Lee Harris: The Intellectual Origins of America-Bashing
Part 2 – Marx’s Political Realism (Policy Review, 2002)
Marx’s claim to have created a “scientific” socialism rested on his rejection of all previous socialist thought as mere utopian fantasy. He argued that revolutionary activity must be grounded in objective historical conditions, not idealistic dreams.
Utopian socialists, in Marx’s view, wasted energy on morally appealing visions that had no realistic chance of success. True socialism would emerge not from wishful thinking but from the inevitable contradictions of capitalism itself—specifically, the immiserization of the proletariat.
Only when workers had “nothing to lose but their chains” would they possess both the motive and the power to overthrow the system. Any revolutionary program that ignored this material precondition was, for Marx, politically irresponsible.
Harris stresses that this commitment to hard-headed realism is what distinguished Marxism from earlier socialist traditions—and what makes later departures from it (including some forms of anti-Americanism) a return to the very utopian fantasy Marx condemned.
Next: Part 3 – Immiserization
