Writes Althea, Content writer, Headline Diplomat eMagazine
Before the berthing of the COVID-19 virus at the shores of the West, the communist agenda used to be restricted to the hushed voices of pro-liberal politicians and individuals, at least unofficially. Communism since the crash of the Soviet Union used to be practically limited to China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Laos, except for Cuba.
A few countries have been fingered for warming up to Marxist values over the last decades, especially after the Great Depression of 2007 and 2009, which was seen by anti-capitalists as the failure of capitalism.
Today, communism seems to have come into a full-blown political ideology especially in many Western countries as world nations in almost all the global hemispheres succored to the use of Marxist-styled philosophies which involve the warming up of Europe and Africa to China, introducing power monopoly with some dose of totalitarian rules.
China’s influence on the African continent had long been strengthened before the COVID 19 came. But political analysts have been warning the west and Africa of the Communist Party of China’s influence on the African continent.
“China’s stronghold on Africa poses serious national security and economic problems for the American people and human rights issues for many Africans,” warns Kay James, an opinion columnist at Boston Herald.
But China has made Africa a priority continent with its “Coronavirus diplomacy” key in securing the sub-Saharan and North African regions, ensuring dominance. China also has huge financial commitments to African states as borrowings get close to $200 billion, with Kenya, Angola, and Ethiopia topping the list of countries financially indebted to China.
However, China’s new relationship with Africa has a political undertone, part of which is the consolidation of China’s international agenda and Marxist-style rule.
For example, at the 2018 Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), China and the 53 countries of Africa “made a commitment to push for a new model of international relations that is based on mutual respect, fairness, justice, cooperation, and win-win solutions,” according to Yun Sun, a Nonresident Fellow in Global Economy and Development, Africa Growth Initiative at Brookings, an American research group. “China and Africa both opposed protectionism and unilateralism, pledging their support for an open world economy and the multilateral trade system.”
On the other side of the divide, following the waning of capitalism in the US, Western countries too, have seen themselves resetting with communist agenda. The last two years have seen countries in the core Western hemisphere declaring forced lockdowns and making forced PCR tests.
In Germany, moves are being made against workers who refuse to be vaccinated. Salary subsidies will be ended for unvaccinated workers in the country, according to reports from the NYTimes. Earlier in September, France also suspended more than 3000 workers who are yet to vaccinate against the COVID-19 pandemic. Italy is also making an anti-COVID green pass for vaccinated employees which means employees who don’t have proof of vaccination and a negative result will be penalized.
“The government is ready to speed up on the ‘green pass’… (for) not just the public sector, but private too,” regional affairs minister Mariastella Gelmini said last week Wednesday.
US may be slipping back to communism
In the US, thanks to the COVID-19 politics of compulsory restrictions, lockdowns, compulsory vaccinations, social benefits, and more, at this point, the worst fears of anti-communist, right-wing and Hispanic Americans may be coming to life.
However, if other countries could be an easy target by communist nations and succumb to communist practices for survival in a COVID-ravaged socio-economic sphere, nothing could be as more incompatible, in appearance, than the United States, the cradle and spearhead of globalized capitalism and the thought of Karl Marx.
Nonetheless, if America is marked by a long tradition of hostility towards communism, and if communism remains a rare label on the political scene, Marxist thought now has an indisputable thrill across the Atlantic, among young people, in particular.
Periodically during the presidential campaign, Donald Trump fueled voters’ fear of a victory for socialism in the event of defeat. He updated an old American tradition: the anti-Communist witch hunt. “McCarthyism is back,” said the site, In Defense of Communism on October 5, 2020. The name couldn’t be clearer.
The initiative undeniably evokes the great “Red Scare” fanned in the early 1950s by Senator Joseph McCarthy, when the Cold War was in full swing, to pass without opposition multiple measures of surveillance and repression of socialist activists.
The USSR has since collapsed, and the systematic witch-hunt has ended. But hostility to Marxist thought remained strong in the United States before the 2020 elections.
Just before the elections, the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation denounced the “imminent threat of a socialist America.”
For his part, political scientist Yoram Hazony asserted, with some anxiety, posited that “Marxism is back, and making an astonishingly successful bid to seize control of the most important American media companies, universities and schools, major corporations and philanthropic organizations, and even the courts, the government bureaucracy, and some churches.”
Explaining the reactivation of the “Red Scare”?
The bourgeoisie recognizes that there is a risk and is worried about it. These attacks are not those of people who have confidence in the sustainability of their political and economic system, analyzes the Trotskyist political scientist Alan Woods, director of the journal In Defense of Marxism.
And to note that we are witnessing a revival, which is in its infancy, of left anti-capitalist movements, but also communism and socialism, we are experiencing an exceptional resurgence of interest, especially among young people. This is also the analysis proposed by journalist John B. Judis.
