IrishOutlaw : communism

Time to Bury The Dead

IrishOutlaw — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:04:00 GMT

Some people in the movement seem to want to hold on to the relics of the past as if their lives depend on it. I believe this is due to an inability to comprehensively come up with new approaches to age old problems. Of course, that is only a part of it. There is also the refusal to face the reality of the situation, as it is now and how it has been. In some places, the idea of a socialist revolution based on the precepts set forth by Marx may make sense, but most places don’t fit the bill. Marx was concerned with the struggle between to unique classes, the bourgeois and proletariat. I have heard bourgeois applied to so many different people and ideas that the word has no meaning any more. Anyone that points out the reality of the situation is bourgeois. It is pretty sad really. It is no longer a prerequisite that someone be intellectually honest. Honesty and intellectualism are shunned. And the revolution is a failure because of it. Socialism has brought about more authoritarian governments than the ones they attempted to replace. Marx already said that, “The traditions of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.” He was an advocate of looking forward as opposed to living in the past. It is time that revolution meant just that. Revolution.

Ancient Language and Modern Reality

It is important to consider history and the context within which Marx was writing before we attempt to apply those terms and words to our modern world. The situation today, though we can draw parallels, is not the world of the 1800’s.

Wealth in the 1800’s was measured by psychical property. The more psychical property, the wealthier someone was. Land ownership was restricted, by law, to the bourgeois class that Marx was talking about. They owned “the means of production” because the property and everything on it, regardless of who did the work to produce it, belonged to the land holders. These bourgeois claimed all sorts of rights and liberties with the people whose lives they controlled. And all of this was enforced by the legal system that was in place. There was no way to move from the lower class and it was reinforced by the law.

Today the socialists equate the poor with the proletariat. This is not an apt comparison. Yes, there are struggles to being poor. Getting by day to day can be a struggle and the prospect of home or land ownership seems like a pipe dream to some. But this condition is not necessarily imposed by law. There are definitely things that the government does to maintain this lower class, after all, one side needs the cheap labor and the other side needs someone to point to so they can say how far we need to go. But the days of the company or landlord being able to oppress them are long gone.

There is a monopoly on land and how it can be used and by whom. But that monopoly isn’t in the hands of the rich landlord anymore, instead it is in the hands of the government. They draw borders and institute programs that control the flow of people and goods and restrict ownership of land that is not being used. The federal government in the US is the largest single land holder. And I assure you, they are not about to let the productive class claim any right of appropriation on that land. It is in this way that the government controls the scarcity of resources and keeps the poor from using their labor and mixing it with the land to create a life for themselves.

Scarcity

The scarcity that existed in the time of Marx and Engel’s no longer exists in this day and age. Yes there is a “class gap” between the rich and the poor, but the ability to transverse that gap is no longer limited to a direct uprising and “theft” of the wealth. Today people change between these groups on a regular basis. The idea of redistributing wealth is nothing more than advocating theft. The reason a large Marxist movement has never taken hold in the United States, and never will, is because the conditions of scarcity of basic resources do not exist. We have only ONE class that controls the wealth, the government class. We don’t have a group of people starving and working for their mere sustenance, despite the claims of some. There are not people dieing of hunger in the streets, there are not great lords of the manor forcing people to work their factories just to get by. Some people like to paint this picture but it simply isn’t true. Again, there is an inability or a direct attack on honest discussion, based solely on the need to create a struggle that doesn’t exist. Without that struggle, the conditions Marx pointed out for the seeds of revolution do not exist.

So we are left with socialist movement within government institutions as the means of effecting the change from a statist society to a free society. What do they create instead though? A regime that is even more authoritarian than the previous one. Instead of creating a free society, they create a society were all “citizens” are condemned to equal slavery. The idea that the accumulation of power into the hands of these self-proclaimed defenders will result in more humane treatment has proven to be false time and again. Their actions do nothing to return the power of self determination to the people; instead their programs drive the wedge between the ruling class and the people deeper. They set the chains in stone, they make the whip seem to be made of velvet and they convince the people to give up freedom in the name of the “greater good”. There exists no greater good in society than freedom. Only one class benefits from this relationship, the ruling class. Far from the ruling class of Marx’s time this group uses their social programs to maintain the illusion of a compassionate hand. The illusion is so appealing that it is accepted by most without question.

