I hope you had a leisurely, grateful Labor Day. If you shopped or dined anywhere, I hope you thanked the people for working. It’s a big accomplishment in American history that the labor unions won a fair place at the table. That they became bulwarks of society — for a few critical decades, during the Cold War. Since then, private sector unions have declined, partly thanks to Mafia-linked corruption. The labor movement was hijacked by self-dealing government unions.

It was the AFL-CIO under Lane Kirkland that provided much of the funds for the free labor union Solidarity in Poland. This after that country’s Communist government outlawed it. No Communist party worth its salt could let workers choose which organization represented them. Because they’d rarely have picked the Communists.

Nothing galled Marxists more than real workers organizations. These rejected their Party’s claim to speak for the whole working class, all around the world. What drove men like Kirkland to conduct their own foreign policy, and take on a superpower?

The Cold War Inside Every U.S. Labor Union

Read Dan Flynn’s fascinating book, A Conservative History of the American Left to find out. Every union in America by 1977 had fought its own Cold War against the Communist Party, USA, and its efforts to infiltrate labor unions. Many unions that exist today had to fight off Communist puppet rivals. Lane Kirkland, like former screen actor Ronald Reagan, was a veteran of that battle.

Authentically Christian members of the Civil Rights Movement had to fight a similar battle. Some blacks rightly angered at Jim Crow drifted into the glue traps of Communist front groups. Those were set up by Soviet agents to divide and conquer America.

In the 1930s, the real needs and religious faith of black Americans took second place to Stalin’s line. The Party told them to seek Marxist, black separatist states in the Deep South — under Moscow’s control. So you had talented men like Paul Robeson, who let anger at racial segregation drive them to pen eulogies for men like Joseph Stalin. Never mind that he’d murdered millions in ethnic purges and famines. Or run a state with millions of literal slave laborers. 

White Antifa Thugs Shouting the N-Word

Today we see the founders and leaders of Black Lives Matter proudly insist that they are “trained Marxists.” We watch angry white kids emerge from their mothers’ basements in suburbs, to go start street fights and fires in inner city areas they’d never normally visit. Some even shout the n-word at black cops or Trump supporters, and the c-word at women. (They feel they’ve earned the right, I guess.) I quipped about this over the weekend on Twitter:

When masked white rioters working for the Democrats destroy a black neighborhood that’s different from the Klan in the 1920s HOW again???

— John Zmirak (@JZmirak) September 7, 2020

Of course, in one way the current violence is actually more galling than previous white-led race riots. At least the thugs who terrorized black neighborhoods in the 1920s didn’t pretend that they spoke for blacks, and were doing this for their own good. That’s some high-level gaslighting right there. But there’s plenty of precedent for it among Marxist intellectuals, who were happy to have the secret police torture, imprison, and starve workers and peasants — whom they claimed to represent.

Ivy League Leninists

As a blue collar kid on the maximum financial aid at Yale in the 1980s, I used to have fun with the Marxists I ran into. I’d talk about how my mom grew up malnourished in the 1930s, one of 11 children in a Hell’s Kitchen tenement, of whom only 5 lived past age 4. At the same time, of course, the Ivy League Marxist’s grandpa was running Standard Oil, or clipping stock coupons for the sweatshop companies in his portfolio.

I’d always point out to such people, “I’m from the working class. We have no interest in your crackpot materialist ideology. We want free churches, safe neighborhoods, a strong America — and most of us would like to hang abortionists from lamp posts. Go sell the Gulag somewhere else.”

Karl Marx: Nihilist Vandal

None of them seemed moved by this. Nor by the deep-seated hatred that Communism provoked amongst working people in America — much less in countries like Poland, Hungary, East Germany, and Russia. You see, as Paul Kengor documents in The Devil and Karl Marx (I’ll be interviewing him soon for The Stream), Marxism was never about working people in the first place. Except as a pretext.

Marx was an angry, destructive nihilist. He hated the cosmos itself, the very order of life on earth. He latched onto the suffering of working people in a difficult historical period, but only to use it. The grievances of factory workers in 1848 were gasoline he could pour all over society, in order to set it afire. Because, like Joker in the Batman movies, some men just want to watch the world burn. The individual workers meant as much to Marx (or subsequent Marxists) as the dinosaurs whose bodies form fossil fuels.

We need to make common cause with Americans in the various communities which today’s trained Marxists pretend to represent. We want police reform, which means better training and tactics. We’d rather see zero suspects die in the course of getting arrested. But defunding or disbanding police forces would achieve the very opposite. It would put all the power in the hands of the Antifa thugs terrorizing neighborhoods — or of the citizens militias that would arise to stop them. Due process would vanish. Hundreds would die, and hundreds of thousands be scorched into poverty, in our nation’s poorest communities.

Not that the Marxists would care, safe in their suburbs. If you want to break some eggs, you must claim to be making an omelet.   

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”