Well, it’s May Day.
Here on Long Island Sound in Connecticut, it’s a beautiful day—spring is near its apogee: The sky is bright, bright blue, the sea ripples gently in a million tiny undulations, and the sun shines benignantly.
The air is still crystal clear, the greens of leaves and lawn are fresh, unspoiled, and jolly, the tulips are alert and colorful, and the pear, cherry, and apple trees are exploding in a riot of whites and pinks.
But I’m not, and it isn’t.
It’s always struck me as unfair that the communists should have appropriated May Day.
In this part of the world, anyway, it’s such a smiling holiday: expectancy everywhere beginning to deliver on its springtime promises.
Communism makes plenty of promises, of course, as does its apparently less martial little brother, socialism.
The trouble is, neither keeps its promises.
Marx said that under communism, man would be a hunter in the morning, a fisherman in the afternoon, and a critical critic at night.
As it turns out, one is hungry in the morning, interrogated in the afternoon, and on the way to the gulag or at least out of a job by nightfall.
And so it has been with all the many varieties of Marxism.
All have ended, Kolakowski reminds us, “in the same way,” by revealing “the farcical aspect of human bondage.”
That encompasses what we might call the existential aspect of the Marxist project.
Kolakowski provides a meticulous inventory of other signal aspects of the Marxist deformation, paying particular attention to its habitually fantastical quality and its tendency to thuggishness.
He touches only lightly on one of the most ironical aspects of Marxism: its utter failure as an engine of economic prosperity.
What makes this failure ironical is Marx’s insistence that his philosophy, unlike all previous ones, was not only “scientific,” but also eminently practical.
Hitherto, he said, philosophers had merely interpreted the world; but the real task—a task that only Marxism is fully equipped to carry out—is to change it.
From the beginning, sober commentators understood that Marx’s pretensions to being “scientific” and to economic literacy were ridiculous.
History has reinforced those insights.
The truth is that Marxism is an infallible prescription for economic immiseration and hence the contraction of human liberty.
In the sublunary world, there are no exceptions.
The more thoroughly Marxist principles are enforced, the poorer and less free the people will be.
Joe Biden has drifted into a well-pressed version of Marxism, though of course he avoids the term.
Call it what you will, the economic results are exactly what you would expect.
Just a few days ago, we learned that the U.S. economy had its worst showing in years.
We were supposed to be roaring back after the COVID lockdowns.
Instead, the economy contracted by 1.4 percent.
Add that to runaway inflation, especially in housing, energy, and food, and you have an economic and social disaster on the horizon.
And it looks as if the Biden administration plans to deal with that impending disaster the way authoritarian regimes always deal with dissent: through surveillance and suppression.
We should be used to it by now.
In fact, as Tucker Carlson pointed out in a blistering exposé of this creepy new initiative, what they are interested in is not protecting Americans but controlling them.
Happy May Day.
The apple trees are bursting from bud to blossom, but the panicked denizens of the administrative state are desperately clamping down on independent thinking and dissent.
There are some signs of pushback, but only a rash man would wager on the outcome.
There’s a reason that “May Day,” quite apart from its seasonal declaration, is both a Marxist holiday and a distress signal.
