Socialism is derived from the Latin word ‘Socialis,’ which means ‘Public.’ Socialism is an economic and social system characterized by state and public control over the economy, means of production, distribution of resources, as well as political theories and movements associated with them.
Now the question is; has Socialism Ever Worked?
Although not in every country, socialism has worked in China for several years, and it’s still working. The same too was recorded in Denmark. Socialism makes tax to be at a high rate, but the good part of it is that you have excellent and quality health care and other services. According to debate.org, socialism is already working in some part of the country and it’s still working. It’s a firm decision coupled with the fact that the tax will be very. But what’s the big deal in having to pay enormous tax when you have the probability of living almost well taken care of?
So that is about socialism and where it has actually worked. Continue reading for more information on the topic.
What You Need To Know About The Various Forms Of Socialism
There are many varieties of socialism, and there is no single definition that includes all of them. Socialist systems are grouped into non-market and market forms. Non-market socialism involves the replacement of market factors of production and money by engineering and technical criteria based on calculations made in kind, thereby creating an economic mechanism that works by economic principles that are different from the laws of capitalism.
Non-market socialism seeks to circumvent the inefficiencies and crises traditionally associated with capital accumulation and profit systems. In turn, market socialism retains the use of money prices, market factors, and, in some cases, a profit motive to the activities of publicly owned enterprises and the distribution of means of production between them.
Profits earned by these firms will be directly controlled by the labor force of each firm or accumulated for society as a whole in the form of a social dividend.
Socialist politics has both international and national orientation and is planned through political parties as well as opposing party politics. It sometimes intersects with trade unions, and at other times is independent and critical of trade unions. It is present in both industrialized and developing countries.
It is created within the framework of social democracy implies a mixed economy, which includes significant government intervention in the form of redistribution of income, various kinds of regulation, and a welfare state
How Socialism Relates To Other Economic Systems?
The followers of Marxism call socialism the first phase of communism, which begins after the transitional stage from capitalism to communism: the transitional stage starts with the seizure of political power and ends with the destruction of private ownership of the primary means of production with the transition to a state-planned economy.
The first phase of communism ends with overcoming the contradictions between people of mental and material labor, as well as between the city and the village. The guarantee of this development since the seizure of political power is the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is carried out by the soviets.
So, here is the view on the socialism of classical Marxism. Studying history, Marx concluded a change in socio-economic formations – the slave system was replaced by feudalism, the one by capitalism. The structure was determined by the mode of production peculiar only to it. Each subsequent formation had greater labor efficiency.
From this point of view, it is easy to imagine that with time, capitalism will leave history, and it will be replaced by a certain following socio-economic formation with even greater efficiency. Classical Marxism calls communism the next structure, and the transitional system between communism and capitalism is called socialism.
In the first half of the 20th century, during the fierce political struggle of various factions of the left, socialism and communism were divided – they began to regard socialism as a formation,
The idea of socialism and communism is straightforward. In the framework of capitalism at the end of the 19th century, society has already produced an incredible amount of material wealth compared with the beginning of the century. If we imagine a further increase in labor efficiency, it will become clear that there will be more and more benefits and less and less labor to receive them.
Let us recall, say, how many people worked in the USSR, and how many works in modern China; remember that the New Year in the USSR was a working day, while now we all enjoy quite a long weekend.
This is the practical manifestation of increasing labor efficiency. At a certain moment, it will be possible without special efforts to provide all citizens with a minimum average standard of living, requiring absolutely nothing in return from them – labor efficiency will allow this. But this is not all.
Further development of technology will allow a person to abandon labor completely – machines can make machines in the same way as people. Human labor passes only into the creative field. At this moment, the issue of redistribution of goods will move from the practical field to the moral and ethical one.
There are so many benefits, and the price is so low that it is not difficult to distribute them among all comers. You may notice that in such a situation, it is even necessary because an increase in labor efficiency implies a reduction in jobs — a society of welfare and unconditional income in this situation is inevitable. I outlined the question (in addition to the welfare) of the left of the first half of the 20th century.
There is nothing perfect in communism or socialism. Everything is realistic – we are witnessing an increase in labor efficiency even now, in times relatively difficult for the global economy. The same 3d printers, although they are now only a toy and an indicator of the level of household technologies, can someday be used in production. Robotics is also being improved.
Socialism And Capitalism For The Common Man
Our generation imagines socialism and capitalism as different systems of economic management. It is not explained at school, but only frightens today’s students with repression. However, socialism is different from capitalism.
Types Of Socialism
The various types of socialism are conservative or right socialism, social engineering, or scientist socialism, democratic socialism, or social democracy, real socialism, or soviet-type economies. Although there are various types of socialism, I will be focusing on one type that is of special interest.
Conservative or right socialism is a type of socialism whereby institutional aggression is used to save the status quo and privileges of certain cohorts and individuals. The main goal of right-wing socialism is to preserve everything as it is, without letting free enterprise and creative human activity destroy the pre-established framework of social organization.
To achieve this goal, the ‘right-wing’ socialist systems rely on systematic institutional aggression, which applies everywhere they need it. In this regard, conservative and democratic socialism differ only in motives and those specific social groups to which they seek to provide privileges.
Conservative or “right” socialism is also characterized by pronounced paternalism, understood as an attempt to “freeze” the behavior of people by assigning them those roles in consumption or production that are considered appropriate by the conservative regulatory body. Also, under a socialist system of this type, authorities usually seek to impose on society, in an orderly manner, certain behavior that they consider moral or orthodox.
With conservative or right socialism, military socialism is closely linked. It is defined as the kind of socialism where all institutions are subordinate to the goals of warfare, and the scale of values, which determine the social status and income of citizens. It depends primarily or exclusively on the position of a person with the armed forces.
Guild and agrarian socialism can also be attributed to the type of conservative, or “right”, socialism. In the first of these systems, authorities seek to create a society based on a hierarchy of specialists, managers, artisans, officers, and workers, and in the second, forcibly divide the land between certain social groups.
It must be emphasized that the philosophy of conservatism is incompatible with innovation and creativity. It is concerned with the past and does not trust what market processes could create. It is mostly opportunistic and devoid of principles. Therefore, it usually recommends that institutional coercion be entrusted to “wise and kind leaders” who have different criteria in each case. So, conservatism is an obscurantist doctrine that completely neglects the fact that the functioning of social processes occurs due to the energy of entrepreneurship, and especially the problem of fatal ignorance inherent in all leaders.
Conclusion
Socialism requires a lot of processes and efforts to make it work in any sphere, both at the national and international levels. However, in response to the question, has socialism ever worked, we can see it has not worked as it ought to because its principles have been corrupted, and its application has been significantly influenced.
Leon Trotsky has always had a certain appeal for intellectuals that the other Bolshevik leaders lacked. The reasons for this are clear enough. He was a writer, an occasional literary critic — according to Irving Howe, a very good one — and an historian (of the revolutions of 1905 and 1917). He had an interest in psychoanalysis and modern developments in physics, and, even when in power, suggested that the new Communist thought-controllers shouldn’t be too harsh on writers with such ideas — not exactly a Nat Hentoff position on freedom of expression, but about as good as one can expect among Communists.
Above all, Trotsky was himself an intellectual, and one who played a great part in what many of that breed have considered to be the real world — the world of revolutionary bloodshed and terror. He was second only to Lenin in 1917; in the Civil War he was the leader of the Red Army and the Organizer of Victory. As Howe says, “For intellectuals throughout the world there was something fascinating about the spectacle of a man of words transforming himself through sheer will into a man of deeds.”
