ARON
Many are under the illusion that Communists have not been truly communist, meaning that they had deviated from Marx's ideas which were humanitarian.
They believe that Communism is a political philosophy that has behind it some nebulous 'equality' and its principles are basically altruist and brought much change.
It is only in their practice they aver, somehow that all the horrors that are now recorded in history and the disconcerting deeds that come to light as done by communists, in the Soviet Union, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Cacaceusceu’s Romania, North Korea, and the list runs inexhaustibly through Tibet, Nepal, Maoist held Indian Countryside...as in Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and now in the increasing murders of Hindu activists in Kerela.
Marxism is a reactionary product of its time, and comes as stylish development of European Socialism, and shares quite unabashedly concepts that are now discredited in today’s Europe and world polity, - anti-Semitism, Class extermination, and extremist violence.
“Even its adversaries often imagine it began with nothing but high ideals”-points out George Watson- in his ‘Lost literature of socialism’- “and in an era of socialist obituaries like Noel Annan's Our Age (1990) and the revelations of oppression now emerging from the liberation of Eastern Europe, one seldom hears its first intentions seriously questioned.
The subtext reads ‘We meant well’.”
He further asks-“I want to ask here why, in defiance of the evidence, the name of socialism still sounds benevolent, why its Tory and reactionary traditions, explicit as they once were,
have been so soundly forgotten, and why there are still parties that preserve the name when
the thing itself is widely rejected even by its disciples”.
“One reason is that the scriptures of socialism are little read even by specialists, and
the evasion has had its costs. People simply do not know what, in its heyday, the idea was
about. That heyday, which stretched for a century or so from the 1840s, gave rise to a
mountain of prose - Marx and Engels, Ruskin and Morris, Wells and Shaw, Lenin, Stalin
and Mao - which is now seen, not without reason, as boring if not actively embarrassing,
and lies largely unregarded; any account of socialist racialism, for example, produces blank
incredulity or indignation. It seems fair to suspect that socialists do not dare to read the
writings of the pioneers; and their opponents, more surprisingly, do not read them either.
'I had no idea Marx went as far as that,' Isaiah Berlin once remarked when I produced
evidence for his genocidal ideas, though his excellent little book Karl Marx (1939), critical
as it was of its subject, had by then passed through several editions. Socialism had led a
charmed life as a word because hardly anyone studies what it once said”.
The notion that it stood for ‘equality’ is another such myth- it stood for Tory values than egalitarianism.
Watson continues-
Whether medieval, neolithic or palaeolithic, socialism was from its origins onwards
a hierarchical doctrine, and it venerated aristocracy and leadership. `My continual aim,'
Ruskin wrote in Unto This Last,-
has been to show the eternal superiority of some men over others,
sometimes even of one man to all others; and to show the
advisability of appointing such person or persons to guide, to lead,
or on occasion even to compel and subdue, their inferiors according
to their own better knowledge and wiser will” (para 54).
And explains another feature we see in them- ‘Those who have wondered why, in practice, socialists can be so snobbish may have their answer here. They were not snobs in spite of being socialist, in all likelihood, but socialists because they were snobs’.
The principle of socialist aristocracy was candidly announced by Lenin fifteen
years before he seized power, and in What is to Be Done? (1902), a pamphlet written in
exile, he put a blunt case for the rule of an intellectual élite.
Since Marxist revolution is based on theory, and only intellectuals can understand theory, only an intellectual élite can lead the revolution: 'the educated representatives of the propertied class, the intelligentsia' (II.A). Marx and Engels, after all, as he justly remarks, were bourgeois intellectuals. So, of course, was Lenin; and so, for the most part, were the great Marxist dictators of Europe and Asia after him, like Mao Tse-Tung. Socialism necessarily means government by a privileged class, as Lenin saw, since only those of privileged education are capable of planning and governing.
Hence the aristocratic superiority of the Bolsheviks, who reminded Bertrand
Russell, when he visited Lenin soon after the October Revolution, of the British publicschool
élite that then governed India.
