I think perhaps my spiciest take is that Marxists have underrated the extent to which Marxism itself (and of course the Soviet Union) played a crucial intellectual role in generating class consciousness **for the ruling class** & thus its been missed how reflexive the reliability on these ideas was
People talk about the impact of the soviet union on creating a sense of danger that "required" reforms but I think the intellectual role is just as important. The most important generation of post-war period ruling class leadership got exposed to high quality Marxist thinking in the 1930s.
Some of them **were Marxists** then.
And at the same time it was paranoia about the Soviet Union that led this elite to make most of the stupid (and murderous) decisions that ended up undermining their position and encouraged them to leave a door open to the irrationalist right
Yeah that’s pretty spicy 🌶️
Yes. Yes. Yes. Bourgeois ideology succumbed to anti-communist ideology, which contained a core of pseudo-Marxism transmitted by the ex-Communists who became anti-communists.
1/14 When former Communist Party of Poland member Isaac Deutscher reviewed “The God that Failed” in 1950, he quoted Ignazio Silone's remark that "the final conflict will be between the Communists and the ex-Communists." That prediction has proven to be overly optimistic.
2/14 Three years later, Hannah Arendt distinguished between former Communists and ex-Communists in "The Ex-Communists." The latter morphed into communists-in-reverse informers while the former simply went on with the rest of their lives.
3/14 The role of ex-communists in anti-communist agitation was the subject of several essays in the early 1950s but faded by the end of the decade. Arendt's essay on ex-Communists, however, raised issues that should have received more attention over the years since.
4/14 A recent article in Commonweal Magazine, where her essay was originally published, highlights its continuing relevance today. Arendt, after all, wrote the "textbook" on totalitarianism – “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” www.commonwealmagazine.org/hannah-arend...
5/14 In her Ex-Communists essay and in an earlier typescript from around 1950 dealing with the issue, "The Eggs Speak Up," she argued that the ex-communists brought their Stalinist habits with them into their anti-communist agitation, thus creating a totalitarian threat from the right.
6/14 "[T]hey are introducing police methods into normal social life..." she wrote, "Because, without exception, they name names, they make police agents of themselves after the fact, as it were. In this way, the informant system is being integrated into the society."
7/14 There are few surviving "Communists" or "ex-Communists" if we take the death of Stalin as the cut-off for being one or the other. An 18-year old in 1953 would be 90 in 2025. But the "totalitarian" political influences of the Comintern generation did not die with them.
8/14 David Horowitz, the "radical son" of CPUSA members and sixties radical turned right-wing agitator mentored Stephen Miller, Donald Trump's anti-immigrant "brain" and deputy chief of staff. Miller channels Horowitz's all-consuming anti-left rage without ever having been a leftist.
9/14 In the 80s and 90s a surrogate totalitarian communist threat, "cultural Marxism," was manufactured out of whole cloth. In 1989, T. Kenneth Cribb gave an address to the Heritage Foundation on "Conservatism and the American Academy: Prospects for the 1990s."