The rise of the Democratic Socialists of America has made it clear that socialism endures, even after a century of catastrophic failure. There has never been a successful socialist country, but American socialists have won many of their biggest victories yet this year, most recently in Michigan.Their platform involves much public (state) ownership of things, just as historical socialism has. If someone ever tries to tell you otherwise, remember this passage from The Communist Manifesto: “The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest … all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the State.”Naturally, opponents wonder why socialists seem completely unfazed by how bad their record is. The reason can only be understood if we understand the thought processes of the socialist. They are quite different from what you are probably used to. We must understand the utopianism and the relativism of the Left.
For utopianism, the German Marxist Ernst Bloch is informative. In his monumental book Main Currents of Marxism: Its Origins, Growth and Dissolution, the historian Leszek Kolakowski devotes an entire chapter to Bloch. Bloch states that “man is the root of all things.” That is to say, man is the master of reality itself. He can mold it as he sees fit, regardless of what the “facts” might indicate.Normally, we have thought outward based on the rules of reason: the law of noncontradiction, modus ponens, Occam’s razor, etc. Not so for the socialist. Based on Bloch, the socialist thinks from utopia backward. Reality is made to conform to the utopian ideal, not the ideal to reality. As the root of all things, all man needs to do is make the necessary changes to bring utopia about. Statues of socialist leaders. (Getty Images)
