http://www.cardinalcollective.com/blog/archives/2004/02/000754.htmlFebruary 09, 2004
Neocons as Marxists
Michael Lind (apparently a former neocon himself) has an interesting piece on neoconservatism in The Nation this month. (Link from Matthew Yglesias.) The passage Yglesias notes is a criticism of David Brooks and other neocons that want to claim that neoconservatism doesn't really exist. However, the passages that stuck out most to me were some comparisons with Stalinism.
The fact that most of the younger neocons were never on the left is irrelevant; they are the intellectual (and, in the case of William Kristol and John Podhoretz, the literal) heirs of older ex-leftists. The idea that the United States and similar societies are dominated by a decadent, postbourgeois "new class" was developed by thinkers in the Trotskyist tradition like James Burnham and Max Schachtman, who influenced an older generation of neocons. The concept of the "global democratic revolution" has its origins in the Trotskyist Fourth International's vision of permanent revolution. The economic determinist idea that liberal democracy is an epiphenomenon of capitalism, promoted by neocons like Michael Novak, is simply Marxism with entrepreneurs substituted for proletarians as the heroic subjects of history.
It's generally considered bad form to compare one's opponent to Stalin, just as it is to compare her to Hitler, but here I don't mean the comparison in any of the offensive ways. The relevant point is just that both are Marxists. I don't mean this in the sense of Communists (I think Communism and Marxism are too often conflated - it's very common to be one without the other). It's more similar to the way cultural conservatives often criticise academics for being Marxist, in that the academics are focused on socioeconomic class conflict as a driving force in world history. However, the neocon vision seems to be even more Marxist than this. Like Trotsky or Stalin, neocons dream of a new world order that will arise when the people of the world manage to overthrow their current oppressors, most likely with the help of one of the few nations that has reached the liberated ideal of future societies. As a caricature, neocons are just Marxists who believe that the bourgeois, rather than the proletariat, is the class that will finally bring about world unity and end the dialectical materialist processes of history.
I personally think that if one were to subscribe to a dialectical materialist view of history, it wouldn't make sense to think of there being an endpoint, but rather one should see society as continually creating a new underclass to serve as antithesis to the victors of the previous revolution. Not to mention that I think that dialectical materialism is barely less out of date than Hegel's dialectical idealism, and has been superseded by more accurate theories of history. Neither of which is a criticism of Communism as a political doctrine. And the collapse of (most of) the brutal totalitarian states of the Soviet bloc really seems to me to be irrelevant in critique of either Communism as a form of societal organization (as distinct from totalitarianism) or Marxism as a theory of history.
UPDATE: All this talk about Marxism is just one more point in this article. There's really plenty of other reasons to read it as well. It's an interestingly sympathetic and critical article about neoconservatism as a whole. It's not clear to me what the distinction Lind makes between neocons and liberal hawks though, even though he now seems to have more sympathy for the latter. He mentions allowing Southern religious conservatives into the movement, but that certainly doesn't apply to the older generation of neocons.
Posted by Kenneth Easwaran at February 9, 2004 12:39 AM | TrackBack
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