https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/09/marxist-virus-still-lethal-bruce-thornton/
At the start of the fifth month of urban rioting, it’s obvious that the deaths of black men resisting arrest are not causing the disorder, any more than imaginary “systemic racism.” But these excuses are mere pretexts. What we are really witnessing is the manifestation of a Marxist ideology and methodology over 150 years old. This intellectual virus has waxed and waned over that time, but has survived for one reason: The liberal democracies have adopted policies that accept and legitimize the technocratic, redistributionist, centralized Leviathan state.
Such endorsement of basically collectivist economic and social policies has created in the body politic the potential space in which Marxism can slumber until it erupts into an epidemic.
Many of us are puzzled by the endorsement of socialism on the part of the richest, freest, best- nourished people who ever existed. We point out socialism’s failures, from the failed revolutions of 1848 to the outbreak of World War I, when socialist political parties across Europe voted to finance a war in which millions of men fought, suffered, and died for the flags of their countries–– nations that Marxist doctrine claimed were transitory, parochial epiphenomena destined to disappear when communism triumphed and the red “heaven on earth” joined mankind in one global, collectivist identity.
But Marxist theory had been proven false decades before the Great War. As the great historian of the Soviet Union Robert Conquest pointed out, by the late 19th century “the Marxist predictions of a capitalist failure to expand production, of a fall in the rate of profit, a decrease in wages, of increasing proletarian impoverishment and the resulting approach of revolutionary crisis in the industrial countries had all proved false.” The proletariat didn’t get poorer, it became middle class consumers.
