"Rather than searching in Marx's texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible."

Cartoon by Etta Hulme

"The [destructive aftermaths of the] Soviet Union, Maoist China, Kim's North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe, Chavez and Maduro's Venezuela, and countless other deadly authoritarian regimes and revolutions— all carried out in Marx's name, and celebrated by Marxists at their inception — are casually dismissed and dissociated from Marx's theories ... They are not 'true socialism' or 'true Marxism,' we are told, and it falls to the next socialist regime to implement Marx 'the right way.'
    "A succinct and representative example of this tendency among modern intellectuals may be seen in political theorist Matthew McManus's account of Marx's reputation over time

'But of course the most substantial objection came from Karl Marx, whose epochal critique of political economy remains in some respects the climax of the modernist project...Marxism became the chief theoretical outlook for most of the major socialist movements and parties by the end of the 19th century, with many achieving important reforms. But its reputation was seriously tarnished by the totalitarian movements in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, which appealed to Marx's legacy to advance tyranny while taking serious liberties with his thought. With the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1989, many thought socialisms' days were numbered, though it has since enjoyed a resurgence in popularity as the inequalities and vulgarities of neoliberalism [sic] became increasingly scrutinised.'

"Note that McManus errs in assigning high status to Marx's intellectual following in the late nineteenth century, which, as we have seen, he did not possess at any point in his life or for many decades thereafter. Neither does McManus substantiate his efforts to differentiate the humanitarian abuses of Marx's twentieth century followers from Marx's own revolutionary theorising. 

    "One is reminded of the quip of French philosopher Michel Foucault, who stated in a rare moment of clarity: 'Rather than searching in [Marx's] texts for a condemnation in advance of the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts could have made the Gulag possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it intolerable truth still accepted today.' 'The Gulag question,' Foucault continued, 'must be posed not in terms of error (reduction of the problem to one of theory) but in terms of reality'."

~ Phil Magness, from recent writing

Venezuela reminds us: hard-core Marxists "are not ousted electorally nor peacefully."

 

Your regular reminder, this time from Venezuela overnight, that hard-core Marxists "are not ousted electorally nor peacefully." [Click the pics for links.]

Let's not ask a Marxist about the environment

"Solving our global ecological crises today requires understanding how capitalism has transformed humanity’s relationship to the land," says the Marxist Jacobin website. "Karl Marx’s thought," they say, "gives us the tools to do just that."

Does it? Did it? The record of the Soviet Union and its empire — history's largest experiment in Marxism — was dismal. Air in the city of Nikel, in the Arctic Circle (below), was so bad that occupants routinely wore respirators outside to avoid the sulphuric acid in the air. 

The Caspian Sea was transformed into a sewer. "Hundreds of factories and refineries along the Caspian Sea dump untreated waste into the sea," explains Thomas DiLorenzo, "and major cities routinely dump raw sewage. It has been estimated that one-half of all the discharged effluent is carried in the Volga River, which flows into the Caspian Sea. The concentration of oil in the Volga is so great that steamboats are equipped with signs forbidding passengers to toss cigarettes overboard." 

Meanwhile, in Russia's "steel city" Magnitogorsk (to this day now only Russia's third-most polluted city), 

any new arrival to the city [was] likely to notice an industrial tinge to the air, like the whiff of a charcoal brazier and an acrid dryness at the back of the throat. ... [T]he level of benzopyrene in the air, a carcinogen that has been linked to lung cancer, was 23 times the allowed amount. In addition, millions of cubic metres of industrial waste water is pumped into the Ural River each year, according to environmentalists, polluting it with heavy particles, nitrites and other chemicals.... [A]ccording to Anna Rozhkova, head of the environmental group EcoMagnitka, only one in 20 children born in the city is completely free of health problems and allergies. The head of Magnitogorsk’s oncological hospital said in a 2012 interview that “people around the world are susceptible [to cancer], but we unfortunately outpace all others.”

That report is from The Guardian.

Pollution in the Marxist paradise was so inevitable that citizens were literally forced to adapt. A contemporary cartoon shows citizens, having no legal recourse,  using the chemical waste to paint the houses.

And it wasn't just Russia. Victor Sebestyen's book Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire explains that

even by East German standards, Leipzig was a filthy place. Millions of tons of sulphur dioxide were spewed into. the atmosphere nearby each year. The water in the reservoirs and rivers were massively polluted. An official government report, kept strictly secret, revealed that the city's water supply contained twenty substances available only on doctor's prescription, and ten times West German levels of mercury. Journalists and scientists who investigated the high levels of cancers, respiratory ailments and skin diseases around the city — which produced more than two-thirds of East Germany's electricity — were simply arrested.

 

What's 'woke'? Let me explain.

 

You hear it all the time now. 'Woke.' "He's woke." "She's woke." "That's woke." Woke, woke. woke. You hear it all the time.

But awake to what?

James Lindsay likes tweaking 'woke' noses, and he's a fairly knowledgable chap on the subject. "There's a right name for the 'Woke' ideology," he explains, "and it's 'Critical Constructivism.' 

Critical constructivist ideology is what you "wake up" to when you go 'Woke'." He explains in a lengthy Twitter thread:

Reading this book [above], which originally codified it in 2005, is like reading a confession of Woke ideology. Let's talk about it.
    The guy whose name is on the cover of that book is credited with codifying critical constructivism, or as it would be better to call it, critical constructivist ideology (or ideologies). His name is Joe Kincheloe, he was at Magill University, and he was a critical pedagogue.
    Just to remind you, critical pedagogy is a form of brainwashing posing as education — it is the application of critical theory to educational theory and praxis, as well as the teaching and practice of critical theories in schools. ... [C]ritical pedagogy was developed ... to use educational materials as a 'mediator to political knowledge,' i.e., an excuse to brainwash.
    The point of critical pedagogy is to use education as a means not to educate, but to raise a critical consciousness in students instead. That is, its purpose is to make them 'Woke.' What does that entail, though? It means becoming a critical constructivist, as Kincheloe details.

