Brief Opinion on Yoram Hazony's 'The Challenge of Marxism'

15 October 2025.

Note: for a deeper commentary on the actual content of this article, read here (will be linked when published).

This review was requested by a comrade, and, in the revolutionary advancement of Gladsnost (Cordialness), Thoughts of a Comrade is always glad to oblige a comrade.

I thought long and hard about whether to commit any of my brief opinions to, thin and negative as they were, to paper. But two things have swayed me over the sea-wall of indecision. Firstly, a comrade's duty is to friendship as friendship is to a comrade's duty, or else it is nothing, and then my calls for Reform should prove me a fraud. Secondly, I have discovered a positive contribution I could make, in dispelling some ,,facts'', and thereby defending the sincerity of political discourse and the reputations of Marxism and conservatism, neither of which Master Hazony seems to care much about.

At the end of the article, I will include a few selections from my commentary which proves that Master Hazony does not know what Marxism is.

Indeed, the reason why I doubt the conservative essence of Master Hazony's criticisms is simply because I have seen actual conservative critiques of socialism and liberalism both, and whilst I may disagree with these critiques on any number of views informing their analysis, conservative critiques seem much more grounded, intelligent, and ultimately useful. Further, Master Hazony's conflation at all pains of communists with Woke-liberals reminds me very much of the burgher Right-libertarian hack Robert Lefebrve, who stated in his pamphlet Constitutional Government To-day in Soviet Russia 'in [the USSR AND the US], private ownership is banned at this point' (page twenty-two). Some of Hazony's remarks, I feel, are at the very least setting him on the path to becoming a total polemicist (in the sense of one who, not lying, is sincerely delusional in his analyses).

Except for Hazony's supremely brief mention of family, I do not understand how this is a conservative instead of a right-liberal critique of Marxism. And this brings me to a deeper point I should like to make.

The Right and Left are mostly one and the same at the moment: they are representatives of middling-class degeneracy, that is to say anti-cultural, anti-Gemeinschaftly (in the sense of a particularly aspired-to community with a wholly encompassing sense of purpose) vulgar economism, whose tradition is an ever drying puddle of identitarian fetishes.

This similarity leads to a deceptively similar world-view, which I believe Master Hazony may well share to a greater extent. This very middling-class world-view is why Marx and Engels preferred the aristocratic monarchist de Balzac to the liberal burgher (or 'towner/walledman', which may be the source of cultural degeneracy) Victor Hugo, despite what one might expect if he were to utilise that infantile concept of a 'political spectrum'. Master Deneen and Master Hazony are likewise seemingly separated by an immeasurable chasm, just as Lenin, Gorky, and Bogdanov, three chiefe Bolshevik intellectuals, seemed as well to be separated by such a gap. So it goes right into to-day.

My final point will be a brief interrogation of Hazony's objective. There is a rising contingent of noble, feudal, faithful, cultured, and conservative socialists and communists, including a renewed, communally organic anti-state-academia intelligentsia, resembling in character some aspects of the radical Russian intelligentsia. It is a glorious and noble, not middling-burgher expression of yearning and design for a directing purpose. Master Deneen appears to be aware of this, and has thus made his message less polemical, more intellectual, which allows many ideologies and tendencies to use or learn from it. Hazony seems extremely uninterested in having a sincere discussion on the benefits of conservatism and the errors of liberalism or the Enlightenment's paradigms. It looks to me as if he is intentionally cutting conservatism off from its newfound potential growth and alliances, which makes me think all the more that he is a covert operative of right-liberalism.

It is even perhaps that Hazony is a donor or puppet of the Republican Party USA, the predominant right-liberal malformation on the world stage. This possibility I first heard in some of the Amazon reviews of his books, but I have hither held out hope that they were biasedly untrue, but it now appears that these reviews may indeed have some truth.

I will end this article with four choice selections of my in-depth commentary on the first and second section of Master Hazony's article (see beginning of article for link).

I. Legally a Marxist Conspiracy?

'Already our first problem. "Marxism... bid to seize control of... even the courts". Whilst I could perhaps grant Master Hazony that various Marxist tendencies are building projects around the previous institutions he listed, I am utterly unconvinced, like Master Hugh Collins of Marxism and Law fame, that there is any concerted, focused effort to build a Marxist project around the courts or law in general.

Before TOAC launched our Reform-Leninist policies of New Socialist Constitutional Law (here) and Renewed Socialist Legality (here), there were exclusively collections of essays published into books present. And the majority of these essays have, if unsurprisingly yet disappointingly (as Master Collins affirms), taken a negative "Pashukanisite" or an outright hostile, post-modernist attitude towards burgher (and the former socialist!) systems of law. Rather than attempting any manner of synthesis, sublation, or merely informed analysis for the purpose of education, the Left retreats into uncompromising contempt or suspicious deconstruction when confronted with law— burgher or socialist'.

