(反共產) On the Definition of Communism (Anti-Communist Perspective)

I was asked today by several people some
of them sincerely and some of them in sincerely to discuss the definition of communism on this channel in the past I've discussed the definition of socialism which is in many ways more interesting to me I think a more new Austin challenging area of discussion and especially in how it applies to politics today I've also discussed the meaning of being left wing being right wing left and right as broad cultural categories as political concepts that seems so malleable and have different meanings in different cultures and different periods of history but today we're talking about communism and we're going to approach this in the way I would approach it if I were a university professor putting together a course putting together a set of readings for the students to do many people would presume to begin a discussion of communism at the end by talking about dictatorships that killed tens of millions of people dictatorships like Joseph Stalin Russia and Mao Zedong in China by discussing the great disasters that have come to define the significance of communism in the public imagination I think it's actually really important to begin a discussion of the meaning of communism the definition and how it changed over time by looking at the period before Karl Marx I would assign as the first reading in a course of this type Thomas More's utopia utopia by Thomas More it's impossible to exaggerate how influential this book was historically and yet on the other hand it's impossible to exaggerate how unknown and forgotten it is now today when people read this book it's very difficult for them to even at random what it was that was so inspiring or so important about it and that is in some ways a reflection of just how influential it's been it's become so influential that its influence has become pervasive to the point of being invisible it's also very strange because Thomas More's utopia is ultimately a somewhat silly book it's written with a very strange uniquely British sense of humor which is a distinctively British sense of humor does anyone really think that Thomas Moore is seriously proposing that in the future man concert have a utopia where people make toilets out of solid gold where their chamber pots are gold so that they come to regard gold as something worthless no probably not literally this is again a sort of strange dry sense of humor but it is part of the process of him putting forward its point Thomas More can be very directly contrasted to Bernard Mandeville in the fable of the bees Bernard Mandeville is definitely one of the most important thinkers and philosophers in the history of political economy the development of economics as a science and even a sense the the ethics of capitalism but if Bernard Mandeville is the first bold step off in one direction with his thesis that public virtues are private vices then Thomas More's utopia is a step in the opposite direction Thomas More gave people the thrilling idea that what they ought to accomplish in future is a society with no money at all with the abolition of money itself and it's very significant to note that to some extent in the original text Thomas More is joking when the text was for example translated into Japanese and Chinese any trace of that dry British sense of humor was gone now what was Thomas More joking about in a sense he was joking about the way in which ancient Greek and Roman ideas were being imported to England France Germany Western Europe in his time in there was being imported or exported across many centuries and also across geographical and cultural barriers there's no doubt that of course dealing with communism in a thoroughgoing way could also look for components of the definition of communism in ancient Greek writing if I had to pick just two sources I would probably pick Aristotle and the comedian Aristophanes just some short passages from Aristophanes Aristophanes provides illustrations of the extent to which in ancient Athens people were real interested in entertaining ideas about creating a whole new society of radically different principles radically restructuring the nature of the family the nature of property of course one of the simplest forms of radical redistribution of wealth was simply for the government to take away all the land from the rich people and give it to all the poor people this happened again and again in ancient Greece and note that I'm not saying Athens but in the greater Greek area that's observed and commented on by people like Aristotle the idea of the government taking away private property and redistributing it was a shall we say a commonplace feature of revolutions in ancient Greece and continue to be discussed and reflected upon at least in ancient Rome the role of the state the notion of private property the idea that the state had the role of master educator in forming and reforming human nature these ideas are powerfully found in ancient Greek sources and indeed they became very dangerous in 19th and 20th century communism so we could look for some elements of that in Aristotle some evidence in Aristophanes and then I think ultimately it has to deal with some of the historical and pseudo historical sources on Sparta in early communism it's actually remarkable how often people observing what was going on for example in the Soviet Union in the 1920s referred to it as the new Sparta and made both joking and serious comparisons to Sparta the extent to which Sparta and lies told about Sparta because it's normally not it's not the real historical facts but the mythology surrounding Sparta inspired communists and fascists alike all kinds of radical and extreme political movements in history of Europe is unbelievable but one of the legends about Sparta and this is really drawing the line from Thomas Moore to communism in a powerful way one of the most important legends about Sparta was the idea that people there had no money that they had no gold that it was shameful for them to buy and sell or property of any kind that it was a