Trotsky lost out to Stalin in the power struggle of the 1920s, and in exile became a severe and knowledgeable critic of his great antagonist; thus, for intellectuals with no access to other critics of Stalinism — classical liberal, anarchist, or conservative — Trotsky’s writings in the 1930s opened their eyes to some aspects at least of the charnel-house that was Stalin’s Russia. During the period of the Great Purge and the Moscow show trials, Trotsky was placed at the center of the myth of treason and collaboration with Germany and Japan that Stalin spun as a pretext for eliminating his old comrades. In 1940, an agent of the Soviet secret police, Ramon Mercador, sought Trotsky out at his home in Mexico City and killed him with an ice ax to the head.
Irving Howe, the distinguished literary critic and editor of Dissent, tells the story of this interesting life with great lucidity, economy, and grace. The emphasis is on Trotsky’s thought, with which Howe has concerned himself for almost the past 40 years. As a young man, he states, “I came for a brief time under Trotsky’s influence, and since then, even though or perhaps because I have remained a socialist, I have found myself moving farther and farther away from his ideas.”
Howe is in fact considerably more critical of Trotsky than I had expected. He identifies many of Trotsky’s crucial errors, and uses them to cast light on the flaws in Marxism, Leninism, and the Soviet regime that Trotsky contributed so much to creating. And yet there is a curious ambivalence in the book. Somehow the ignorance and evil in Trotsky’s life are never allowed their full weight in the balance, and, in the end, he turns out to be, in Howe’s view, a hero and “titan” of the 20th century. It’s as if Howe had chosen not to think out fully the moral implications of what it means to have said and done the things that Trotsky said and did.
We can take as our first example Howe’s discussion of the final outcome of Trotsky’s political labors: the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet regime. Throughout this book Howe makes cogent points regarding the real class character of this regime and other Communist governments — which, he notes, manifested itself very early on:
A new social stratum — it had sprung up the very morning of the revolution — began to consolidate itself: the party-state bureaucracy which found its support in the technical intelligentsia, the factory managers, the military officials, and, above all, the party functionaries…. To speak of a party-state bureaucracy in a country where industry has been nationalized means to speak of a new ruling elite, perhaps a new ruling class, which parasitically fastened itself upon every institution of Russian life. [emphasis in original]
Howe goes on to say that it was not to be expected that the Bolsheviks themselves would realize what they had done and what class they had actually raised to power: “It was a historical novelty for which little provision had been made in the Marxist scheme of things, except perhaps in some occasional passages to be found in Marx’s writings about the distinctive social character of Oriental despotism.”
This is not entirely correct. Howe himself shows how Trotsky, in his book 1905 (a history of the Russian revolution of that year), had had a glimpse of this form of society, one in which the state bureaucracy was itself the ruling class. In analyzing the Tsarist regime, Trotsky had picked up on the strand of Marxist thought that saw the state as an independent parasitic body, feeding on all the social classes engaged in the process of production. This was a view that Marx expressed, for instance, in his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.
More importantly, the class character of Marxism itself — as well as the probable consequences of the coming to power of a Marxist Party — had been identified well before Trotsky’s time. The great 19th-century anarchist Michael Bakunin — whose name does not even appear in Howe’s book, just as not a single other anarchist is even mentioned anywhere in it — had already subjected Marxism to critical scrutiny in the 1870s. In the course of this, Bakunin had uncovered the dirty little secret of the future Marxist state:
The State has always been the patrimony of some privileged class or other; a priestly class, an aristocratic class, a bourgeois class, and finally a bureaucratic class…. But in the People’s State of Marx, there will be, we are told, no privileged class at all … but there will be a government, which will not content itself with governing and administering the masses politically, as all governments do today, but which will also administer them economically, concentrating in its own hands the production and the just division of wealth, the cultivation of land, the establishment and development of factories, the organization and direction of commerce, finally the application of capital to production by the only banker, the State. All that will demand an immense knowledge and many “heads overflowing with brains” in this government. It will be the reign of scientific intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and contemptuous of all regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy of real and pretended scientists and scholars. [Emphasis added.]
This perspective was taken up somewhat later by the Polish-Russian revolutionist, Waclaw Machajski, who held, in the words of Max Nomad, that — “nineteenth century socialism was not the expression of the interests of the manual workers but the ideology of the impecunious, malcontent, lower middle-class intellectual workers … behind the socialist ‘ideal’ was a new form of exploitation for the benefit of the officeholders and managers of the socialized state.”
Thus, that Marxism in power would mean the rule of state functionaries was not merely intrinsically probable — given the massive increment of state power envisaged by Marxists, what else could it be? — but it had also been predicted by writers well known to a revolutionary like Trotsky. Trotsky, however, had not permitted himself to take this analysis seriously before committing himself to the Marxist revolutionary enterprise. More than that: “To the end of his days,” as Howe writes, he “held that Stalinist Russia should still be designated as a ‘degenerated workers’ state’ because it preserved the nationalized property forms that were a ‘conquest’ of the Russian Revolution” — as if nationalized property and the planned economy were not the very instruments of rule of the new class in Soviet Russia!”It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be.”
It remained for some of Trotsky’s more critical disciples, especially Max Shachtman in the United States, to point out to their master what had actually happened in Russia: that the Revolution had not produced a “workers’ State,” nor was there any danger that “capitalism” would be restored, as Trotsky continued to fret it would. Instead, there had come into an existence in Russia a “bureaucratic collectivism” even more reactionary and oppressive than what had gone before.
Trotsky rejected this interpretation. In fact he had no choice. For, as Howe states, the dissidents “called into question the entire revolutionary perspective upon which [Trotsky] continued to base his politics…. There was the further possibility, if Trotsky’s critics were right, that the whole perspective of socialism might have to be revised.” Indeed.
To his credit, Howe recognizes that a key period for understanding Bolshevism, including the thought of Trotsky, is the period of war communism, from 1918 to 1921. As he describes it, “Industry was almost completely nationalized. Private trade was banned. Party squads were sent into the countryside to requisition food from the peasants.” The results were tragic on a vast scale. The economic system simply broke down, with all the immense suffering and all the countless deaths from starvation that such a small statement implies. As Trotsky himself later put it, “The collapse of the productive forces surpassed anything of the kind that history had ever seen. The country, and the government with it, were at the very edge of the abyss.”
How had this come about? Here Howe follows the orthodox interpretation: War communism was merely the product of emergency conditions, created by the Revolution and the Civil War. It was a system of “extreme measures [which the Bolsheviks] had never dreamt of in their earlier programs.”
Now, this last may be, strictly speaking, correct. It may well be, that is, that the Bolsheviks had never had the slightest idea of what their aims would mean concretely for the economic life of Russia, how those aims would of necessity have to be implemented, or what the consequences would be.
But war communism was no mere “improvisation,” whose horrors are to be chalked up to the chaos in Russia at the time. The system was willed and itself helped produce that chaos. As Paul Craig Roberts has argued in his brilliant book Alienation and the Soviet Economy, war communism was an attempt to translate into “Reality” the Marxist ideal: the abolition of “commodity production,” of the price system and the market.
This, as Roberts demonstrates, was what Marxism was all about. This is what the end of “alienation” and the final liberation of mankind consisted in. Why should it be surprising that when self-confident and determined Marxists like Lenin and Trotsky seized power in a great nation, they tried to put into effect the very policy that was their whole reason for being?
As evidence for this interpretation, Roberts quotes Trotsky himself (ironically, from a book of Trotsky’s writings edited by Irving Howe):
[T]he period of so-called “war communism” [was a period when] economic life was wholly subjected to the needs of the front … it is necessary to acknowledge, however, that in its original conception it pursued broader aims. The Soviet government hoped and strove to develop these methods of regimentation directly into a system of planned economy in distribution as well as production. In other words, from “war communism” it hoped gradually, but without destroying the system, to arrive at genuine communism … reality, however, came into increasing conflict with the program of “war communism.” Production continually declined, and not only because of the destructive action of the war.
