Marx as Conservative

Marx's hatred of modernity is, I think, insufficiently appreciated.

"Everything solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned . . ." he declared in the Communist Manifesto.

No contemporary conservative mindlessly prattling on about the toxicity of "cultural Marxism" can fathom the revulsion against modernity that colors Marx's writing from beginning to end. 

The idea of a Hegelian Aufhebung that would that would, like the monster in Alien, burst capitalism from within and usher in a latent communism was just cope. Someone who understood as exquisitely as Marx did the depth of capitalism's ignobility was in danger of drowning in despair. Instead, he found in Hegel a means to invert pessimism into a synthetic—one might say almost manic—faith in the inevitability communism and the restoration of the world. Of course, he insisted that he had turned Hegel on his head, that his dialectic was grounded in a materialist logic. But the very notion of a dialectical unfolding is metaphysical and owes its origin in the belief that the universe is animated by an ineffable divine purpose.

Then too, I wonder how much Marx's belief in proletarian revolutionary agency was unconsciously a recreation of the Jewish consoling myth of the golem. Like the golem, the proletariat is an inert mass until it becomes imbued with class consciousness and changes from an "in itself" to a "for itself."

The anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, and ultimately, amti-modern orientation of Marxism hidden beneath its revolutionary rhetoric helps explain how communism protected the societies in which it was victorious from the worst consequences of modernity, for ultimately communism quarantined these societies from consumerism's relentless liquidation of traditional norms.. And this is why even after the dismantling of the old Stalinist systems, the decadent and now economically and culturally senescent West has not lost any of its antipathy for the East.