The Attraction of Marxism

Tonight, while I was watching a rerun of Mark Levine’s show Life Liberty & Levine, Pete Hegseth questioned Levine about his new book American Marxism. One of the questions Hegseth asked Levine was what he believed is the attraction of Marxism.

Levine said that he touches on this in his book and gave a brief explanation. Basically, what he said is that there are two types of people who are attracted to Marxism. There are people who wish to abdicate personal responsibility and there are people who want power and control over others.

Later, when I reflected on this, I realized it was a classic example of an abusive relationship. In this type of abusive relationship, one party gives up some or all of their freedom for security, however illusory, and the other party offers them security in exchange for control over their lives. I am keenly aware of this kind of relationship because I have been in several during my lifetime.

This kind of relationship is the relationship women get into when they marry a domineering man who promises to take care of them. It is the kind of relationship many people find themselves in when they go to work for a company that promises benefits and promotions. It is certainly the relationship prostitutes get into with pimps. In the case of the prostitutes, the relationship is more coercive than beneficial, but that is often a characteristic of such abusive relationships. They are tantamount to slavery.

Often, in this kind of relationship, the party wishing to take control convinces the party they wish to control that the party to be controlled is in more danger than they actually are: “The world is a scary place and you need me to protect you from it!”

That is exactly what organizations like BLM and theories like CRT are doing to the black population in the United States. They are convincing them that the United States is filled with systemic racism and murderous police and that their only refuge is a much more powerful central government.  What blacks and other minorities fail to realize is that they are trading their personal freedom for illusive security.

The illusive security that is being promised is thinly veiled communism. In its inception, it has replaced the original notion of class warfare with race warfare, which is really just class warfare with an easy identifier. It is simpler to tell the difference between a white person and a brown person than between a rich person and a poor person. It has all the classic trappings of communism as described by countless proponents of communism in the past: redistribution, abdication of private ownership and central authority. Of course, as residents of Cuba and North Korea understand all too well, this kind of relationship always leads to slavery.

It is ironic that the same process that initiated slavery in the United States is being repeated today. It started with people who wanted to come to the United States, ostensibly to be taken care of, that traded their freedom for a plot of land and an uncertain future as an indentured servant. Later, this process evolved into full-fledged slavery. Apparently, once people in power acquire a taste for total control, they are loath to part with it. Blacks who lament their ancestor’s slavery and were freed only by a bloody civil war are unwittingly wandering into the bonds of that peculiar institution.

I am not sure what can be done to save them (and all of us) from this terrible fate. I am trying to warn everyone, but I recognize the divide between my words and those who truly need to hear them. They will say that I do not understand. Sadly, I understand all too well.