Roberts goes on to quote Victor Serge: “The social system of those years was later called ‘War Communism.’ At the time it was called simply ‘Communism’ … Trotsky had just written that this system would last over decades if the transition to a genuine, unfettered Socialism was to be assured. Bukharin … considered the present mode of production to be final.”
One slight obstacle was encountered, however, on the road to the abolition of the price system and the market: “Reality,” as Trotsky noted, “came into increasing conflict” with the economic “system” that the Bolshevik rulers had fastened on Russia. After a few years of misery and famine for the Russian masses — there is no record of any Bolshevik leader having died of starvation in this period — the rulers thought again, and a New Economic Policy (NEP) — including elements of private ownership and allowing for market transactions — was decreed.
The significance of all this cannot be exaggerated. What we have with Trotsky and his comrades in the Great October Revolution is the spectacle of a few literary-philosophical intellectuals seizing power in a great country with the aim of overturning the whole economic system — but without the slightest idea of how an economic system works. In State and Revolution, written just before he took power, Lenin wrote,
The accounting and control necessary [for the operation of a national economy] have been simplified by capitalism to the utmost, till they have become the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic.
With this piece of cretinism Trotsky doubtless agreed. And why wouldn’t he? Lenin, Trotsky, and the rest had all their lives been professional revolutionaries, with no connection at all to the process of production and, except for Bukharin, little interest in the real workings of an economic system. Their concerns had been the strategy and tactics of revolution and the perpetual, monkish exegesis of the holy books of Marxism.
The nitty-gritty of how an economic system functions — how, in our world, men and women work, produce, exchange, and survive — was something from which they prudishly averted their eyes, as pertaining to the nether-regions. These “materialists” and “scientific socialists” lived in a mental world where understanding Hegel, Feuerbach, and the hideousness of Eugen Duehring’s philosophical errors was infinitely more important than understanding what might be the meaning of a price.
Of the actual operations of social production and exchange they had about the same appreciation as John Henry Newman or, indeed, St. Bernard of Clairvaux. This is a common enough circumstance among intellectuals; the tragedy here is that the Bolsheviks came to rule over millions of real workers, real peasants, and real businessmen.
Howe puts the matter rather too sweetly: once in power, he says, “Trotsky was trying to think his way through difficulties no Russian Marxist had quite foreseen.” And what did the brilliant intellectual propose as a solution to the problems Russia now faced? “In December 1919 Trotsky put forward a series of ‘theses’ [sic] before the party’s Central Committee in which he argued for compulsory work and labor armies ruled through military discipline….”
So, forced labor, and not just for political opponents, but for the Russian working class. Let Daniel and Gabriel Cohn-Bendit, the left-anarchists from the May days of 1968 in Paris, take up the argument:
“Was it so true,” Trotsky asked, “that compulsory labor was always unproductive?” He denounced this view as “wretched and miserable liberal prejudice,” learnedly pointing out that “chattel slavery, too, was productive” and that compulsory serf labor was in its times “a progressive phenomenon.” He told the unions [at the Third Congress of Trade Unions] that “coercion, regimentation, and militarization of labor were no mere emergency measures and that the workers’ State normally had the right to coerce any citizen to perform any work at any place of its choosing.”
And why not? Hadn’t Marx and Engels, in their ten-point program for revolutionary government in The Communist Manifesto, demanded as point eight, “Equal liability for all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture”? Neither Marx nor Engels ever disavowed their claim that those in charge of “the workers’ state” had the right to enslave the workers and peasants whenever the need might arise. Now, having annihilated the hated market, the Bolsheviks found that the need for enslavement had, indeed, arisen. And of all the Bolshevik leaders, the most ardent and aggressive advocate of forced labor was Leon Trotsky.
There are other areas in which Howe’s critique of Trotsky is not penetrating enough, in which it turns out to be altogether too soft-focused and oblique. For instance, he taxes Trotsky with certain philosophical contradictions stemming from his belief in “historical materialism.” All through his life, Howe asserts, Trotsky employed “moral criteria by no means simply derived from or reducible to class interest. He would speak of honor, courage, and truth as if these were known constants, for somewhere in the orthodox Marxist there survived a streak of nineteenth century Russian ethicism, earnest and romantic.”
Let us leave aside the silly implication that there is something “romantic” about belief in ethical values, as against the “scientific” character of orthodox Marxism. In this passage, Howe seems to be saying that adherence to certain commonly accepted values is, among Marxists, a rare kind of atavism on Trotsky’s part. Not at all.
Ofcourse historical materialism dismisses ethical rules as nothing more than the “expression,” or “reflection,” or whatever, of “underlying class relationships” and, ultimately, of “the material productive forces.” But no Marxist has ever taken this seriously, except as pretext for breaking ethical rules (as when Lenin and Trotsky argued in justification of their terror). Even Marx and Engels, in their “Inaugural Address of the First International,” wrote that the International’s foreign policy would be to “vindicate the simple laws of morals and justice [sic] which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the laws paramount of the intercourse of nations.””War communism was no mere ‘improvisation,’ whose horrors are to be chalked up to the chaos in Russia at the time. The system was willed and itself helped produce that chaos.”
That Trotsky admired honor, courage, and truth is not something that cries out for explanation by reference to Russian tradition of “ethicism” (whatever that might be). The admiration of those values is a part of the common heritage of us all. To think that there is a problem here that needs explaining is to take “historical materialism” much too seriously to begin with.
Similarly with other contradictions Howe thinks he has discovered between Trotsky’s Marxist philosophy and certain statements Trotsky made in commenting on real political events. Of the Bolshevik Revolution itself, Trotsky says that it would have taken place even if he had not been in Petrograd, “on condition that Lenin was present and in command.” Howe asks, “What happens to historical materialism?” The point Howe is making, of course, is that in the Marxist view individuals are not allowed to play any critical role in shaping really important historical events, let alone in determining whether or not they occur.
But the answer to Howe’s question is that, when Trotsky commits a blunder like this, nothing happens. Nothing happens, because “historical materialism” was pretentious nonsense from the beginning, a political strategy rather than a philosophical position. Occasionally, in daubing in some of the light patches of sky that are intended to make up for the dark ones in Trotsky’s life, Howe comes perilously close to slipping into a fantasy world.
He says that in the struggle with Stalin, Trotsky was at a disadvantage, because he “fought on the terrain of the enemy, accepting the damaging assumption of a Bolshevik monopoly of power.” But why is this assumption located on the enemy’s terrain? Trotsky shared that view with Stalin. He no more believed that a supporter of capitalism had a right to propagate his ideas than a medieval inquisitor believed in a witch’s right to her own personal style. And as for the rights even of other socialists — Trotsky in 1921 had led the attack on the Kronstadt rebels, who merely demanded freedom for socialists other than the Bolsheviks. At the time, Trotsky boasted that the rebels would be shot “like partridges” — as, pursuant to his orders, they were.
Howe even stoops to trying a touch of pathos. In sketching the tactics Stalin used in the struggle with Trotsky, he speaks of “the organized harassment to which Trotskyist leaders, distinguished Old Bolsheviks, were subjected by hooligans in the employ of the party apparatus, the severe threats made against all within the party….” Really now — is it political violence used against Leon Trotsky and his “distinguished” followers that is supposed to make our blood run cold? No: if there was ever a satisfying case of poetic justice, the “harassment” and “persecution” of Trotsky — down to and including the ice ax incident — is surely it.