The Communist political bureaucracy uses, enjoys and disposes of
nationalized property (pp. 40, 44), wrote Milovan Djilas the Yugaslov dissident.
The Communist political bureaucracy uses, enjoys and disposes of
nationalized property (pp. 40, 44),
so that it turns into a Bourbon-style system of high-living magnates like Tito who pay no
taxes and live in palaces, their daily existence eased by chauffeured cars, opera boxes and
yachts, not to mention servants and medical care paid for out of the public purse. Socialism
readily becomes a system ripe for exploitation by friends and relatives. The example of
Sanjay Gandhi, appointed by his mother as head of a state car firm and destined, had he
lived, to succeed her as prime minister of India, shows that even in elective systems public
ownership and hereditary privilege go hand in hand.
In a tomb in Red Square in Moscow Lenin lay, his body fluids replaced at his death in 1924 by a chemical compound that leaves in doubt whether the object of veneration is Lenin or not, a problem familiar in style to historians of the medieval church.3 Stalin joined him for eight years after 1953, an embalmed corpse. When Mao died in 1976 the example was felt to be challenging, and more than ten thousand people, China Youth News revealed in December 1992, were involved in designing the sarcophagus, the Communist Party holding a national meeting of coffin-makers where six coffins were judged to be fit for the Great Helmsman of the Chinese people, five of them being kept as spares. The glow on his face, as he lies in a
crystal sarcophagus in the Mao museum in Peking, is now know to have been achieved by
running light-conducting fibers into the sarcophagus, so that the light is reflected on his
features, carefully arranged to disguise his wrinkles. This leaves all other instances of
saint-worship since the early Christians looking jejune and inadequate.
Watson had chosen to quote Alfred Sudre though Bastiat was even more illuming, and prophetic on the destructive nature of Socialism.
Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) can be without exaggeration said to be the Visionary voice of Free market that alone he held can grant political freedom, and prosperity, a man far ahead of his times, when populist parroting of socialist dogmas were held to be somehow a mark of the intellectual.
Founder of the weekly le lebre exchange , and intellectual and parliamentarian of the first order, advocating Free Market economy, and at the very moment France was to be flooded by the surging Socialist Wave.
First, two or more men can plan to work and live in common. As long as they do not try to disturb the security or restrict the liberty or encroach upon the property of others, directly or indirectly, then, if they do any harm at all, they do it only to themselves. The tendency of such men will always be to go into distant uninhabited places to make their dream come true. Whoever has reflected on these matters knows that these poor fellows will die of hardship, the victims of their illusions.
but society has nothing to fear from their fantasies.
Another form of communism, and certainly the most brutal, consists in putting all existing property into one heap and parceling it out ex aequo. This is plunder erected into a universal rule of law. It involves the destruction not only of property, but also of labor and of the very motive that impels a man to work. This kind of communism is so violent, so absurd, and so monstrous that I cannot really believe it to be dangerous.
No, communism is not dangerous when it appears in its most naive form, that of pure and simple plunder. It is not dangerous, because it inspires horror.
I hasten to add that if protectionism can be and should be compared to communism, it is not to this form of communism that I have just described.
7.46
But communism assumes a third form.
To make the state intervene, to give it the task of stabilizing profits and equalizing wealth by taking from some, without their consent, in order to give to others, without receiving anything in return on their part, to make the state responsible for achieving equality by means of plunder—this indeed is communism.
Bastiat was not only sure but contemptuous, that any large scale attempt to erect a socialist society would be undone by its own horrifying failures that cannot endure.
Which ultimately was proved right by history, and Bastiat is saying this confidently in 1840.
The procedures employed by the state to attain this end do not matter, any more than the fancy names with which the idea is tricked out. Whether the state seeks to realize it by direct or by indirect means, by restrictive measures or by taxes, by tariffs or by the right to employment; whether it goes under the name of equality, solidarity, or fraternity, in no way changes the nature of things. The plunder of property is nonetheless plunder because it is accomplished in a regular, orderly, systematic way, through the action of the law.
