When I was a kid in the 1950s, I thought I knew what the left was—and I did, up to a point.
The Communist Manifesto appealed to my 14-year-old self because, in a way, it’s written on that level. When you think about it, it’s pretty simplistic, especially about human psychology.
Nevertheless, in those days, it was clear to me and to many others what the left was—socialism, the working class owning the means of production, and so forth, no more chauffeur-driven Cadillacs for my parents’ stuffy, imperious neighbor.
I even remember reading that this “scientific” socialism would, according to Karl Marx anyway, lead to the “withering away of the state.” Hurray, I thought. I wasn’t sure what that would be like, but it sounded good.
And, yes, I was pretty precocious reading this stuff, but I wasn’t alone; some of my friends read it, too. We wanted to be cool. We also listened to Miles Davis records and went to see an Ingmar Bergman movie, even though we weren’t sure what was going on.
All this was, of course, long before any of us knew of such things as the Chinese communist Great Leap Forward and Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution or the Soviet gulags or Stalin’s mass starvation of Ukraine and all the many millions who died from these and how socialism/communism was the greatest mass murder machine in human history by exponential amounts.
We did know that Hitler was evil, obviously, but we didn’t realize that he and Mussolini actually began as socialists.
But we do now—or should.
There isn’t much excuse for believing in this anymore or even in that tired line about this time “getting socialism right.” How many times does that need attempting?
Of course, that “should” part is key because given the state of the U.S. educational system, it’s easy to imagine that a majority of our young people have no idea what any of the foregoing mass murders were—an enquirer would get blank stares—making those same people equally easy pickings for today’s version of leftism.