The best example of Howe’s strange gentleness toward Trotsky I have for the last. What, when all is said and done, was Trotsky’s picture of the Communist society of the future? Howe does quote from Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution the famous, and ridiculous, last lines: “The average human type [Trotsky wrote] will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.” He doesn’t, however, tell us what precedes these lines — Trotsky’s sketch of the future society, his passionate dream. Under Communism, Trotsky states, Man will
reconstruct society and himself in accordance with his own plan…. The imperceptible, ant-like piling up of quarters and streets, brick by brick, from generation to generation, will give way to the titanic construction of city-villages, with map and compass in hand…. Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built up consciously, will be erected and corrected…. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training…. [It will be] possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life…. The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the laws of heredity and sexual selection! … Man will make it his purpose … to create a higher social biological type, or, if you please, a superman.
“Man … his own plan … his purpose… his own hands.” When Trotsky promoted the formation of worker-slave armies in industry, he believed that his own will was the will of the Proletarian Man. It is easy to guess whose will would stand in for that of Communist Man when the time came to direct the collective experiments on the physiological life, the complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physiological training, the reconstruction of the traditional family, the substitution of “something else” for blind sexual selection in the reproduction of human beings, and the creation of the superhuman.
This, then, is Trotsky’s final goal: a world where mankind is “free” in the sense that Marxism understands the term — where all of human life, starting from the economics, but going on to embrace everything, even the most private and intimate parts of human existence — is consciously planned by “society,” which is assumed to have a single will. And it is this — this disgusting positivist nightmare — that, for him, made all the enslavement and killings acceptable!
Surely, this was another dirty little secret that Howe had an obligation to let us in on.
Howe ends by saying of Trotsky that “the example of his energy and heroism is likely to grip the imagination of generations to come,” adding that, “even those of us who cannot heed his word may recognize that Leon Trotsky, in his power and his fall, is one of the titans of our century.”
This is the kind of writing that covers the great issues of right and wrong in human affairs with a blanket of historicist snow. The fact is that Trotsky used his talents to take power in order to impose his willful dream — the abolition of the market, private property, and the bourgeoisie. His actions brought untold misery and death to his country.
Yet, to the end of his life, he tried in every way he could to bring the Marxist revolution to other peoples — to the French, the Germans, the Italians — with what probable consequences, he, better than anyone else, had reason to know. He was a champion of thought-control, prison camps, and the firing squad for his opponents, and of forced labor for ordinary, nonbrilliant working people. He openly defended chattel slavery — which, even in our century, must surely put him into a quite select company.
He was an intellectual who never asked himself such a simple question as: “What reason do I have to believe that the economic condition of workers under socialism will be better than under capitalism?” To the last, he never permitted himself to glimpse the possibility that the bloody, bureaucratic tyranny over which Stalin presided might never have come into existence but for his own efforts.
A hero? Well, no thank you — I’ll find my own heroes somewhere else. A titan of the 20th century? In a sense, yes. At least Leon Trotsky shares with the other “titans” of our century this characteristic: it would have been better if he had never been born.
This review originally appeared in Libertarian Review, Vol. 8, No. 2 (March 1979), pp. 38–42.Author:
Ralph Raico (1936–2016) was professor emeritus in European history at Buffalo State College and a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He was a specialist on the history of liberty, the liberal tradition in Europe, and the relationship between war and the rise of the state. He is the author of The Place of Religion in the Liberal Philosophy of Constant, Tocqueville, and Lord Acton.
A bibliography of Ralph Raico’s work, compiled by Tyler Kubik, is found here.
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As a libertarian, let me make my position clear with respect to the FBI: It should be abolished, not reformed or reined in. That’s because in a free society there is no national police force. Criminal justice, along with all the power a criminal-justice system entails, is best left at the state and local level. National police forces are inherent to totalitarian regimes, such as those in Iran, North Korea, and China.
Thus, it’s not a coincidence that the Framers did not provide for a FBI in the Constitution, just as it isn’t a coincidence that our American ancestors did not have a FBI for more than a century after the Constitution called the federal government into existence. In fact, if the American people had been told after the Constitutional Convention that the Constitution was bringing into existence a federal government that included a national police force, it is a virtual certainty that they never would have approved the deal, in which case the country would have continued operating under the Articles of Confederation, a type of governmental system in which the federal government’s powers were so weak that it didn’t even have the power to tax.
During his term in office, President Truman alluded to the nature and practices of the FBI when he said, “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail…. Edgar Hoover would give his right eye to take over, and all congressmen and senators are afraid of him.”
It is now undisputed that Hoover, who was the director of the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, was a serial blackmailer. He and his agents would secretly compile information on American citizens, including presidents and members of Congress, in order to blackmail them into doing what Hoover wanted them to do.
One of Hoover’s principal areas of secret surveillance for the purpose of blackmail involved sexual activity. He has his agents would conduct secret surveillance on people’s sexual activities, compile extensive secret files containing the information, and then blackmail the person with it.
One famous target of Hoover’s blackmail was Martin Luther King, a man who Hoover and his fellow cohorts at the FBI were convinced was a spearhead in what they, along with the Pentagon, the CIA, and the NSA, were convinced was a worldwide communist conspiracy based in Moscow to take over the United States and the rest of the world. The FBI’s secret surveillance of King had discovered that he was engaged in an extramarital affair. Hoover used the information to blackmail King with the aim of causing him to commit suicide. The blackmail was: Kill yourself or we will disclose your perfidy to your wife and to the world.
And of course there was COINTELPRO, the massive illegal FBI scheme to infiltrate and destroy domestic organizations that were suspected to be part of the supposed worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based in Moscow. In acts that would have made the communists proud, Hoover’s FBI targeted for surveillance African-Americans, gays, war protestors, and leftists.
Okay, that’s water under the bridge and Hoover has been dead for almost 50 years. But guess whose name appears on the building in Washington, D.C., that houses the FBI. It’s called the J. Edgar Hoover Building.
Now, I ask you: What kind of people would honor and glorify a serial blackmailer by naming their building after him? What kind of people would go to work for an organization that has named its building after a serial blackmailer?
I sometimes wonder whether a person who has been nominated to be FBI director has demanded the removal of Hoover’s name from the building as a condition of accepting the job. From what I know, not one single FBI director in the last 25 years, including Christopher Wray, Andrew McCabe, James Comey, and Robert Mueller, has made such a demand. Why not? What’s up with that, especially in an era when statues of Civil War heroes are being removed from the public square? Is fighting for the Confederacy worse than being a serial blackmailer?
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987, Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News’ Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano’s show Freedom Watch. View these interviews at LewRockwell.com and from Full Context. Send him email.
If your kids don’t know these things, it’s time you seriously consider educational alternatives for your child. And please don’t say you can’t afford it, because you can’t afford not to. If you love your children, take them out of public school, find a good private/parochial school, homeschool, or simply keep them at home. They’ll learn a lot more watching Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune than spending seven hours a day in a government-run holding tank for the children of dysfunctional parents.
Below are questions and subject matters my peers and I learned between the ages of, say, 12-18. These issues and facts were taught during the 60s and 70s in great detail. Minorities had no problems learning these things. Why do they have problems with them now? It’s called the “soft racism of low expectations,” “dumbing down.”
Ask your children or grandchildren these questions. If they can’t answer a good many of them, they are the victims of child abuse.
QUESTIONS
Who invented the cotton gin?
The steamboat ?
The electric lightbulb?
Movable press?
The reaper?
The sewing machine?
Vulcanized rubber?
Who was George Washington Carver ? And what particular plant was he famous for studying ?
Can you identify all 50 states from a map of the United States? And name their capitals?
Can you identify most of the countries on a world map ? And name their capitals?
Can you diagram a sentence?
Do you know the grammar rules governing the use of “less vs. fewer? Punctuation ? When to use an apostrophe ? Semicolon ? Quotation marks ? Capitalization? Proper syntax?
I heard through the grapevine that there are eighth-graders who still don’t their multiplication tables. I find that appalling. Can you quickly recite the multiplication tables? Like, right now.
