Philosophy Now Forum

to be clear, I am not a communist, Marxist or Leninist
or even a Socialist... my preferred political choice is actually
anarchism...and I was an anarchist for over 10 years..
I lived the life of an anarchist... but we have to understand
how I got there... I was radicalized by the election of Raygun
in 1980... I saw the damaged he did in California, having lived
there since 1973...and I was afraid of what he might do nationally..
and my fears were quite justified as we are still dealing with his
mess 40 years on... Raygun was one of the 5 worst presidents in
American history.... and so, in 1980, with his election, I was
faced with a choice, what to do about it? I wasn't sure which way
to go, so I engaged in a two-year study of political matters,
in which I extensively studied both Communism and Anarchism...
(along with a study of capitalism) and after a couple of years,
I rejected communism and accepted anarchism...and began
my life as an anarchist... in the 90's, I rethought my choices
and began my third political act, by becoming a very liberal democrat...
and today, I am not sure what I am today.. I have rejected democracy
as it doesn't exist today in America... America properly speaking is
now a corporatocracy...government run by and owned by corporations...

that is why I say to those who claim that the danger in the world
is government.. I say, you are fighting the wrong war...
the major problem today is the official state religion of
capitalism.... this drive to profits has done substantial
damage to our world and land of America and I am not sure
that damage can be fixed... the drive to profits has
lead us to global warming, the alienation of the people
of the world, the worldwide nihilism in which people
and their values are negated/dehumanized for profits...
(in which profits are far more valued than people or
their values) income inequality, the turning of America
into a two-class system, the wealthy and the rest of us...
which is quite evident in our cities like NY, SF, Chicago,
Boston, and LA....

Marx believed that and capitalists wholly agree with the
statement that the "substructure'' of the world is
economics... that human beings are "homo economicus"
driven by economic matters, that the other stuff,
the political, the ARTS, science, literature, history,
even morality/ethics were all subsets of economics,
all the activities of human beings were a subset of
economics...even values like love, peace, hope,
charity, curiosity.... they were not valued for being values
worth seeking, but because of their economic
usage, nothing more....for Marx, all of human life is
just an economic engagement and nothing more..
and that is why I say he wasn't political... because
politics were simply just another branch of economics...

and this is just another example of my disagreement with
Marx... it has been said that human beings are really nothing
more than problem solvers... that is the point of being human,
to solve the many diverse problems of being human... that makes
more sense to me than human beings being "homo economicus",
or even more possible, human beings, being ''Homo Artifex" Latin for Artist.
to be human means to create.. that is what it means to be human

anyway, back at the ranch, another disagreement with Marx,
is this idea of class consciouness.....which is based on
economic terms.. the poor unite because they are poor
and the wealthy unite because they are wealthy...
we connect to each other based on economic status,
and no other connection matters to us beyond that....
but that is clearly not right...human unite, connect over
a wide variety of reasons, not just economic ones...
social, political, religious, sports, nationality, color of
ones skin... there are a vast number of means to connect
human beings together, not just economic ones...
but this is once again because of Marx's emphasis on
the economic, not the political or social or philosophical
connection....the economic.... I believe that man,
human beings are far more than their economic
possibilities....which is something that Marx never really considered...

another point of contention between Marx and myself,
is that the end product of history, which is the "worker state"
in which the final product is that all that is left
in the world are workers... and poof, we reach the end
of history.... now we may, at some point, reach such
a point of a worker paradise, but it ain't today
and it isn't the final act of history...

the point of the human being is to adapt and change to
the ever-changing conditions, environment that we face
every single day... and we can see how capitalism is
an answer to one such question facing human beings
at the time...how to best organize ourselves economically....
and that answer was the right answer, at that time...
but today, conditions have changed and the answer of
capitalism no longer applies... given how capitalism
is bringing us closer the destruction of our world,
and in fact, is in a great degree, the cause of
our many myriad problems today...

so, I disagree with Marx's starting point, in that the
world is based on economic activity, and all the rest
of what we do, ART, political, philosophical, our very
dreams have an economic basis.... and I disagree with
his ending that the final, desired goal of humanity
is to reach some sort of worker's paradise....

and I disagree with Marx in the middle....
that his ideas of dialectical materialism are correct....
from our friends at wiki:

''the Marxist theory.... that political and historical events
result from the conflict of social forces and are interpretable as
a series of contradictions and their solutions. The conflict
is believed to be cause by MATERIAL NEEDS"

and those material needs are economic in nature...that we find
the meaning of existence in the economic, not the political
or social or ART or creativity....that we become human
by our economic activity and through no other means....

