In these times, when countries all over the globe are falling and threatening to fall under Communist rule, it may seem odd to argue that Marxism is on the decline. Yet we too often mistake Western (which in practice tends to mean American) weakness for Communist strength and thus discount developments that have begun to undermine the edifice that Marx-Engels-Lenin built.
The successes of the last sixty years have been due less to the attractiveness of Communism, with its programmed inefficiency, than to the wave of utopianism which swept the West in proportion as Christianity weakened. If among the great social thinkers of the nineteenth century—Bentham, Comte, Marx, Fourier, Mill—only Marx survived as the progenitor of concrete regimes, the reason is not that he was “right”; it is that certain universalist aspirations woven into the fabric of his doctrine inspired in its adherents a sort of religious fervor. It attracted an intellectual class that was adrift, in search of a melange of faith and science. These intellectuals did not confine their attention to Marxism: they toyed with a whole spectrum of new ideologies, but none of the others—evolutionism, psychoanalysis, racial doctrines—was found suitable, since each divided people instead of uniting them.
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