‘Third Worldism’ is America’s Greatest Threat
by
When Marxism became tribal, it also became genocidal.
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Marxism isn’t a political or economic theory: it’s a conspiracy theory. As an understanding of human relations, it’s childish, but it’s an incredibly effective conspiracy theory because it offers a universally applicable framework for fostering resentments and weaponizing grievances.
Despite the fears of conservatives and the hopes of leftists, Marxism had only a limited impact on the European workers it had been designed to sway and appealed far more to the children of the bourgeoisie who had developed it and ached for the destruction of their way of life, it had its most devastating impacts in non-western societies and among non-westerners in the West.
Among westerners, Marxism failed to gain headway among the working class and became a set of academic theories of societal conflict with a great deal of impact on cultural elites leading to secondary and tertiary societal infections among people who knew nothing about Marxism.
Among non-westerners however, Marxism fused with identity politics to create a leftist theory of tribal resentments. The problem with applying Marxism to class warfare had been that so much of the working class in an industrial society aspired to social mobility and wealth. The poor didn’t want to ‘eat the rich’, they wanted to become the rich, or at least ascend to the middle class.
In tribal settings, where divisions of race, ethnicity, culture and religion were seen as much less permeable, and could not be resolved through social mobility or integration, Marxism took its true and final form as an ideology of ethnic cleansing and genocide, creating a rationale that made the mass murder of millions of people in the name of social progress seem reasonable.
The Communist genocides were not really about about Marxism, rather Marxism became a permission system for killing large numbers of people who were really being targeted for tribal reasons, for example Jews and Ukrainians in the Soviet Union, Christians and Vietnamese in Cambodia, Indians in Nicaragua or rival clans under Somalia’s Marxist-Leninist regime.
That doesn’t mean Marxism is innocent of these crimes, on the contrary, Marxists consciously adopted their ideology to tribal appeals and Marxist ideology provided the framework for elevating tribal resentments, racial, religious and ethnic, to the state of a general philosophy of human conflict, offering clear delineations of victim and oppressor, and championing terrorism and tyranny as sanctioned solutions for resolving tribal resentments.
Worse still, Marxist terrorists and tyrants could count on the complicity of international Marxists, as Cambodia’s Pol Pot could count on MIT’s Noam Chomsky, to cover-up their crimes, and even non-Marxist terrorists and tyrants could also count on that support if they were seen as aligned with the goals of the larger third world decolonization movement and were killing members of a western or western-aligned race, religion or ethnicity. That is why Judith Butler and the DSA can defend Hamas and its killing of Jews as a progressive movement.