Written: 1992
First Published: 1992
Source: Fraser, C. (1998). "Stranger in a Strange Land." In Revolution, She Wrote (pp 305-307). Seattle, WA: Red Letter Press.
Transcription/Markup: Philip Davis and Glenn Kirkindall
Copyleft: Internet Archive (marxists.org)
2015. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document
under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.
The sky is falling down. The world as we've known it is ending, and not with whimpers but with very loud bangs indeed.
Everybody seems to be shootin' down everybody else. People who once were amicable family, mates, neighbors, fellow workers, colleagues, comrades, and nations are turning on each other like snarling wolves.
If friends, relatives and compatriots aren't threatening and divorcing each other, they're likely to be suing or slaughtering each other. Division, destruction and doom are the masters of the day.
Where in the world does a revolutionary, socialist, humanist—me—go to register? Did hopelessly random and unbenign cosmic forces deposit me on the wrong planet?
Is it true that there are no answers, only questions? Is ideology really dead? Are humans conceived in sin and condemned to folly? Are religious maniacs and nationalist hysterics and crass opportunists and fascist demagogues and demented damn fools the wave of a minutely Balkanized new order based on a nuclear, concentration-camp culture?
Will tomorrow never come?
I don't believe any of this claptrap—this bourgeois, allegedly pragmatic, end-of-history, old hat crap.
I do believe in the scientific validity of cockeyed optimism.
I believe that the human race deserves and will achieve a nobler destiny than the casual brutality and chaos of a market economy and Deutschland Über Alles pop psychology.
I believe that revolution and socialism and democracy and rich personal fulfillment, within the context of a dazzling and liberating worldwide and world-class art and culture, are not only possible but imminent.
And I believe, above all, in true believers. Only a visionary, attempting the untried and untested, can be a practical leader. Only a politically correct radical can sow the seeds that transform scorched earth into bountiful harvests. The basic thing needed to attain devoutly wished for results is philosophy.
And finally I believe in Karl Marx. Totally. Gratefully. Admiringly. The death of his influence, like the demise of communism, has not only been greatly exaggerated, it's been contrived by venal economic warlords and their media lackeys and lickspittles, who think nothing of disinterring the remains of dead geniuses in order to misinterpret and slander them one more time.
They're going berserk over poor old Karl Marx these days. They froth and fulminate, excoriating as they exhume.
They hate him, hate him! (Where are the anti-Hate Crimes/malicious harassment liberals when we need them?) They cannot tolerate this titan among thinkers because his analysis of society is so true and trenchant—and his solutions (that dreaded S-word) are so logical and inevitable and beautiful.
Yes, Marxism and real communism and the promise of mortal happiness are beautiful goals that even today inspire and animate millions of afflicted, thoughtful workers on all continents—even, quiet as it's kept, in the USA.
So my apparent strangerhood in America is only that—relative isolation in this benighted heartland of world counterrevolution. Someday soon Americans themselves will grab the helm of revolution (it's happened twice before, you know) and they will create "a land that's free for you and me and a Russian lullaby," and we'll all be strangers no more.
Keep the faith. And we'll see which class system, in the long homestretch of history, will bury the other one.