What Do You Mean Again?

The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.

-Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto

I came of age during the dying throes of the Soviet Union.  Most of my memories of anything prior to about 1980 have mostly to do with Star Wars (not the Ronald Reagan version). The Berlin Wall fell during my sophomore year in High School and McDonalds, Levis and Capitalism won the great Cold War against the Red Menace. At the time, I was not at all familiar with what Marx and Engels and their communist comrades had actually said in the much maligned manifesto.  To judge from what we were told in Social Studies class, it must have been evil and godless.  Even my "cool" and liberal teacher didn't actually have us read what they said about the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, probably because he would have had to wade through waves of angry parents if he actually had teenagers read the dreaded Communist Manifesto.

I never actually read the thing myself until I was in Seminary.  I was working in the library and shelving books, and I saw this little thing sitting there, not but thirty pages or so long.  In those days, I was used to reading German Theologians and so I could absorb and digest that sort of thing like eating potato chips.  I read it, and I looked for the evil that might have, when I was a kid, brought the world to its knees. I didn't find it.

I found lots of stuff that I didn't exactly agree with as a comfortable (decidedly bourgeoisie) academic who actually likes (mostly) his decadent capitalist situation.  I was not instantly persuaded, nor have I been since then, that communism is the answer to all our woes.  What I was interested in was the historical perspective of a group of people who have become the minority opinion (Yes I know about China, and their billions of communists, but they honestly don't drive the consciousness of the world the way the West does, at least not yet).  I found the historical framing of the struggle between classes to be fairly compelling, and it has become more so in the past fifteen years. It is a critique I think we still need to answer.

I don't agree with Marx's optimism about the proletariat, but it's likely that the picture has shifted too significantly to know whether or not he was actually being naive.  What I do see in the Manifesto is a rather bold attempt at outlining a revolution.  It is a moment where some people realized that the history of the world was basically a repetitive cycle of oppression of the weak by the strong and the poor by the rich. They saw through the illusion of democratization.  They saw the role that money and wealth were playing in turning the merchant class into the new aristocracy, or essentially a tool of the aristocracy, and in that case, they were not wrong.

In the brutal world of the twentieth century it was difficult to defend communism (technically socialism, as full fledged communism has never really happened).  You had Stalin, who managed to out Hitler, Hitler, but who mostly did it from behind the Iron Curtain where we mostly agreed not to peek.  You had oppressive and godless governments who enforced the will of the State and never really ever got around to the general good and welfare of the collective.

In that context, it was easy for us to wear the white hat, we were free, we had all the smiles and good times.  Never mind the McCarthy hearings, or the black list, never mind the racial tensions and the struggle for women's rights, never mind the myriad forms of oppression that are woven into the fabric of our nation.  Comparatively speaking we were heaven on earth up against the hell that we had to literally hold back with our finger itching at the trigger of nuclear war.

The problem with staring so intently at your enemy is that you often don't look at yourself very critically or constructively, and I think that has led to a rather glaring blind spot in our collective consciousness.  We look back at those years as the halcyon days of our great empire, and in many ways our impulse is to yearn for them.  There is a lot behind that: then we knew who our enemy was and we understood them.  Russians are essentially Europeans, even though a lot of their country is in Asia.  Moscow and Petersburg are European cities, they are understandable and familiar to the western mind.  Mutually Assured Destruction worked because both sides realized it was a bad idea to incinerate the only planet we actually have.

Our enemy of these times is actually not so reliable in that department.  We understand them poorly, if at all, and we honestly don't give them the honor we gave the USSR as an opponent.  We disdain them and hate them with a different sort of bile.  That's why so many in our culture now are kind of obsessed with Vladmir Putin, even as an enemy, he hearkens us back to the "good old days."  Honestly we would rather deal with the likes of him than with Osama Bin Laden or whatever god forsaken maniac wants to kill us this week.

The "good old days" were not really so good as we mostly remember them.  It really was terrifying to contemplate all out nuclear war.  As frightful as the prospects of terror attacks and even some sort of dirty bomb might be, it's not quite of the same character as the world-ending conflagration that would have been fought essentially between targeting computers.

As problematic as the world is now, I don't really want to rewind to that state of affairs.  I would rather learn from history than repeat it, and I think that means learning from the minority opinions and the ideas that may have been put on the scrap heap.  If they were wrong, why were they wrong?  How wrong were they?  How wrong were we even though we "won?"

Instead of making America great again, how about we just try making it better than it is now, and focus particularly on trying for a nation that is better than it has ever been? Instead of repeating the same cycle and enduring the same oppression and division, how about we learn from our past rather than idolizing it?