Can you discuss the significance and meaning of the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution? When were they written and/or ratified?
Can you name five major figures of the Renaissance?
Can you name Christopher Columbus’ three ships? Where they landed?
When was Julius Caesar assassinated? Date and year.
Can you briefly discuss the early American settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown? What drew these early settlers to risk life and limb to come here? Remember–there were no food stamps, no welfare checks, and no Section 8 housing. They started from scratch; the rest is history.
When did the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock?
Can you name the major battles of the War of Independence? Which war preceded the War of Independence that, in fact, helped set the stage for the War of Independence?
Can you prove that a triangle is 180 degrees?
Can you prove that alternate exterior angles are equal?
Can you name the formula of the Pythagorean Theorem?
Can you name the formula of Einstein’s theory of relativity?
Can you cite the five rights enshrined in the First Amendment?
Can you name your Natural Rights? HINT: There are three.
Can you name the seven continents?
Can you name the two major mountain ranges in the United States?
Can you name the seven parts of speech?
Can you name the seven auxiliary verbs?
Can you name the seven figures of speech?
Do you know the “rule of three” in mathematics?
Have you read any of the following—A Tale of Two Cities, any Shakesperean plays, Oliver Twist, Wuthering Heights, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, The Last of the Mohicans, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Little Women, Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Democracy in America ? If not, can you at least name the authors of these classics ?
Do you know the difference between a peninsula and isthmus?
Can you briefly discuss the Protestant Reformation, Counterreformation? Can you name some of the major players of these historic periods?
Who is Charlemagne and why is he important? On which day was he crowned the first Holy Roman Emperor and what was the name of the crown?
Can you discuss the Age of Discovery? Columbus, Pizarro, de Leon, Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Francis Drake, Magellan, Balboa ? What can you say about these conquistadores and explorers?
Can you identify at some of the major thinkers of the Enlightenment ? Can you identify the generally accepted years and during which the Enlightenment took place? What was the significance of the period? Explain its impact on our own history? Name three countries which were on the forefront of this Age ?
Our country is routinely called a democracy. This is soooo incorrect. Yet, many of the so-called elite in the media, academia, and politics, who should know better, continue to call our nation a democracy. Our Founding Fathers loathed the idea of democracy, likening it to the “rule of the mob.” Which term correctly describes our form of government?
What is a synonym? An antonym ? A homonym?
Do you know when to use there, their, and they’re ? Your and you’re ? Do you know when to use subjective and objective pronouns ?
Do you know the formulae for converting Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa?
Can you name the planets? In order of their distance from the sun ?
Can you name the oceans ?
What was the first battle/act of aggression in the War of Northern Aggression (sometimes called the Civil War by the benighted) ?
Can you name the Great Lakes ? In order of size ?
Which treaty codified the nation-state system in which we still live ? Which war did the treaty end ? When?
Can you recite the Preamble to the Constitution? The Presidential Oath of Office ?
Who wrote the Declaration of Independence? Whose signature appears boldly as the first signatory?
Can you recite your ABCs? Count from one to 10?
Can you name at least ten Founding Fathers ?
Can you name at least five major battles of the War of Independence ? The War of Northern Aggression ? World War I ? World War II ?
Can you name the first five presidents ? The five latest ?
Who was William Shakespeare? When did he live? What was the name of the town he lived in? What was his nickname ? Name three of his plays.
Who was Sir Isaac Newton? Galileo? Copernicus? Louis Pasteur? Can you name at least five scientists from the 17th and 18th centuries?
I could go on and on. But these are just the basics of grammar, mathematics, and history that all of us were required to learn while attending school in the 60s and 70s. Minorities were required to learn these things, and did. I don’t recall any minorities struggling with these things.
For further information on the state of our education system, check out the works of Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams. I must sadly report that the vast majority of our teachers couldn’t answer these questions either. Remember—if you can’t go to college, go to Teachers School.
Please feel free to add additional questions or comments.
All of my life, I have said that the left’s moral compass is broken.
And all of my life, I was wrong.
Why I was wrong explains both the left and the moral crisis we are in better than almost any other explanation.
I was wrong because in order to have a broken moral compass, you need to have a moral compass to begin with. But the left doesn’t have one.
This is not meant as an attack. It is a description of reality. The left regularly acknowledges that it doesn’t think in terms of good and evil. Most of us are so used to thinking in those terms — what we call “Judeo-Christian” — that it is very difficult for us to divide the world in any other way.
But since Karl Marx, the left (not liberalism; the two are different) has always divided the world, and, therefore, human actions, in ways other than good and evil. The left, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous words, has always operated “beyond good and evil.”
It all began with Marx, who divided the world by economic class — worker and owner or exploited and exploiter. To Marx and to Marxism, there is no such thing as a good or an evil that transcends class. Good is defined as what is good for the working class; evil is what is bad for the working class.
Therefore, to Marxists, there is no such thing as a universal good or a universal evil. Those of us still in thrall to Judeo-Christian morality believe that good and evil are universal. In other words, whether an act is good or evil has nothing to do with who committed the act — rich or poor, male or female, religious or secular, member of one’s nation or of another nation. Stealing and murder are morally wrong, no matter who stole or who murdered.
That is not the case for Marx and the left. In Marx’s words in “Capital” (“Das Kapital”):
“Right can never be higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural development thereby determined. We therefore reject every attempt to impose on us any moral dogma whatsoever as an eternal, ultimate and forever immutable moral law.”
Fifty-three years later, Marx’s foremost disciple, Vladimir Lenin, architect of the Russian Revolution, proclaimed:
“We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. … We do not believe in an eternal morality. … We repudiate all morality derived from non-human (i.e., God) and non-class concepts” (Address to the Third Congress of the Russian Young Communist League, Oct. 2, 1920).
As professor Wilfred Cantwell Smith, director of Harvard University’s Center for the Study of World Religions, wrote in 1957: “For Marxism there is no reason (literally no reason: our universe, the movement posits, is the kind of universe where there cannot conceivably be any reason) for not killing or torturing or exploiting a human person if his liquidation or torture or slave labor will advance the historical process.”
This is how Marx’s ideological heirs, today’s leftists, view the world — with one important difference: Morality is not determined only by class, but by race, power and sex as well.
RACE
It is left-wing dogma that a black person cannot be a racist. Only whites can be racist. And, indeed, all whites are racist.
It is increasingly a left-wing position that when blacks loot, they are only taking what they deserve, or, as the looters often put it, looted goods are “reparations.” A Black Lives Matter organizer in Chicago, Ariel Atkins, recently put it this way:
“I don’t care if somebody decides to loot a Gucci or a Macy’s or a Nike store because that makes sure that person eats. That makes sure that person has clothes. That is reparations. Anything they want to take, take it because these businesses have insurance” (Chicago Tribune, Aug. 17, 2020).
POWER
Another nonmoral left-wing compass concerns power. Just as right and wrong are determined by class (worker and owner/rich and poor) and race (white and people of color), good and evil are also determined by power (the strong and the weak).
That explains much of the left’s hatred for two countries in particular — America and Israel. America is wrong when it does almost anything in the world that involves weaker countries — assassinates the most important Iranian terrorist, builds a wall between itself and Mexico, opposes unlimited immigration. It is wrong because it is much stronger than those other countries.
The left’s antipathy to Israel derives from both the power compass and the race compass. Because Israel is so much stronger than the Palestinians and because Israelis are classified as white (despite the fact that more than half of all Israelis are not white), the left deems Israel wrong. So, when Israel justifiably attacks Gaza for raining rockets over Israel, the world’s left vehemently attacks Israel — because it is so much stronger than the people of Gaza and because whites have attacked people of color.
