i am not a communist

I figure i'd post this as I've been getting in arguments with Marxits and Communists lately. Rather then write in great detail, and bore the fuck out of everyone, I am just going to post a section of George Monbiot's book "manifesto for a new world order". It is clear, and concise, and says everything I would have said on the subject. So for the following reasons, and the fact that I would never willingly particpate in violent revolution, I am not a communist.

The Manifestos great innovation and great failure was the staggeringly simplistic theory into which it sought to force society. Dialectical materialism reduced humanity’s complex social and political relations to a simple conflict between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’; that is to say the owners of property and the workers, by which Marx and Engels meant the industrial labourers employed by large capitalist concerns. Any class which did not conform to this dialectic was either, like the peasants, shopkeepers, artisans and aristocrats, destined to ‘decay and finally disappear in the face of modern industry’, or like the unemployed , was to be regarded as ‘social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of old society’, with no legitimate existence in a post-revolutionary world.

Unfortunately for those living under communist regimes, society did not function as Marx suggested. The peasants, aristocrats, artisans and shopkeepers did not disappear of their own accord: they; like everyone else who did not fit conveniently into the industrial proletariat, had to be eliminated, as they interfered with the theoretical system Marx had imposed on society. Marx, who described them as ‘reactionaries’ trying ‘to roll back the wheel of history’, might have approved of their extermination. The ‘social scum’ of the lumpenproletriat, which came to include indigenous people, had to be disposed of just as hastily, in case they became, as Marx warned, ‘the bribed tool of reactionary intrigue’. As the theory so woefully failed to fit society, society had to be remodeled to fit the theory. And Marx provided the perfect excuse for ruthless extermination. By personalizing oppression as ‘the bourgeoisie’ he introduced the justification for numberless atrocities.

Moreover, Marx’s industrial proletariat, modeled on the factory workers of Lancashire, upon whom he relied to ferment revolution, turned out to be rather less inclined to revolt than the peasants, or, for that matter, the petty bourgeois, artisans, factory owners, aristocrats and educated middle classes from whom he drew almost all his early disciples. In order to overcome this inconvenience, Marx effectively re-invokes, in the form of bourgeois communist ideologues such as himself, the guardian-philosophers of Plato’s dictatorship. Rather than trust the faceless proletariat to make its own decisions, he appoints these guardians to ‘represent and take care of the future’ of that class.

His prescriptions, in other words, flatly fail to address the critical political question, namely ‘who guards the guards?’ Democratic systems contain, in theory at least, certain safeguards, principally in the form of elections, designed to ensure that those who exercise power over society do so in its best interests. The government is supposed to entertain a healthy fear of its people, for the people are supposed to be permitted to dismiss their government. The Communist Manifesto offers no such defenses. As the ancient Greeks discovered, guardian-philosophers tend rapidly to shed both the responsibilities of guardianship and the disinterested virtues of philosophy.

Moreover, by abolishing private property and centralizing ‘all instruments of production in the hands of the State’, Marx granted communist governments a possibly unprecedented power over human life. Officials could decide what – indeed whether – people ate, where they lived, how they worked, even what they wore. Marx himself, in other words, devised the perfect preconditions for totalitarian dictatorship. The ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ transforms itself, with instant effect, into the dictatorship of the bureaucrat.

The problem is compounded by the Utopian myth at the heart of the Manifesto’s philosophy: that with the triumph of the proletariat, all conflict will come to an end, and everyone shall pursue, through ‘the free development of each’. ‘the free development of all’. But history does not come to an end; dialectical materialism has no ultimate synthesis. New struggles do, and must, emerge as needs change, interests diverge and new form of oppression manifest themselves, and a system which takes no account of this is a system doomed to sclerotic corruption. Indeed, Stalin and Mao recognised this, through their perpetual discovery of the new enemies required to sustain the dynamic of power. Marx helped the industrial working class to recognize and act upon its power. His analysis remains an indispensable means of understanding both history and economics. But his political programme, as formulated in the Manifesto, was a dead end. It stands at odds with everything most people claim to value: human freedom, accountability, diversity. Any attempt to systematize people by means of a simple, let alone binary, code will founder with disastrous consequences both for those forced to conform to the Marxist ideal, and for those judged by the all powerful state to offend it.