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WHY DO CONSERVATIVES continue to insist that Marxism and Marxists wield significant power in the world’s capitalist nations? Why do they refuse to accept the reality of the Right’s historic victory over “actually existing socialism” in 1991? Hell! If socialism had defeated capitalism as decisively as capitalism defeated socialism, then the global party would have been epic. So, why the continuing need for this fictional Marxist bogeyman nearly 30 years after the poor, broken creature conveniently committed suicide? I just don’t get it.
Perhaps it would help if conservatives were treated to a brief history of how the Marxists, who did, once, play a part in the political life of the Capitalist West, went down to defeat long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because the political persuasiveness of Marxist theory collapsed a long time before the Soviet Union, and it was the “New Social Movements” wot done it.
New Social Movements? Oh yes, these were the ideological shock-troops that smashed headlong into the doctrines and institutions of the “Old Left” in the 1960s and 70s and drove its representatives (already shattered and scattered by the McCarthyite witch-hunts of the 1950s) even further into the political wilderness. The black civil rights movement, which owed more to Gandhi that Marx. The environmental movement, whose bible was Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring”, not “Das Kapital”. The “second wave” of feminism, driven forward by Betty Freidan and her ground-breaking best-seller, “The Feminine Mystique”.
Conservatives have long insisted that the people who participated in these movements were communist “fellow-travellers”. Truth to tell, it was the other way around. It was the Marxists who attempted to ride these new political tigers. In almost every case they failed. The new social movements shook them off like dew.
How do I know? Because I watched it happen. The student movement of the 1970s and early-1980s offered a ringside seat to anyone with an interest in left-wing politics. On New Zealand’s university campuses the Maoists and their Trotskyite foes waged a bitter struggle for political hegemony. (The Moscow-aligned Socialist Unity Party steered well clear of the universities, preferring the company of old-fashioned trade unionists!) They were disciplined and dedicated, these Marxists, but to win converts they had to be where the action was, and in the 70s and 80s the action was abortion law reform, anti-apartheid, nuclear disarmament, Maori rights, and conservationism. In other words, with the new social movements.
The poor buggers didn’t stand a chance. Women fighting for the right to control their own fertility bridled at the lofty condescension of all these Marxist blokes who seemed to think that women’s liberation was something that could wait until after the revolution, and that in the meantime their female comrades owed them their, ahem, undivided attention. The anti-apartheid movement, like the movement for Maori rights, contained many activists who were frankly suspicious of all these lefties spouting the ideas of dead Europeans and expecting indigenous people to follow along behind them without demur. The anti-nuclear movement, not unreasonably, objected that the world had every bit as much to fear from the socialists’ missiles as it did from the capitalists! The greenies, similarly, looked at the environmental destruction wreaked by the USSR’s five-year plans and declined the Old Left’s kind offers of instruction.
Sometimes it came down to set-piece ideological battles. At a feminist congress held in Piha in 1978, the lesbian separatists, in a my-enemy’s-enemy-is-my-friend alliance with the “cultural feminists”, decisively routed the Marxist feminists who’d turned up from outfits like the Socialist Action League and the Wellington-based Marxist-Leninist Organisation.
In the famously “post-materialist” Values Party, there was a similar showdown between the Marxist “eco-socialists” and less radical environmentalists. Once again, it was the Marxists who came off second-best. Although, it is only fair to acknowledge the contribution of Marxists like Sue Bradford and Keith Locke to the Values Party’s successor, the Greens. Not that Sue’s contribution was enough to win her the Green Party’s co-leadership. That contest was won by, yes, you guessed it, a cultural feminist and Maori nationalist – Metiria Turei.
Inevitably, the ideas encountered by the student Marxists as they interacted with the new social movements began to take their toll on these young communists’ ideological convictions. From the by-the-book Marxism, in which they had been schooled by old-guard communists from the 1940s and 50s, they found themselves moving into less familiar and much more demanding territory.
The “Tripod Theory of Oppression”, for example, attempted to meld the arguments of race and gender onto Marxism’s class-based theories of exploitation and oppression. When the white, male, bosses park their fat arses on the backs of the poor, says the Tripod Theory, the stool they perch upon presses down with three legs – not one. Academics at Massey University even produced a journal inspired by the Tripod Theory. It was called, rather predictably, “Race, Class & Gender”.
In the end, it all got too much for even the communists’ famed discipline to contain. Old-fashioned Labour supporters like myself looked on in amused disbelief as young female comrades from the crumbling Marxist sects began running-off with their sisters-in-struggle, leaving former boyfriends and spouses sobbing disconsolately into their proletarian pints.
From Marxism as revolutionary threat, to Marxism as soap opera. If the conservatives had only known how little they had to fear!
The laughter ceased, however, as the new social movements congealed into ideological formations that brooked no challenge. Though many conservatives may not realise it, the term “political correctness” was coined by leftists who found this new orthodoxy as overbearing and unattractive as the drear Stalinist catechisms of the 1930s.
They thrived, however, these new social movements – not least because the global free-market revolution that was gathering pace in the late-1970s and throughout the 80s realised early-on how useful they could be in the ongoing struggle to overcome the fierce resistance of the traditional Left to their economic reforms.
This is, perhaps, the greatest irony. Neoliberalism abjures the heavy-handed state no less strenuously than the new social movements resisted the heavy-handed doctrines of the Old Left. Born out of the conscientized middle-classes, the new social movements – known originally as the “New Left” – were no less protective of the rights of the sovereign individual than the economic libertarians of the so-called “New Right”. Whatever the name of the ideology currently unifying the thing that the new social movements turned into, it ain’t Marxism.
Conservatives should ask themselves why so few mourned the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. The simple answer: the USSR was the last man standing. Western Marxism had been wiped out as a significant political force long before the hammer and sickle came down.
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