“Not all ideology is blind.”
“Subscribing to anything, wholesale, is problematic.”
“There’s a purpose to ideology,” she counters. “It coheres a system of ideas, lets you see the end we’re working towards, a fairer world.”
Aleksandr shakes his head. “Historical inevitability is a delusion.”
“It isnot! There’s something to it, the idea that we’re striving towards something better, that history is cumulative.”
“History isn’t some singular force, Lili. It’s chaos, there is no sum to its parts.”
“We should just accept suffering then?”
“It blinds us, historical materialism. It obfuscates the natural absurdity, tragedy, choice in history. Reduces it to inevitability for the sake of cohered ideology. Nothing is inevitable, no matter what Marx alleges.”
“You can’t just discount Marxism entirely,” she protests. “Sure, he tends grandiose, but he has value.”
Aleksandr inclines his head, a conciliatory gesture. “I agree.” His hand runs up and down her bare leg. “Marxism offers a compelling worldview, I understand that’s alluring when you’re young.”
“Don’t patronize me,” she snaps.
“I’m serious,” he insists. “He answered a real need. He gave people language through which they could represent and recognize a story they’d been telling for a long time. I understand the charms of the dialectic, truly—and he was a genius, too, in how he observed political reality. But he falters when he posits these grand ideological schemes, thrusts into the future.”
She sighs. “I don’t understand you,” she says simply. “One minute, you drag Marx as the devil, the next you say he has good points.”
“It’s not as black-and-white as that.”
“Some things are.”
“I didn’t take you as the religious type.”
She snorts. “I’m not.”
“Ideology can become a religion.”
“And capitalism isn’t?”
“I think of it more as the most perfect embodiment of both negative and positive freedoms.” He grins. “A worldview of freedoms.”
“Yes, well, you can take anything to an extreme.”
“And that’s both the appeal and danger of Marxism, how it offers what religion once did. There’s an absolutism to it—answers to all your questions, direction for the rage, purpose to your suffering. Even the narrative progression he uses—there’s a reason Koestler called Marxism the god that failed, a reason it’s had more resonance in Catholic and Orthodox countries than Protestant ones,” he says, reaching across her legs for his coffee from the table.
“That’s—” Lili frowns, pausing. “That’s actually an insightful point.”
Aleksandr smirks, squeezing her thigh as he leans back against the couch.
“But,” she says, reaching for his coffee, “Marx is in no way the entirety of socialist thought.”
Aleksandr groans. “Socialism has moved beyond Marx!” she insists.
“Socialism, in whatever form, necessitates blind faith in the planner.”
“I’m not arguing for a dictatorship here!” she exclaims, her throat hurting a little with the strain; shadows of last night. “No democratic socialist is.”
He looks unimpressed. “It’s a fact, Lili. Socialism tends towards totalitarianism.”
“And capitalism tends towards rampant inequality and misery!”
