11 Ways Leftists Have Tried to Cover for Marx's Failures

Chapter 7.6: The best of both worlds

Why this book | Title Page | Table of Contents
Preface | Introduction
PART 1
Chapter 1 (1.1) (1.2) | Chapter 2 (2.1) (2.2) (2.3) | Chapter 3 (3.1) (3.2) (3.3) (3.4) (3.5) (3.6)
PART 2
Chapter 4 (4.1) (4.2) (4.3) (4.4) (4.5) | Chapter 5 (5.1) (5.2) (5.3) (5.4) (5.5) (5.6) (5.7) (5.8) (5.9)
Chapter 6 (6.1) (6.2) (6.3) (6.4) (6.5)
PART 3
Chapter 7 (7.1) (7.2) (7.3) (7.4) (7.5) (7.6) | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12 | Chapter 13 | Chapter 14
PART 4
Chapter 15 | Chapter 16 | Chapter 17 |
PART 5
Chapter 18 | Chapter 19 | Chapter 20 | Conclusion
Appendix | Works Cited

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7.6 — The best of both worlds

• An antidote to racial obsession

• The future belongs to the individual

Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

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The best of both worlds

I don’t want to do nothing; there’s plenty to do.
The question I ponder is, ‘Who plans for whom?’
Do I plan for myself or leave it to you?
I want plans by the many, not by the few.

—"Keynes vs. Hayek 2," by John Papola & Russ Roberts

There is a natural (and morally good) alternative to the horrors of collectivism: community. 

Communities are formed by free individuals choosing to be together. Where collectivism reduces the individual to the status of a cell in a larger body—a drop of water in a gray ocean—community respects the freedom and rights of each person. Where collectivism obtains submission through violence, community invites choice. 

Communities allow for togetherness without force. Cooperation without subordination. The result is more vibrant and authentic. Everyone makes his or her own unique contribution. Collectivism is the uniformity of the meat grinder…community is a potluck dinner.

Though the realities of human existence may once have required a more tribal approach (and empowered those who would abuse it), our understanding of the indivisible centrality of the individual has grown as our species has advanced. Increasingly, societies are judged not on the opulence of their palaces or how many soldiers they can put in the field, but on how they treat the individual.

Even popular entertainment reveals an intuitive understanding of the primacy of the individual. One might expect Hollywood, which is dominated by the political left, to produce entertainment that lionizes the collective. But in most cases, it doesn’t. The good guys in adventure stories are almost always a group of scrappy individuals. Often enough, they’re up against a faceless collective bent on stamping out their individuality and taking their freedom.

And when one of the heroes sacrifices himself—for the mission or out of love for his fellows—we know that he did it of his own free will…not as a self-effacing cog in a machine, but as an individual. In that moment of sacrifice, we feel his individual personality, his individual worth, more keenly than at any other time.¹ Hollywood makes these sorts of stories, and people flock to see them, in part because somewhere, deep down, most of us have this intuitive understanding.

The subject of sacrifice in turn raises another essential point of comparison between community and collectivism. The realities of human existence do sometimes require individual sacrifice for the sake—and sometimes for the very survival—of the family, the tribe, the group. Collectivism plays on our deep-seated understanding of this need. The difference is that collectivism demands your sacrifice, and will force you to make it. Community sometimes needs your sacrifice, and loves you for choosing to make it.²

An antidote to racial obsession

❝The core of racism is the notion that the individual is meaningless and that membership in the collective—the race—is the source of his identity and value. '[D]iversity' propagates all the evils inherent in racism…that an individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by his racial heritage…that the individual is defined by his race.

— Peter Schwartz

As we began discussing in chapter 3, since the end of the nineteenth century, the left has unfolded as a series of revisions of Marx—attempts to cover for his failures and implement leftism in other ways.

First came the revisions of revolutionary leftism. Marxism had proved to be insufficiently attractive to produce spontaneous worldwide socialist revolution, and workers were showing no special interest in rising up to overthrow “capitalism.” This led to…

• Revolution by a revolutionary vanguard in place of spontaneous revolution by the working class. (Revision 1)

• The rise of national socialism and fascism (and a quieter, pragmatic turn of the orthodox left to nation-centric approaches). (Revision 2)

• The realization that leftism would have to be spread worldwide through war or subversion. (Revision 3)

This subversion strategy, in turn, took two forms: