Donald Trump, Republican ideology, and a Marxist revolution

The argument of the Republican Party for decades has been that communism is an existential menace to any nation that calls itself free. What they believe to be the corollary to this is the claim that they are the only political organization that is capable of resisting. Over time, this has turned into the belief that anyone who disagrees with any aspect of Republican ideology must be a communist, communism being in this view anything that a right winger disagrees with, be it green energy, Social Security, the Federal Reserve, or requirements to keep poison out of drinking water. And with the rise of Donald Trump, labeling someone a communist all too often is a troll’s game, a tactic to disrupt the conversation and shut down civil society.

To those of us outside school of thought, however, this can look like a desperate attempt to hide the danger signs that their economic system is sending. If the right would bother actually to read Marx — admittedly, his devotion to Hegel makes his writing needlessly dense and tortured — they would find that Marx’s predictions are a warning that anti-communists would do well to hear.

Marx’s view was that history has a direction, a propulsive force contained within each era that builds until the internal contradictions cause an overthrow of the present system that will resolve into a…