culture utterly set against Commerce and instead fixated on a very different notion of true virtue and in some ways of course the philosophy of Plato is a response to that and a commentary on that now anyone who gives careful and balanced consideration will realize that this this has about as much relation to real life as Sesame Street resembles an actual street you know city but in a case the historically real Sparta inspired these legends and these legends in their turn inspired a range of utopian thinkers to some extent Thomas More but much more those who came in the centuries that followed after Thomas More's utopia now I'm not gonna say a lot further here about communists before Karl Marx it's important to note though that Karl Marx himself who was put it this way he was more famous and influential after he died than when he was alive Karl Marx himself referred to other people as communists there's a very telling quotation in which Karl Marx or refers to Louis Auguste Blanqui and the Blanc East's as the real communists in many ways the life of Karl Marx is when communism ceases to have anything meaningful to do with communes which again this could be a whole separate long lecture about that many people ask me I can remember some of my ex-girlfriends saying why is it the Communists are so little interested in communes the use of the term Communists and communist and the use of these terms in various French Revolutions plural you have to remember in French the word commune doesn't really have the same meaning as it has in English and France is really another big forgotten source of inspiration for this tree of communism people today of course think of Russia China even places like Cuba but France was much much more important in the past than people now think it was for how communism as an ideology and political movement developed and for how Karl Marx's own thought Karl Marx and angles were basically obsessed with the details of the French Revolution and indeed a sense of just how committed they were to violence was that they examined that history and their conclusion was not the future of their hypothetical political movement the the political movement they were writing down on paper but not actually leading they committed their movement to being much more violent than the disasters of the French Revolution both french revolutions plural they've rejected ameliorative and conciliatory approach to political progress and change they looked at the violence and class warfare of the French Revolution and they looked at the ideas about class struggle that they found in Aristotle it really is aerosol that's the single most important inspiration for Karl Marx and is looking at the structure of class interest shaping society they looked at all that legacy of violence that look at those examples and they said no in the future things should be ought to be more violence still so talking about then the marxist period of communism answer said there's the pre Marxist period and there's the Marxist period we have the emergency air of several distinctive elements of communism that will continue up to this day from the first period from Thomas More's utopia forward we had the idea of abolishing money that this ideal which is an found in ancient Sparta at least mythologically found in Thomas More's utopia that would continue through to the present day it's not coal Marx's a special fascination but it does indeed continue through Karl Marx the idea of abolishing currency itself I would say is not it doesn't have the same emphasis in Karl Marx as other elements of communism but it marks one of his distinctive one of the distinctive elements of his approach that says support from other communists commune ARDS revolutionary new jovian thinkers is the emphasis on class struggle class warfare materialist dialectics the idea that his interpretation of history was a prediction of the future that was ineluctable and inevitable because of his analysis of quote unquote the material conditions of class struggle so on and so forth with Marx we have set in stone so to speak a formula for violence and the idea that social progress can only come about through struggle through class struggle through class war that it's only exclusively when the working class rises up and takes away the means of production from the the more elite classes is the bourgeois class the aristocrats and so on that that is absolutely the only way forward in history and there's no value whatsoever for example in the aristocrats becoming more kindly disposed towards the people or the bourgeoisie becoming a I don't know better at caring for the welfare of factory workers or law and regulations improving the conditions of failures no no that in Marxist view is false consciousness false consciousness is false in contrast what was fundamentally the view of class self-interest set down by Aristotle so in many ways Karl Marx took Aristotle's philosophy of how society works and turned it on its head turned it upside down now those of you are familiar with kind of mainstream Marxist dogmatism will know that the standard phrase said about the origin of Karl Marx's philosophy was that he took the philosophy of Hegel and turned it on its head um I think there's very little truth and facility to that and I'm in a position to say because I've actually read the philosophy of Hegel very few people laughs it's incredibly boring and that's very very little relation to you know in a meaningful sense the discussion we're having today the the meeting of Marxism so in moving forward from the pre Marxist period to the Marxist period quite a few distinctive features of communism are added to the list in Marxist period if you're doing a full course you know you could really make a checklist and work through them and it's worth noting to some extent Marx commits to any one of these but only to a limited extent so to give an example if you move all the way forward to Mao Zedong and China in the 1960s by that period of time it was obvious to everyone who was a communist that what communism necessarily entailed was the destruction