[Stop paying tax] Total Propaganda Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young #2/119

You may have heard it used by the United States presidential candidate Bernie Sanders during his astonishingly popular campaigns of 2016 and 2020.If you were listening in to the 2017 French Presidential election, you would have heard the word truly and more traditionally used by Jean-Luc Mélenchon. You may have heard it used by the record numbers of young people joining political parties like British Labour or organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). You might even have heard it even earlier, had you attended one of the many anti-austerity protests that swept the globe during the first half of the decade following the colossal capitalist clusterfuck that was the 2008–2009 economic crash. If you ever joined me and my family at a table, you would have heard it then, too. As in, there goes the socialist again, going on about seizing the means of production while totally covered in gravy. I am delighted to find a more agreeable place and time than Christmas dinner in which to address the topic.

For various reasons, which you can be sure I will start boring you with in Chapter 1, talk of socialism — which can also be called “communism” by some, or, just to mess with your shit, “the materialist Left” — has lately become more frequent and public. It’s not just for the festive family table or nineteenth-century white men anymore! No. Apparently, many inquisitive youngsters of the West have decided they don’t mind the sound of this thing at all, this form of socialism written down by Marx in the mean little rooms of a long-ago Europe.

You, whether old or young or a midlife husk like me, have not become curious about something like socialism on a whim. To take real interest in any “ism” is a time-sucking pain, especially when that ism has endured decades of bad press. And it has had such bad press. Everyone is always calling someone a “Marxist” as though this is a slur; as though they even understand what Marxism means in an era where it is no longer truly taught at universities.

You might have heard people say that Marxism is too idealistic, too lazy, or about as helpful to the present day as a derelict coal mine.