"Oppressed and evil oppressors"

A few excerpts from "Why the Revolution Never Ends":

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels famously began The Communist Manifesto (1848) proclaiming that “a specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism,” but today it is more like a zombie, unexpectedly risen from the dead. History did not end, it just had taken a brief nap.

Refurbishing the old ideology was easy. It was only necessary to substitute other, more up-to-date oppositions for “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” so the world could still be divided into virtuous oppressed and evil oppressors. Far from betraying Marxism, this flexibility was just what Marx and Vladimir Lenin had recommended. Lenin, who adapted an ideology focused on workers to a country still composed largely of peasants, deemed the rigid refusal to grasp present opportunities an “infantile disorder.” Marx himself had described a constant change of hostile classes: “freedman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed.”

And why limit oneself to one opposition at a time? White and black, cis and trans, colonizer and colonized, and many more potentially unlimited contrasts now “intersect.” ....

Robert Conquest wisely observed that Marxism captivates not in spite of its mass killings but because of them. That is why it attracted far more enthusiastic American followers during Stalin’s great terror than in the less brutal reigns of Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev, when admiration shifted to the even more murderous Mao. .... (more)

Gary Saul Morson, "Why the Revolution Never Ends," The Free Press, July 24, 2025.