As some people have said, it always starts with teacher mis-education. 

Note what we've already said, though. Yes, Marcuse. Yes, intersectionality. Yes, CRT and Queer Theory et cetera. Yes, yes, yes. That's Woke, BUT Woke was born and bred in education schools. I first recognised this right after [Helen Pluckrose and I] published our 2020 book 'Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody.'
    Critical pedagogy, following people like Henry Giroux and Joe Kincheloe, forged together the religious liberationist Marxism of [Paulo] Freire, literally a Liberation Theologian, with the 'European theorists,' including both Critical Marxists like Marcuse and postmodernists like Foucault.
    In other words, when Jordan Peterson identifies what we now call 'Woke' as 'postmodern neo-Marxism,' he was exactly right. ["Yes, no, and sort of," says philosopher Stephen Hicks.] It was a neo-Marxist critique that had taken a postmodern turn away from realism and reality. The right name for that is 'critical constructivism.'

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM CONTAINS (OR SYNTHESISES) two disparate parts: 'critical,' which refers to Critical Theory (that is, neo-Marxism or Critical Marxism), and 'constructivism,' which refers to the constructivist thinking at the heart of postmodernism and poststructuralism.
Critical Theory we all already generally understand at this point. The idea is pretty simple: 

• ruthless criticism of everything that exists; 

• calling everything you want to control 'oppression' until you control it; 

• finding a new proletariat in 'ghetto populations'; blah blah blah.

    More accurately, Critical Theory means believing the world and the people in it are contoured by systems of social, cultural, and economic power that are effectively inescapable and all serve to reproduce the 'existing society' (status quo) and its capitalist engine.

    Critical Theory is not concerned with the operation of the world, 'epistemic adequacy' (i.e., knowing what you're talking about), or anything else. They're interested in how systemic power shapes and contours all things and how they're experienced, to which they give a (neo)-Marxist critique.
    Constructivism is a bit less familiar for two reasons:
We've done a lot of explaining and criticising Critical Theory already, so people are catching on, and it's a downright alien intellectual landscape that is almost impossible to believe anyone actually believes. 

You're already very familiar with the language of constructivism: 'X is a social construct.' Constructivism fundamentally believes that the world is socially constructed. That's a profound claim. So are people as part of the world. That's another profound claim. So is power. I need you to stop thinking you get it and listen now because you're probably already rejecting the idea that anyone can be a constructivist who believes the world is itself socially constructed. That's because you're fundamentally a realist, but they are not realists at all.
    Constructivists believe, as Kincheloe says explicitly, that nothing exists before perception. That means that, to a constructivist, some objective shared reality doesn't exist. To them, there is no reality except the perception of reality, and the perception of reality is constructed by power.
    I need you to stop again because you probably reject getting it again. They really believe this. There is no reality except perceived reality. Reality is perceived according to one's social and political position with respect to prevailing dominant power. Do you understand?
    Constructivism rejects the idea of an objective shared reality that we can observe and draw consistent conclusions about. Conclusions are the result of perceptions and interpretations, which are colored and shaped by dominant power, mostly in getting people to accept that power.
    In place of an objective shared reality we can draw conclusions about, we all inhabit our own 'lived realities' that are shaped by power dynamics that primarily play out on the group level, hence the need for 'social justice' to make power equitable among and across groups.
    Because (critical) constructivist ideologies believe themselves the only way to truly study the effects of systemic dominant power, they have a monopoly on knowing how it works [despite the contradiction in terms], who benefits, and who suffers oppression because of it. Their interpretation is the only game in town.
    All interpretations that disagree with critical constructivism [they insist] do so for one or more bad reasons, for example:

• not knowing the value of critical constructivism, 
• being motivated to protect one's power on one or more levels, 
• prejudice and hate, or
• having bought the dominant ideology's terms, etc. 

CRITICAL CONSTRUCTIVISM IS PARTICULARLY HOSTILE to 'Western' science, favouring what it calls 'subjugated knowledges. This should all feel very familiar right now [hello Mātauranga Māori], and it's worth noting that Kincheloe is largely credited with starting the idea of 'decolonising' knowledge. 

    Kincheloe, in his own words, explains that critical constructivism is a 'weltanshuuang,' that is, a worldview, based on a 'critical hermeneutical' understanding of experienced reality. This means it intends to interpret everything through critical constructivism.
    In other words, critical constructivism is a hermetically-sealed ideological worldview (a cult worldview) that claims a monopoly on interpretation of the world by virtue of its capacity to call anything that challenges it an unjust application of self-serving dominant power.
    When you are "Woke," you are a critical constructivist, or at least suffer ideological contamination by critical constructivism, whether you know it or not. You believe important aspects of the world are socially (politically) constructed, that power is the main variable, etc.
    More importantly, you believe that perception (of unjust power) combined with (that) interpretation of reality is a more faithful description of reality than empirical fact or logical consistency, which are "reductionist" to critical constructivists.
    This wackadoodle (anti-realist) belief is a consequence of the good-ol' Hegelian/Marxist dialectic that critical constructivism imports wholesale. As Kincheloe explains, his worldview is better because it knows knowledge is both subjective and objective at the same time.
    He phrases it that all knowledge requires interpretation, and that means knowledge is constructed from the known (objective) and the knower (subjective) who knows it. It isn't "knowledge" at all until interpretation is added, and critical constructivist interpretation is best.
    Why is critical constructivist interpretation best? Here comes another standard Marxist trick: because it's the only one (self)-aware of the fact that 'positionality' with respect to power matters, so it's allegedly the only one accounting for dominant power systems at all.