and the meaning of existence is found in being part of
the vast movement that Marx found in the world..
the economic "the dialectical materialism" that is
the heart of the human existence is a vast force
that is moving toward the end of history....
and we human beings are to sacrifice all we are, to an
immense and indifferent movement toward the final
goal of a worker's state... the means that Stalin and Lenin
used to make sure the final goal was met, was to happily
sacrificed the individual to gain this final goal....
and plenty were sacrificed to seek out this final goal..
and that is another point of contention with Marx..
that the individual was happily sacrificed to gain this final goal,
the worker's state... and not so surprisingly enough,
this was the exact same idea that the capitalist had...
that the individual was happily sacrificed to gain this final goal,
in the case of capitalism, profits.. there is no difference
between capitalism and communism in this area...
both are more than willing to sacrifice people in the name
of some goal..... that capitalism will sacrifice human beings
in the name of profits, I have dubbed nihilism....and so is
communism that is willing to sacrifice human beings in the name of
of achieving the final goal.... communism is also guilty of
nihilism....

Now that wasn't Marx's intention, but that was his achievement,
to make possible the nihilism of communism, in which we
sacrifice human being for the "betterment" of others...

now the great thing about Marx and Marxism, is that
it allows us to have many, many different versions
of Marx and Marxism....for every person seems to have
another version of Marx and Marxism...

that Marx failed to see the full implications of what he
wrote is clear....but to condemned Marx for his followers
failure is also quite wrong as we shall see in the next post....

Kropotkin

Now one of the critiques of Marx has been the immense failure
of "communism" in the 20th century... but I think differently...

think of what was Marx trying to do? what problem was
he trying to solve? that human beings lived in vast cities,
with immense poverty and despair.... the way this occurred
was the fact that millions were unable to support themselves
on the land... agriculture had been the main source of
people's livelihood for about 10,000 years...
in the U.S, America was still a rural country until about 1900,
when the number of American living in cities was greater than
the number of people living in rural areas....and today, the vast
majority of people in America live on the coast, east and west,
and in cities...

and the way people now gained their livelihood was in
factories beginning in 1820's or so in America, and the factory
was no longer the main income driver in America starting
in the 70's and 80's.. and today, most people have
service jobs....or white collar jobs....

but being Marx, he saw the world in economic terms and so
his solutions were economic ones... but the people after Marx,
Lenin, Stalin, Mao, were more political than Marx was....
what was Marxism was turned into something else...
but we can see that something else if we look
at the society at large... for example, the Soviet Union
was a place where Marxism was the official economic policy,
but it really wasn't.... the drive for Lenin and then Stalin,
was to turn Russia into a modern state, without, without
the use of Capitalism....and if one thinks of the world in
terms of the economic, the fact is that Stalin/Lenin was
quite successful in transforming their country into a modern
economic powerhouse... but we must ask ourselves, at
what cost? the fact is that millions of people died in this
attempt to modernize the Soviet Union... but and this is
important, that the Soviet Union was not a communist
country as defined by Marx... remember that Marx
wanted a person to perform one type of work in the morning
and another type of work in the afternoon, in other words,
he wanted to diversify what it meant to be human.. by
answering what he saw as being the main idea of being human,
which is the economic... we were to find meaning and the point
of existence in work.... and then the Soviet Union under Lenin
and Stalin, made work the entire point of human existence....
if you weren't helping to build up the Soviet Union,
you were pointless... being a "parasite" was a great crime in
the Soviet Union, as it is in America today... to "leach" off
the public system was punishable in the Soviet Union,
as the right wing has been doing since Ronald Raygun
so called, "welfare queen".. demonizing those who are forced
to exist on public assistance.... capitalism and communism
have much in common...

but the really interesting part of the Soviet Union is
something we see today in the Modern GOP/MAGA world...
the rise of the cult... that the most worship part of communism
wasn't communism, but was Lenin, and then Stalin...
the unofficial religion of the Soviet Union was the
rise of the glorification of the leader... with statues
and speeches and daily reminders of the "glorious" leader...
then it was Lenin and then Stalin and today its IQ45...
the fact is that the worship of the leaders has more
value then the system in place... thus worshipping
Lenin and Stalin was more important than communism..
and the worshipping of IQ45 is more important than
the party, the cult of IQ45 is more important than
the GOP/MAGA party...the exact same practice
of the Soviet Union of worshipping the leader over
the system exists today in America....