of religion in the most literal sense persecuting Buddhist monks burning down Buddhist monasteries so on and so forth and now if you go back and look at Carl Marxism right at what he says about religion Co Marx does say that religion is the opiate of the masses but if you read that in context the opiate of the masses the soul for a soulless world it's not clear at all I mean it's not clear at all that what Karl Marx had in mind was what seems so obvious to everyone being the meaning of communism by the time Mao Zedong is in power so in that same way you can look at assumptions about well for example what does it mean to abolish the free market you have free market systems you have an T free market systems it's very clear that from Karl Marx's period forward communism is identified with being anti free market but what does that really entail does it mean that they want a command economy or not now think you can go through Marx's own work and you can you can compare what he says in different contexts most of what he has to say is negative I mean a very large part of what he has to say in task capital is just lamenting how from his perspective capitalism is awful and doomed there are many many many patches of Marx in which he seems to be saying that feudalism was better than capitalism even many passages where he's talking about the advantages of slavery where he seems to think slavery is better the capital's so he kind of is using any contrast or argument possible to make it seem as yes capitalism is is so terrible even by the way in his brief discussions of slavery in the United States murder was slavery of black African people in the United States those are really really weird but anyway call Marx didn't know much about most of the stuff you pass judgment on he didn't know much about history United States America nor India nor China he wrote on all these topics liberally in any case you can move forward looking at this as B like being like a velcro ball that's rolling across a carpet picking up more and more lint as it goes you already have a kernel of the idea starting in ancient Sparta to some extent ancient Athens coming through Thomas More's utopia Thomas More adds the crucial element of wanting to abolish money and blaming the existence of money itself Karl Marx is in a new stage where we have the accumulation of several new distinctive features of communism and that really separates communism at that point from the earlier frankly more idealistic less violent period of various schools of Communists and communist anyway and that more open-minded period when someone like Karl Marx himself could look at a totally different philosophy like louia Gus funky and say oh they they're legitimate commerce they're the real communist after Karl Marx the definition of communism becomes narrow from the perspective of communists themselves and they become intensely interested in persecuting and murdering one another internal violence within communism so that only people who meet their precise definition of what communism is frankly are allowed to live that's very similar to the history of many mainstream religions both because both Catholicism and Protestantism have a long history of that that they have a definition and anyone doesn't measure up to it is much more of a threat to the coherence of that religion than outside and openly opposed forces so going along the carpet then you get into a discussion of Lenin and how Marxist Leninist is different from Marxism obviously you have to deal with Stalin ISM obviously you have to deal with Mao Zedong but of course there were smaller I mean Yugoslavia has its own whole history of communist philosophy and communism in practice which can be very illuminating you can look at well obviously you know from my perspective places like Laos Cambodia Vietnam these are also interesting mirrors to hold up to how these different ideologies developed as they as they went along so you know what is communism how are you going to have you to define it well one of the crucial clarifications that have had to make again and again is that communism promises that the workers will take over the means of production but what it delivers in practice is that the state will take over the means of production it promises that the farmers will take back the land from the landlords that the poor will take back ownership of land from the aristocrats but what it delivers is that all land ownership is taken away and centralized by the state communism is indeed defined in historical reality by command economy and by centralization as opposed to decentralization to an astounding extent it's defined in practice by totalitarianism by the extension of government control over all else basically a form of military dictatorship that to a greater and greater extent dictates every element of human life and why is that well it is probably because as mentioned at a much earlier stage it was very clear what Karl Marx was against what he wanted to abolish he wanted to abolish the free market he wanted to abolish capital itself he wanted to abolish banking he wanted to abolish investments he wants to abolish these things the word abolish is very easy to throw around and then in practice what are you really going to replace it with one way or another again and again what we saw was simply the extension of the military over these things or of command economy state organs offices and bureaucracies that very fundamentally remove very fundamentally mimicked military organization and that also like the military ultimately rely on violence to force people to comply there's a very good book called the new class by mill evangelist so mill evangelist just felt DJ ILS mill evangelist lived through the formation of actually existing communism and you just la vía and he points out I think relatively concisely it's a short book that while the Communist promised you know a new type of freedom what they actually livered was a return to a type of feudalism it created a new type of aristocracy it was simply an aristocracy defined by your status within the Communist Party