WE COULD GO ON AND on about this, but you hopefully get the idea. Critical constructivism is the real name for 'Woke.' It's a cult-ideological view of the world that cannot be challenged from the outside, only concentrated from within, and it's what you 'wake up' to when Woked. [A different name for 'Critical Constructivism': Cognitive Onanism.]
    Critical constructivism is an insane, self-serving, hermetically sealed cult-ideological worldview and belief system, including a demand to put it into praxis (activism) to recreate the world for the possibility of a 'liberation' it cannot describe, by definition. A disaster.
    There is a long, detailed academic history and pedigree to 'Woke,' though, so don't let people gaslight you into believing it's some right-wing bogeyman no one can even define. It's easily comprehensible despite being almost impossible to grok like an insider.
    People who become 'Woke' (critical constructivists) are in a cult that is necessarily destructive. Why is it necessarily destructive? Because it rejects reality, and attempts instead to understand a 'reality' based in the subjective interpretations of power .....
    Furthermore, its objective is to destroy the only thing it regards as being 'real,' which are the power dynamics it identifies so it can hate them and destroy them. Those are 'socially real' because they are imposed by those with dominant power, who must be disempowered. Simple.

To conclude, Woke is a real thing. It can be explained in great detail as exactly what its critics have been saying about it for years, and those details are all available in straightforward black and white from its creators, if you can just read them and believe them.

 

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by Karl Marx" [updated]

"The capitalist system was termed 'capitalism' not by a friend of the system, but by an individual who considered it to be the worst of all historical systems, the greatest evil that had ever befallen mankind. That man was Karl Marx. Nevertheless, there is no reason to reject Marx’s term, because it describes clearly the source of the great social improvements brought about by capitalism. 

    "Those improvements are the result of capital accumulation; they are based on the fact that people, as a rule, do not consume everything they have produced, that they save—and invest—a part of it. 

    "There is a great deal of misunderstanding about this ... [not least that] capitalist savings benefit workers.

"An often unrealised fact about capitalism is this: savings mean benefits for all those who are anxious to produce or to earn wages. When a man has accrued a certain amount of money—let us say, one thousand dollars—and, instead of spending it, entrusts these dollars to a savings bank or an insurance company, the money goes into the hands of an entrepreneur, a businessman, enabling him to go out and embark on a project which could not have been embarked on yesterday, because the required capital was unavailable.
    "What will the businessman do now with the additional capital? The first thing he must do, the first use he will make of this additional capital, is to go out and hire workers and buy raw materials—in turn causing a further demand for workers and raw materials to develop, as well as a tendency toward higher wages and higher prices for raw materials. Long before the saver or the entrepreneur obtains any profit from all of this, the unemployed worker, the producer of raw materials, the farmer, and the wage- earner are all sharing in the benefits of the additional savings.
    "When the entrepreneur will get something out of the project depends on the future state of the market and on his ability to anticipate correctly the future state of the market. But the workers as well as the producers of raw materials get the benefits immediately....
    "The scornful depiction of capitalism by some people as a system designed to make the rich become richer and the poor become poorer is wrong from beginning to end. Marx’s thesis regarding the coming of socialism was based on the assumption that workers were getting poorer, that the masses were becoming more destitute, and that finally all the wealth of a country would be concentrated in a few hands or in the hands of one man only. And then the masses of impoverished workers would finally rebel and expropriate the riches of the wealthy proprietors....
    "If we look upon the history of the world, and especially upon the history of England since 1865, we realize that Marx was wrong in every respect. There is no western, capitalistic country in which the conditions of the masses have not improved in an unprecedented way. All these improvements of the last eighty or ninety years were made in spite of the prognostications of Karl Marx.
    "We must realise, however, that this higher standard of living depends on the supply of capital. ... A country becomes more prosperous in proportion to the rise in the invested capital per unit of its population."

~ Ludwig Von Mises, from the collection of six of his lectures titled Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow, and in Brazil under the title As Seis Lições (The Six Lessons) [hat tip Renato Moicano]

UPDATE:  Sad news just in that economic historian Robert Hessen has just died. David R. Henderson remembers him, and quotes from his contribution to the Concise Encylopaedia of Economics on Capitalism. 

"Capitalism,” a term of disparagement coined by socialists in the mid-nineteenth century, is a misnomer for “economic individualism,” which Adam Smith earlier called “the obvious and simple system of natural liberty” (Wealth of Nations).   Economic individualism’s basic premise is that the pursuit of self-interest and the right to own private property are morally defensible and legally legitimate. Its major corollary is that the state exists to protect individual rights. Subject to certain restrictions, individuals (alone or with others) are free to decide where to invest, what to produce or sell, and what prices to charge. There is no natural limit to the range of their efforts in terms of assets, sales, and profits; or the number of customers, employees, and investors; or whether they operate in local, regional, national, or international markets.

Here’s another great paragraph:

In early-nineteenth-century England the most visible face of capitalism was the textile factories that hired women and children. Critics (Richard Oastler and Robert Southey, among others) denounced the mill owners as heartless exploiters and described the working conditions—long hours, low pay, monotonous routine—as if they were unprecedented. Believing that poverty was new, not merely more visible in crowded towns and villages, critics compared contemporary times unfavourably with earlier centuries. Their claims of increasing misery, however, were based on ignorance of how squalid life actually had been earlier. Before children began earning money working in factories, they had been sent to live in parish poorhouses; apprenticed as unpaid household servants; rented out for backbreaking agricultural labor; or became beggars, vagrants, thieves, and prostitutes. The precapitalist “good old days” simply never existed (see industrial revolution and the standard of living).

And:

Despite these constraints, which worked sporadically and unpredictably, the benefits of capitalism were widely diffused. Luxuries quickly were transformed into necessities. At first, the luxuries were cheap cotton clothes, fresh meat, and white bread; then sewing machines, bicycles, sporting goods, and musical instruments; then automobiles, washing machines, clothes dryers, and refrigerators; then telephones, radios, televisions, air conditioners, and freezers; and most recently, TiVos, digital cameras, DVD players, and cell phones. ...

