My break-up with Marxism

Venezuela was a failed test

Much like I describe myself in this blog as a “recovering Coastal Elite,” I often refer to myself as a “recovering” or “former” Marxist. In progressive spaces, it’s usually social currency to be the most radical person in the room, so my colleagues are often surprised.

People I work with are often not super informed about Marxism and its related universe of leftist ideas, but they’re instinctively sympathetic. As one colleague I spoke with said, “you know, I’ve never read any of that stuff, but I assume it’s right.”

In part to answer those questions and in part to process my own journey, I wanted to write some posts about my own experience with Marxism. How did I fall in love with this intellectual universe, why did I fall out of love, and what elements still remain in my worldview? I’ll tackle the first two parts in this post.

Falling in love

My own trajectory is like a lot of Jewish intellectuals throughout history: I substituted religion for socialism in my late teens and early twenties. It started in Rosh Hashanah services, ninth grade. I remember sitting, reading a litany of apologies to God for various indiscretions over the past year, and hearing a voice in my head go “you know no one is listening to this, right?”

Around the same time, I discovered the work of Glenn Greenwald, then at Salon. His singular focus on civil liberties violations during the War on Terror exposed me to the idea that there were ideas that had bipartisan support that were bad. I grew up in a typically Democratic milieu in Seattle and it was a revelation to learn that Democrats did bad stuff, too. In the civil liberties case, they had also been deeply hypocritical, criticizing George Bush and then being silent when Barack Obama continued his policies.

I became quite zealous about this stuff. I asked for an ACLU Washington membership for my birthday and had my Dad drive me to see Glenn Greenwald speak at their annual dinner. I started carrying a foldable Constitution in my wallet.

Source: Mine was smaller than this, but also less sturdy and flaked apart over the years.

Fundamentally, what Greenwald did for me was open me up to the fact that there were important ideas that lay outside of the political mainstream, the Overton Window of acceptable ideas. After all, what could be more important than the President asserting the right to drone strike American citizens? I was ready for more radical ideas.

In 2013, a socialist publication called Jacobin received NYT coverage and published a primer to their own work. It was off to the races for me. One article that impacted me was their defense of “food stamp hipsters.” Why should we shame people who take welfare? Why shouldn’t the state help sustain artists, who contribute to a vibrant society?

By the time I went to college, I had dabbled in all sorts of leftist writing online and was ready to jump further down the rabbit hole. I often joke that my Latin American Studies degree was where all the Marxists in different departments go to hang out.

In that coursework, I learned about the expansive political spectrum that existed around the world. The differences between Democrats and Republicans were narrow, Latin American politics stretched both further left and right. Given the left-wing bent of the program, the emphasis was always on critiquing the existing system and the valor of radical, marginalized groups.

I went deep into this stuff! Like a good leftist, I tried on new labels like new clothes: socialist, anarchist, post-Marxist, communist, libertarian socialist, anarcho-syndicalist, you name it. But, fundamentally, I was on the team.

By the end, I had taken graduate level courses and was considering PhD programs like Cultural Anthropology and Sociology with a left-wing bent. I could follow new books coming out with names like Decolonizing Dialectics.

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In the years since, I’ve fallen out of love with a lot of these ideas. There’s more to write about what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in my worldview. But what I’m trying to capture here is the personal story. And like with many big life changes, this one was gradual and resulted more from random experiences puncturing my worldview than it did from reading some grand critique and internalizing it right away.

For me, the big thing that pushed me over the edge was watching events unfold in Venezuela. But first, how did the intellectual scene I was a part of make sense of previous issues with socialist governance?

Reckoning with the USSR

All contemporary communists must eventually reckon with the USSR and Soviet Bloc countries, the many catastrophes of actually-existing communism. I read innumerable essays admitting that the USSR was bad, but that it went wrong in some way. It was captured by bureaucrats! Trotsky was right and you can never have socialism in just one country! This has been meme-ified as the common retort “real socialism has never been tried.”

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At the time, leftist intellectuals were learning about the brutality of Stalinism and the deprivation in the USSR. Famously, Albert Camus broke with the idea of revolutionary violence, leading to a falling out with his friend and fellow philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:

This split was made all the more dramatic by the practical disappearance of the Right and the ascendancy of the Soviet Union – which empowered hardliners throughout Europe, but raised disquieting questions for communists as the horrors of gulags, terror and show trials came to light. The question for every leftist of the postwar era was simple: which side are you on?

With the publication of The Rebel, Camus declared for a peaceful socialism that would not resort to revolutionary violence. He was appalled by the stories emerging from the USSR: it was not a country of hand-in-hand communists, living freely, but a country with no freedom at all. Sartre, meanwhile, would fight for communism, and he was prepared to endorse violence to do so. … Though he never actually joined the French Communist Party, he would continue to defend communism throughout Europe until 1956, when the Soviet tanks in Budapest convinced him, finally, that the USSR did not hold the way forward.

While there are a handful of Soviet apologists, the predominant line in leftist circles is this: if I had been there, I would have been on the right side of this debate. I would be Camus, not Sartre.

Easy call with the benefit of hindsight, but how’d everyone do on a modern day test?

Surfing the Pink Tide

I was in the Latin American Studies program in the 2010s. At the time, the region was experiencing a pendulum swing towards leftist governments, which some scholars called the Pink Tide.

