Jordan Peterson is an extremely astute political scientist. Here he discusses what the attraction of Marxism in the present day is: it is not what you might expect.
In the past, Marxism had primarily economic appeal to those choosing it. A mixture of various tyrannical states, some capitalist, some allegedly power hungry in the same way, could be taken as legitimate points of grievance, where a person could point at the wealth of others and agree with the proposal that Marxism might offer a truly utopian path to some sense of “equality.”
Peterson notes a grisly prediction by no less than Friederich Nietzsche – that the process of trying to implement Marxism would be the catalyst of the destruction of hundreds of millions of innocent lives. It has been so.
What never came was that Utopia. Modern day proponents of Communism often still believe in the Utopian vision, but fault the passions of the Soviet leadership for going “off-course” in both Russia and China, for example; Russia during the Soviet period and China then and now, as China has become a true economic powerhouse while many of her people do not live so well.
But in the West, economically based Marxism / Communism (seen as the same thing by most Westerners, though people here in Russia often make a distinction they think is important), is not attractive.
The reason Communism is not attractive in the West is clear – there is not the abject reality of poverty in places like the United States. There ARE homeless people, but these are not the folks advocating for Communist or Marxist governments. They are not involved in the street riots that have rocked so many cities this last six months. Think about that. The people who are doing the rioting are often college “educated” young millennial adults, most of them white, not black, spurred on by grievance politics as Marxism has morphed into some sort of “social justice” beacon. Money doesn’t inspire revolution for these people; they have enough of that. But the idea of “rising up against social injustice, putting things right (depending on whatever one’s personal definition of right actually is), this has a great deal of attraction.
It is easy to build up a narrative saying that one side is for repression of justice and the other is for the execution of that “justice.” Oddly enough, the real repressive party as regards social and race-related justice are the Democrats in the United States. The party that advocates equal opportunity for all and lives it more are the Republicans.
But the rhetoric from the aggrieved has it the other way, and it is presently held to with all the fervor of a religion.
Jordan explains this in this segment. We hope you find it useful.
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