The late conservative cultural critic Roger Scruton once remarked, “Not everything Marx said was wrong.”
Such a statement from Sir Roger, a man who dedicated his life to combatting Marxism — both in its totalitarian Soviet form and in its “softer” cultural form in the West — may seem strange. However, it is precisely because Scruton was a Cold Warrior who engaged in a tete-a-tete with the earlier generations of Old Left and New Left intellectuals that the conservative gadfly could make such a statement.
Scruton’s puckish comment seems to belie an inconvenient truth: Marxism as a philosophy is (deadly) wrong, but throughout the twentieth century, many well-meaning and intelligent people embraced some form of Marxism out of altruistic motives, hoping to improve the lot of the poor and working class around the world.
As shocking as it may seem, there was a time when the left cared about the working class of their own countries. There also once was a time (as recent as the anti-WTO protests of the ’00s) in which the left opposed globalism, which they saw as a tool for eradicating cultures across the world and creating an environment in which wages could be driven down by immigration and global corporate expansion. There was further a time in which the left argued for free speech and open intellectual inquiry as well as high intellectual standards in K-12, college, and university education.
In the era of “woke capitalism” and “millennial leftism,” however, these sentiments have been eclipsed