In the Parliament where there was a clamor for socialist bosh his voice was drowned by the din, but when we read them a century and a half later, it thunders out loud and clear, tall and above the racket as the very voice of Truth that they were denying and how right he was and the history that proved- those who refused to heed chasing their utopias and its children perish the thought with the Soviet Union and red China.
But what do you want? Speak frankly.
You do not want exchange to be free!
Then you want it not to be free?
So you want it to take place under the influence of oppression? For if it does not take place under the influence of oppression, it will take place in freedom, and that is what you do not want.
‘Sudre does not even mention Marx or Engels in his Histoire du Communisme (1849),” reminds George -Watson,-
“ but he traces the history of the idea from Plato through Sir ThomasMore to Proudhon, concluding that since Plato's time socialism had always been `an obstacle to progress' by replacing liberty with the rule of despots; and five years later, in a sequel on sovereignty, he condemned ancient Greek influence on the modern mind for its fatal dedication to a priori reasoning - what Sudre called ‘its fierce determination to realize, at whatever cost, the conceptions of arrogant theorizing’. These are radical protests, in the wake of the revolution of 1848, against the predictably conservative effects of socialist theories.
Socialism, he wrote, has always been an obstacle to progress, has slowed its pace and harnessed itself backwards to the chariot of civilization. Humanity has advanced-
not because of socialism but in spite of it, developing rather by the gradual extension of property and liberty, of equality of rights and legal enactment, by the progressive enhancement and purification of the principles of marriage and the family; by science, literature and the arts.
Communism necessarily means regression. It has - tried to suppress all those elements of progress and in their place set despotism, equality of degradation, promiscuity and ignorance.
All the great revolutions have been achieved outside communism:
11- the abolition of slavery [...] the liberation of the human spirit that mankind owes to the Reformation, to Galileo, Bacon and Descartes; the abolition of feudalism and of inequalities before the law achieved on the night of 4th August (pp. 478 - 9)
It is sometimes thought, for all that, that socialism in its day at least bequeathed to
Europe and elsewhere the blessings of welfare state.
That is not how it appeared at the time. The welfare enactments of the Liberal
government of 1906-14, promoted by Asquith, Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, were
an outcome not of socialism but of a New Liberalism to which the small parliamentary
group of Labor members, intent only on trade-union reform, had to be persuaded. Nor did
William Beveridge, the author of National Health Service in Britain, think kindly of
socialism. He often complained to me in his last years of the resistance of Labor leaders
during the Second World War to his Report of 1942. 'I joined the Liberal Party,' he once
told a public meeting, 'and sat in the Commons as a Liberal, for two reason: one, that I was
and am a Liberal; and two, that the Liberals were the only party that wholeheartedly
welcomed my plans for a National Health Service'; and in his memoir Power and Influence
(1953) he has left a record of Ernest Bevin's opposition as a Labor leader:
For Ernest Bevin, with his trade-union background of unskilled
workers [...] social insurance was less important than bargaining
about wages (p. 295),
That capitalism, once rendered humane, might also be rendered harmless,
even popular, was a profound and intelligible fear of the socialist mind in the early years of
the century. Events have proved it right. When the two Germanies were united in 1990-1,
the welfare provision of the capitalist West was discovered to be more than twice as high
as that of the socialist East. It is the realization that it takes a free market to sustain public
welfare through massive wealth-creation that powerfully contributed to the death of
socialism in the last years of the twentieth century.
We will take up Genocide as an inherent ingredient of Marxist ideology, Terrorism an inextricable component of Leninism and mass murders and Terrorising as inseperable to Communist activism in our next study.
The first, Genocide is already being increasingly as felt an approaching doom by the alert section of Keralite Hindu community and the Bengalis, and terror felt with each passing day by the murder of Hindu activists, and how they are inherent to Marxist Thought that is the fount of all their scourge.
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