INVESTIGATION

Full Marx for George Bush

05 November 2005

The President of the United States is not a communist, says John Laughland, but his belief in a global democratic revolution is inspired by Marxist thinking

In particular, they reveal that the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. If Chairman Mao once said that ‘Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: “It is right to rebel”’, that sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy. One of the key catchphrases of George Bush’s presidency has been the eminently Trotskyite concept of world revolution: on 6 November 2003 the American President specifically said, ‘The establishment of a free Iraq in the heart of the Middle East will be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.’ In his second inaugural speech, on 20 January, Bush announced nothing less than a programme of political emancipation for the whole planet — he said that America was pursuing ‘the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world’.

George Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his closest advisers, especially the neoconservatives, come from what can only be described as a post-Trostkyite background. The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin’s alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938. Within two years, Irving Kristol — the man who was later to be the founding father of the neoconservative movement which so dominates the Bush administration — joined it. Kristol’s own influence has been immense and his son, William, is now one of America’s most influential neocons. But Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983 he wrote that he was still proud of it.