Article by Thomas Lifson in The American Thinker
How the Marxists are realizing their dreams in America two centuries after the birth of Marx
Who was Karl Marx? The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today’s Rampaging American Left............by James Simpson
Longtime readers of American Thinker are familiar with the work of James Simpson, a tireless researcher on the inner workings of the American left. In 2008, as Barack Obama was poised to win the presidency, he brought to the attention of the public the Cloward-Piven strategy of manufactured crisis that he correctly predicted would animate the Obama administration. Simpson’s explanation of the strategy laid out by these two Columbia University professors was picked up by many of the leading voices of the conservative movement and came to shape our understanding of the true course of the Obama presidency.
As we now watch Obama’s vice president Joe Biden, now barely senescent, installed in the Oval Office and apparently controlled by “advisors” from his old boss’s regime, that strategy of manufactured crisis is being forced upon the Republic on a gigantic scale. The southern border is open, a contagious by highly survivable viral contagion is being used to demolish our personal liberties, and the nation stands on the brink of financial ruin with previously unthinkable sums of money about to be borrowed and spent on a wish list of leftist social programs that would once and for all finish off our freedoms and empower government bureaucrats to control the minutiae and direction of our lives.
In his recently published book, Who was Karl Marx? The Men, the Motives and the Menace Behind Today’s Rampaging American Left, Simpson delves deeper into the history and course of the left’s century-and-a-half of evil plotting to destroy freedom and had power to a self-appointed coterie of revolutionaries who know no constraint or limits on their deviousness or ruthlessness, all in the name of a utopia they promise to their followers.
To such a heavy and frankly depressing subject, Simpson brings a deft hand, and in the course of just over 150 pages traces the thinkers and the strategies they created and shows how their work now is finally being implemented in the world’s largest economy and formerly freest and most dynamic society.
This is a book full of connections. I found the historical chapters, beginning with Karl Marx and the revolutionary followers who fleshed out specific strategies to accomplish his plan to seize power, eye-opening. His chapter entitled “The Most Important Radical No One’s Ever Heard of” is startling, for as the title asserted, I had never heard of Sergey Nechayev, author of a three-pamphlet published in 1869, titled The Revolutionary Catechism. Nechayev laid out the path of utter ruthlessness that enabled the Bolsheviks to seize power from the much larger group of revolutionaries that managed to topple to Czar of Russia and implement the world’s first communist revolution, ostensibly to implement the worker’s paradise promised by Karl Marx, but in fact to install themselves as unconstrained tyrants.
Simpson demonstrates how the strategies and tactics of Nechayev have been at the heart of leftist politics for well over a century, and even today animate the activities of the left here, disguised under a thin veneer of democratic politics. In an appendix to the heavily-footnoted book, Simpson reprints the entire Revolutionary Catechism. Both hs chapter and the document itself ought to be required reading for anyone who seeks to understand what we face at this key historical moment, with the left poised to seize hitherto undreamed-of powers on the thinnest of congressional mandates and led by dotard who often references what “they tell” him he is “supposed to do.”
Other important and more prominent twentieth century figures in the history of leftist strategic thinking, like Georgi Lukacs, Antonio Granmsci, and Herbert Marcuse and The Frankfurt School are also covered, in brief and readable chapters, including Obama’s mentor Saul Alinsky. It was the Frankfurt School scholars, imported to America, who led the systematic takeover of our colleges and universities, and thereby started indoctrinating our youth into a revolutionary constituency, brainwashed to hate our freedoms and imagining the fanciful paradise promised but never delivered by Marxists.
The second half of the book focuses on the present day and how the “orchestrated crisis” is being stage managed by the figures and organizations we now contend with: from Obama and Biden to Antifa and BLM. What makes these chapters different from what we may read in the course ofn following the conservative commentary of the day is the connections Simpson draws to the ideas and work of the earlier theorists who laid out in plain sight what they intended to do, and how ruthless they would be, unconstrained by truth, morality, or humanity. The promised paradise that seduces followers to their path never, ever is realized, and the ruthlessness of their political approach – justified by the promised paradise – tells us the nature of the system they install and operate.
After reading this book, you will understand the depth and meaning of the expression “useful idiot,” a species that today sits in the commanding heights of our media, universities, nonprofit
Organizations and government bureaucracies. If they ever were to read about Nechayev and his plans for them once power lies in the hands of the revolutionaries – as put into practice by Lenin and other communist revolutionaries like Mao and Pol Pot -- they might rethink their activities. But of course, they will not. But you can in this short and inexpensive ($15 in paperback) guide to the roots of our present situation, with the loss of our liberties in very real prospect.
The final section of the book is titled, "A Comprehensive Plan to Save America," drawing on the work of others as well as Sumpson's own reserach. There may still be a chance to implement it, but time is running out and we are at the knife's edge.
