Esoteric Brezhnevism

  Though communist ideology ultimately would become synonymous with its Jewish usurper, Karl Marx, several figures – Gracchus Babeuf, Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Étienne Cabet among them – predated him as pioneers of European socialist thought during what became known as its utopian phase, before the Marxists would introduce pretensions to “scientific” rigor. Another trailblazing communist, one whose name has fallen into obscurity since the nineteenth century, is German labor agitator Wilhelm Weitling (1808-1871). The sole English-language book on Weitling, Carl Wittke’s The Utopian Socialist: A Biography of Wilhelm Weitling, Nineteenth-Century Reformer , has long been out of print, and – as if to symbolically underline the subject’s neglect – the used copy I obtained was easily the mustiest-smelling book I ever purchased. A journeyman tailor and autodidact, Weitling was the son of a German servant girl and a French soldier who never returned from Napoleon’s Russia...

  Radically as Marxism and Zionism would part ways in the twentieth century, it is interesting to observe that the two ideologies’ early histories are intertwined in the person of Moses Hess (1812-1875), a Jewish radical Hegelian thinker and contemporary of Marx whose 1862 Zionist manifesto, Rome and Jerusalem , predates Theodor Herzl’s The Jewish State by more than three decades. Hess, like Marx, was born in Germany’s Rhineland to a merchant father who intended for his son to pursue a life of religious study. As Hess recorded in his diary, however, “the Talmud utterly repelled me” [1]. His adolescent intellectual awakening saw him drawn to French socialism and to the works of Baruch Spinoza and G.W.F. Hegel, whose thought would in different ways shape the course of Hess’s philosophical and political development. Under the influence of Hegel, Hess would in his early years stand out as a “dialectical Idealist” as opposed to a dialectical materialist, as his fellow left Hegelian Mar...

Meghnad Desai with Bill Clinton There is a growing consciousness among nationalists and even conservatives that the “Left” – those parties or cultural elements that previously defended the interests of the working class – have largely abandoned the proletariat in favor of “woke”, identity-oriented platforms that not only do not serve workers’ interests, but actually further capital’s ends. Neoliberal economist and propagandist Meghnad Desai, formerly of the London School of Economics, provides a useful summary of a major contributing factor to this decades-long trend in his largely boring but occasionally interesting 2002 book Marx’s Revenge: The Resurgence of Capitalism and the Death of Statist Socialism . The key to the dismantling of the workers’ state, as he explains, was the abolition of the gold-based monetary system established by the Bretton Woods Agreement: This was a historic moment. Just as the British government was rejecting Keynesian reflationary polic...