that Jews have historically played as merchants and
moneylenders. Jews also needed to abandon their beliefs in being chosen by God.
Finally, Jews could no longer think of themselves as a people but instead should
assimilate into the wider human family. Take away Judaism as an economic class,
a religion, and an ethnicity and there is nothing left. As such, for Marxists,
Jews did not exist as a people and Judaism needed to disappear. Only by abandoning Jewish peoplehood could Judaism join the People.
One of the ironies of Marxist anti-Semitism is that it was
not lessened by the large numbers of Jewish Marxists. On the contrary, Jewish
Marxists promoted anti-Semitism. To be accepted as a Marxist, a Jew needed to demonstrate that they rejected everything about Judaism. At most a non-particularist version of Judaism (Tikkun Olam) could be allowed to survive. Such a Judaism is not any kind of Judaism at all but it is useful for covering the fact that the goal is the elimination of Judaism. Following this logic, Jewish identity could be allowed as long as a Jew used their position as a Jew to denounce Judaism and argue that they were not being anti-Semitic in doing so on the grounds that they were Jewish and were fulfilling the true Jewish spirit of humanistic universalism.