Is Barack Obama a Marxist?
“All I know is that I am not a Marxist” - Karl Marx
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.” - Groucho Marx
Conservative radio pundits and some of their callers, along with a few bloggers, have described Barack Obama as a “Marxist. ” If by “Marxist” they mean that Obama’s politics are a brew of socialism, authoritarianism and radical egalitarianism, they’re right. But I see no evidence that Obama believes in violent overthrow of our capitalist system, or in any of the real complexities Marxism aims at the stupid, the envious, the unbalanced, the power-mad and the credulous.
True, the Black Liberation Theology of Trinity United is infested with Marxist class dynamics and socialism; it offers up some Marxian and Neo-Marxist musings on the subject of consciousness, hermeneutics, violence as means, and an entire honey bucket load of dialectical excreta. But I doubt that Obama is a BLT believer; its spurious but powerful demands for charity and sanctioned humility compete with his personal vanity, his insight, and his desire for the good life. We will not see Barack Obama in any real egalitarian arrangement.
As for Marxist orthodoxy, it’s difficult today to find any political philosophy, Left or Right, which doesn’t incorporate some of the prejudices, social values and processes which shaped the pseudo social-science built by Karl Marx. Some hard, utilitarian market-love adored by conservatives is, in ways, Hegelian/Marxist. It’s impossible to define or isolate Marxist “thinking” as the sole property of Marx.
That’s because so little that Marx wrote about, or formulated, was actually original or creative; it consisted of pages of intellectual theft, and the elaboration of ideas and concepts broadcast by his predecessors, collaborators and contemporary superiors, among whom the primary concerns were human liberty and dignity. The elements of “Marxism” were everywhere before Karl Marx grew his first beard.
His ideas floated atop an age of rationalism, where eventually Darwin and Freud would add their own gears and wheels to the “scientific” study of mankind. That Marx’s clockwork absurdities, his observations and predictions have survived at all into our age of deconstruction is puzzling. A lot of it is simply obvious and mundane, while its emotive theorizing and puffery continue an egalitarian road blazed by Rousseau, and the communard, utopian silliness of thinkers as far back as Plato.
The reason I doubt that Obama is a Marxist is that Marxism has fallen on hard times and Obama is no consumer of the second-rate. Marxism appears in a few places, like shiny scales dropping from a rotting fish - leftist riffraff, for example, who gorge on the lard of weirdo capitalism, then show up to protest in mass-marketed fancy-dress, and assert their devotion to a dead, 19th century socialist failure and crank. Laughable.
You can also find Neo-Marxism in that intellectual burger joint, Critical Theory, where brainy work is found for otherwise unemployable socialist academics. Critical Theorists question everything, including Marxism, except the dialectical process which makes Marxism possible. Hello? Why? Because without it, Critical Theory would be 100% charlatanry rather than just 99%.
No, Obama is worse than a Marxist. He’s a modern “progressive”, a clever, wildly ambitious believer in the ever-progressing good society. He believes that group life is a process, and that he’s going to have something to DO with it! In his world, nothing can be left alone to develop, mature or even regress on its own. He’s interested in YOU, and that should scare the hell out of you.
Archived in: Barack Obama, Conservatives, Marxism, Progressives, SocialismSeptember 6, 2008 at 5:37 pm | Trackback
14 comments
Social progressive practice may be seen best in with children in kindergarten, where the teacher will place toys out for play, instructing them to share. She will turn her back and capitalism breaks out. Everytime!
Only by standing on their tiny backs can the urge to gather what one wants be suppressed. It is never removed; the suppression is resented.
Increasing the suppression is akin to squeezing jello in your fist with the same results.
Stumbled on this via an alert and most enjoyed it. I do not agree with the conclusion but I respect how you got there. Give Barack a few conservative points.
I watched what passed for Marxism expire in the lecture halls of Cambridge in the 80s. You are spot on about Barack’s relation to BLT which to me is as much a besmirching of theology as anything else.
I am sure we could find more to disagree on but I did wanted to tip my hat to intelligence. Cheers, S
Whoops the form threw in my email address instead of my blog.
Thank you very much, Stephen. Considering how emphatic I am about Obama’s political shortcomings (last paragraph), and your support for him, you’ve been very gracious.
We can agree on some things, such as BLT. It seems to me that Christian activism of the BLT kind concerns itself less with sin and human nature than it does with how to resolve both problems with the power of the state. It’s hard to see where revelation and virtue come in at all.
That also might explain how I feel about progressivism.