That these amenities had become available to most people did not cause capitalism’s critics to recant, or even to relent. Instead, they ingeniously reversed themselves. Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse proclaimed that the real evil of capitalism is prosperity, because it seduces workers away from their historic mission—the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—by supplying them with cars and household appliances, which he called “tools of enslavement.”Some critics reject capitalism by extolling “the simple life” and labeling prosperity mindless materialism. In the 1950s, critics such as John Kenneth Galbraith and Vance Packard attacked the legitimacy of consumer demand, asserting that if goods had to be advertised in order to sell, they could not be serving any authentic human needs. They charged that consumers are brainwashed by Madison Avenue and crave whatever the giant corporations choose to produce and advertise, and complained that the “public sector” is starved while frivolous private desires are being satisfied. And having seen that capitalism reduced poverty instead of intensifying it, critics such as Gar Alperovitz and Michael Harrington proclaimed equality the highest moral value, calling for higher taxes on incomes and inheritances to massively redistribute wealth, not only nationally but also internationally.

""The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence ... "

"The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are. 

    "Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. 

    "Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others. 

    "Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or stupidity. 

    "Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you. 

    "This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the 'scientific' analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: The implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d’etre for all the rest."

~ Henry Hazlitt, from his 1966 article 'Marxism in One Minute' [PDF, page 9]

 

Chris Trotter: 'honest but deluded'

Political commentator Chris Trotter has always been at the 'honest but deluded' end of the socialist spectrum. That is, he honestly wants material wealth, human progress, free speech, and social freedoms, but he is yet to understand that socialism doesn't deliver any of that -- that the essential nature of socialism is not the "equality" it allegedly strives for, but the need for armed robbery to establish and maintain it. The impossibility of socialism's goals inspires the coercion needed to achieve them.

And he's slowly discovering that even many of his erstwhile allies have grown to like the coercion more than those goals.

The revelation makes good reading.

Writing yesterday on the blog of Martin Bradbury -- who for a while now has had his own eyes slowly opened about the increasingly "woke" joylessness of the controlling left -- Trotter explains that he's finally worked out "why writing about today’s version of 'progressive' politics leaves me feeling so depressed." 

It's not just about the duplicitous party politics of this particular election cycle. He rejects the Greens's "dominant ultra-progressive faction" who "favour sending those found guilty of uttering or publishing 'Hate Speech' to prison for three years"  as much as he spurns Labour's conscious deception over He Puapua -- insisting "that the report in no way represented a blueprint for New Zealand’s transformation into a bicultural state, when a steady stream of official policy decisions confirmed that’s exactly what it was?" ("It is precisely this sort of conscious deception, this deliberate 'fooling' of the voters, that has transformed progressive politics from what used to be a joyful affirmation of idealism into a joyless exercise in dishonesty").

Worse: 

If, by some miracle, Labour-Green wins the election [he writes], then none of the initiatives which both parties signed-up to over the past six years: radical ethnic nationalism, censorship, transgenderism; are going to be abandoned. What looms ahead of New Zealand if Labour-Green wins is grinding economic austerity and relentless cultural warfare. Thinner bread and bloody roses.

He has yet to recognise that it is precisely the lack of traction for Marx's call for conflict between collectives based on class warfare that inevitably saw it morph into conflict between collectives based first on race (easier for the braindead to identify) and now on (trans)gender. But for a collectivist, like him, who still genuinely wishes for progress, the results he sees are depressing: the politics, he say, "are joyless; because the logical end-point of the ideology they espouse is one of universal dissatisfaction and unending conflict. In other words, their direction-of-travel is dystopic."

Progressive politics [he writes] has moved beyond the idea of uplifting and overcoming; of building a society in which there are no masters, no servants; no rich, no poor. Envisaged now is what can only be described as a perpetual theatre of cruelty, in which those to whom evil has been done, are encouraged to do evil in return. Far from serving as the emancipating “vanguard” of the Proletariat, as Karl Marx hoped, the intelligentsia of the Twenty-First Century are claiming for themselves the role of Grand Inquisitor. They have made themselves the pitiless torturers of all those whose privileges cannot be overcome or abandoned, only confessed to and punished.

Marxist "class warfare," in other words, has bled inevitably into so-called "cultural Marxism," and the grim authoritarianism of a Maoist Cultural Revolution. 

Over the top? Barking mad? Grossly defamatory of activists who only want people to be free and equal? How I wish it were true! But one only has to visit the febrile world of social media to grasp the perverse enjoyment contemporary progressives derive from “flaming”, “de-platforming”, and “cancelling” – oh, what an ominous word that is – those who refuse to step forward and confess....

Those who were in Albert Park on 25 March 2023, and those who watched the many video recordings made at the scene, could not help but note the delirious hatred of the mob, and the brutal behaviour it spawned. Such is the praxis of the post-modern progressive: telling the news media that theirs was a gathering of peace and love – while punching a 70-year-old woman in the face.... Have a care when fighting monsters,” warned the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, “lest ye become a monster yourself.” ...

That which Twentieth-Century progressives most feared, Twenty-First Century progressivism has become.

He's come a long way, Mr Trotter. 

When he realises one day that the only equality we need for human progress is equality before the law -- and that "the wealth of the rich is not the cause of the poverty of the poor, but rather of making the poor less poor, indeed, rich" -- then perhaps he will be ready to embrace the cause of true freedom. Without coercion.

Instead of deploying the flawed and simplistic "left-right" political spectrum -- two ends of a spectrum that depict similars instead of opposites -- Lawrence Reed argues in this guest post that we should judge political and economic systems by whom they empower: the State, or the individual.