II. Liberal Oppression Contra Class Struggle

'Marx does not say men will purposefully, autonomously "form themselves into cohesive groups". That is simply not a Marxist definition of class, or certainly not one I have ever heard of, except from the mouths of social-liberals. Then, we are left to make sense of this even more confusing (confused!) line: "which exploit one another to the extent they are able". Ah ya, burghers of all lands, unite! You have nothing to lose but the chains of exploitation beshackled unto you by your cruel proletarian wage-masters, ha! In what world is this the nature of capitalist relations; how are proletarians, do pray tell us, able to exploit the class which is able to sack them at a moment's notice (give or take a minute depending on labour law)?

It is most clear that Master Hazony does not know, or does not care to know that exploitation is, for once in this article's writing, an actual, indeed fundamental Marxist concept, rather than another radical-liberal one as are most of the terms he has previously mentioned (out of them, anti-fascism is not exclusively Marxist and can mean many things, and "political correctness", the only truly Marxist term, is now derelict).

What, then, is exploitation? To quote a snippet of The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, with my own emphasis added:

'Exploitation occurs when one section of the population produces a surplus whose use is controlled by another section. Classes in Marxist theory exist only in relation to each other and that relation turns upon the form of exploitation occurring in a given mode of production... Under capitalism, exploitation takes the form of the extraction of surplus value by the class of industrial capitalists from the working class'.

All boldings mine.

This Hazony guy is supposed to be writing an analysis of Marxism, but does not know how to obtain and open a (mass trade) dictionary? Do not laugh!

Master Hazony should have saved us all a gross deal of effort if he had just procured a copy of The Dictionary of Marxist Thought, in which an occurence this article should not exist'.

III. Liberal Categories of False Consciousness

'Though this is, for once, somewhat close to a Marxist conception, it is still as ever riddled with errors. Firstly, more of a caveat or clarification that an outright correction: whilst many capitalists and liberal intellectuals are unaware of exploitation, socialitive hegemony (usually surfacing as hedonism, nihilism, and cultural degeneracy), and imperialism, there are still quite a few who do know, those capitalists who are indeed class-conscious, and those liberal intellectuals who have been 'ideologised', understanding the internal mechanisms and justifications for the ideology.

The 'thinking in terms of liberal categories', socialitive, philosophical, ideological, is actually correct, good work. Well, we ought to make sure that 'liberal categories' is understood to be so only because liberalism and capitalism are the ruling ideology and mode of production. Previously, exempli gratia the 1200s-1500s, it was conservative, or noble categories which arose from the predominant feudal mode of production. It is important to highlight that the categories in society's world-view are to some extent cumulative. Feudal laws and customs still linger at the edges of society, and aristocratic cultural artefacts are still considered of high quality and are toured for; the theology of religions is still established and evolving from precepts of the 500s-1100s. These relics are still influencing the views and lives of many, and Roman imperium with Greek philosophy are so deeply embedded that most matters now are in fact debates held on these ancient foundations'.

IV. The Fate of State and Ruling-Class

'"...Revolutionary reconstitution of society. Marx suggests that, historically"... labouring classes have done this. This is not a semantic difference, but a real theoretical one which better explains history than Master Hazony's nebulous and liberal "oppressed classes". It will not be the coffee baristas, retail clerks, and the students who destroy the state and reform society, but the truckers, Amazon workers, and the nighlumpen (also called the 'precariat') who will. The former because all oppression is abhorrent to them, will for the most part not engage in such a revolutionary departure. They will instead provide the dynamite schematics for the latter to make and set off, if even that.

"The destruction of the oppressor class" is a false characterisation. The role and social relations of the class will be liquidated, but the active destruction of the ruling class through attentats and detentions is an anarchist view, with which Marxists have always strongly disagreed. Master Hazony mixes the two up, as he does so many other ideologies, for he says after [destruction of]..."the social norms and ideas that hold the regime... in place". This second characterisation is much closer to the Marxist view-point than his first one.

"the '''violent overthrow''' of the liberal opressors" will not be directed, in the main, at the liberal ideological apparatus, but against the gendarmerie in the super-structure and the capitalist managers and owners in the system of production. The ideological apparatus in the super-structure will be subject to a far more complex process of reconfiguration and reform, not "violent overthrow".

Then Master Hazony ends with a massive error by stating "the [proletarians] seize control of the state". Indeed, this is what Marx thought prior to 1871, for it is exactly what happened in Paris, 1871. It proved tobe incorrect, the theory that one class can seize another, ruling-class's machinery of state, and Marx thus revised said thoughts, as he himself pointed out in the Preface to the 1872 Deutsch Edition of the Manifesto "one thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that '''the working-class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes'''.

Dear Marx, at least Master Jordan Peterson bothered to read the Manifesto before opining on anything related to Marxism! Then again, we have already seen that a three page dictionary entry is too much reading to expect of Master Hazony, so I suppose that I am not really surprised'.