the diminishment of the movement of communism
in favor of cult worship of the leader is part of the
failure of communism...whereas Marx (seem to)
want the movement of communism to take priority over
the leader...if a state is engaged in worshiping the leader
over the movement, then it is not about that movement
anymore.... it is about the leader, Lenin and then Stalin,
and not about communism....the state is about the leader
and not about the movement, then we are no longer engaged
in communism...it is something else.... and not communism...
and this is why, in part, why I disagree with communism
as practice by Lenin/Stalin.. it become a dictatorship...
and did China and it communism... it became a cult about
Mao, and not about communism... that is why I don't consider
them, The Soviet Union and Mao's China to be communism...
they were, both of them, dictatorships... not communism....
hence why I believe that communism/Marxism has never been tried...
the modern day "communism" has been about the cult of the
leader and not about actual communism...for nowhere in
Marx do we read about 5 year plans, or education camps,
or genocide... practices very much conducted by the cult
of leadership that was the Soviet Union and China....

the fact is that Marxism as written by Marx, had nothing
to do with the Soviet Union or China... they were something
completely different...dictatorships...

and to blame Marx for his "followers" failure means you
may as well blame Jesus for the inquisition or the mass wars
of extermination that the Catholic church practice for centuries...

one cannot blame the creator of a religion or a political
party for the actions of the next generation that ran that
religion or political party....

Kropotkin

let us continue to think about this...

take two modern day movements and let us compare
them with communism of the Soviet Union and China...

the two I am going to concentrate on is Gandhi's movement
to free India from England and Martin Luther Kings civil
right movement....

think of Gandhi and his movement, what did he put first,
the movement or himself? the movement...he discouraged
the attempt to make him the focus of the movement,
what was important was the movement, not himself...
the glorification of Gandhi happened after his death, not
during his life...his engagement was with the principles he
thought that matter... it was called "Satyagraha" which was
thought to be the ''truth" or ''insistence'' or ''holding firmly to
to truth'' or perhaps even ''truth force" in any event, this
''truth force" was a particular form of nonviolent resistance
or civil resistance...Gandhi thought of "Satyagraha''
as not only a tactic, but as a universal rule or solvent for
injustice and harm.... and he put that belief in ''Satyagraha"
before himself... the rule came first and Gandhi was second,
at best.... very unlike the communistic states which
put the leaders first and the movement second....

the second movement was MLK movement of civil rights
in which MLK followed Gandhi in putting the movement first
and leadership, King, second....achieving full civil rights
was much more important than one's own personal
egoistical needs... a leader, a true leader is about the
movement, the goal that it comes before oneself....
something that that IQ45 and Putin have failed to do..
the MAGA movement is, for him, all about him..
and for Putin, the entire country of Russia is about
Putin, and that is what failure looks like....
putting the self before the movement...

and therein lies the failure of the Soviet Union and China,
and Venezuela.. the leaders putting themselves before
country...the cult of the leader only leads to failure,
whereas putting the country, movement first is a big
step toward success...

Kropotkin

in a continuation of this theme, what works
and what doesn't in the success and failure of
a movement or country....

when a person, the leader or founder of a country or movement,
put the movement or country first, that country or movement,
will have a better chance to succeed... let us take a few other
leaders who put the movement first... Jesus... he didn't take
nor did he care about himself.. what matters is the path to god,
and that was his only criteria... his own personal success or failure
was less important to him that the fact that others could reach
god or heaven....

another example is St. Francis.. who put his Franciscans
movement ahead of his own success... the religious movements
that have succeed are the movement that the leaders pushes
the agenda of the movement, not his/her's own personal success...

that is why Biden has been a far more successful leader than IQ45...
because it hasn't been about Biden but about this country... and that
makes all the difference in the world...IQ45 wanted
parades and statues and monuments to him, still does...
but that isn't leadership, that is ego... and IQ45 has ego
to spare.. but he is a failure.. both personally and professionally,
and politically...for at best, one can only lead by being a cult
leader for so long before failure strikes.. and IQ45 has no interest
in anything but being worshipped... as did Lenin and Stalin
and Mao....

and America will continue to fail until we have leaders who
put the country first, and not themselves...
which is following the path of Washington, Lincoln,
either Roosevelt, and even JFK... leadership is about
the movement or country, not about how many statues we
build to that leader....

Kropotkin

I must admit that when I wrote this thread, I would have
disagreements galore... Kropotkin, you are so wrong,
that I can't even begin to tell you how wrong you are...
and yet, nothing....

Kropotkin