The figures seem to prove them right: 70% of young millennials (18-27 years old) said they would be ready to vote for a communist candidate. 36% of them approve of the ideas of communism – a 28% increase since 2018. Also, 40% would now rather “live in a socialist country than in a capitalist country”, and 20% consider “that no form of capitalism” is capable of producing the kind of world we dream of for the next generation.
Most Democrats are also not convinced about capitalism and think, it, needs serious fixing, Los Angeles Times reported liberals saying.
“I’m a capitalist,” Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic politician, first declared. Then he ended up saying: “It is clearly an imperfect, unfair, unjust, and racist capitalist economy.”
However, before his election, Biden, wouldn’t commit directly to the open admission for socialism but tries something that bridges both capitalism and socialism. He advocated for something which he termed “moral capitalism.”
“I don’t begrudge anybody making a million or hundreds of millions of dollars,” Biden told students at the University of Pennsylvania last year. “But I do think there’s some shared responsibility, and it’s not being shared fairly…. What happened to a moral responsibility, to a moral capitalism?”
As for the Democratic Socialists of America party which originally had 5,000 members, it grew to 50,000 members in 2018, and 77,000 in 2020. A clear dynamic in which youth plays a central role: The median age of the party thus fell from 68 in 2013 to 33 in 2017.
From a numbers perspective, the trend seems undeniable. However, it is necessary to clarify. If they imagine the Scandinavian countries, they are not talking about socialism. Socialism is not social democracy, and neither is it the same as communism or anti-capitalism.
Americans don’t seem to understand what sets these terms apart. If the use of the word “socialism” has become widespread today (to the point that Bill Gates can use it with a certain sympathy), the term “communism” remains much more taboo.
It is therefore worthy of determining precisely to what extent this “leftist” dynamic is by re-reading Marx’s work. More than a return to the texts, it is above all about a comprehensive understanding of capitalism as a social structure, and not just as an economic system. But undeniably, Marxist ideas are circulating.
Anticapitalists’ mistrust
How do you explain the renewal of socialism in the United States? Cyclical reasons, first: “Since he came into office, Barack Obama’s ideological adversaries called him many things. But “socialist” heads the list,” says Michael Kazin, director of the left-wing magazine Dissent, during Obama’s time as president. “A quick search for the president’s name and the “S” word turns up thousands of images of Obama with hammer and sickle, Obama reviewing troops in Red Square, Obama embracing Karl Marx, and so on. Unsurprisingly, many young people with no memory of the Cold War reflected that if a president they like is a “socialist,” perhaps that’s not such a bad thing after all.”
The enthusiasm for the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, who claims to be a “democratic socialist” as well as the current popularity of the young politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, also contributed to make the socialist approach a possible alternative.
But if there is one factor that explains, more than the others, the current success of Marxian thought in the United States, it is first of all the unprecedented crisis of capitalism, in the wake of the economic and financial crisis of 2008.
The shock of the Great Recession showed the failure of capitalism, observes Michael Kazin. Nancy Holmstrom confirms that for most people things are not going well, especially for young people. They face massive school debt and job insecurity. Their situation is much worse than that of their parents at their age. Even when they dream of a Scandinavian-style social democracy, protest movements are tendentially anti-capitalist.
A movement like Occupy Wall Street (2011), which has been the subject of many Marxist interpretations, perhaps most clearly indicates the growing distrust of capitalism.
For Alan Woods, the “unprecedented crisis” in the COVID-19-era economy is leading to a transformation of class consciousness among workers and youth. But he asked people not to misconstrue the crisis to have been caused by the pandemic. Socialist movements began way back before now, according to him.
“Capitalism has never been more unstable, nor the potential for class struggle greater,” Woods says, as reported by The Marxist. “It is a crisis that is frankly unlike any other crisis that we’ve seen and it will have the most momentous consequences. One of the factors that makes it different is that it’s mixed up with the pandemic. Now we must be absolutely clear about this: this crisis was not caused by the pandemic. It was in preparation before the pandemic started. It is now inseparably linked with the pandemic, which served to expose all the main fault lines within society.”
Conclusion
US’s waning global dominance, anti-capitalist mistrust, undemocratic COVID policies, and China’s increasing political and economic influence, and more are some of the factors which can explain the success of Marx’s thought in contemporary Western and developing countries.
The pandemic has further dealt a heavy blow to whatever isn’t communism. The West – US and capitalism especially – and democratic rules are declining while the East, China, communism, and authoritarian rules are rising above the horizons.
Today’s pro-communism activists, of course, have little to do with their European counterparts in the heyday of the Communist Parties. They draw from Marx’s tools of analysis and criticism without concern for orthodoxy. And very often they are not in fact supporters of the communist world of perfect harmony. But all, however, aspire, more than in the past, to a profound change of political and economic regime.
