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The beginning of one of the worst periods of American history is barely six decades in our past.It was the hysteria over communism, a peril that would consume the entire world, the political right ranted, unless we surrendered our constitutional freedoms to combat it. Just as we are now being told we must surrender our constitutional freedoms to combat "terrorism."
But what is communism?
It is the oldest and probably the most-successful systems of government ever devised. It was a primeval system that served ancient societies well. It just didn't fit with an advanced economic world. The discord in the philosophy of Karl Marx is that one had to be highly intelligent to read and understand what he was saying, but one had to be a fool to think his visions would actually work in a modern world.
Ancient hunter-and-gatherer tribes used the collective to survive. The males would hunt in unison to track down and kill prey, to protect the village as warriors and to construct what was needed. The women would work in unison gathering herbs and berries, preparing communal meals and in raising children. For that society, collectivism worked well for hundreds of thousands of years. Marx and Friedrich Engels even praised American Indian tribes living in such enclaves for their internal peacefulness and absence of crime to argue for that social system to replace the misery-filled and crime-ridden capitalist society in which they lived.
The American political right praises the Iroquois Federation and its system of self-rule as the basis of the US Constitution. In "Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State" Engles did the same as a basis of scientific socialism; i.e. Marxism.
Marx advocated a meritocracy; that's what "from each according to his abilities" means. The political right argues that it favors a "meritocracy" in the United States although when it comes to inherited wealth, privilege, power and position in life, meritocracy is conspicuously absent from right-wing rhetoric.
Marx advocated a living income with "to each according to his needs." Okay, the political right is definitely anti-Marxist on this principle.
But Marx and Engels; despite their advanced educational degrees and finely honed intellects, never asked the most-fundamental question: If these two systems (communal society and technological economy) could be compatible, why did they not evolve together? The only logical answer is that they can't be compatible and the failure of the Soviet system proved that. Soviet leaders openly admitted that they were not practicing pure Marxism because they were surrounded by capitalist enemies and Marxism couldn't flourish until the enemies were vanquished. China abandoning Marxist economics while keeping a police-state society also shows that Marxism isn't compatible with modernity.
Marx never advocated a police state. He lived in a society in which everything was controlled by the propertied and monied classes, a totalitarianism of the bourgeoisie. Government, commerce, the legal system, the church, education were controlled by the ruling ownership classes to serve only those privileged classes. Marx envisioned a system in which those institutions would be controlled by the working classes and would serve the working classes; a "dictatorship of the proletariat." He only envisioned a reverse of the prevailing social order; not the brutal police state the Bolsheviks imposed on Russia and its fellow socialist republics. The society he inhabited differed little from the society in which America is saddled with today except that in his 19th Century, the aristocracy admitted that it was an aristocracy. America's democratic republic and other such nations managed to overcome the ills Marx railed against without becoming totalitarian states by building a strong middle class; that is, until the neo-con revolution beginning with Ronald Reagan began reversing the progress to form what we today know as "corporacracy".
The author is qualified to discuss this matter by virtue of involvement in the US intelligence community defending the nation from communism and studying Marxist philosophy at Georgetown University Graduate School of Government to enhance his employment at the National Security Agency.
While at Georgetown, virtually the entire class came to realize that communism ~ as practiced in the Soviet Union ~ would fail if it were not radically altered. When Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to reform the system, it failed.
The intelligence community felt that containment, not confrontation, was sufficient because it also could see communism self-destructing.
Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, was one of the first to see the end of communism while all those around him were in a virtual panic. In a 1951 dissenting opinion, Douglas forecast the demise of communism. He wrote:
"There comes a time when even speech loses its constitutional immunity ... When conditions are so critical that there will be no time to avoid the evil that the speech threatens, it is time to call a halt ... The restraint to be constitutional must be based on more than fear, on more than passionate opposition against the speech, on more than a revolted dislike for its contents. There must be some immediate injury to society that is likely if speech is allowed."
In that case, American communists were appealing their convictions for organizing study groups to teach their beliefs with the aid of four books: "Foundations of Leninism by Stalin" (1924), "The Communist Manifesto" by Marx and Engels (1848), "State and Revolution" by Lenin (1917) and "History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (1939). There was no question about legality of the books; they weren't, and couldn't be, restricted. Only the communists' speech was involved because a foe of Marxism could have used the same books to teach opposition to communism without fear of arrest.
