noot

Originally Posted by noot

On Communism


1. Corporations are the modern day's equivalent plantations.
2. Wages are a form of slavery.
3. Corporate entities have only one reason to exist. And that is the accumulation of riches by any means under the law. And it needs to be stated that big corporations make those laws directly and indirectly. Donations to politicians are proffered for the sole purpose bribing them to enact laws to their benefit. That is the direct approach. The indirect approach is still less ethical than the former. It has to do, again, with spending out of corporate profits on advertisements, political action committees, rigged polls, PR firms. In effect the indirect approach is simply the widest possible dissemination of capitalist propaganda.


ON COMMUNISM

This thread concerns the Communist Party beginning with the Revolution of 1905 and the reasons that it was a still born ideology. I'll be focusing on personalities rather than inherent contradictions in making the case that Communism, as an alternative to Corporatism, after liquidating bourgeois sensibilities and moralisms, replaced them with nothing of greater import than reactionary opposition to the rich and the ugliness of nascent, as well as full blown, personality cults.

That said, Communism, socialism, and anarchism, will always hold a sway over the strivings of intelligent young people in any country at any time. It was Jonas Savimbi of the Angolan Unita party, who said in the early 70"s:
"If you're not a Marxist by the time you're twenty- you're not very bright. If you're still a Marxist by the time you're 40- you're not too bright either."

That was also true of myself. Even knowing better, as a youth I supported such cut throats as Lenin and Stalin. Even Trotsky, who was perhaps less of a ******* than the other two, still pursued policies of liquidation against the perceived enemies of the Revolution: using the Red Army to brutally repress the Anarchists, for instance. (Liquidation is a good Commie word.)

In 1920, Bertrand Russell, in my opinion the greatest humanitarian of modern times and also among the most erudite philosophers of the 20th century, came away with the following impression of Lenin after a long meeting between the two in the Kremlin. Russell, a Marxist himself at the time, found the unquestioned leader of the Revolution to be a humorless brute. Russell said, "When I first met Lenin...my most vivid impressions were of bigotry and Mongolian cruelty. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, 'and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree-- ha ha ha!' His guffaw at the thoughts of those massacred made my blood run cold."

Once Communism became infected by this amoral transcendental suspension of basic human kindness and understanding, it was doomed to failure. And note that the man responsible for the personification of that amoral worldview was the founder of the Soviet Communist Party, himself! The Revolution, from the moment that Lenin assumed leadership was doomed to failure. (That conclusion is my own and not Bertrand Russell's.) Russell believed that once the excesses of the Revolution were eclipsed by pure Marxist humanitarianism a new and educated and ethical Proletariat would assume its rightful place as the fundamental guarantor Natural, Classless Democracy, i.e. rule by the people, supplanting the rule of God and Church, Ethnic bigotry and privilege, Capital, and feudal Corporatism. He may have been right in that assessment but the fact remains that vendetta driven reaction and Lenin's personality, plus a lack of imaginative policy aside from reaction, precluded that dream from ever coming to be. The initial problem, of course, the worm in the center of the peach, the problem mentioned by hundreds of historians and polemicists over the course of time, was that Marx never envisioned a peasant uprising in the first place. The Communist Revolution was, according to Marx, supposed to be the synthesis of opposing forces, a Material Dialectic, and would necessarily first manifest itself in the industrialized, fixed-class societies, of England and France. Certainly not in Russia. There's no point in going into the reasons that Dialectical Materialism was not considered applicable, yet, to Russia- that it could not be, in 1905 or 1917 or even 1939, a Russian process; (that proposition been beaten to death for the last 150 years by historians and economists to the extent that the proposition, per se, is considered proved. If that comment doesn't satisfy you, feel free to do your own research and get back to me with any objections.) But the sorry truth is that indeed Marxist Revolution never could adapt to Russia or its successor, the USSR. All that remained of the Revolution after the Leninist/Stalinist usurpation, (yes I'll use the U word,) were the slogans. Unfortunately.

The Marxist Principle that the Communist Party must act as the vanguard of the Proletarian Revolution (an axiom that is central to Marxist thought and one never abandoned by any Marxist or Communist to this day) invited an abysmal arrogance and conceit into the Russian Revolution ( a Revolution that, as I mentioned, was at best an ironic aberration. This irony was unrecognized by the Bolsheviks. That- or this truth was either disingenuously denied or, more likely, never understood by the Bolsheviks to start with. And that misappropriation of History has continued even to this day. Revolution necessarily and ineluctably follows a Platonist continuum, according to Marx, and is therefore the necessary i.e. inevitable outcome of Natural Law as applied to industrial society. Those who succeed the Czars also had the obligation to interpret and to guide the applications of that natural law. Marxism is at once an economic and moral theory. And as applied to Russia it was only half right. The ethical pronouncements of Marxism could have informed the new Soviet Union even as the economic principles could not. The inequalities predicated on class are, to my mind, undeniable and a true shame to humanity. So I agree with Marx on that. This ethical set was not discovered by Marx, but rather predated his theories by thousands of years. The Marxist Revolutionary ethical constraints do not flow from the revolution itself. Rather they are system of presuppositions identified by most religious and moralistic philosophers as disparate as Mohammed, Moses, Kant, Jesus, Socrates, Buddha, and the American and French Revolutions. Of all the largest faiths in the world it is only Hinduism that denies these principles concerning the arbitrary and inherently unjust division of societies into classes of the entitled as opposed to the permanently dispossessed. And even India is dealing with nullifying religious categories by legislation.

All the forgoing is just a statement that the Communists who managed to gain power through revolution have ****** up, bigtime- with possible exception of Cuba.
©General Striker 2011