House of Eratosthenes

You can read my comment on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, but some among us have made a point of not creating an account there and presumably cannot do so. Now here’s the problem: Defining communism, communists, socialism and socialists has, in itself, become a tactic used by the communists to make inroads into our country, its culture, and its political process. Here and there you may have seen those enthusiastically-leftward-leaning making a point of questioning their antagonists “Do you even know what Communism is?” and you’ll notice they do not supply any specifics when they do so, nor do they undertake to define how some meaningful misunderstanding might have occurred in the definition of communism.

These words are special in the sense that, they become less useful when they are defined with greater precision:

“Communism” is one of the few words whose definition makes more sense as you loosen it up, make it less specific.

The ultimate precise definition makes no sense at all: Life in a commune, in which property ownership only applies to the community as a whole, individual ownership has been entirely eliminated, and the community is classless. “Communist” would be someone living in, not desiring to build, such a commune. This definition doesn’t even intersect with reality because it has never been successfully put into practice. If the definition is this narrow, then it must forever remain a dream and nothing else. As a practical matter it doesn’t define anything because it doesn’t include anything.

Think how this would work: The assets, revenue-generating and otherwise, would be placed in a common store, and the accumulation of assets along with the associated revenue streams would be parceled out equitably, according to community share or according to need. Someone needs to figure out what that is. We-ell…no matter how you cut that up, that’s power. Not everybody in the community can wield that kind of power. Some sort of officer has to be elected to make these tough decisions. So for the society to be class-less, that office would have to be rotated throughout all the competent community members. Or, you could have some kind of a robot do it. An artificial intelligence to administer the day-to-day living of this community for hundreds or thousands of years…until Captain Kirk beams down to use some Kirk/Spock logic to blow it up or something.

But, no, it hasn’t happened. The communist pattern has been to “elect” some super-duper-special-macho demigod guy to pick the winners and losers. Dictator for life. He can’t make any mistakes because if he ever makes a mistake, it stops being a mistake on the spot. Napoleon. Pol Pot. Mao Tse-Tung. Kimg Jong-Il. Castro. Lenin. Stalin. Pharoah Ramses II. “Class-less” my ass.

Continuing…

The BROADEST definition makes the most sense: Agitation for political reform, cloaking its destructive energies in the disguise of creative efforts, using inter-class resentment and a phony desire for “equality” to make said disguise more effective. A “communist” would be a revolutionary-minded zealot acting on destructive impulses and recruiting outsiders to his agenda by means of the general human emotions of envy, jealousy and resentment.

A communist is distinguished from other political advocates in the sense that when individuals achieve material success, he sees something wrong with it and nurses a destructive desire to “fix” the problem.

So: Communism. Noun. A protocol of political reform — not a system of government — in which the fuel of interclass resentment is used to power an engine of confusion between creative efforts and destructive efforts. Communistic political agendas have it in common that they are deeply invested in rubbing (economically) jealous feelings raw, to confuse the populace into thinking the reformers are in the process of building something when the reformers are really in the process of tearing something down.

They are also to be distinguished from other flavors of political reform, in the sense that they are constantly making an issue out of “equality.” If you come up with a solution that helps a stranger to whom you were not indebted in any way, and in so doing achieve a material profit through a process of trade, the communist sees that as an unsolved problem. There may follow a bunch of empty rhetoric about “I want to make sure the people standing in line behind you have a fair shot,” but that is nothing more than a deception. The material profitability is the real problem.

And so I would call out these common, vital elements:

1. It seeks to destroy. Its political agenda is one of destruction.
2. It seeks to confuse, primarily to present its destructive efforts as creative ones.
3. It does not seek to confuse these destructive energies with creative ones by means of being clever; it seeks to achieve this confusion by means of aggravating natural human jealousies.
4. It defines economic classes according to its own convenience. Its message to the classes is “I am here to represent you, and open a can-of-whoop, bring a beatdown upon those who are one class above you.”
5. In pushing for this, it creates a natural incentive for itself to broaden the population of the lower economic classes, and narrow the population of the higher, more successful ones. Communism constantly makes itself into the enemy of economic success, since it is most durably maintained as a political arrangement when there are lots of poor people and not very many rich people.
6. Its leaders, by their existence, confound this stated objective of achieving a “classless” society, since the leaders occupy a class unto themselves. They monopolize power. They deny their human flaws and failings, and the system of government they establish and maintain similarly denies their human flaws and failings. These dictators cannot make a mistake, ever, since should they ever make one, the mistake will cease to be a mistake on the spot.
7. This new system of government, by insisting on “equality,” insists on failure. As I’ve made the point earlier: What is the big challenge in a potato-sack race, the challenge is that you cannot move your feet too far apart, right? That is the way it is with a capitalist economy; when it is not permitted that people and their prospects can drift too far from the median, the incentive disappears and things don’t go. A dogmatic insistence on equality in all things, stops things from running. When heat and pressure cannot deviate from some established norm, a car’s engine cannot run. When voltage cannot be anomalous, an electric motor cannot run, a light cannot go on, and things don’t work.

Actually, “communism” has been tried a lot, back before Marx — Fourierites, Owenites, Saint-Simonians, etc. There were a whole slew of movements in the wake of the French Revolution that tried to “manage” society “scientifically.” But they all failed, because a) they tended to be into lots of other stuff, like free love (see the Oneida Community, Brook Farm) that didn’t fly in the 1820s and b) because the very idea of “scientifically managing” a whole society is effin’ retarded. But to their great, ummm…. credit? they did try to figure out a way to pool resources and distribute “shares” according to who did what work.

It was as farcical as you’d expect, but at least they tried. Unlike our current bunch of socialists, who want you to live like a communard while they live it up like the bourgeoisie, lecturing you all the while on your greed, ignorance, and materialism.
- Severian | 10/24/2012 @ 06:08
[…] Minority-Hiring Arguments The Queen Consort’s Cause Live-Blogging the Last Debate of 2012 Let’s Define Communism, Once and For All “I Don’t Honor Race, I Honor Character!” “Specifically” Who, Exactly, […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 10/31/2012 @ 07:39
[…] tactic to dissuade the observation from being made, or from gaining any more traction. Well, we here do know what it means, have thought about it, and it applies. That’s a case of something simple being gussied up as something complicated, possessing […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 11/07/2012 @ 11:48
[…] in distorting the definitions. Also, as I pointed out back at my own place awhile ago — we can’t rely on the textbook definitions of “communism” and “socialism” because they simply don’t […]
- Latest Wikipedia Talk Page Mess: Socialism | Rotten Chestnuts | 12/01/2012 @ 08:51
[…] is a road to Communism; which, if we are to define it in a way that is truly meaningful to us and accurately reflects […]
- House of Eratosthenes | 07/21/2013 @ 13:54
[…] is a road to Communism; which, if we are to define it in a way that is truly meaningful to us and accurately reflects […]
- Memo For File CLXXXII | Rotten Chestnuts | 07/21/2013 @ 14:23

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Recent

Items of Interest

Monthly Archives

What They Say

Links

Let’s Define Communism, Once and For AllMonday, October 22nd, 2012

Let’s Define Communism, Once and For All
Monday, October 22nd, 2012