Genuine, Democratic, Revolutionary Socialism is the Path to Medical Freedom
I am active in the medical freedom movement. And I’m a socialist. This makes me an odd bird, I will grant you. In these times of mass psychosis formation, I am a rare exception.
Liberals like Bobby Kennedy, Jr., and Del Bigtree, who now describe themselves as politically homeless, are also the rare exception. Most liberals today have sold out their desire for freedom, their upholding of civil liberties, their critical intellect, their opposition to illegitimate state authority, their demand for an accountable process regulating corporate capitalist production
Most socialists have also added to this list of betrayals, a betrayal of our struggle against capitalism and imperialism. In theory we are against these institutions. But not where it counts. Not when it involves unscientific mandates from unelected medical professionals like Dr. Anthony Fauci, taking their orders from Big Pharma, which is an integral part of...capitalist imperialism!
And there is the integrally related Great Reset, whose perpetrators in and around the World Economic Forum are quite open about their intention to use their campaign Covid-repression/terror to bring the rest of the human race under their control. This is being engineered by the dominant fraction of Capital—Big Tech and the military intelligence complexii Yet most of us have been conditioned (by the ideology of scientism, and by the CIA) to reply, “That’s just a conspiracy theory!”iii
By default, then, many if not most in the medical freedom movement either don’t want to talk about any ideology, in the name of unity, or uphold ideas of conservative libertarianism. I will deal briefly with each of these pipe dreams in turn:
1) “We should have no ideology. It gets in the way of unity.” But if we define ideology in the broad sense, as a system of ideas, an analysis of present day society, coupled with a plan to create a different society where we will not experience the crisis we are undergoing, then ideology is a necessity to any political movement. Having an ideology has its problems, if people don’t want to open their minds to the possibility that their ideology might, in some places, be wrong. Then their ideology becomes a closed system. But we need an idea of what we should fight for, what and whom we should fight against, and where we want to end up as a society. Denying the need for this may give us a temporary sense that we’re all on the same side. But it leaves us without any direction. Instead, we must be willing to debate our ideas with each other in a calm, rational, logical manner.
2) Conservative libertarianism: I’ve dealt in other articles I’ve written with this ideology. Here I just want to discuss what I consider to be its fundamental flaw: an idea expressed by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations, and by founding father Thomas Paine, just before the American Revolution, and then Proudhon, in the mid-19th century. We can summarize this belief as follows:
Though driven by self interest, the free market is the best system for humanity
This is because it delivers, as if by the hidden hand of God, a maximum of freedom and efficiency in creating the best of all possible worlds for the consumer
It meets his or her desires and needs to the extent, through his hard work, that he or she proves him or herself deserving of such fulfillment,
It does this by creating and delivering products that are the best possible quality and the lowest possible, and affordable, price.
The free market makes all such hardworking and deserving people equals. By its very nature, it “levels the playing field.” Whatever inequalities arise in a free market society, are created because of inequalities in talent, ability, and inclination to work hard.
Free market capitalism is opposed to monopoly. A monopolized market is the opposite of a free market. It creates artificial inequality, a society where a ruling class rewards itself just for being in the ruling class, without any reference to how hard they work. It creates poverty, shortages, injustice, et alia.
Far from intrinsically giving rise to a monopolized market, the free market is the antidote to it. The only reason why monopoly arises is that people get control of the state, expand it, and use it to create a monopoly.
Thus, because the expanded State is the problem, and in the drivers seat for the whole process, the solution is purely political, or even anti-political. Let’s do either of the following:
Elect better people to office. They will dismantle the State-monopoly complex.
Or we will—simply by walking away from the State, ending our participation in it. Get off the grid. Build “parallel structures.”
However, this ideology is false. The capitalist system is based upon exploitation. The capitalists take the full value of the product created by the workers, minus the wages they pay the workers in order to keep them alive to work the next day, plus the additional wages won by the workers through collective struggle via their trade unions. As a worker, you earn only a wage—unless you can’t find a job. This is entirely possible, since the capitalist has no interest in maintaining full employment. He just wants to exploit you. The more of you who are unemployed, the better off the capitalist is—because, by replacing you with a machine, he can cut his wage costs, and undercut his competitors’ prices. And he can use the unemployed as scabs when those who do work elect to go to strike against their low wages and poor conditions.
