Yes, Communism is making a comeback among today's hip young people. Just yesterday, in the Times (£), Kevin Maher was writing about Boots Riley, "the communist rapper who is the new toast of Hollywood", with his film Sorry to Bother You, which has been hailed in the US as a masterpiece (“A must-see,” says The New York Times; “A knockout,” says Rolling Stone):
He joined the Marxist-Leninist Progressive Labour Party at the age of 15, but says that it’s no big deal. America is more socialist, in reality, than anybody realises, he says before launching into another dense disquisition, this time on the history of US socialism that encompasses everything from a socialist takeover of Louisiana in the 1880s to the reality of “red” state communism in the 1930s, to the failure of Hillary Clinton’s presidential election campaign (“She was too similar to Jeb Bush”), to a recent Harvard survey that suggested that more than 50 per cent of millennials believe in a socialist society. [...]
Another hugely impressive chunk of economic theory that tackles racial stereotypes and implicates the tenets of capitalism in their perpetuation. “The tropes of blackness say that these people are lazy, that they are insufficient, to say the least,” he says. “And that their poverty is the result of bad choices, as opposed to the real explanation of poverty, which is that under capitalism you must have a certain amount of unemployed people or else wages go up and stock prices fall.”
So there you go. Blacks under Communism would of course prosper and shine, as history so clearly shows. Whereas, in America, an eloquent radical black man like Boots Riley here would never be allowed to spread his dangerously subversive ideas. [Well OK, maybe just this once It must be that old repressive tolerance again.]
Now here's Cathy Young, in the latest Tablet look at the state of the American left, inspired by Paul Berman's series of essays:
Commie chic is cool again.
Teen Vogue, which now serves its beauty and lifestyle tips with a heavy dose of progressive politics, celebrated Karl Marx’s 200th birthday in May with a feature lauding the father of Communism as a bold and relevant thinker. “His writings have inspired social movements in Soviet Russia, China, Cuba, Argentina, Ghana, Burkina Faso, and more,” the article noted, coyly omitting any mention of how those “social movements” turned out. More recently and on a more highbrow note, Boston Reviewgives us an essay exploring Jean-Paul Sartre’s blend of existentialism and Marxism as a “philosophy for our time,” complete with a photo of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir in a 1960 tête-à-tête with Che Guevara.
Kirsten Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, offers Communist nostalgia with a feminist twist in her recent book, Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism, which trots out a few East German sex surveys as evidence for its dubious claim. (Yes, the “socialism” in her title refers to the pre-1991 Soviet-bloc variety.) Meanwhile, left-wing Twitter accounts increasingly sport not only the socialist rose emoji but the Communist hammer-and-sickle—and, in real space, Communist symbols and Soviet flags have been a mainstay at “anti-fascist” protest rallies.
In part, the new Communist chic reflects the rise in the popularity of socialism. A Gallup poll earlier this year found that, among Democrats, Democratic-leaning independents—and, perhaps most significant, among all American adults under 30—socialism is now viewed more positively than capitalism. To some extent, this is a consequence of capitalism’s falling stock: more than half of respondents in both groups have reported a positive view of socialism since 2010, while approval of capitalism has dropped by more than 10 percentage points in two years. Most Americans who profess to like socialism associate it with Western European welfare states; still, even Communism is viewed favorably by more than one in four young adults. Meanwhile, Democratic Socialists such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are shaking up the Democratic Party. And hip new intellectuals and pundits with a soft spot for Communism are everywhere. [...]
But logic or no logic, facts or no facts, the left’s rekindled love affair with Communism persists. In large part, it’s driven by disaffection with the existing order and the growing sense that radical change is possible. It is also fueled by the increasingly common perception that the modern left is battling “fascists” and “Nazis.” In this scheme of things, the Communists are the good guys who beat the Nazis. One popular far-left meme depicts the 1940 “extreme right” as Nazis declaring “We should gas all Jews,” the “extreme left” as a heroic Red Army soldier with the slogan, “We should gas zero Jews,” and the “‘rational’ center” as splitting it down the middle with “We should gas half of the Jews.”
The invocation of Jews is particularly ironic given that the rise of Communist sympathies on the left has gone hand in hand with the rise of a strident anti-Zionism that has deeply anti-Semitic hues informed, not incidentally, by Soviet ideological critiques of the Jewish state developed in the context of Cold War geopolitical conflicts. (The most obvious example of this tendency is the British Labor Party, where the now-dominant Jeremy Corbyn faction is steeped in both Soviet apologism—Corbyn chief strategist Seumas Milne has been called a Stalinist with only slight exaggeration—and Jew-bashing.)
Worth reading in full.
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