The Big Problem With the Traditional 'Political Spectrum' Children Are Taught in Schools

guest post by Lawrence Reed

In classes on Government and Political Science, with few exceptions, students in both high school and university are taught that the so-called “political spectrum” (or “political/economic” spectrum) looks like this: Communism and Socialism reside on the Left, Capitalism and Fascism dwell on the Right. Various mixtures of those things lie somewhere in between:

This is not only false and misleading, it is also idiocy. Toss it into the trash bin and demand a refund from the teacher who presented it as fact, or as any kind of insightful educational tool.

At the very least, a spectrum that looks like that should raise some tough questions. Why should socialists and fascists be depicted as virtual opposites when they share so much in common—from their fundamental, intellectual principles to their methods of implementation? If a political spectrum is supposed to illustrate a range of relationships between the individual and the State, or the very size and scope of the State, then why are systems of Big State/Small Individuals present at both ends of it?

On any other topic, the two ends of a spectrum would depict opposites. Let’s say you wanted to illustrate a range for stupidity. It would look like this:

How much sense would it make for “Extremely Stupid” to appear at both the far Left and the far Right ends of the range?

For the same reason, you would create only confusion with a spectrum that looks like this:

If you wanted to depict a range of options regarding the size of government, a more meaningful range would be this one:

Let us get back to that first sketch above, the spectrum that is most often presented to students as gospel. It is a big reason why so many people think that the communism of Lenin and Stalin was diametrically opposed to the fascism of Hitler and Mussolini (even if people who lived under those systems could not tell much difference).

I must say that in the first place, I am not a fan of one-dimensional spectra as a device for understanding politics, especially when those who construct them insert terms along the range that are not all compatible with what the range is supposed to depict. (Capitalism, for example, is not a political system; it is an economic one. It is entirely possible (though uncommon and ultimately unstable) for a one-party political monopoly to allow a considerable degree of economic freedom. And the spectra shown here are literally one-dimensional, when it would take at least two dimensions, if not three, to truly show the complexity of political positioning.) But my purpose here is not to go that broad, but to deal only with the defective one-dimensional political/economic spectrum that most students learn.

My contention is that if Communism, Socialism, Fascism and Capitalism all appear on the same range line it is terribly misleading and utterly useless, to place the first two on the left and the second two on the right. 

If we were to place opposites at each end, then, the placement that makes the most sense is probably this one:

I can already hear the spluttering from the cheap (communist-leaning seasts!) The perspective represented in that last sketch, just above, immediately arouses dispute because its implications are quite different from what students are typically taught. The inevitable objections include these three:

1. Communism and fascism cannot be close together because communists and fascists fought each other bitterly. Hitler attacked Stalin, for example!

This objection is equivalent to claiming, “Al Capone and Bugs Moran hated and fought each other so they can’t both be considered gangsters.” Or, “Since Argentina and Brazil compete so fiercely in football, both teams cannot be composed of footballers.”

Both communism and fascism demonstrate in actual practice an extremely low regard for the lives and rights of their subject peoples. Why should anyone expect their practitioners to be nice to each other, especially when they are rivals for territory and influence on the world stage?

We should remember that Hitler and Stalin were allies before they were enemies. They secretly agreed to carve up Poland in August 1939, leading directly to World War II. The fact that Hitler turned on Stalin two years later is nothing more than proof of the proverb, “There’s no honour among thieves.” Thieves are still thieves even if they steal from each other.

2. Under communism as Karl Marx defined it, government “withers away.” So it cannot be aligned closely with socialism because socialism involves lots of government.

Marx’s conception of communism is worse than purely hypothetical. It is sheer lunacy. The idea that the absolutist despots of the all-powerful “proletarian dictatorship” would one day simply walk away from power has no precedent to point to and no logic behind it. Even as a prophecy, it strains credulity to the breaking point.

Communism is my Sketch 5 appears where it does because in actual practice, it is just a little more radical than the worst socialism. It is the difference between the murderous, totalitarian Khmer Rouge of Cambodia and, say, the socialism of Castro’s Cuba.

3. Communism and Fascism are radically different because in focus, one is internationalist and the other is nationalist (as in Hitler’s “national socialism”).

Big deal. Again, chocolate and vanilla are two different flavors of ice cream, but they’re both ice cream. Was it any consolation to the French or the Norwegians or the Poles that Hitler was a national socialist instead of an international socialist? Did it make any difference to the Ethiopians that Mussolini was an Italian nationalist instead of a Soviet internationalist?

Endless confusion persists in political analysis because of the false dichotomy the conventional spectrum (Sketch 1) suggests. People are taught to think that fascists Mussolini and Hitler were polar opposites of communists Lenin, Stalin, and Mao. In fact, however, they were all peas in the same collectivist pod. They all claimed to be socialists. They all sought to concentrate power in the State and to glorify the State. They all stomped on individuals who wanted nothing more than to pursue their own ambitions in peaceful commerce. They all denigrated private property, either by outright seizure or regulating it to serve the purposes of the State.

Don’t take my word for it. Consider these remarks of the two principal Fascist kingpins, Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Ask yourself, “Are these remarks materially different from what Lenin, Stalin and Mao—or even Marx—believed and said?”

In a February 24, 1920 speech outlining the Nazi 25-Point Program, Hitler proclaimed, “The common good before the individual good!”

In a speech to Italy’s Chamber of Deputies on December 9, 1928, Mussolini declared, “All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State!”

“To put it quite clearly,” said Hitler in a 1931 interview with journalist Richard Breitling, a core program of his Party was “the nationalisation of all public companies, in other words socialisation, or what is known here as socialism…the principle of authority. The good of the community takes priority over that of the individual. But the State should retain control; every owner should feel himself to be an agent of the State; it is his duty not to misuse his possessions to the detriment of the State or the interests of his fellow countrymen. That is the overriding point. The Third Reich will always retain the right to control property owners.”

