You can’t reason with Marxists because they are fundamentally unreasonable

“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” – Maya Angelou. 

Between pervasive anti-Semitism and failures in governing, Marxists are shouting who they are.

Shouldn’t we listen?

Some of the more famous Marxists – Vladimir Lenin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot – led regimes that were not only brutal, accounting for millions of deaths, but failed to deliver the utopian visions they promised. They peaked at the revolutions and it was all downhill from there.

It’s crazy anyone would want to emulate them, but socialism and other Marxist-inspired approaches to government are making a big comeback.

That doesn’t mean all Marxists are bad people. In fact, many are probably sincere in wanting to make the world a better place – but there’s a reason Marxism has failed to do that.

Academia is lousy with Marxists. Recently, I wrote about Jemma Decristo, a currently-suspended faculty member at UC Davis.

Decristo tweeted: “One group of ppl we have easy access to in the US is all these zionist journalists who spread propaganda & misinformation[.] They have houses w addresses, kids in school[.] They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more,” adding images of a knife, ax and blood droplets just to cut through any remaining ambiguity.

If you look around social media, it’s not actually that uncommon of a tweet, especially amongst Marxists. The reason is because violence is a feature of Marxism, not a bug.

Marxists see everything through the prism of a constant class struggle, oppressor against oppressed. In the case of Decristo’s tweet, she’s referring (albeit indirectly) to the conflict between Israel and Palestine, where she sees Israel as the oppressor.

Israel isn’t perfect, but Decristo’s argument goes off the rails by targeting kids and journalists. It’s not particularly intellectual, but it highlights the broader point that Marxists see revolutionary violence as justified so long as the “oppressed” are pushing back against the “oppressor.”

Marxism is attractive to many because tearing down oppression is a good thing, at least in the abstract. But revolutionary mobs haven’t proven to be the best judges of what’s oppressive, especially considering what zealous Marxists have done once given power.

To Decristo, killing Zionist journalists and their kids is a step towards liberation, proving the mob could come for anyone.

Many Marxists I’ve met are actually kind-hearted people who believe that through central planning they can solve the world’s problems.

But, again, let’s look at the record.

In Venezuela, it was estimated a few years back that nine million people were suffering from malnutrition and hunger while produce was left rotting because the government was in charge of distributing it.

For decades China had a one-child policy, which led to forced sterilizations and abortions (primarily of girls). But then its population started slowing and then shrinking and now China has decided it’s limiting abortions to regain its population and find gender parity because there’s 35 million more men than women.

Even more relatively modest implementations of socialist policies have backfired in ways that have seriously harmed people.

England has socialized medicine, called the National Health Service, which has been failing for years in a number of ways, including a backlog of patients. In fact, the number of people who died while waiting for treatment has doubled in five years – 120,000 people died on waiting lists last year.

And then there’s California, where ascendant Marxism is dominating state politics. In general, the more the state’s politicians seek big government solutions, the further away the state gets from actually solving the problems at hand

Take this tweet from one of the Legislature’s leading Marxists, Assemblyman Alex Lee: “Having a strong social housing developer can ensure that the lands around the station — which are public state property — get realized into true vibrant community assessts (sic). That’s why public sector development expertise is so crucial in long term economic development for CA.”

Though it’s government policies making it impossible to build an adequate number of housing units, Lee wants to put the government in charge of building “public housing.” But worse yet, Lee was responding to a tweet from the High Speed Rail Authority, which is the poster child of failed government policies and programs.

Lee is talking about building public housing along the high-speed rail’s proposed Central Valley locations, which makes no sense.

At the moment, the line is only realistic from Merced to Bakersfield and it is unlikely that market research would show this route is in particularly high demand, especially at the high estimated costs of tickets.

It’s even less likely that considering those two things, non-subsidized housing would survive, which means that this is not going to be an effective solution across the board.

But don’t throw logic at Marxism. It’s not interested.

Marxists seem to think that if you just put enough “experts” in a room they’ll solve all of the world’s problems. It sounds great, but, again, the record speaks for itself.

On its face, revolutionary violence and central planning seem to have little in common – but they are both leaves from the same tree.

Marxists love revolution, tearing down structures, reinventing the world, which is why Bernie Sanders, that outspoken socialist (who, like Lee, does not seem to want to murder anyone), kept framing his presidential campaign in terms of a revolution.

Marxists are guided by the belief that they’re on the right side of every issue and anything they do in pursuit of those ends are fair game, even as the possibility of disastrous consequences looms.

It’s who they are.

Follow Matt Fleming on Twitter @FlemingWords