“The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” -Karl Marx
It is 1997, and I was sitting in the commons of my high school in a small town in Ohio, reading this out loud directly from The Communist Manifesto. To whom? Anyone that would listen. I was attracted to Marxism at an early age, maybe to be more of a contrarian than anything else, but also due to its antagonistic relationship with those that grew up during the Cold War, me being one of those individuals albeit for a short amount of time at the tail end of that period of history.
Marxism was attractive to me for several reason more than just the shock value & reactions from people when you tell them or they hear what you are saying. I was a true disciple, a real believer. As it is a utopian ideology, it is by nature a romantic movement. Total equality, fairness, workers controlling the means of production, as it was only fair since they did all the work. It would be the leveling of the playing field. We would have a more fair society, a liberated society. Liberated from what? Greed, poverty, inequality across all categories. “Jay, enough already, this is ridiculous. It never has worked.” My answer would always be “yes well Western interference, sabotage by the ruling classes of the world, the Revolution shouldn’t have started in Russia, Marx didn’t even think it ought to have started there. If we instituted communism here, it could really work due to how rich we are, and that we already have moved to capitalism, and now will make the final step, it’s the perfect environment!”
I repeated this often, because I believed it. Useful idiot. I would have been one of those people who thought that since he was in on the game from the first minute, that I would land myself a comfortable position on the Revolutionary Central Committee, the old “I am an intellectual, comrade! I am not going to be working in the salt mine!” If today’s Marxist was being honest, they would confess the same thing. Everyone thinks they will get the dacha in the countryside, that they will be in a position of great power and authority. That is the privilege of being utopian revolutionary. The mines are not your destiny, nor the work camps, nor the firing squad. You - the well-read Marxist will be making decisions impacting those aforementioned workers. The hard truth of it is that in most of these situations (historically, anyway) you are lucky to survive. There are Stalinist apologists who say it is counterrevolutionary to blame one individual, that Trotsky was just as complicit for the extinguishing of the Old Bolsheviks. True, a lot of blood is on a lot of hands, including contemporary disciples of this failed ideology. However, good old Uncle Joe was the last one with a chair when the music stopped, and he was in charge after all, so let us dispense with this blatant nonsense. Either way, those who were there in the beginning didn’t make it to a comfortable retirement, and there is no reason to expect an alternative outcome. If Trotsky was the most orthodox in his Marxism (and I believe he was), the constant state of the revolutionary struggle would dictate that it continues to cause upheaval, that the old must be washed away, and that even included himself eventually with an ice pick in Mexico City.
“When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence… communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting all religion, and all morality, instead of constituting them on a new basis; it therefore acts in contradiction to all past historical experience.” - Karl Marx
No disciple of Marx believes they will be shoveled onto the ash heap of history, that they will be the ones with the shovel. In many cases, this is true, they do end up with the shovel, just not in the way they thought it would have worked out, either bludgeoned by it, and then upon it.