Venezuela and the “Bolivarian Revolution” led by Hugo Chavez were at the center of this moment. Here, in the case of Chavez, was a working class guy who rose to the heights of power. He championed the ideas of Hungarian philosopher István Mészáros, which seemed cool and fresh, not just running back failed socialist policy.

He was a particularly charismatic spokesperson and symbolic leader with an anti-imperialist bent. No one was better at exciting skeptics of the US government and capitalism. He famously gifted Barack Obama the leftist classic Open Veins of Latin America. Here he is calling George W. Bush “the Devil” at the UN in 2006:

There were all sorts of scholarly articles and books about Venezuela. George Ciccariello-Maher (who also wrote Decolonizing Dialectics and was later canceled for saying dumb stuff) wrote two, including one about how Chavez’s street militias were building radical democratic communes that lay the groundwork for a post-capitalist future.

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I remember reading favorably about Chavez’s weekly Presidential talk show Alo Presidente, a similar concept to FDR’s Fireside Chats. Here was Chavez making the Presidency accessible! He’d take calls and solve people’s problems live on the air. How cool is that?

Look, not everyone on the Left was cheering on Venezuela. But it wasn’t just academics. Jeremy Corbyn was a fan. The Nation called Venezuela “the most Democratic country in the Western hemisphere.” Oliver Stone released a glowing documentary tribute. Chavez had a moment!

Venezuela was a disaster

Well, you probably already know how things actually turned out in Venezuela. But if you don’t: Chavez died. His increasingly-authoritarian government was taken over by Nicolas Maduro. Political repression has worsened, their democracy is gone. Their economy contracted 80% between 2014 and 2021, which as the NYT noted in 2019 is incredibly rare outside of a war. A 2023 survey found that 83% of the country lived in poverty.

Ultimately, Venezuela collapsed for some predictable reasons that were obscured by citing obscure Hungarian theorists. They maintained price controls on goods like milk that were unrealistic and hollowed out local production, using oil revenues to import cheap goods and paper over any shortages.

But then oil revenue collapsed. In part because they had hollowed out the federal oil company and replaced everyone with political loyalists who didn’t know how to run it. And… now you’ve killed the local milk market, you have no money to import it, and there’s no milk on the shelves. Multiply that out by a lot of other sectors of the economy. The NYT was already reporting on infants dying due to hospital supply shortages in 2016, and that was only part-way into this steep decline.

You can read all sorts of economic analyses and heartbreaking reporting. But to me, the best way to sum it up is with the migration statistics.

Al-Jazeera reports that almost 7M people left Venezuela since 2014. That’s a lot of people in a country that hovers around 28-30M people. Many go to neighboring Colombia, where some are undocumented in precarious situations.

Others go further north, crossing the dangerous Darien Gap and attempt to find refuge in Panama or seek asylum in the US. Even if they survive this journey and make it to a welcoming country, they face the prospect of starting their life completely over in a new country, daunting for anyone.

I believe that people are experts on their own lives. And what they are telling us is that where they live is so terrible that they will risk life and limb to get out.

We failed the test

There was so much excitement to have a new anti-imperialist standard-bearer. This led people to dismiss a lot of important signals before and during this collapse. As the situation worsened in Venezuela, I saw quite a lag in leftist opinion. Full of changing the subject and “whataboutism” — the US also has problems! Of course, you have Noam Chomsky saying that the problem is that it’s not real socialism and was still too capitalist.

Meanwhile, the country was collapsing. People were starving.

I found the failure to accept that we had been wrong about Chavez to be despicable. Some leftists I know are still in denial, or quick to blame US embargoes for everything. This is a hallmark of Cuba apologists, too, who are currently experiencing the worst exodus of people in their country’s history as the country continues to struggle with rolling blackouts.

Let’s also revisit one of those case studies above. Alo Presidente was part of a larger caudillo-style cult of personality that ended up being bad for the reasons it always is. Here he is intimidating a bank and threatening him with expropriation on national TV:

If you watch videos, it’s just a mix of a Trump rally and Trump’s Truth Social presence. “I alone can fix it” is the vibe, Chavez has sycophants praise him on TV, and would fire people live on the air. Here he is just walking around pointing at random buildings and expropriating them, mostly just to get applause from the people around him:

Frankly, it’s embarrassing that anyone watched this play out in real time and argued that it was a good political project.

Fundamentally, all of this made me feel betrayed. It made me question the rigor and integrity that the thinkers I idolized were bringing to other issues.

And it made me wonder about the core ideas here. Many people had called all of this from the start: the dangers of populist authoritarianism, the short-sighted nature of poverty reduction through price controls and oil spending. Maybe they were on to something?

Over time, I’ve become much less beholden to a particular ideology, taking ideas from different places and applying different lenses to suit a given situation. As Paul Berman said in his obituary of Stanley Crouch, “an intellectual is someone who understands systematic ideologies, but does not have one.” There’s plenty of useful values and ideas that have stuck with me from my Marxist days.

I’ve spent years wrestling with what to keep and what to chuck from the Marxist toolkit, and I’d like to write a future post digging into that nuance. But ultimately there’s a one-word answer for why I’m not a Marxist anymore: Venezuela.