“This is what we propose now to the Treasury,” announced Mussolini on June 19, 1919. “Either the property owners expropriate themselves, or we summon the masses of war veterans to march against these obstacles and overthrow them.”

Less than two weeks before (on June 6, 1919), the future Il Duce virtually plagiarised The Communist Manifesto when he said, “We want an extraordinary heavy taxation, with a progressive character, on capital, that will represent an authentic partial expropriation of all wealth; seizures of all assets of religious congregations and suppression of all the ecclesiastic Episcopal revenues.”

This line from Hitler’s May Day speech at Templehof Air Field in 1934 could have come straight from Lenin: “The hammer will once more become the symbol of the German worker and the sickle the sign of the German peasant.”

That’s the same socialist fanatic who declared in an October 5, 1937 speech, “There is a difference between the theoretical knowledge of socialism and the practical life of socialism. People are not born socialists but must first be taught how to become them.” (Please note: communists and fascists share a common hostility to private and home schooling.)

Mussolini asserted that “there are plenty of intellectual affinities between us” (socialists of the communist variety and socialists of the fascist flavour). In the same interview in 1921, he said, “Tomorrow, Fascists and Communists, both persecuted by the police, may arrive at an agreement, sinking their differences until the time comes to share the spoils…Like them, we believe in the necessity for a centralized and unitary state, imposing an iron discipline on everyone, but with the difference that they reach this conclusion through the idea of class, we through the idea of the nation.”

Hitler once declared, “National Socialism is the determination to create a new man. There will no longer exist any individual arbitrary will, nor realms in which the individual belongs to himself. The time of happiness as a private matter is over.” In 1932 his fascist soul mate Mussolini echoed the most doctrinaire Bolshevik when he stated, “It was inevitable that I should become a Socialist ultra, a Blanquist, indeed a communist. I carried about a medallion with Marx’s head on it in my pocket. I think I regarded it as a sort of talisman… [Marx] had a profound critical intelligence and was in some sense even a prophet.”

The same Mussolini advised the American businessman and politician Grover Whalen in 1939, “You want to know what fascism is like? It is like your New Deal!” He was referring to the central planning, anti-capitalist mandates and sky-high taxes of Franklin Roosevelt.

On and on it goes. Based on what they said and what they did, it is ludicrous to separate Fascism from the Left and make it out to be just a purified form of classical liberal Capitalism. If you insist on using the conventional spectrum as depicted in Sketch 1, you are deceiving yourself as to the differences between Communism and Fascism. They both belong firmly on the socialist Left. Actual differences amounted to minimalist window-dressing. Even their primary implementers said so.

Instead of deploying flawed and simplistic spectrum charts, let us judge political and economic systems by whom they empower—the State or the individual. That makes things a lot clearer.

* * * * * 

Lawrence Read is the President Emeritus io the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). This article was adapted from an issue of the FEE Daily email newsletter, and then appeared at the FEE blog. 

Marxian exploitation

"Karl Marx claimed that employers exploit workers because they do not give them the full exchange value of the goods and services they produce. However, Marx’s alternative also exploits workers. The formula 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' necessitates Marxian exploitation. A worker whose ability exceeds his need receives less than he produces and is, by Marx’s own definition, exploited."

~ Richard Fulmer, from his post 'Condemning the Profit Motive'

IDENTITY POLITICS (Part 4): Politics & Polylogism, Marx + Marcuse

So now you know what identity politics is, and something about what makes it stink: it stinks, because it says everyone who's born the same, or are grew up the same, thinks the same. So "stay in your lane"!

It suits the group-think merchants to promote this bullshit because (they hope) they can surf to political power on the group conflict it creates.

But how do they get away with it?

TODAY we burrow down into how this idiotic groupthink emerged into political life, and from where. And for that, we have to go all the way to Germany, and a bearded bloke in the British Museum Library, and their excuse for why the proletariat seems so generally happy with the fruits of capitalism, and wholly un-ready to revolt ...

Some Causes: Politics & Polylogism

"To the Frankfurt School, Freud offered a psychology admirably suited

to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism… Thus Marcuse has an

explanation for the new generation of revolutionaries-in-training for

why capitalism … seems to be peaceful, tolerant, and progressive—when,

as every good socialist knows, it cannot really be—and for why the

workers are so disappointingly un-revolutionary. Capitalism does not merely 

oppress the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically."

~ philosopher Stephen Hicks (Explaining Post-Modernism, pp 162-3)

THE POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES REPRESENTED by encouraging group conflict were grasped early by the philosopher Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979).

Marcuse had a rare heritage. He was a German Marxist from the Frankfurt School, and also a student of Martin Heidegger, who embraced Nazism during the later war. In the rarefied atmosphere of Sixties America, Marcuse's writings on revolt and political power would make him “the father of the New Left.”

From Marx, Marcuse got the rejection of reason as a universal tool.  Like Marx, he promoted instead the notion of poly-logism – of so-called “multiple logics” – the idea that the conditions of one’s birth and upbringing “hard wire” your thinking and your very means of thought. 

You think we're all talking past each other? Of course, say Marcuse and Marx: because what's true in logic for your group is not true for mine.  They do mean this literally:

Marxian polylogism asserts that the logical structure of the mind is different with the members of various social classes. Racial polylogism differs from Marxian polylogism only in so far as it ascribes to each race a peculiar logical structure of mind and maintains that all members of a definite race, no matter what their class affiliation may be, are endowed with this peculiar logical structure. [Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action]

It wasn't born as a "socialist" idea however. It was embraced by both right and left: For the European left at this time, the defining feature was class; for the European right, it was race. For both, the important thing was the collective -- the only difference was how the collective was defined. 