What Douglas saw that others couldn't was, "If they (the books) are understood, the ugliness of Communism is revealed, its deceit and cunning are exposed, the nature of its activities becomes apparent, and the chances of its success less likely." That observation indicates Douglas was one of the first to understand that most anti-communism crusades weren't needed because communism was its own worst enemy and there was no valid reason to weaken the Constitution with crusades against a movement that was sure to fail.
We have had experiments with systems like Marxism in the United States. Both Oneida, NY, and Amana, Iowa, began as collective societies based on communal sharing of labor and equal distribution of what was created. Both failed; Oneida in cutlery manufacturing and Amana in appliances because the social system was primitive while the economic system was advanced.
So why did we go through decades of freedom-destroying anti-communism hysteria?
When capitalism failed in the Great Depression beginning in 1929 many people wondered if there was an economic system that would not be subject to the repeated depressions ~ as in the 1840s, 1870s, 1890s and the biggie of the 1930s ~ so they looked at Marxism. They were not Marxists, not Bolsheviks, they weren't collectivists or advocates of the police state, but their curiosity got them branded for life by the likes of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other right-wing hysteria mongers.
The political right was always in a snit over anything Marxist, fearing that if Americans heard anything relating to Marxism they would automatically become communists, rather than anti-communists, thereby conservatives were giving a backhanded admission ~ at least in their minds ~ of communism's superiority over their own philosophies. Of all the things Marx said in his lifetime, the one the right never acknowledges is, "I am not a Marxist," said because revolutionaries had hijacked and distorted his philosophy just as American neo-cons have hijacked and distorted Barry Goldwater's philosophy.
But in its zeal of anti-communism, the political right became anti-democracy because it couldn't tell the difference.
Things denounced as communistic by the political right:
1 Unions and collective bargaining
2 Minimum wages
3 Safe working conditions
4 Unemployment insurance & worlers comp
5 Civil rights struggle
6 Equal rights
7 Women's rights
8 Fluoride in drinking water
9 Public education
10 Secular government
11 Social Security
12 Medicare and Medicaid
13 Universal health coverage
14 Environmental protection
15 Taxation, especially income tax
16 Gun control
17 Unbiased, honest journalism
18 Civil protest of government misdeeds
19 Any government program that benefits the lower classes
20 Free speech (if liberal)
21 Liberalism or progressivism, in short, anything not far-right reactionary fascism.
Implementing many of these programs enabled the West to correct the evils Marx railed against in the 19th-century without violence or establishing the police state the Bolsheviks felt necessary in Russia and Eastern Europe.
Today we are becoming anti-democracy instead of anti-terrorism because the right once again cannot tell the difference.
When the New England Patriots won a Super Bowl without any "stars," their reliance on teamwork was denounced by Rush Limbaugh as communistic because it was "collective."
George Bush's America has an important facet in common with the Bolsheviks' Soviet Union, as well as Hitler's Third Reich and Saddam Hussein's Irag, and that is to hold any position in government a person must belong to a favored group and be intensely loyal to the leader. That is reflected in the recent firings of US attorneys who enforced the laws, rather than Bush policies, and the purging of intelligence agencies of analysts who tried to tell Bush what he needed to hear rather than what he wanted to hear. And meaningful positions outside of government are also often available only to supporters of the regime. The Bolsheviks tried to make everyone in society ~ except themselves ~ the same; Bush tries to have everyone think the same.
There were news reports several years ago about a serial killer in the Ukraine capital Kiev, who murdered 53 children before being caught. During his killing spree, Kiev parents did nothing to protect their children because they knew nothing of the killings: Bolshevik leaders suppressed the facts because they refused to let anyone see that their society wasn't perfect. Bush is using the same tactic regarding deaths in Iraq, global warming, the economy, energy policy and myriad other facets of American life.
It should be obvious by now that the political right hated Marxism because it was designed as a salvation of the working class, but our right isn't radically different from Bolshevik positions on use of government power. Reactionaries seem not to be anti-Bolshevik because they are taking this nation in that direction; the major difference being that under Bolsheviks the economic means of a nation were controlled by the state and under American neo-cons the state is controlled by economic forces.
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