SEX
When a woman accuses a man of sexually harassing or raping her, the left’s reaction is not, “Let us try to determine the truth as best we can.” It is, “Believe women.” One must automatically “believe women” because, on the left, it is not only morality that doesn’t transcend race, power, class or sex; truth doesn’t either. That’s why leftists protest and riot whenever a confrontation between a police officer and a black person ends with the death of an unarmed black person. The police officer is automatically racist, and the death is automatically deemed murder. On the left, the concept of objective truth is increasingly deemed a form of white supremacy.
So, then, it turns out I was mistaken all my life. The left’s moral compass is not broken. The left simply rejects such a compass.
Paul Kengor is a professor of political science at Grove City College in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He has just published “The Devil and Karl Marx,” a careful look at the diabolical side of Karl Marx. The book has come out during an important time in our history since so many Americans, particularly our youth, have fallen for the seductive siren song of socialism taught to them by the academic elite.
“The Black Book of Communism,” edited by Stephane Courtois, details the Marxist-Leninist death toll in the 20th century. Here is the breakdown: USSR, 20 million deaths; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; North Korea and Cambodia, 2 million each; Eastern Europe, 1 million; and about 3.5 million in Latin America, Africa and Afghanistan. These figures understate those detailed by Professor R.J. Rummel in “Death by Government.” He finds that from 1917 until its collapse, the Soviet Union murdered or caused the death of 61 million people, mostly its own citizens. From 1949 to 1976, Communist China’s Mao Zedong regime was responsible for the death of as many as 78 million of its own citizens.
The world’s intellectual elite readily focus on Adolf Hitler’s murderous atrocities but ignore those of the world’s socialists. Mao Zedong has been long admired by academics and leftists across our country. They often marched around singing his praises and waving his little red book, “Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung.” President Barack Obama’s communications director, Anita Dunn, in her June 2009 commencement address to St. Andrews Episcopal High School at Washington National Cathedral, said Mao was one of her heroes.
Whether it’s the academic community, the media elite, stalwarts of the Democratic Party or organizations such as the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, Green for All, the Sierra Club and the Children’s Defense Fund, there is a great tolerance for the ideas of socialism — a system that has caused more deaths and human misery than all other systems combined. Today’s leftists, socialists and progressives would bristle at the suggestion that their agenda differs little from those of Nazi, Soviet and Maoist mass murderers. Keep in mind that one does not have to be in favor of death camps or wars of conquest to be a tyrant. The only requirement is that one must believe in the primacy of the state over individual rights.
Kengor highlights another feature of Marx ignored by his followers. This feature of Marxism should be disturbing to Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, who said that she and her fellow organizers are “trained Marxists.” I wonder whether she shares Marx’s views on race. Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, was viewed as having Negro blood in his veins. Marx denigrated him as “Negillo” and “The Gorilla.”
Marx had similar hate for Jews. He referred to his fellow socialist labor organizer Ferdinand Lasalle as a “greasy Jew,” “the little kike,” “water polack jew” and “Jewish n—-r.” In 1844, Marx wrote an essay titled “The Jewish Question” in which he asks, “What is the worldly cult of the Jew?” His answer: “Haggling. What is his worldly god? Money.”
Down through the years, leftists made a moral equivalency between communist/socialist totalitarianism and democracy. W. E. B. Du Bois, writing in the National Guardian (1953) said, “Joseph Stalin was a great man; few other men of the 20th century approach his stature.” Walter Duranty called Stalin “the greatest living statesman … a quiet, unobtrusive man.” George Bernard Shaw expressed admiration for Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith visited Mao’s China and praised Mao Zedong and the Chinese economic system. Michel Oksenberg, President Jimmy Carter’s China expert, complained that “America is doomed to decay until radical, even revolutionary, change fundamentally alters the institutions and values,” and urged us to “borrow ideas and solutions” from China.
Kengor does a yeoman’s job of highlighting the evils of Marxism. The question is whether Americans will heed his lesson or fall prey to the false promises and live the horrors of socialism. By the way, while Sweden and Denmark have a large welfare system, they have market economies — not socialist economies, as some leftists claim.
According to the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) latest “Update on the Budget Outlook,” this year’s $3.3 trillion federal deficit is not just three times larger than last year: it is the largest federal deficit in history. The CBO update also predicts that the federal debt will equal 104 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) next year and will reach 108 percent of GDP by 2030.
The CBO update also shows that the Social Security, Medicare, and highway trust funds will all be bankrupt by 2031. This will put pressure on Congress to bail out the trust funds thus further increasing the debt.
This year’s spike in federal spending was caused by the multi-trillion dollar coronavirus relief/economic stimulus bills passed by Congress and signed by the president. However, spending had already increased by $937 billion from the time President Trump was sworn in until the lockdown.
Federal spending is unlikely to be reduced no matter who wins the presidential election. Former Vice President Joe Biden has proposed increasing spending on everything from Obamacare to militarism to “green” cronyism. Yet some progressives are attacking Biden for being to “stingy” in his spending proposals. Even more distressing is how few progressives are critical of Biden’s support for increasing the military budget.
With some notable exceptions, such as his infrastructure plan, President Trump is not proposing any massive new spending programs. However, he Is not promising to stop increasing, much less cut, federal spending.
Most Republicans have abandoned their Obama-era opposition to deficit spending to support President Trump’s spending increases. This repeats a pattern where Republicans oppose deficit spending under a Democrat president but decide that “deficits don’t matter” when a Republican is sitting in the Oval Office. If Biden wins in November, Republicans will likely once again discover that deficits do matter, especially if Democrats also gain control of the Senate.
Government spending forcibly takes resources from the private sector, where they are used to produce goods and services desired by consumers, and puts them in the hands of politicians and bureaucrats. This distorts the market, reducing efficiency and lowering the people’s standard of living. This, combined with pressure to monetize the federal debt, causes the Federal Reserve to pump money into the economy leading to a boom-bust business cycle.
Unless Congress begins reducing spending, the coming economic crisis will be even worse. The logical place to start cutting spending is ending all unnecessary overseas commitments, corporate welfare, and shuttling down all unconstitutional federal agencies — starting with the Department of Education.
The savings from these cuts can be used to start paying down debt and providing for those truly dependent on the current system while we transition away from the welfare state. Private charities, including ones run by religious organizations, are better than government bureaucracies at providing effective and compassionate aid to those in need.
Most politicians will not vote to curtail the welfare-warfare state unless their constituents demand it. The people will not demand an end to big government as long as so many believe that the government has a moral responsibility to, and is capable of, providing them with economic and personal security.
Therefore, our priority must be on getting people to reject the entitlement mentality and embrace the philosophy of liberty and personal responsibility. This will enable us to build a movement capable of convincing politicians to stop voting for more spending and debt and instead vote to respect the Constitutional limitations on government in all areas.
Voting is important. But it does not define your freedom. You could vote for a fascist. You could vote for a Communist. You can vote for a tyrant who will (you think) give you something for nothing, while enslaving your neighbor to provide you with that something. None of that is freedom, and none of that is fair or just. Voting is just as often part of the problem, as part of the solution.
What defines your freedom? Your inalienable rights. America’s Bill of Rights embodies many of them: the right to free speech, the right to physically arm and protect yourself (from criminals or government), the right to due process and equal treatment under the law. The bottom line: You are sovereign over your life, your mind, your body and your SELF. There is no sanity or mental health without that freedom, although freedom cannot guarantee mental health; it can only make it possible. America was founded on the idea of individual rights; not the “right” of one pressure group to tyrannize or enslave a different pressure group, as it works today.
When you vote, you ought to choose the people who best uphold RIGHTS. Not the fascists, the Communists, the COVID tyrants, the Marxists, the looter supporters, nor many of the other sorry choices we now have. Vote like your rights and life depends on it. Vote like it might be your last time. Because given many of today’s candidates, it might be.