Thanks again…H
PS: One of my great uncles was a silver worker in CT. He came from Beaver Falls, PA. He was a socialist. I have a photo of him in a gathering of hard-looking men, beneath a large engraving of Karl Marx.
He was blackballed in Meriden, CT, and not allowed to work anywhere he was identified. He bought a farm in Shelburne Falls in the 1920’s, and eventually died working it in the 1951.
Considering the conditions of his life, Marx clearly had the solution and the capitalists didn’t. He was right.
BLT…for a minute there, I thought you were talking about a sandwich…
I would have to say that Barry Hussein, along with the rest of the semi-rational Left (those that don’t foam at the mouth, bathe regularly, and appear to hold a regular job and lifestyle) may be unconcious Marxists, or if the recognize their Marxist beliefs, followers of the Gramscian approach to power (slicing freedoms away, increasing their control over society bit by bit over the years.)
As for Barry’s messiah complex; that I would attribute to his rather expansive ego, which is visible in spades ( Am I allowed to use that word in the same sentence with The One?) in many of his campaign posters, photographs and the styrofoam Barackopolis in Denver. In my experience, many of those infected by one or more variants Marxist thought tend to have a vastly inflated self-importance, thinking that they’re the latest VI Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Fidel or Che. I don’t know which comes first, whether Marxism leads to ego inflation, or having a big ego leads one to Marxism.
I would agree that Marxism, like its somewhat less bloodthirsty brother, Socialism; are names that have acquired a less than desireable cachet (excepting the usual suspects amongst the more extreme moonbats), hence the use of the term “Progressivism” or “Populism”. But nevertheless, its still the same crap, just with a different label on the container.
“I would agree that Marxism…[]…still the same crap, just with a different label on the container.”
You betcha Bryan, like putting a pink ribbon on a pile of sh** and calling it pretty.
One thing about which the Left never talks is the number of persons helped advancing the Great March Forward, improving the Radiant Future and the new Cambodian farming technology of 1975. And so many more.
“One thing about which the Left never talks is the number of persons helped advancing the Great March Forward, improving the Radiant Future and the new Cambodian farming technology of 1975. And so many more.”
Assuming they are ignorant of the Marxist thought animating and directing their causes; I believe Lenin referred to them as “useful idiots”.
I probably should have referred to the helped as the dead that “couldn’t be educated” to the wonders of of Progressive crap.
On target again, Bryan. Gramsci’s idea of hegemony was to slowly alter all the terms of the debate in communism’s favor, probably also including the language, and the means by which we describe things. That’s the fixation on “consciousness” that stinks up leftist thinking. They simply deny your reality, and rationalism goes up in smoke. It seems to me more like Maoism than Marxism.
I believe that many on the left take this stuff seriously, and with civil disobedience now viewed as honorable, the last barrier to peaceful change through elective systems is down…and has been since at least the 1960’s.
Marxism is so amorphous now that along the range of the left, and in a few cranky parts of the right, you’ll find all of it in varying proportions. Obama would turn a lot of it loose without blinking an eye.
Hotspur:
I would generally concur that much of the left would restort to violence after the election. If The Obama wins, it will be an orgy of violence directed at those they consider their enemies…just as payback for dare opposing Hopenchange and to make sure that we know who the new boss is in town and we can’t do a damn thing about it.
If McCain wins, I think that the left will contest this, even if it is a clear-cut victory; bringing out the ususal electoral myths such as disenfranchised and suppressed voters, diebold, et.al. I think that they’ll first try a challenge to the Electoral College based on the 14th Amendment.
In any case, I think that Barry will have himself “inaugurated” into office, as sort of an Anti-Presidency. In this case, I believe that he will get significant support from bureaucracy in fedgov (excepting Defense, with varying support from other agencies) as well as the state bureaucracies. This will make very difficult for McCain to get anything done, leaving his only option to close down these agencies. The left will take this as cutting off the very air they breathe, and then comes violence and secession from the Blue States.
“…cutting off the very air they breathe, and then comes violence and secession from the Blue States.” Followed by cutting of the money and putting up wire on the borders. Lets see how long they last without tax revenues to pay the welfare roles. There will be a migration of persons out of those states, those that leave late may lose much through confiscation.
This will solve the national debt is one fell swoop. Imagine how much money is saved when the entitlements are removed, and not all of them.
I think that those traitorous Dem states WILL confiscate everything from everyone, at least starting with those the left considers the rich, class enemies and the like. It will eventually move down the line to the middle and lower classes, given the progs abhorance of anything and anyone they cannot control.
YES.