This could seem amusing. For one example, David Ricardo’s 200-year-old Law of Comparative Advantage (which demonstrates the win-win proposition of free trade) was condemned by German Marxists because he was bourgeois, by German racists because he was a Jew – and by German Nationalists because he was English! So that was it: free trade was out, without any need at all to address any of Ricardo’s reasoning. Because by this anti-principle of multiple logics, reason is no longer universal, and each group has its own “logic” – precisely the formula for dissent, disagreement, and disruption that a Marcuse was after.

Marcuse was reinforced in this rejection of reason by Heidegger, who called it that “most stiff-necked adversary of thought" – an obstacle to be discarded. Marcuse was happy to throw it out: bathwater, baby, and all. 

HE THEN SET ABOUT about redressing the problem apparent to every Marxist no matter how blind: that the masses were simply failing to become impoverished under capitalism, and would therefore never rise up in revolt in the manner than Marx had long predicted. 

On this troublesome point, Marcuse found comfort in the ideas of Sigmund Freud. When Freud applied his worrisome psychoanalytics to social philosophy, he found himself arguing that civilisation is “an unstable, surface phenomenon based upon the repression of instinctual energies,” the forces of civilisation having evolved (according to Freud) “by incrementally suppressing instincts and forcing their expression into polite, orderly, and rational forms. Civilisation is thus an artificial construct overlaying a seething mass of irrational energies in the id.”[1]  To Marcuse and, the Frankfurt School, “Freud offered a psychology admirably suited to diagnosing the pathologies of capitalism.”[6]

It was not that the masses were not impoverished, argued Marcuse[3], who was blind to folk around him who were enjoying the fruits of rising post-war prosperity. It was simply, he argued, that individuals en masse were themselves blind to the so-called “structural impoverishment”that is allegedly implicit in the capital system,:“increasingly unaware that the apparently comfortable world they live in is a mask for an underlying realm of brutal conflict and competition.”[8] 

You didn't realise all that was seething underneath the surface of your weekly supermarket shop, did you.

Since the proletariat themselves however are blind to this brutal, if implicit, “structural” oppression -- if Joe Sixpack enjoying his relative peace and comfort to much to even see it -- then Mr Sixpack must have his eyes opened! Opened, insisted Marcuse, by overt political action from outside the proletariat. By a “great refusal.” It was the job of the insightful activist, he said, to "lift the veil" from victims’ eyes. Only then would they rise up and overthrow their structural oppressors. 

ALL THIS SOUNDS MAD enough. But first, he had to sell them a new idea of oppression. Instead of being happy in their own rising wealth and prosperity, they had to be taught to be unhappy in the alleged inequality of this blessings across the land -- to be upset that some others were pulling down more -- to be angry that the majority of the wealth, comfort, and power was in the hands of the "oppressors." To be angry about it, and to act.

One of the first "direct actions" Marcuse called for was to silence these alleged “oppressors.” (This was "cancel culture" back in the sixties.) Silencing the alleged oppressors on the grounds of this new view of equality, based upon so-called “power differentials.” Silenced as a matter of "social justice." In his widely influential 1965 essay titled “Repressive Tolerance,”

Marcuse argued that tolerance and free speech confer benefits on society only under special conditions that almost never exist: absolute equality. He believed that when power differentials between groups exist, tolerance only empowers the already powerful and makes it easier for them to dominate institutions like education, the media, and most channels of communication. Indiscriminate tolerance is “repressive,” he argued; it blocks the political agenda and suppresses the voices of the less powerful. If indiscriminate tolerance is unfair, then what is needed is a form of tolerance that discriminates. A truly “liberating tolerance,” claimed Marcuse, is one that favours the weak and restrains the strong. Who are the weak and the strong? For Marcuse, writing in 1965, the weak was the political left and the strong was the political right.[5]

He went on to argue that that the forces of the left must therefore use the arguments of “tolerance” against the powerful forces of intolerance allegedly commanded by the capitalist class. He therefore demanded 

the withdrawal of toleration of speech and assembly from groups and movements that promote aggressive policies, armament, chauvinism, discrimination on the grounds of race and religion, or that oppose the extension of public services, social security, medical care, etc. Moreover, the restoration of freedom of thought [sic] may necessitate new and rigid restrictions on teachings and practices in the educational institutions which, by their very methods and concepts, serve to enclose the mind within the established universe of discourse and behaviour – thereby precluding a priori a rational evaluation of the alternatives.[6]

Remember, this is what he called "repressive tolerance."

If we summarise, he is arguing that

“Because Western civilisation is inherently oppressive... speech should be free for those who oppose freedom, capitalism and the foundations of Western society, but not for those who defend them.”[7]

And in case the reader misses it, Marcuse makes the point explicit:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left. [8]

This is a message impossible for any reader to miss. And they don’t.

[Remember some years ago for example when Chris Trotter was defending Helen Clark's illegal pledge-card spending as "acceptable corruption"? And then applauding her subsequent Electoral Finance Act “shutting down those with money [as] a necessary restriction on freedom of expression”?[10] That's where this comes from. Observe the widespread justification and even denial of the violence in Albert Park earlier this month? That's where it leads.] 

Following this script, those who dissent from the new orthodoxy are shouted down, denied platforms, forced into sensitivity re-education courses, forbidden from speaking, intimidated, mobbed, and even threatened with violence to get them to shut up. Consider again University of Missouri professor Melissa Click’s call to her backers — “Hey, who wants to help me get this reporter out of here? I need some muscle over here!” [9] That was Marcuse’s message in action. So too is the shouting down of "TERFs" and "Nazis" by folk too ignorant to even know what Nazism means.

All is acceptable when it’s your Team’s corruption you're defending.

We see here too, slithering in from stage left, one of the most irrational ideas afloat on this whole sea of abject, anti-rational nonsense: the idea that is called intersectionality. It is this notion – justifying that some groups be made more unequal than others – that powers much of the tribalism shutting down modern debate.

MORE ON THAT TOMORROW.

