Maurice Newman: The tenets of Marxism have mostly come true

It seems the influence of Marxist ideals in our society has changed the fundamental democratic processes of our everyday lifestyle, writes Maurice Newman.

From the vantage point of 2021, former FBI agent W Cleon Skousen’s 1960s best seller The Naked Communist reads more like a prophecy come true than its intended exposure of an ambitious, post-war, Marxist Manifesto.

In just 60 years, nearly all its goals have been achieved. While US centric, the Manifesto has been applied universally.

The first priority was the capture of at least one major American political party. That goal has been accomplished. And not just in America. Marxist ideology now strongly influences both Australia’s major parties.

The Manifesto called for the targeting of judges who could weaken American institutions through technical decisions based on human rights.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), leading socialist revolutionary. Picture: Getty Images

This too has happened in Australia.

Schools were to become transmission belts for socialist propaganda. By softening the curriculum, teachers’ associations would carry the party-line in required-reading textbooks, anti-capitalist teachings and the vilification of Western society.

Propaganda would replace education. No wonder nearly 30 per cent of Australia’s 15-year-olds can’t achieve baseline standards in maths, reading and science.

Marxist teaching holds degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural and healthy”. Laws governing obscenity are attacked as “censorship”.

Today, acceptance of pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio and TV has become part of everyday life.

“Cultural Marxism” also demands traditional religion be replaced by “social religion”.

The Bible must be discredited and its believers mocked for needing a “religious crutch”. And so it has come to pass.

The number of people identifying as Christians in Australia has fallen dramatically. Picture: Jono Searle

In Australia, the number of self-identified Christians has fallen 24 per cent in 17 years.

Much of post-war Marxism’s success has been through the media, where it has won ideological control of editorial writing, book reviews and student newspapers.

Key positions in radio, television and film are now filled with sympathetic presenters, actors and producers.

Today, mainstream and social media along with Hollywood and the arts are dominated by leftwing propagandists.

After 60 years of assiduous cultivation, the Marxist takeover of our bureaucracies is all but complete.

They have become self-serving collectives, bent on ideological outcomes for which they have no popular mandate. Even the military has been suborned.

Defence Department personnel were recently encouraged to hold morning teas for the International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia, Interphobia and Transphobia.

It is believed China’s defence establishment passed up the opportunity.

Marxism wants to destroy the traditional family. Picture: Getty Images

Yet, one Western institution remains stubbornly resistant. It is the family. Marxism opposes the family unit and wants it and traditional marriage abolished. It believes monogamy is not the natural state of humanity.

Accordingly, children should be raised communally so society is “one, big, harmonious, family, rather than fractured into competitive, squabbling family units”.

Marxists strongly advocate that children be removed from parental influence once they cease motherly dependence.

Consistent with this goal and, unless invited, Australian law forbids parental access to the My Health Records of a 14-years-old-and-up child. It means a teenager as young as 14, confused on gender identity and encouraged by peers and social media, can seek puberty blockers from a taxpayer-funded gender clinic without parental consent.

Indeed, child protection authorities removed a teenager whose parents did not “affirm” the child’s trans identity and opposed drug therapy as too risky.

When a 15-year-old girl decided to have a double mastectomy, an Australian court ruled this was “informed consent”. Big Brother knows better.

Marxist influence has also contributed to the decline in registered marriages.

By making divorce easier and, by removing the old stigmas, promiscuity and single parenting is on the rise. It undermines the security which traditional family values and life-long marriage once provided.

Research shows that in education, single-parent children score well below those from dual-parent households. They find less fulfilment in work and are more likely to go to jail.

Until recently, a free society was considered an inalienable right.

Today, freedoms are subject to state patronage. A cosy cartel of self-serving public servants, central bankers and crony capitalists have created a system which punishes smaller enterprises and have nots.

Higher taxes and burdensome regulations impact small business the hardest and limit social mobility. Who you know has become important to success.

Members of a Chinese People's Liberation Army band represent the country’s Marxist utopia. Picture: Getty Images

Even before the Covid emergency, Australia’s public debt was heading to over $1 trillion. Next year $1.5 trillion seems likely. This is the sad legacy we bequeath to our children. We have allowed our democratic system to unravel incrementally.

Many of those who profess the most individualistic objectives have supported collectivist means without recognising the contradiction.

Well-meaning perhaps. But for future generations the result is morally and financially impoverishing. It doesn’t matter whether the label is Marxist, socialist, progressive or moderate. The result is the same.

To see the end game, we need only observe Beijing’s Marxist utopia. Having taken 70 years to reach maturity, the top 0.1 per cent of earners have more wealth than the bottom 50 per cent.

Indeed, China has more billionaires than America, India and Germany combined. For that inequity, China’s poor have endured the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which claimed 40 million lives, the havoc of the Cultural Revolution, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre.

Former Russian President Boris Yeltsin knew that people don’t notice when they lose their freedom.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” is a Marxist myth.

Can’t happen here? Don’t believe it. The pandemic has revealed the profound authoritarian instincts of some of our current political and bureaucratic leaders and the speed with which they move.

So, as the new year beckons and for the sake of future generations, we must question how much more control of our lives we should cede to those who have already proven incompetent and unaccountable.

The hour is late and even holding the line will be a long and arduous struggle.

But former Soviet Union president Boris Yeltsin should know.

He warns: “We don’t appreciate what we have until it’s gone. Freedom is like that. It’s like air. When you have it, you don’t notice it.’’