How Marxism created the West
by James McElroy, UnHerd:
Contemporary explanations of wokeness are always insufficient. Public intellectuals either pretend there has been no major revolution in values, or offer silly debates about whether wokeness is really neo-Hegelian anarchism, or neo-Freudian Romanticism, or double-backflip Puritanism with a dash of neo-neo Kantianism. The work of an obscure Italian philosopher who died in 1989 is perhaps an unlikely place to find clarity. But Augusto Del Noce provides an explanation at once straightforward and original: Marxism changed the trajectory of the West.
Del Noce’s work seems particularly current in the Anglosphere, perhaps, because it has only recently become available in English. Carlo Lancelotti, a New York-based math professor, first translated Del Noce’s The Crisis of Modernity in 2014; this month, his translation of The Problem with Atheism was published. The latter was written first — between 1917 and 1945 — and produced the thesis about Marxism that allowed Del Noce to see the future.
Del Noce’s take on Marxism was strange. It was, he believed, a stillborn ideology, dead upon arrival, yet its rotting carcass sprouted every 20th Century political movement. “There is already at the onset of Marxism an insuperable contradiction,” he wrote. Marx’s view of history, according to Del Noce, was a consequence of his commitment to atheism, which can never be proved directly, and must therefore present itself as the outcome of an irreversible historical process — man’s liberation, via science and technology, from primitive superstition. Marx argued that the idea of God was a symptom of man’s alienation through oppression; as society removed forms of oppression, the question of God would disappear. Society’s values, Marx believed, were just expressions of its economic arrangements and that the development of these arrangements was leading to an inevitable destination: the march of history would culminate in Communism, which would be free of both oppression and the idea of God.
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