A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, I admit I don’t know much about most of these thinkers and I found your comment interesting and informative. I think you make an important point that reason/liberty-branded ideologies can get off the rails too.
Anti-communist purges have this element of “The Great Evil” that you are fighting, like witch hunts but secular, and that can cause people to become fanatical in their fight for the good. And if you’re part of a freedom/reason-branded ideology, it might be particularly hard to notice that actually you have become the bad guys too.
(Still, what’s the alternative? Marxism can present things as though reason is just a tool to attain power and truth-seeking doesn’t matter/is just some people’s branding for their own pursuit of power. And clearly that can’t be what we want either because without reason, there’s no hope to make the world better.)
Did you know that after the communist purge, Western powers helped install one of the most corrupt regimes on earth under Suharto in Indonesia, a regime that lasted for 32 years? That period (until −1998) fundamentally shaped why Indonesia is still struggling to build functioning democratic institutions today. Institutional weakness, oligarchic power, and entrenched corruption remain structural problems. Now Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, is president. The consequences of the purge are still lived by 280 millions of people today (Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by size and population).
From where I stand, when violence and ideological destruction happens outside the developed world, why it often becomes framed as a regrettable but acceptable cost of protecting the “right” ideology. This begins to resemble a form of hipocritical moral hierarchy.
Are lives in parts of the world that do not fit comfortably within Western ideological purity treated as expendable?
At what point does defense of a “good” ideology begin to resemble the very fanaticism being warned against?
If the topic is ideological fanaticism, then isn’t dismissing Marxist or left thinkers outright risks becoming the very same dogmatic certainty being discussed in this post (and ultimately, preventing truth-seeking principle?). I understand your instinct, but refusing engagement is different from critique.
Furthermore, Marxism/Marxist thoughts should not be reducible to merely authoritarian histories; it has generated analyses of ideology, capital, state power, and development across the social sciences, this is my overall point.
(Modern-day China complicates this type of anti-Marxist tendencies. Whatever one thinks normatively, it has overseen massive poverty reduction and economic transformation under institutions influenced by Marxist frameworks, plus point, without soliciting bloody wars or subjugation as it happened in European history. This is studied extensively by now mainstream economists such as Yuen Yuen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away The Ladder, Dani Rodrik’s Globalisation Paradox, etc. Engagement with Marxist literature is not necessarily ideological endorsement but may also provide ample empirical evidence.)
I’m typically a non-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy (probably fairly extreme by EA standards; I support US withdrawal from NATO). But it seems to me that the evaluation of a given foreign policy depends largely on what baseline you use for comparison purposes. If North Korea is used as the baseline for what communism can do to a country, modern Indonesia seems preferable by comparison.
Critics of US foreign policy typically use a high implicit baseline which allows them to blame the US no matter what the US does.
Consider a country with a bad government or some other political disaster of some sort.
If the US opposes the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “destabilizing” the country. (“The US destabilized Iraq.”)
If the US collaborates with the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “propping up” an odious regime. (“The US propped up Suharto.”)
If the US does nothing, the US is “complicit” through its inaction. (“The US is complicit in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”)
I suspect that this little trifecta is leading to increasing nihilism in US foreign policy circles.
I think there is something to this, but the US didn’t just “prop up” Suharto in the sense of had normal relations of trade and mutual favours even though he did bad things. (That indeed may well be the right attitude to many bad governments, and ones that many lefitsts might demand the US to take to bad left-wing governments, yes.) They helped install him, a process which was incredibly bloody and violent, even apart from the long-term effects of his rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
Remember also that the same people are not necessarily making all of these arguments. Relatively few radical leftists saying the first two things are also making a huge moral deal about the US failing to help Ukraine, I think. Even if they are strongly against the Russian invasion. It’s mostly liberals who are saying the 3rd one.
From where I stand, when violence and ideological destruction happens outside the developed world, why it often becomes framed as a regrettable but acceptable cost of protecting the “right” ideology. This begins to resemble a form of hipocritical moral hierarchy.
I agree that this is a thing that happens and it must be frustrating when you are from such parts of the world. But note that I didn’t do this in my comment.
Also, my impression is that many Westerners these days are not particularly attached to defending the actions of their countries in the past. On the contrary, a lot of people are readily willing to discuss these things or even harbor negative sentiments towards their country for past sins. I’m originally from Switzerland, so there isn’t that much controversial history there—apart from spineless/soulless opportunism during WW2 and in the banking system—but even among Americans, my sense is that many of them will totally agree with you that America did terrible things in the name of anti-communism. Simultaneously, you’re probably right that most people (me included) don’t know much about what happened in Indonesia (say) because it was far away. (And yeah, it probably plays a role as well that it doesn’t fit simple historical narratives or doesn’t portray the West in the best way, but I think that was more of an issue at the time when these events were happening, since it shaped how the American press talked about it back then, and more recent (and more neutral/two-sided) discussions is naturally a niche interest because most people live in the present.