Class Struggle

There is a class struggle in this country as I briefly touched on above. Far from being the bourgeois class spoken of by Marx, the current ruling class consists of the government itself. With a monopoly on the land, the law, the money and the use of force, they are able to create social and economic situations that seek to ensure that they maintain power. The goal, no matter how altruistic they try to make it appear, is to keep the hierarchical system in place, with them firmly on top.

So why do some people embrace this “collection of power”, even if it is into the hands of a local council or group? The very idea that a group or collective can adequately represent the individual is a fallacy. Only the individual can and will work in their best interest at all times. This may include appointing a representative for themselves, but only if the representative is willing and able to make their wishes known to the letter. That means for a society to exist each person must have their voice heard and be allowed to make their decisions based on their own internal truth.

Any system that doesn’t recognize the sovereignty of the individual is an enemy of freedom. Government, even on the local scale, is still government and by nature is the enemy of freedom. It is time that we refocus the class struggle from the economic angle and realize that the struggle exists not between the rich and the poor, but between the controllers of the markets and the labor. This was the actual message of Marx and one that seems to have been largely ignored or at least hijacked by self serving would be gods.

Capital

The favorite target of the old movement was capital. But we have to look at what capital and wealth were in that day and age. It is time to ask ourselves if the situations that Marx described at the time fit with our knowledge of what capital is today. Capitalism has become the enemy, even though the word is taken out of context and applied to an economic system that it doesn’t represent.

Every person is their own highest authority. No one has a moral right to place limitations on what they can achieve, how they can live or who they can associate with. The free person knows that their life has value. Knowing the value of that life, they are able to make any decisions necessary to sustain that life. Thinking and acting on those thoughts can not be interfered with by anyone else, unless those actions interfere with the freedom of another. Self ownership is one of the cornerstones of life. All other rights are derived from the idea of self ownership. The state can only infringe on that fundamental right, by proclaiming themselves the voice of the people. The only person that can speak for me is me. Anyone else that tries to do it is robbing me of self ownership. No government or group can come “close enough” to holding my best interest at heart. No one, not government or a group or an individual, can ask me to trade or act in any manner that causes me a loss of any sort. That is an underlying part of self ownership. By nature, man will always act in their own best interest; therefore transactions between people are always a net gain so long as people are allowed to enact those transactions of their own free will.

This is capital. Each person, their skills, their beliefs, their thoughts, their actions, the fruits of their labor, all those thing are included in capital. Simply stated, capitalism is a belief that an individual has total moral right to all those things.

Instead of embracing capitalism, it comes under attack. I have to assume it is from a misconception of what capitalism is. Just for the record, we don’t live in a capitalist system. We live in a system that business has set up, in collusion with government, in which exploitation MUST happen for the system to work. From the worker being exploited by the owner to everyone being exploited by the government, this system is evil to the core. This is not the free market.

In the free market, you are free to make voluntary exchanges for goods, commodities or services. These transactions are between two people. There is no outside force that can be applied to any part of the transaction. When the transaction occurs, both parties gain from it. The environment for a free market to work in can’t exist in conjunction with a government that is able to influence those transactions. Any criticism of capitalism that blames the system for the actions of the government is at least ill-informed, at most an outright fabrication.

158 Years of the Same Ol’ Song and Dance

The failure of the Marxist revolution has not stopped people from holding onto the ideas that he espoused. At the time they were revolutionary, today they are tired and empty rhetoric. Marx never intended for his work to become the bible of anyone. He wanted to provide a basic insight into revolutionary thought and action, which he succeeded well at doing. Unfortunately we see people have stagnated and can’t get past the ancient slogans and movements. There is no movement today. There is nothing but small groups holding on for dear life to ideas that many of them barely comprehend today. The only remnants of that school of thought making any movement today are unable to come up with a plan to get from here to there. They realize that the communist society they envision can not come about through socialist revolution, so they advocate and end to the state. But to what end? Only to replace it with a new state when the old one is gone. Though this is a broad generalization, it is easily seen within their ranks.