Marx assumes tacitly that the social condition of a class uniquely determines its interests and that there can be no doubt what kind of policy best serves these interests. The class does not have to choose between various policies. The historical situation enjoins upon it a definite policy. There is no alternative. It follows that the class does not act, since acting implies choosing among various possible ways of procedure. The material productive forces act through the medium of the class members.
But Marx, Engels, and all other Marxians ignored this fundamental dogma of their creed as soon as they stepped beyond the borders of epistemology and began commenting upon historical and political issues. Then they not only charged the nonproletarian classes with hostility to the proletarians but criticized their policies as not conducive to promoting the true interests of their own classes.
The most important of Marx’s political pamphlets is the Address on the Civil War in France (1871). It furiously attacks the French government which, backed by the immense majority of the nation, was intent upon quelling the rebellion of the Paris Commune. It recklessly calumniates all the leading members of that government, calling them swindlers, forgers, and embezzlers. Jules Favre, it charges, was “living in concubinage with the wife of a dipsomaniac,” and General de Gallifet profited from the alleged prostitution of his wife. In short, the pamphlet set the pattern for the defamation tactics of the socialist press, which the Marxians indignantly chastised as one of the worst excrescences of capitalism when the tabloid press adopted it.
Yet all these slanderous lies, however reprehensible, may be interpreted as partisan stratagems in the implacable war against bourgeois civilization. They are at least not incompatible with Marxian epistemological principles. But it is another thing to question the expediency of the bourgeois policy from the standpoint of the class interests of the bourgeoisie.
The Address maintains that the policy of the French bourgeoisie has unmasked the essential teachings of its own ideology, the only purpose of which is “to delay the class struggle”; henceforth it will no longer be possible for the class rule of the bourgeoisie “to hide in a nationalist uniform.” Henceforth there will no longer be any question of peace or armistice between the workers and their exploiters. The battle will be resumed again and again and there can be no doubt about the final victory of the workingmen.1
It must be noted that these observations were made with regard to a situation in which the majority of the French people had only to choose between unconditional surrender to a small minority of revolutionaries or fighting them. Neither Marx nor anybody else had ever expected that the majority of a nation would yield without resistance to armed aggression on the part of a minority.
Still more important is the fact that Marx in these observations ascribes to the policies adopted by the French bourgeoisie a decisive influence upon the course of events. In this he contradicts all his other writings. In the Communist Manifesto he had announced the implacable and relentless class struggle without any regard to the defense tactics the bourgeois may resort to. He had deduced the inevitability of this struggle from the class situation of the exploiters and that of the exploited. There is no room in the Marxian system for the assumption that the policies adopted by the bourgeoisie could in any way affect the emergence of the class struggle and its outcome.
If it is true that one class, the French bourgeoisie of 1871, was in a position to choose between alternative policies and, through its decision, to influence the course of events, the same must be true also of other classes in other historical situations. Then all the dogmas of Marxian materialism are exploded. Then it is not true that the class situation teaches a class what its genuine class interests are and what kind of policy best serves these interests. It is not true that only such ideas as are conducive to the real interests of a class meet with approval on the part of those who direct the policies of the class. It may happen that different ideas direct those policies and thus get an influence upon the course of events. But then it is not true that what counts in history are only interests, and that ideas are merely an ideological superstructure, uniquely determined by these interests.
It becomes imperative to scrutinize ideas in order to sift those which are really beneficial to the interests of the class concerned from those which are not. It becomes necessary to discuss conflicting ideas with the methods of logical reasoning. The makeshift by means of which Marx wanted to outlaw such dispassionate weighing of the pros and cons of definite ideas breaks down. The way toward an examination of the merits and demerits of socialism, which Marx wanted to prohibit as “unscientific,” is reopened.
Another important address of Marx was his paper of 1865, Value, Price and Profit. In this document Marx criticizes the traditional policies of the labor unions. They should abandon their “conservative motto, A fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work! and ought to inscribe on their banner the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wages system!“2 This is obviously a controversy about which kind of policy best serves the class interests of the workers.
Marx in this case deviates from his usual procedure of branding all his proletarian opponents traitors. He implicitly admits that there can prevail dissent even among honest and sincere champions of the class interests of the workers and that such differences must be settled by debating the issue. Perhaps on second thought he himself discovered that the way he had dealt with the problem involved was incompatible with all his dogmas, for he did not have printed this paper which he had read on June 26, 1865, in the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association. It was first published in 1898 by one of his daughters.
But the theme we are scrutinizing is not Marx’s failure to cling consistently to his own doctrine and his lapses into ways of thinking incompatible with it. We have to examine the tenability of the Marxian doctrine and must therefore turn to the peculiar connotation the term “interests” has in the context of this doctrine.
Every individual, and for that matter every group of individuals, aims in acting at the substitution of a state of affairs that suits him better for a state of affairs that he considers less satisfactory. Without any regard to the qualification of these two states of affairs from any other point of view, we may say in this sense that he pursues his own interests. But the question of what is more desirable and what is less is decided by the acting individual. It is the outcome of choosing among various possible solutions. It is a judgment of value. It is determined by the individual’s ideas about the effects these various states may have upon his own well-being. But it ultimately depends upon the value he attaches to these anticipated effects.
If we keep this in mind, it is not sensible to declare that ideas are a product of interests. Ideas tell a man what his interests are. At a later date, looking upon his past actions, the individual may form the opinion that he has erred and that another mode of acting would have served his own interests better. But this does not mean that at the critical instant in which he acted he did not act according to his interests. He acted according to what he, at that time, considered would serve his interests best.
If an unaffected observer looks upon another man’s action, he may think, “This fellow errs; what he does will not serve what he considers to be his interest; another way of acting would be more suitable for attaining the ends he aims at.” In this sense a historian can say today or a judicious contemporary could say in 1939, “In invading Poland, Hitler and the Nazis made a mistake; the invasion harmed what they considered to be their interests.”
Such criticism is sensible so long as it deals only with the means and not with the ultimate ends of an action. The choice of ultimate ends is a judgment of value solely dependent on the judging individual’s valuation. All that another man can say about it is, “I would have made a different choice.” If a Roman had said to a Christian doomed to be lacerated by wild beasts in the circus, “You will best serve your interests by bowing down and worshiping the statue of our divine Emperor,” the Christian would have answered, “My prime interest is to comply with the precepts of my creed.”
But Marxism, as a philosophy of history claiming to know the ends which men are bound to aim at, employs the term “interests” with a different connotation. The interests it refers to are not those chosen by men on the ground of judgments of value. They are the ends the material productive forces are aiming at. These forces aim at the establishment of socialism. They use the proletarians as a means for the realization of this end.
The superhuman material productive forces pursue their own interests, independently of the will of mortal men. The proletarian class is merely a tool in their hands. The actions of the class are not its own actions but those which the material productive forces perform in using the class as an instrument without a will of its own. The class interests to which Marx refers are in fact the interests of the material productive forces, which want to be freed from “the fetters upon their development.”
Interests of this kind, of course, do not depend upon the ideas of ordinary men. They are determined exclusively by the ideas of the man Marx, who generated both the phantom of the material productive forces and the anthropomorphic image of their interests.
In the world of reality, life, and human action there is no such thing as interests independent of ideas, preceding them temporally and logically. What a man considers his interest is the result of his ideas.
If there is any sense in the proposition that the interests of the proletarians would be best served by socialism, it is this: the ends which the individual proletarians are aiming at will be best achieved by socialism. Such a proposition requires proof. It is vain to substitute for such a proof the recourse to an arbitrarily contrived system of philosophy of history.