FWIW, I’ve long had the book “The Cold War: A World History” by Odd Arne Westad physically on my reading list and I expect I will learn more about the dangers of non-Marxist ideologies from reading that than by reading Marxist literature directly. Reading your reply, it reads a bit as though you think the following is a sound inference: “What happened in Indonesia during the Cold War in the name of anti-communism was atrocious, therefore it’s worth reading Marxist literature to better understand the dangers of ‘liberalism’ (or what people try to sell as liberalism, even if it involves empowering terrible dictators).” But this obviously isn’t sound. I’d rather learn more about the dangers of witch hunts and overreactions from good historians than by reading Marxist literature.
I understand that you’re skeptical of my dismissal of Marxist literature since I haven’t read much of it. At the same time, you didn’t really reply to my point about its atrocious track record, so I feel like I have said more than enough to put the burden back on you to convince us that these texts are worth reading in the context of David Althaus et al’s post.
I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled “The German Ideology” — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.
Communism is a “reason-based” ideology, at least originally, in that it sees itself as secular and scientific and dispassionate and based on hard economics, rather than tradition or God. I mean, yes, Marxists tend to be more keen on evoking sociological explanations for people’s beliefs than liberals are, but even Marxists usually believe social science is possible and even liberals admit people’s beliefs are distorted by bias all the time, so the difference is one of emphasis rather than fundamental commitment I think.
This isn’t a defence of communism particularly. The mere fact that people claim that something is the output of reason and science doesn’t mean it actually is. That goes for liberalism too.
A bit bold to unqualifiedly recommend a list of thinkers of which ~half were Marxists, on the topic of ideological fanaticism causing great harms.
Obviously that doesn’t mean it’s all bad, I admit I don’t know much about most of these thinkers and I found your comment interesting and informative. I think you make an important point that reason/liberty-branded ideologies can get off the rails too.
Anti-communist purges have this element of “The Great Evil” that you are fighting, like witch hunts but secular, and that can cause people to become fanatical in their fight for the good. And if you’re part of a freedom/reason-branded ideology, it might be particularly hard to notice that actually you have become the bad guys too.
(Still, what’s the alternative? Marxism can present things as though reason is just a tool to attain power and truth-seeking doesn’t matter/is just some people’s branding for their own pursuit of power. And clearly that can’t be what we want either because without reason, there’s no hope to make the world better.)
Did you know that after the communist purge, Western powers helped install one of the most corrupt regimes on earth under Suharto in Indonesia, a regime that lasted for 32 years? That period (until −1998) fundamentally shaped why Indonesia is still struggling to build functioning democratic institutions today. Institutional weakness, oligarchic power, and entrenched corruption remain structural problems. Now Suharto’s former son-in-law, Prabowo Subianto, is president. The consequences of the purge are still lived by 280 millions of people today (Indonesia is the fourth largest country in the world by size and population).
From where I stand, when violence and ideological destruction happens outside the developed world, why it often becomes framed as a regrettable but acceptable cost of protecting the “right” ideology. This begins to resemble a form of hipocritical moral hierarchy.
Are lives in parts of the world that do not fit comfortably within Western ideological purity treated as expendable?
At what point does defense of a “good” ideology begin to resemble the very fanaticism being warned against?
If the topic is ideological fanaticism, then isn’t dismissing Marxist or left thinkers outright risks becoming the very same dogmatic certainty being discussed in this post (and ultimately, preventing truth-seeking principle?). I understand your instinct, but refusing engagement is different from critique.
Furthermore, Marxism/Marxist thoughts should not be reducible to merely authoritarian histories; it has generated analyses of ideology, capital, state power, and development across the social sciences, this is my overall point.
(Modern-day China complicates this type of anti-Marxist tendencies. Whatever one thinks normatively, it has overseen massive poverty reduction and economic transformation under institutions influenced by Marxist frameworks, plus point, without soliciting bloody wars or subjugation as it happened in European history. This is studied extensively by now mainstream economists such as Yuen Yuen Ang’s How China Escaped the Poverty Trap , Ha-Joon Chang’s Kicking Away The Ladder, Dani Rodrik’s Globalisation Paradox, etc. Engagement with Marxist literature is not necessarily ideological endorsement but may also provide ample empirical evidence.)
I’m typically a non-interventionist when it comes to foreign policy (probably fairly extreme by EA standards; I support US withdrawal from NATO). But it seems to me that the evaluation of a given foreign policy depends largely on what baseline you use for comparison purposes. If North Korea is used as the baseline for what communism can do to a country, modern Indonesia seems preferable by comparison.
Critics of US foreign policy typically use a high implicit baseline which allows them to blame the US no matter what the US does.
Consider a country with a bad government or some other political disaster of some sort.
If the US opposes the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “destabilizing” the country. (“The US destabilized Iraq.”)