We have seen the rise of socialism in many facets and many countries around the world. Usually leading to a depressing, oppressive end. The nature of man is to work in his own self interest. We can not deny that, in fact we should embrace that. To ever see real change we have to take into account the nature of humankind focus our thoughts on achieving change with that nature in mind. As soon as power is concentrated in one central body it has the effect of growing exponentially until it is all inclusive. Without competition there is no motivation for those in power to work in a manner that will insure that their personal needs are met while at the same time working to be more attractive to the persons they wish to represent.

The inability of the socialist movement to get past the dictatorship phase is well known. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho, all have proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that total power concentrated in the state or councils ends up in the hands of the most vicious perpetrators on Earth. Even the socialist influence on other countries like, Great Britain, the United States and Germany have shown that the aim of true freedom can not be achieved in a collectivist society. Unless we turn away from the mistaken thought that a small group can represent the whole of society, we can make no progress towards securing our own liberty, much less the liberty of even the smallest minority group in society, the individual. The only system that can achieve that is the one were every individual is totally free to make all decisions regarding their “self ownership”. Their property must be respected by all. The fruits of their labor must be theirs to negotiate or trade with as they choose. We must realize that there is no greater societal good than the freedom of the individual to do as they please in all maters, provided they grant us the same courtesy.

Problems and Solutions to Distribution

The problem of distribution of wealth has been addressed many times. But the answers, for the most part, have been unsatisfactory. The main reason for this seems to lie with the means of distribution. Only one system has consistently proven itself a model of efficient distribution and like it or not that is capitalism. When the individual has total control over the worth of themselves and are free to trade with anyone they wish, on any terms they wish, they can exercise true freedom. All transactions must be between individuals or their representatives. There can be no outside influence that will always consider THEIR interest in a transaction that does not concern them. They will always influence those trades in their best interests, despite what is in the best interest of the other parties involved. It doesn’t matter if this is a large centralized government or a local council. If they are given the power to intervene in transactions, their nature will require them to look out for their own interests in the transaction over anyone else involved. Not to mention the fact that giving someone, even if it is a local council, the ability to intervene in private transactions is giving them the ability to exert force against non-compliance.

The successful model of distribution will see that the real value exists in the individuals and that their transactions will lead to the betterment of the society. Just as freedom comes from the ground up, so does economic growth.

Conclusion

Today, to see any real change, we need to change our language. What existed at one time no longer exists. Holding on to failed ideas and slogans that mean nothing will not change anything. The most that can accomplish is to keep everything “as is”. That is unacceptable to the person that yearns for freedom.

It is time to learn from the lessons and words of people like Marx and tailor them to fit our personal reality. Not the reality of 19^th century Europe, but today. It is time to live in the present and bury the dead. They are stinking up the place.

The No Name Group Project

The Damning Mentality of the American Right

IrishOutlaw — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 23:59:00 GMT

Give Peace a Chance

It is funny that a word like “Peace” automatically brands you a commie loving democrat to so many people. The idea of “perpetual war” and always having an enemy to fight is so engrained on the American Right that the idea of peace is a foreign concept. The real American Idol (at least to the right-wingers), Ronald Reagan, is the shining beacon of freedom. After all, he single handedly ended the Cold War, freed millions from communism, and stopped an imminent nuclear attack against the US. All while lowering taxes and keeping his hair perfect. Ok, I know this is a fairy tale and easily squashed and I will probably get around to doing that sooner or later, but the concept of the Cold War and the mentality behind it are what is important about the Reagan reign.

Today the perpetual war idea has us locked into battle with terrorists. Of course, there are other things we are doing battle with like drugs and poverty. Even though those two things are out of the scope of this article, they do play to the idea that we must be locked in a continual struggle for “the greater good”. As I have pointed out before and I am sure most people are already aware of, the idea of “the greater good” is nothing more than another form of subjugation, either by the masses on the minority or by the mini-tyrants of the state on us all. Invariably, the mini-tyrants will take any grain of acquiescence and use it to their advantage, taking the natural good will of mankind and using it as a bludgeon against the people.

