The smokescreen of socialism

OPINION:

The smokescreen of utopia often masquerades as the soft, glowing light of hope.

Individuality can be easily dismissed as performative, showcasing an egotism embedded in forces that alienate and destroy. The dismissal is facilitated by the fact that it’s easier to see the anomie and existential angst when men act than it is to see the positive transformations of letting men be free.

Socialism pursues an illusory world of perfect economic relations whose disguise lures us to deny agency. That smokescreen is thick. We are all trapped within historical forces outside our control. As in, you do not exist, I cannot see you; our meaning and purpose lie in being dropped within a wave that cannot be stopped.

The oppressor tricks you with subjectivity to maintain a steady state of social power. I cannot see you, as you are but a token of recognition whose existence bears an indelible mark determined by the complexity of the modes of production: oppressed or oppressor, victim or victimizer.

Socialism is bad anthropology. It presents a vision of the human person that imprisons us inside predetermined categories with their own destinies. We are not unique, unrepeatable and important beings with the moral capacity for self-realization, made in the very image and likeness of God. There is no deity as the grounding of our capacities of reason and volition.

Marx, the dialectical utopian, scoffed at the moralist “utopian socialists” and their aspirations of a coming harmony because they missed their own identity, either as “reactionary” or “conservative” elements reflecting the interests of the social classes holding power, whether feudal lords or the bourgeoisie. Everything is grounded in impersonal material conditions. We cannot create small, intentional and mediating communities because we cannot freely intend, in the fullest human sense. We respond to the impersonal movements of history.

True knowledge comes from staying in our lane. Socialist economies have to be centrally planned because there is nothing meaningful in the periphery. If the human person is a cog within the machine, then knowledge exists only at its center. It is centrally planned because there are no plural spheres in society with an authority that does not answer to another. Nature and the mind are reduced to material economic forces. The individual disappears as a meaningful factor for interpreting society because cogs are only subsidiary parts.

In the struggle against a powerful victimizing class, we need to let the enlightened engineers who control the machine’s heart make all the decisions. Enlightenment comes from the steady center of the great revolutionary hurricane.

Yet, the single most decisive change of the last 100 years is not technological but theoretical.

The old Marx, with his dogmatic insistence on the foundational place of social class, has company on the floor of social reality. Instead of one element class there are many other forms of cognition. Instead of a “scientific” revolution, where we discover the historical mysteries of human existence, the new ber-revolutionaries say, “Why not get rid of reason itself!”

We can thus say that socialism has been reduced to a will to power, the primary driving force of history.

After bursting onto the scene in the late 1960s, postmodernism provided a radical challenge to all modes of acquiring knowledge in Western society. It became fashionable among leftist academics but remained merely a deconstructive cry of nihilistic dejection. In fact, some scholars thought postmodernism was dead by the late 1980s.

But it rose from its ashes as applied postmodernism. Its mutations were many queer theory, postcolonial studies, radical feminism, critical race theory but its heart was filled with the fuel of the Marxist understanding of the role of power. As a virus, it attached itself to what was left of socialism after the failed Soviet experiment, giving the ideology new, artificial life.

Both the postmodernist virus and the socialist host have changed. The underlying assumptions of postmodernism remained, but the socialist remnant gave them applied force. Socialism became social justice. But not the social justice of Leo XIII’s “Rerum Novarum” or the Civil Rights Movement. Postmodernism, readied for revolution, is what socialism has become.

We are in the midst of a struggle with this mutation.

• Ismael Hernandez is the founder and president of The Freedom & Virtue Institute.