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Marxism isn’t a political or economic theory: it’s a conspiracy theory. As an understanding of human relations, it’s childish, but it’s an incredibly effective conspiracy theory because it offers a universally applicable framework for fostering resentments and weaponizing grievances.
Despite the fears of conservatives and the hopes of leftists, Marxism had only a limited impact on the European workers it had been designed to sway and appealed far more to the children of the bourgeoisie who had developed it and ached for the destruction of their way of life, it had its most devastating impacts in non-western societies and among non-westerners in the West.
Among westerners, Marxism failed to gain headway among the working class and became a set of academic theories of societal conflict with a great deal of impact on cultural elites leading to secondary and tertiary societal infections among people who knew nothing about Marxism.
Among non-westerners however, Marxism fused with identity politics to create a leftist theory of tribal resentments. The problem with applying Marxism to class warfare had been that so much of the working class in an industrial society aspired to social mobility and wealth. The poor didn’t want to ‘eat the rich’, they wanted to become the rich, or at least ascend to the middle class.
In tribal settings, where divisions of race, ethnicity, culture and religion were seen as much less permeable, and could not be resolved through social mobility or integration, Marxism took its true and final form as an ideology of ethnic cleansing and genocide, creating a rationale that made the mass murder of millions of people in the name of social progress seem reasonable.
The Communist genocides were not really about about Marxism, rather Marxism became a permission system for killing large numbers of people who were really being targeted for tribal reasons, for example Jews and Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, Christians and Vietnamese in Cambodia, Indians in Nicaragua or rival clans under Somalia’s Marxist-Leninist regime.
That doesn’t mean Marxism is innocent of these crimes, on the contrary, Marxists consciously adopted their ideology to tribal appeals and Marxist ideology provided the framework for elevating tribal resentments, racial, religious and ethnic, to the state of a general philosophy of human conflict, offering clear delineations of victim and oppressor, and championing terrorism and tyranny as sanctioned solutions for resolving tribal resentments.
Worse still, Marxist terrorists and tyrants could count on the complicity of international Marxists, as Cambodia’s Pol Pot could count on MIT’s Noam Chomsky, to cover-up their crimes, and even non-Marxist terrorists and tyrants could also count on that support if they were seen as aligned with the goals of the larger third world decolonization movement and were killing members of a western or western-aligned race, religion or ethnicity. That is why Judith Butler and the DSA can defend Hamas and its killing of Jews as a progressive movement.
Third World Marxism can transform racial, religious and ethnic massacres in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia into ‘liberation movements’ even when the perpetrators aren’t Marxists. Academic Marxism is defined by what it’s for, but Third World Marxism is defined less by theory and more by opposition. Soviet influence required western Marxists to quickly come around to supporting any regime from the Nazis (during the Hitler-Stalin Pact) to Islamic terrorists, short-circuiting any ideological standards other than the need to destroy the West.
When Hezbollah flags fly at radical allies accompanied by chants of Iran’s slogan, “Marg bar Amirka” to “Death to America”, that’s a reflection of a movement that hates America far more than it cares about abortion, gay rights or state ownership of property and will ally with anything and anyone, from Hitler to the Ayatollahs, commit any crimes and cheer on any atrocities.
Marxism was never meant to be combined with identity politics, but radicals quickly learned that racial and ethnic groups made much better recruits than the undifferentiated mass of workers. As bad as class warfare was, it at least operated within a single society, while identity politics pitted racial, ethnic and religious groups against each other in what became a zero-sum game.
When the enemy is seen as the wealthy and the middle class, there can be some solution short of genocide, but when the enemy is ‘white people’, Jews, Asians, a clan or religion, and it is depicted as the epitome of oppression and evil, and academics teach that no social progress, no peace or justice are possible until it is ‘decolonized’ or ceases to exist, genocide follows.
When western leftists adopted identity politics towards minorities, treating them as a collective oppressed group, despite their individual statues, and ignoring their misdeeds, they destroyed the society’s moral immune system towards applying Marxism to entire races and to the subsequent logic that entire races could be good or bad, and flipped anti-racism to racism.
Third Worldism applied Marxism on a global scale to partition the world into victims and oppressors based on crude racial and economic criteria. The Soviet Union helped usher in a global tribal hierarchy, but Third Worldism soon transcended Moscow and organized nations and races along ideological tribal lines while bearing enmity and resentment towards the U.S.
The Marxist narratives of Third Worldism explained why America and western nations were to blame for everything leading to a slow-motion world war whose global battlefields are not the grand scale of massive armies, fleets and forces of the first two world wars, but of the binding blocks of the world, the migration of populations, products and ideas, that have spread to western countries creating enemy societies within our society dedicated to our destruction.
Third world Marxism, like Marxism in the West, was the ideology of elites, but the fundamental contradiction was harder to detect because third world elites claimed to be representatives of a larger oppressed group and because western leftists seem unable to tell apart the elites from the working class in third world countries and they choose not to care about the distinction.
Third world elites who came to America were treated as the oppressed even as, like Obama’s father and Kamala’s mother, they deeply resented the United States and wanted to destroy it. This resentment isn’t grounded in any actual oppression they experienced, but in tribal resentment of another race, nationality or culture being superior to theirs, which Marxism taught them to cloak in ideology. This is the source of much of the growing extremism in America, the transformation of the country into a low trust society and campus terrorist radicalization.
Western leftists treat this as an ideological alliance when it’s just good old-fashioned racism. Much as they remain convinced that domestic Third Worldism is spreading diversity when it actually consists of groups of people who don’t like each other and are united only by a dislike of us and vague promises of a better society that will emerge when they finally destroy us.
Their behavior isn’t a reflection of faults in our society, but the faults in their own society.
Third Worldism succeeded in creating the anti-western alliance that the Soviet Bloc wanted by sowing the dragon’s teeth of a thousand small scale bigotries, massacres, terrorist organizations, tyrannies and conspiracy theories. But Third Worldism in the macro is defined by nothing deeper than hatred of the West while in the micro it represents smaller tribal ideologies like Islam that have their own societal endgame that is very different from the Marxist one.
The Red-Green alliance between Islam and Marxism isn’t unique, rather it’s the most prominent manifestation of Third Worldism as the bastard stepchild of Marxism and identity politics.
Marxism provides a modernist framework, theories of how a society is being badly run, how it ought to be run, how to identify the villains who are responsible for all the problems and what should be done about it, but rather than infiltrating and taking over third world societies, as the Marxists intended, was infiltrated and turned into a trojan horse for tribal movements like Islam.
While in western societies, Marxism replaced the particular, the ethnicity, the race and the tribe, with its general ideology, in non-western societies and among minorities, the particular adopted Marxism as the general while retaining its fundamental tribal imperatives. Among white western leftists, Marxism became the end, while among third worlders and minorities, it is only the means, and after the fall of the West, the triumph of their particular group is their actual end.
And why the seeming friction between opposed worldviews like Marxism and Islam is not an actual issue. Each sees the other as a means to an end. Even if it’s a different end. The stress points between the worldviews of Islam and Marxism involve a broader view of humanity, history and the existence of a higher power which are no barrier to Islam adopting Marxist structures or to Marxists adopting Muslim foot soldiers for short-term tactical necessity. Marx and Mohammed would no doubt have disapproved, but neither are around, and Third Worldism very much is.
That is why western Marxists express hatred for their race, religion and nation, while in third world societies, they use Marxism to call for the supremacy of their race, nation and, if their religion is Islam, for its triumph as well. That is how Marxism as means can be told apart from Marxism as an end. And it’s why Third Worldism is doubly corrosive to America.