Of course, as with all other things involving Reagan, this mentality can be traced further back.

Roots Bloody Roots

The roots of the eternal struggle, which is in essence the perpetual war idea, probably goes back further than Hegel, but the application of it as political theory can surely be traced to him. His theory was that reality is only a creation of the mind, that what you believe to be true is true, regardless of anything else. The second was that history could be explained as an eternal struggle between opposing spiritual forces. The struggle between opposing spiritual forces can still be seen today in modern politics, especially in the United States. We have all been involved in the fight, either against our will or with our approval, against both Godless Communists and Muslim Terrorists. They hate us for our freedoms may be the rally cry, but the slogans themselves denote the struggle as religious in nature. A belief that America is founded as a beacon of Gods Divine Will, and that will being Christian in nature, both lend credence that any disagreement with the religious dogma of Christianity is a direct attack on the US. Of course, no one just comes out and says this, which would be crazy and would open up the person that says it to outright scorn. There are those that would love nothing more than to see the US become a Christian Fundamentalist country with the implicit separation of church and state done away with, but even those people temper their beliefs in the politically correct speech of the day. There are those too who do not notice the relation between religious belief and political policy. Either out of total ignorance or just a desire to distance them selves from the theological discussion, they choose instead the convenient blinders of that will keep them out of the larger fray.

These Hegelian theories were picked up and refined by another philosophical giant, Karl Marx. Marx took the eternal struggle theory and applied it to class distinctions. His idea was that people make determinations strictly based on economic need and that the struggle applied to the person’s relationship to their economic status in society. Instead of reforming the original Hegelian ideas though, which may have been partially what Marx was attempting; it added another level to the original theory. The struggle not only included the spiritual aspect of being, but it also included their very economic survival, a threat to their very way of life.

Unintended Groundwork

The concept of the greater good and the eternal struggle already existed before the Neo-Cons invaded the right. Eisenhower could rightly be credited with expanding the notion to include the military as the tool of enforcing the greater good on a worldwide scale. Of course, his use of the military was aimed at stopping the spread of another Hegelian offshoot, communism. On the one hand Eisenhower sought to “defend” the country against the threat of “communism”, while at the same time he not only kept the New Deal socialism instituted by Roosevelt, but he expanded the programs and made a cabinet position to oversee them. He built the Interstate Hiway System to make sure that the military could get to any part of the country, and this in a sense lent an air of military interventionist policy into the American consciousness. The idea that there was an enemy, right at our doorstep, was easy to swallow coming out of World War II and the attack on Hawaii by the Japanese. The greater good became the defense, at all cost, of the United States from communism. He stated that the US was, “prepared to use armed force... [to counter] aggression from any country controlled by international communism.” Combine that with our Imperial allies losing control in their colonial areas and the real threat of communism taking hold, especially in the Middle East, where the Imperialists were losing ground to the Arab Nationalists, and gaining support from the communists, and we see a pattern of “the greater good” philosophy taking on a distinctly military personality in the US.

Although Eisenhower added to the military aspect of the idea, the eternal struggle had not yet taken on the perpetual war personality. Eisenhower’s actions were hard to argue against at the time, although people like Louis Bromfield, Murray Rothbard, Garet Garret and Ernest Weir were doing just that. Of course, they were accused of being communists and anarchists and denounced by many on the right.

The insidious use of “might makes right” and perpetual war came after Eisenhower left office. If Eisenhower introduced the idea of military necessity to the American mainstream, the Neo-Con movement found a way to use that idea to their advantage.

Neo-Con Infiltration

The Neo-Con movement is an interesting, yet oft ignored, facet of American politics. Eisenhower’s continuation of New Deal programs, combined with other factors, such as the waning of communist power and internal fighting among the various communist factions, proved fertile ground for a political movement in the US.

