I find it fascinating that George Friedman’s take on critical theory, carried in RealClearWorld, closely tracks with my own, which is undoubtedly because his frame of reference is not unlike my own:
I entered graduate school in 1970, determined to study two things. One was political philosophy, the consideration of the nature of justice, particularly as presented by German philosophers. The second was called comparative communism, the study of communist states and movements, particularly contemporary ones. The choice of subjects wasn’t random, if perhaps presumptive. I wanted to understand Germany, the place that had defined my origins. And I wanted to understand communism, which had defined and would define much of my life. I was hostile to Marxism but deeply believed in understanding your enemy.
The more I studied, the more confused I became. Marxism seemed to have little to do with Marx, and communist regimes were rarely Marxist. Marxist movements around the world rarely consisted of workers, but rather of intellectuals and soldiers, and sometimes criminals. Similarly, Hegel and Nietzsche could be considered proto-Nazis only if you closed your eyes. The intellectual life I sought was far more coherent than the political realities around me. Since I crave order in all things, and since Marxism was more pressing at that moment than Nazism, I dove into the history of Marxism and of Marxist terrorism and MiG-21s.
How did Marx miscalculate? How did Lenin try to compensate for Marxism’s shortcomings? Why did Lenin fail? What caused the Soviet Union to fall? All is explained in the linked piece.
Here’s his conclusion:
The stubbornness of the human soul, for bad or good, transcends both a failed historical model and failed enthusiasm for change. The world is stubborn.
To understand the present moment it’s probably more helpful to understand Augustine than to understand Marx and that is to understand that the aspirations of today’s revolutionaries will crash on the rocks of their own humanity.