All this could never occur to Marx because he was engrossed by the idea that human interests are uniquely and entirely determined by the biological nature of the human body. Man, as he saw it, is exclusively interested in the procurement of the largest quantity of tangible goods. There is no qualitative, only a quantitative, problem in the supply of goods and services. Wants do not depend on ideas but solely on physiological conditions. Blinded by this preconception, Marx ignored the fact that one of the problems of production is to decide what kind of goods are to be produced.
With animals and with primitive men on the verge of starvation, it is certainly true that nothing counts but the quantity of edible things they can secure. There is no need to point out that conditions are entirely different for men, even for those in the earliest stages of civilization. Civilized man is faced with the problem of choosing among the satisfactions of various needs and among various modes of satisfying the same need. His interests are diversified and are determined by the ideas that influence his choosing. One does not serve the interests of a man who wants a new coat by giving him a pair of shoes or those of a man who wants to hear a Beethoven symphony by giving him admission to a boxing match. It is ideas that are responsible for the fact that the interests of people are disparate.
Incidentally, it may be mentioned that this misconstruing of human wants and interests prevented Marx and other socialists from comprehending the distinction between freedom and slavery, between the condition of a man who himself decides how to spend his income and that of a man whom a paternal authority supplies with those things which, as the authority thinks, he needs. In the market economy the consumers choose and thereby determine the quantity and the quality of the goods produced. Under socialism the authority takes care of these matters. In the eyes of Marx and the Marxians there is no substantial difference between these two methods of want satisfaction; it is of no consequence who chooses, the “paltry” individual for himself or the authority for all its subjects. They fail to realize that the authority does not give its wards what they want to get but what, according to the opinion of the authority, they ought to get. If a man who wants to get the Bible gets the Koran instead, he is no longer free.
But even if, for the sake of argument, we were to admit that there is uncertainty neither concerning the kind of goods people are asking for nor concerning the most expedient technological methods of producing them, there remains the conflict between interests in the short run and those in the long run. Here again the decision depends on ideas. It is judgments of value that determine the amount of time preference attached to the value of present goods as against that of future goods. Should one consume or accumulate capital? And how far should capital depletion or accumulation go?
Instead of dealing with all these problems, Marx contented himself with the dogma that socialism will be an earthly paradise in which everybody will get all he needs. Of course, if one starts from this dogma, one can quietly declare that the interests of everybody, whatever they may be, will be best served under socialism. In the land of Cockaigne people will no longer need any ideas, will no longer have to resort to any judgments of value, will no longer think and act. They will only open their mouths to let the roast pigeons fly in.
In the world of reality, the conditions of which are the only object of the scientific search for truth, ideas determine what people consider to be their interests. There is no such thing as interests that could be independent of ideas. It is ideas that determine what people consider as their interests. Free men do not act in accordance with their interests. They act in accordance with what they believe furthers their interests.
Watching Democrat-aligned radicals raze our cities over the past three months has felt like a thousand mini-Pearl Harbors — only the enemy is within and the damage is in our backyards. While beleaguered Democrats dig their own graves as they prop up the riots, the ordeal has been exhausting, dispiriting, and frustrating for the rest of us.
Evidence of an alliance between Democrats and BLM couldn’t be more glaring. Pernicious riots have persisted, unchallenged, in Democrat strongholds with the imprimatur of untold Democrat mayors, city councils, and governors. The Democrat media delivers the news with an Orwellian blackout of the word “riot” as our cities immolate before our very eyes. The “it’s all Trump’s fault” blame game is relentlessly hawked by Democrats from Biden, Pelosi, and her minions in Congress, to state and local authorities. Democrat sympathizers in sports, entertainment, and corporate America kneel and capitulate to BLM demands with alarming ease, accede to cancellations, and willingly attend and promote mandatory re-education programs on white privilege. Most glaring is the DNC convention love fest with BLM and the shameless promotion of BLM at the DNC website.
That the violence would endure and balloon as it has, should come as no surprise. BLM never hid their incendiary Marxist agenda targeting the police, our political system, free markets, and the family — all of which are products of white supremacy and privilege. After a month of rioting, BLM leader Hank Newsome’s threat to “burn it all down” if BLM demands are not met, is nothing compared to his closing exhortation in that June 25, 2020 interview with Martha Macallum: “I just want black liberation and black sovereignty by any means necessary.” Two months later his dreams are being realized with whites and “whiteness” in the cross-hairs.
Imperious media, academic, Hollywood, and Beltway wokesters torment the rest of America with accusations of a type of racism that permeates everything we say, do, and are. Denying its existence is further evidence of it. Everything white people have created is saturated with institutional and systemic racism that can only be eradicated by public renunciation of one’s white privilege and an admission it has spawned nothing but evil.
Thus are whites admonished to give up their jobs (see here, and here) and “transfer [their] power to black people” (as white husband of Serena Williams and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian did when he resigned from the Reddit Board, as have other corporate luminaries). They will no longer voice black characters and are advised to relinquish their homes to blacks. White restaurant patrons must allow black demonstrators to drink their beer. White citizens exercising their right to self-defense face criminal indictments, as happened to the McCloskeys in St. Louis and Kyle Rittenhouse in Kenosha. They must kneel in solidarity with BLM even if that goes against their sense of patriotism, as happened with Drew Brees. They must attend mandatory, segregated training to “undo whiteness.” (Can you imagine if homosexuals were forced to attend “undoing homosexuality” training?) And, white Sacramento Kings announcer Grant Napear found out stating “all lives matter” was grounds for dismissal from his job of 32 years.
These punishments for past and present invisible sins are a form of reparations — a variation of wealth and property transfer. If traditional forms of redistribution like welfare, affirmative action, and public housing haven’t worked, why not appropriate the wealth and property of others by force? Got Marx, anyone?
As in the Salem Witch Trials, where those accused of witchcraft were convicted whether they survived or drowned from a dunk in the water, White Americans stand convicted of racism whether they cop to it or not, whether the evidence supports it or not. No trial. No due process. The fix is in with Soviet-style justice.
One thing we’ve gained after three months is greater insight into the psychology of this mob. What started out as a legitimate concern about black deaths at the hands of America’s law enforcement, quickly morphed into a collective temper tantrum by a motley and very dangerous collection of disaffected whites, blacks, and LGBTQ+ fueled by anger about a panoply of societal grievances. Many are criminals, drug addicts, and mentally ill; most have copious amounts of rage they direct at whites, parents, people in authority, successful individuals, and society at large.
They are unwilling to engage in peaceful resolution. Their self-righteous indignation is reinforced by CNN hosts and Democrat politicians telling them they represent the best of America. Once invisible, they now feel invincible. Truth is, having grown up on a diet of “you didn’t build that,” they have no stake in what has been created over time — so they tear down statues, deface landmarks, burn buildings, loot property, and cavalierly take lives. As destroyers, not creators, they have no clue how to build back, let alone build back better. Their guiding principle is Obama’s shame at being an American.
What makes us squirm is being forced to relinquish our jobs and property on the basis of our skin color — to others based on the color of their skin, as if this somehow evens the score: We were once oppressed, now you must be. We were once slaves, now you must be. We didn’t have opportunities, now you must suffer. You were once our masters, now we are yours. Welcome to the cancellation plantation.
This is not about justice, but vengeance. It’s a coup and we are angry. So angry that our instinct is to fight back harder than we’ve been hit. We are frustrated. So frustrated that we aren’t sure if we should fight back or continue to let this play out even if it destroys our cities.
Many want to take action; many want the feds to intervene. But that is exactly what these Marxist ruffians want. Recognizing there will be times we are forced to defend ourselves, we must decide as people who love this country and believe in the perfectibility of our imperfect union, is it worth losing another Kyle Rittenhouse or Aaron Danielson to subversives, who taunt us in the hopes we respond, so they can further escalate the pandemonium? Or, do we outplay them and direct our energies to giving Donald Trump four more years?
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THE ARTFUL DILETTANTE 