Disillusioned with the failure of communism taking hold of power, by 1965 the Trotskyites had “renounced” communism and were looking for a place to land. At first glance it would seem like the Republican Party would be the last place for them to take hold, but they played a tune that resonated with the conservatives in the party, conservatives already resigned to the idea of the New Deal. The message was that the might of the US military could be used to spread the American ideal of right and wrong around the world. Sold as defending our country from the spreading threat of (fill in the blank), conservatives fell neatly in line.

The movement gained ground with Reagan. In Reagan they found a sympathetic ear to military intervention and growth. Reagan himself had come from the left (having been called outright a communist by the Republican Party of California) and his holding onto the idea of “the greater good” idea was parallel to the Neo-Cons. They found in Reagan a “soul-mate” and they helped perpetuate the idea that Reagan single handedly used the mighty power of the US to overthrow the Soviet Union. The idea that the US had a noble calling to rid the world of countries that disagreed with the “moral” foundations of the US has proven to be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of the Republican Party. Irving Kristol, often referred to as “The Godfather” of the Neo-Con movement, in “The Weekly Standard” of August 25, 2003, had this to say…

“Viewed in this way, one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican Party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy. That this new conservative politics is distinctly American is beyond doubt. There is nothing like neoconservatism in Europe, and most European conservatives are highly skeptical of its legitimacy. The fact that conservatism in the United States is so much healthier than in Europe, so much more politically effective, surely has something to do with the existence of neoconservatism. But Europeans, who think it absurd to look to the United States for lessons in political innovation, resolutely refuse to consider this possibility.

Neoconservatism is the first variant of American conservatism in the past century that is in the “American grain.” It is hopeful, not lugubrious; forward-looking, not nostalgic; and its general tone is cheerful, not grim or dyspeptic. Its 20^th-century heroes tend to be TR, FDR, and Ronald Reagan. Such Republican and conservative worthies as Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Dwight Eisenhower, and Barry Goldwater are politely overlooked. Of course, those worthies are in no way overlooked by a large, probably the largest, segment of the Republican party, with the result that most Republican politicians know nothing and could not care less about neoconservatism. Nevertheless, they cannot be blind to the fact that neoconservative policies, reaching out beyond the traditional political and financial base, have helped make the very idea of political conservatism more acceptable to a majority of American voters. Nor has it passed official notice that it is the neoconservative public policies, not the traditional Republican ones, that result in popular Republican presidencies.”

The idea behind the Neo-Con movement is still the same Hegelian theory of a battle between good and evil. It has been ingrained in the American political system as “compassionate conservativism” and everyone that wishes to be considered a conservative in the current climate must accept the same philosophy that Marx accepted, that there is a material struggle against evil morals that must be won at all cost. Spending or military action are nothing in the face of the overall struggle and nothing is out of bounds to achieve the goals.

Perpetual War

So the struggle goes on against this scary threat that is right at our doorstep. The Cold War is over, communism is all but dead, but that doesn’t mean we are out of enemies who “hate us for our freedom”. Every country that doesn’t live how the United States say they should, who doesn’t accept our moral creed (largely based on a spiritual concept not shared by others), will face the might of the US. Even if everyone loved the US, it would be necessary to find an enemy somewhere. Possibly even to create a boogeyman to go after.

Of course, with the US still involved in the struggles of the old Imperial powers, empires that are for all intents and purposes are long dead, we will have no shortage of enemies. The words of Ernest T. Weir in "Leaving Emotions Out of Our Foreign Policy," that he wrote back in the 1954 still ring true…

“(W)e have to accept the fact that it is not the mission of the United States to go charging about the world to free it from bad nations and bad systems of government. We must reconcile ourselves to the fact that there will always be bad nations and bad systems and that our task is to contrive some basis other than warfare on which we can live in the world.”

The sane voices have been calling for it forever, but the crazies are in charge. The general “for the greater good” cry reigns supreme. Not only has the right learned this lesson, they have met the left and surpassed them.

The people that speak out against the ideas of an eternal struggle between good and evil, against the idea of perpetual war, of overthrowing dictators and chasing “bogeymen” through the hills of foreign countries, will still be called communists and anarchists and denounced by many on the right. But don’t feel too bad, you are in good company.

The No Name Group Project