Marx’s hatred of modernity is, I think, insufficiently appreciated.

“Everything solid melts into air, everything holy is profaned . . .” he declared in the Communist Manifesto.

No contemporary conservative mindlessly prattling on about the toxicity of “cultural Marxism” can fathom the revulsion against modernity that colors Marx’s writing from beginning to end. 

The idea of a Hegelian Aufhebung that would, like the monster in Alien, burst capitalism from within and usher in a latent communism was just cope. Marx became a revolutionary because he lacked the courage to be a reactionary. He found in Hegel a means to invert pessimism into a synthetic—one might say almost manic—faith in the inevitability of communism and through communism, the restoration of the world.

For Marx the proletariat is the golem, an inert mass with the potential to become an avenging monster when it acquires (class) consciousness and changes from an “in itself” to a “for itself.”

The anti-bourgeois, anti-liberal, and ultimately, antimodern orientation of Marxism hidden beneath its revolutionary rhetoric helps explain how communism protected the societies in which it was victorious from the worst consequences of modernity, for ultimately communism quarantined these societies from consumerism’s relentless liquidation of tradition. And this is why even after the dismantling of the old Stalinist systems, the decadent and now economically and culturally senescent West has not lost any of its antipathy for the East.