If the US collaborates with the country’s government, the US is to blame because it is “propping up” an odious regime. (“The US propped up Suharto.”)
If the US does nothing, the US is “complicit” through its inaction. (“The US is complicit in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.”)
I suspect that this little trifecta is leading to increasing nihilism in US foreign policy circles.
I think there is something to this, but the US didn’t just “prop up” Suharto in the sense of had normal relations of trade and mutual favours even though he did bad things. (That indeed may well be the right attitude to many bad governments, and ones that many lefitsts might demand the US to take to bad left-wing governments, yes.) They helped install him, a process which was incredibly bloody and violent, even apart from the long-term effects of his rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_mass_killings_of_1965%E2%80%9366
Remember also that the same people are not necessarily making all of these arguments. Relatively few radical leftists saying the first two things are also making a huge moral deal about the US failing to help Ukraine, I think. Even if they are strongly against the Russian invasion. It’s mostly liberals who are saying the 3rd one.
I agree that this is a thing that happens and it must be frustrating when you are from such parts of the world. But note that I didn’t do this in my comment.
Also, my impression is that many Westerners these days are not particularly attached to defending the actions of their countries in the past. On the contrary, a lot of people are readily willing to discuss these things or even harbor negative sentiments towards their country for past sins. I’m originally from Switzerland, so there isn’t that much controversial history there—apart from spineless/soulless opportunism during WW2 and in the banking system—but even among Americans, my sense is that many of them will totally agree with you that America did terrible things in the name of anti-communism. Simultaneously, you’re probably right that most people (me included) don’t know much about what happened in Indonesia (say) because it was far away. (And yeah, it probably plays a role as well that it doesn’t fit simple historical narratives or doesn’t portray the West in the best way, but I think that was more of an issue at the time when these events were happening, since it shaped how the American press talked about it back then, and more recent (and more neutral/two-sided) discussions is naturally a niche interest because most people live in the present.
FWIW, I’ve long had the book “The Cold War: A World History” by Odd Arne Westad physically on my reading list and I expect I will learn more about the dangers of non-Marxist ideologies from reading that than by reading Marxist literature directly. Reading your reply, it reads a bit as though you think the following is a sound inference: “What happened in Indonesia during the Cold War in the name of anti-communism was atrocious, therefore it’s worth reading Marxist literature to better understand the dangers of ‘liberalism’ (or what people try to sell as liberalism, even if it involves empowering terrible dictators).” But this obviously isn’t sound. I’d rather learn more about the dangers of witch hunts and overreactions from good historians than by reading Marxist literature.
I understand that you’re skeptical of my dismissal of Marxist literature since I haven’t read much of it. At the same time, you didn’t really reply to my point about its atrocious track record, so I feel like I have said more than enough to put the burden back on you to convince us that these texts are worth reading in the context of David Althaus et al’s post.
I don’t think the inference is “Indonesia happened, therefore one must adopt Marxism,” or even that Marxist literature is uniquely authoritative. My point is narrower.
If the concern is ideological fanaticism, then understanding the internal logic of influential ideologies seems like a reasonable starting point. Reading historians who describe outcomes is valuable, but it is different from engaging with the conceptual frameworks that shaped how people understood the world in the first place. Marx matters here not because he must be agreed with, but because his ideas shaped large parts of twentieth-century political imagination, including the reactions against them.
To me, this is closer to studying something at its source. If one wants to understand a disease, it helps to examine the organism itself rather than only reading accounts of its effects. Marxist thinkers, in that sense, are part of the intellectual laboratory of modern ideology, just as liberal or conservative thought is.
I also don’t think this needs to be framed as Marxist literature versus good history. Historians like Odd Arne Westad are valuable because they reconstruct events: who acted, under what constraints, with what consequences.
Social theory, however, serves a different purpose. It asks why certain ideas became convincing in the first place, what assumptions about human nature or society they carried, how they defined concepts like progress, justice, or rationality, and how those assumptions structured perception before decisions were even made. It helps explain why intelligent, enlightened people could sincerely believe they were acting morally while producing destructive outcomes. In other words, history tells us what happened and how; theory tries to explain how certain ways of thinking made those outcomes intelligible or even necessary to the actors involved.
Fun fact: Marx wrote something literally titled “The German Ideology” — and despite the title, it is not about fascism.
Communism is a “reason-based” ideology, at least originally, in that it sees itself as secular and scientific and dispassionate and based on hard economics, rather than tradition or God. I mean, yes, Marxists tend to be more keen on evoking sociological explanations for people’s beliefs than liberals are, but even Marxists usually believe social science is possible and even liberals admit people’s beliefs are distorted by bias all the time, so the difference is one of emphasis rather than fundamental commitment I think.
This isn’t a defence of communism particularly. The mere fact that people claim that something is the output of reason and science doesn’t mean it actually is. That goes for liberalism too.