CONTINUED IN PART 5: Intersectionality, or 'How some tribes are made more equal than others'

PART 3 in a series explaining "identity politics," excerpted from one of my chapters in the 2019 book Free Speech Under Attack.

• Part 1: 'What is Identity Politics?'
• Part 2: 'Determinism isn't dead, it just smells that way'
• Part 3: 'Tribal Politics Means Zero-Sum Conflict'

NOTES

[1] In his 1930 book Civilisation and Its Discontents
[2] Summaries of Freud and Marcuse are from Stephen Hicks’s Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault (Expanded Edition), (2013), pg 161-2.
[3] In his 1955 book Eros and Civilisation, making the obvious hat tip to Freud’s tome, and the 1964 best-seller One-Dimensional Man
[4] Ibid, pg. 162-163, summarising the Frankfurt School’s Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer
[5] Jonathan Haidt & Greg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind; How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, pg. 65
[6] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Repressive Tolerance,’ 1965
[7] Steve Simpson, ‘At the Heart of the Attacks on Free Speech, (2015), collected in Defending Free Speech, ed. Steve Simpson (2016)
[8] Ibid.
[9] Tom Palmer, ‘The Three Most Pressing Threats To Liberty Today,’ Cato Policy Report, December, 2016
[10] Editorial, NZ Herald, 18 December, 2017, which noted that “during the controversy over this bill. Illiberalism reigned. ‘People shouldn't be able to say that,’ was a common refrain… There was often an implied trade-off: that shutting down those with money was a necessary restriction on freedom of expression. It reeked of political commentator Chris Trotter's disgraceful conclusion a year ago that the unlawful spending on Labour's pledge card had been acceptable corruption.”

The Philosophical State-Worshipper: "...if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it."

"So what is real freedom to [the German philosopher] Hegel?
    “'It must further be understood [claims Hegel] that all the worth which the human being possesses—all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State.'
    "In the broader context of Hegel’s philosophy, human history is governed by the necessary working out of the Absolute. The Absolute—or God, or Universal Reason, or the Divine Idea—is the actual substance of the universe, and its developmental processes are everything that is. 'God governs the world; the actual working of his government—the carrying out of his plan—is the History of the World.'
    "The State, to the extent that it participates in the Absolute, is God’s instrument for achieving his purposes. 'The State,' accordingly, 'is the Divine Idea as it exists on Earth... One must worship the state as a terrestrial divinity.'
    "In such worship, Hegel believed, we find our real freedom....
    "And again, just in case we have missed Hegel’s point: 'A single person, I need hardly say, is something subordinate, and as such he must dedicate himself to the ethical whole.' And again echoing Rousseau: 'Hence, if the state claims life, the individual must surrender it'.”

~ Stephen Hicks expounding Hegel's disastrous (and influential!) statism, in his post 'Hegel on Worshipping the State' [excerpted from Hicks's 2004 book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault]

"...'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'..."

"The rule, 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' creates incentives to demonstrate minimum ability and maximum need. The inevitable result is poverty."

 ~ Richard Fulmer, commenting on a post by Don Boudreaux

"If the rulers really wanted to communicate with their subjects, they did not use the grotesque doctrine of 'Marxism-Leninism'; they appealed, rather, to nationalist sentiments"

 

"Marxism was a philosophical or semi-philosophical doctrine and a political ideology which was used by the communist state as the main source of legitimacy and the obligatory faith. This ideology was indispensable, regardless of whether people believed in it. In the last period of communist rule it hardly existed as a living faith; the distance between it and reality was so great, and hopes for the joyful future of the communist paradise were fading so rapidly, that both the ruling class (i.e., the party apparatus ) and the ruled were aware of the its emptiness. But it remained officially binding, precisely because it was the main instrument of the the legitimacy of the system of power. If the rulers really wanted to communicate with their subjects, they did not use the grotesque doctrine of 'Marxism-Leninism'; they appealed, rather, to nationalist sentiments or, in the case of the Soviet Union, to imperial glory Eventually the ideology fell apart, together with the empire; its collapse was one of the reasons that the communist system of power died out in Europe."

~ Leszek Kolakowski, from the 2004 Preface to his 1976/8 book Main Currents of Marxism

 

"In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

"One of the common denominators between Leninists and government interventionists in the West is the belief that the problems of monopoly are the problems of ownership: only private monopolies acting out of greed are harmful. These institutions are suppressing scientific and technical progress, polluting the environment, and engaging in other conspiracies against public well-being.
    "Government monopolies, however, were believed to be ethical and upright; they substituted the 'greed' of the profit motive with a 'societal interest.' Yet group bureaucrats who manage and operate the public sector are no less self-interested than those who manage and operate private business. One important difference exists, though: unlike private entrepreneurs, they are not financially responsible for their actions and they operate without institutional constraints of cost control that private property and competition induces. The enlightened minds of planners and technocrats cannot overcome the problem of economic calculation without market signals.
    "'The failure of socialism in Russia, and the enormous suffering and hardship of people in all socialist countries, is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West. 'We should all be thankful to the Soviets,' says Paul Craig Roberts, 'because they have proved conclusively that socialism doesn't work. No one can say they didn't have enough power or enough bureaucracy or enough planners or they didn't go far enough.'...
    "A common mistake Western observers made was to think the Soviet Union's fundamental problem was a lack of democracy. They completely overlooked that the institutional structure of the political system cannot overcome the problem inherent in an economic system with no means of rational calculation. The Soviet Union had a number of leaders who promised political reform, but none was able to put bread on the table. In fact, the primary problem in the Soviet Union was socialism."

~ Yuri N. Maltsev from his article 'The Decline and Fall of Gorbachev and the Soviet State.' Maltsev is a senior fellow of the Mises Institute, who worked as an economist on Mikhail Gorbachev's economic reform team before emigrating to the United States in 1989. The article is based on his introduction to the 1992 book Requiem for Marx