It is precisely because Marxism is not a lifeless dogma, not a completed, ready-made, immutable doctrine, but a living guide to action, that it was bound to reflect the astonishingly abrupt change in the conditions of social life.

VLADIMIR LENIN

The hour is very late. The country has been asleep for decades. But now, it seems, the country is beginning to wake up. The real question is whether our leaders are ready for the task at hand. We have some smart people in government; but do they understand the enemy we are facing? Are they prepared to battle that enemy in the midst of so much confusion and misinformation?

This morning I saw a Breitbart headline about China: “Xi Jinping orders Chinese army to prepare for war ‘at any second.’” Here is our enemy, positioning himself to strike. There is no other way to read it. If we consider the timing of this threat, it’s clear what they want us to do. After all, they have much to gain if Biden becomes president. And besides, they are not so careless as to let their prey escape.

As we watch what happens in today’s joint session of Congress, I am reminded of Stalin’s question, set down in his book, Foundations of Leninism: “Does not the history of the revolutionary movement show that the parliamentary form of struggle is only a school for, and an auxiliary in organizing the extra-parliamentary struggle?”

Marx, Engels and Lenin were opposed to the “opportunism” of those who wanted to work within the capitalist system for peaceful change. The whole point of Marxism is to make a revolution. The Second International, according to Lenin, was dominated by opponents of revolution. He called them “opportunists.” Such people weren’t real Marxists. “Instead of revolutionary policy,” wrote Stalin, “there was flabby philistinism and sordid political bargaining, parliamentary diplomacy and parliamentary scheming….”

“A revolution is not a dinner party,” snarled Mao Zedong, “or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another.”

Americans may not fully understand what lies in store for them. A communist revolution, said Friedrich Engels, requires the annihilation of whole races and classes of people. It is in this sense that America is the target of a communist revolution. In this context Joe Biden may seem quite harmless, but his Chinese communist backers are murderers. If Biden assumes power, the government will devolve into a one-party state. He will kowtow to China. There will be no more U.S. nuclear deterrent. The country’s economy will be damaged. A process of weakening, of stripping out defenses, will accelerate. The communists in Beijing know that America cannot be made into a communist country. The American people would violently turn against the government. To use an old Soviet expression, America is “irredeemably bourgeois.” In other words, Engels was right. A communist revolution requires the annihilation of whole races and classes of people. Most of all, it requires the annihilation of the Americans.    

This aspect of communism is not even understood by most communists. After all, very few of them have actually read Marx or Engels. That kind of study is reserved for people at the top of the communist hierarchy. The Americans also never understood communism, because it was too boring to bother with. The conservatives, who pretended to understand communism as an “ideology” of mass murder actually didn’t understand it at all; that is to say, they never got to know communism in depth. They knew it was murderous, yet they never saw the method in its madness. What they saw disgusted and horrified them, so they didn’t want to get any closer and learn what it actually was.

Marxist leaders are not normal people. When Lenin assailed the “opportunists” of the Second International, the first thing he mocked was their bourgeois inclinations; that is, he criticized them for being normal. These fake Marxists, he said, wouldn’t make a revolution because they didn’t have the majority on their side. They wouldn’t make a revolution because they lacked trained cadres. They wouldn’t make a revolution through a “general strike” because parliamentary politics was more effective. Lenin said their Marxism was hooey. You don’t need a majority, said Lenin. You don’t wait to take power because you lack trained cadres. First take power, then train the cadres. And who cares about the anarchist concept of the “general strike”? Marxism is a more focused, tightly and intelligently controlled form of violence.

The key, of course, is always violence; but violence with craft and cunning behind it. There is no dogma in Marxism about having a majority, or having elite cadres, or launching a general strike. Lenin said “revolutionary theory is not a dogma,” and that it “assumes final shape only in close connection with practical activity of a truly mass and truly revolutionary movement….” (See “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder for details).

Now that we’re watching a communist revolution unfold here in the United States, we ought to get a little more familiar with Marxism-Leninism as a “thesis” and not as a “dogma.” It is something that our conservatives long refused to do; and this refusal is exactly why they went running like dogs to lick Mr. Gorbachev’s face three decades ago. You will always hear conservatives refer to “communist ideology” and its “failures,” as if communism actually represented an economic doctrine. But there is no economic system propounded by Marx. For his part, Lenin retreated into state capitalism after the Russian Civil War. And Stalin’s collectivization of farming was a political measure rather than an economic one. If he had not impoverished the farmers, the farmers would have overthrown him.

The whole course of Marxism-Leninism has been misunderstood, from first to last. Our great historians and conservative thinkers had all the facts. But they never really read Marx or Lenin or Stalin. They never quite understood the motivation, the strategy, the brainpower. And so, they mistook Marxism for an ideology when Marxism was never an ideology. Marx defined “ideology” as the “false consciousness” of a ruling class in a society in which ruling ideas are represented as “universal truth.” You see, Marxists don’t believe in universal truth at all.

Stalin said Marxism had two elements: (1) a materialist “outlook” and (2) a dialectical method. Everything followed from these two things. Many people who are not communists believe that a materialist outlook is the most common-sense view available to modern man. Here we begin to see why communism has been so difficult to oppose. After all, many of our non-communists have no problem with its central proposition.

The Marxist, noted Stalin, is opposed to “idealism” which “regards the world as the embodiment of an ‘absolute idea,’ a ‘universal spirit,’ ‘consciousness’….” Stalin explained that “the world is by its very nature material, that the multifold phenomena of the world constitute different forms of matter in motion, that … the world develops in accordance with the laws of movement and matter and stands in no need of a ‘universal spirit.’” (That is, no need of God.)

As you can see, this is not an “ideology.” This is something broader and more fundamental. It is one of two possible cosmologies: (a) one that tends toward the supernatural, and (b) one that tends toward the natural. What makes Marxism different, and more effective as a weapon against supernaturalism, is its reliance on dialectics. “Contrary to metaphysics,” wrote Stalin, “Dialectics does not regard nature as an accidental agglomeration of things, of phenomena, unconnected with, isolated from, and independent of, each other, but as a connected and integral whole, in which things … are organically connected with … and determined by, each other.” What that means is not at all clear, and it is no accident that Marxists look back fondly to the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus who was also known as Heraclitus “the obscure.” Stalin quoted Heraclitus to the effect that “the world, the all in one, was not created by any God or any man, but was, is and ever will be a living flame, systematically flaring up and systematically dying down….” Lenin called this, “A very good exposition of the rudiments of dialectical materialism.”

Heraclitus taught that the universe was continually changing. “Contrary to metaphysics,” noted Stalin, “dialectics holds that nature is not a state of rest and immobility, stagnation and immutability, but a state of continuous movement and change, of continuous renewal and development, where something is always arising and developing, and something is always disintegrating and dying away.”

This is where the revolution comes in. The communist’s simple insight is that the existing order (capitalism) and its attending Christian civilization is “disintegrating and dying away.” Nietzsche was not the only nineteenth century thinker to suppose that “God is dead.” The Marxist is that clever species of legacy-hunter who goes to the funeral of the “dead God” expecting to steal something; that is to say, the legacy of Western civilization.  

One of the reasons that Marxism has been so successful, is the way it plausibly exploits the superficial assumptions of modern man. Another reason is Marxism’s strategic and tactical flexibility. When you draw your inspiration from an obscure Greek philosopher whose utterances were as dubious as the Delphic Oracle, and you claim to be “scientific” in your approach, it is given that your theses will change with time. And this is exactly what has happened. Those academic pedants who see in Marxism a set of rigid doctrines discredited by history have missed the whole point of Marx’s writings. Every failed Marxist thesis paves the way for a new thesis. That is, after all, the scientific method. If something fails, you return to the drawing board; for Marxism is not about believing. Marxism is about doing. It is about the “science of revolution,” as Stalin said. And this science, at the time of Marx, was only in its infancy. Today it has reached its full destructive maturity. Please note with what sophistication Marxism commands events, dominates media, dictates the principles of education, destroys the careers of its opponents, co-opts liberals and pretends to fight climate change. There is so much more that could be added here.

It is true, of course, that the Marxists have gotten a great deal of power by peddling several false doctrines and leftist dogmas: homosexual marriage, transgenderism, critical race theory, global warming, etc. But none of these are Marxist in the true sense. These “dogmas” are merely tools of Marxism – tools in the scientific toolbox of revolution. In his essay, “Certain Features of the Historical Development of Marxism,” Lenin explained that Marxism “is not a dogma, but a guide to action.” Lenin continued, “This classical statement stresses with remarkable force and expressiveness that aspect of Marxism which is very often lost sight of. And by losing sight of it, we turn Marxism into something one-sided, distorted and lifeless; we deprive it of its life blood; we undermine its basic theoretical foundations – dialectics, the doctrine of historical development, all-embracing and full of contradictions; we undermine its connection with the definite practical tasks of the epoch, which may change with every new turn of history.” (p. 248, V.I. Lenin: Marx, Engels, Marxism, Eighth Revised Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1968).

Imagine the flexibility of a science that “may change with every new turn of history.” This is why George Orwell was so frightened by the Marxists; why the socialist regime in his novel, 1984, was described as a boot stomping on a human face, “forever.” He didn’t see how Marxism would ever lose. Those who said the Marxists would fail because they never understood human nature were wrong. Marx understood human nature perfectly. His adepts could not have lasted in power so long – in China and, dare I say, in Russia too, where they were flexible enough to give up the communist label while retaining the essentials of the communist system. Those families that ruled Soviet Russia – the Central Committee families – yet remain in control. The old Soviet oligarchy hides behind the fake “capitalist” NEP-men of the Gorbachev-Yeltsin-Putin New Economic Policy (NEP). The whole thing is right out of Lenin’s playbook. (And that is what flexibility has to offer.)

You might ask why Marxism is so keen on revolution? Why does dialectical materialism require revolution? The answer to this question is simple. All the Marxist arguments for revolution are not scientific. They are window-dressing. The reason for the revolution will never be stated publicly by Marxist-Leninist theoreticians or leaders. This is the part where you have to study biography; where you have to look at the psychology of Marxist revolutionaries. Think, if you can, what follows from a cynical human being like Marx, who doesn’t believe in God or an afterlife. Cut off from all hope of spiritual salvation, the only thing left for such a person is political power; that is to say, the only real power a materialist can believe in. The salvation found here is that of becoming a God through the politics of revolution. Here we draw closer to the real Marx, and the real Lenin, and – undeniably – the real Stalin; for the Marxist dictators have indeed achieved a godlike status for themselves.  

So, as we live through this momentous day we ought to reflect on what it will take to defeat Marxism. If you think we face an uphill battle now, you haven’t seen anything yet. I do not believe we really know our enemy. I also do not believe we know ourselves; yet today may be a good day to begin learning.