In addition, the capitalist system is bound by crisis:
in the short term, due to the usual boom and bust cycle caused by the capitalists going into a frenzy of investment, taking out credit to finance it, thus creating a “bubble,” and then finding out that they were producing much more than could be consumed by workers who are employed.
in the long-term, the secular waves of crisis noted by economist Nikolai Kondratieff. These occur because of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall as the capitalists cut their wage costs by replacing machines with workers. Since the exchange value of the commodity his workers produce is based upon their human labor, and profit is based upon exchanged value, profits shrink. In the short term, however, until their competitors develop the same or even more capital-intensive production process, the capitalist earns a “technological rent”. He can undercut his competitors’ prices, yet receive more of a share of the total mass of profit enjoyed by the capitalist class as a whole, above and beyond his actually reduced profit. Eventually, however, those of his competitors, who survive, will catch up with him, so his technological rent disappears, and each earns the lower profit rate. The capitalists compensate for this decrease in the rate of profit, by increasing their investment, in order to earn a higher mass of profit—by funneling back more of their profits in, by taking out more credit. However this compensation can only work until the mass of profit begins to decline as well. Now, once again, the system is headed for crisis—which can only be resolved in one of two ways:
depression and war, throwing much of the working class out of work, making them willing to work for starvation wages. Then the capitalists, smelling new a temporarily sustainable profit margins, will begin to invest again in production, including the production of new machines by some workers to replace othersiv
Socialist revolution, overthrowing the whole rotten system.
Thus poverty and crisis is endemic to the system. It is not fair. It is not directed, as Adam Smith, and von Mises, thought, by the hidden hand of a just God (Smith) or of the Sovereign, Hard-Working, Deserving (semi-divine) Consumer (von Mises). No matter how much people are willing to work, we do not get our needs met if we don’t have the money, because we’ve been replaced by a machine, or because the system has gone into recession or depression, or because we’re not paid well enough, even in boom times, to fulfill our basic needs.
It is true that while corporate monopolies use their power to control the State, and use the power of the State to oppress us. This is never more true than today with these mandates! And, until the nineteenth century, in the era of the American Revolution, of Paine and Smith, the State would indeed “charter” monopolies. But that is no longer true, since the early nineteenth century. Ever since, the State has no longer been responsible for the creation of monopolies. As much as Proudhon wanted to deny it, by the nineteenth century, the great monopolies, the multinational corporations, and the centralization of Capital in the hands now of a relative handful of technocratic, eugenicist billionaires, came directly and integrally out of the formally “free” capitalist market.
How? As Marx wrote in Das Kapital, precisely because capitalism is competitive, the capitalists, to cut their costs, continually replace workers with machines. This not only increases productivity, and provides them both a competitive edge, and a temporary “technological rent” their competitors will not in the meantime enjoy, But it also entails monopolization, or what Marx called the “centralization of capital”:
“…there is an increase in the minimum amount of individual capital necessary to carry on a business under its normal conditions. The smaller capitals, therefore, crowd into spheres of production which Modern Industry has only sporadically or incompletely got hold of. Here competition rages…. It always ends in the ruin of many small capitalists, whose capitals partly pass into the hands of their conquerors, partly vanish.”
Thus the State is not in the drivers seat of this process. It is these monopolies that control our society, and our State. They are also in control of the media, and the educational system. And they are hellbent on using their power to depopulate/enslave us. Thus it is not possible to stop this horror, either by electing better officials, or by walking away from their System. We have to smash this system. We need to overthrow it; or it will smash our very humanity.
But how do we do that?
The only class capable of fighting for and leading such a revolution against the present, destructive system is the working class. This class is not only the class most oppressed under capitalism, without the privileges of the middle classes. It also has the power to shut down production, bring the whole System down—and run it, them/ourselves: creating democratic socialism, by which we, the vast majority control our economy and society.vi This would make the Great Reset completely impossible. It would stop these maniacs in their tracks, and bring them to justice for all the carnage they have caused.
But won’t socialism lead to Stalinism? Isn’t socialism inherently tyrannical? Isn’t socialism behind the Great Reset? This is the charge of the conservative libertarians. But none of this is true either.
Firstly, as we have seen, there is nothing intrinsic to socialism that makes it tyrannical. Genuine socialism, is merely democracy, as applied to the economy. If we all own and control the means of production, we will not allow any of us to act upon our sociopathic, anti-social impulses, to hurt any of us. We’ll watch out for our own welfare—and each others. To believe that we instead have the right to pull away from our community, rather than pursue our individual greatness and desires within its democratic political and economic structures, is a sentiment fundamentally based, as Wilson Carey McWilliams wrote, on a will to exploit others, are to exist in parasitic fashion, as does the upper middle class today, off of the fruits of that exploitaton--and on egoistic narcissism.vii
It is capitalism, and not socialism, whose very essence leads to monopoly and tyranny—private property only for the very few, not for the vast majority. The Great Resetters are fascists, not socialists. Their slogan, “you will own nothing, and be happy,” sounds like the Nazi slogan, “Strength through joy.” If none of us owns anything, than somebody—the tiny corporate capitalist elite--will own everything. This is just a further intensification of corporate capitalist monopoly, which, besides the declining Prussian Junker aristocratic class, was the class that created Nazismviii.
This is the opposite of the socialism Marx and Engels thought must succeed capitalism. It resembles the "The Fundamentals of the Future Social System" written by the Russian nihilist (and murderer) Nechaev —a “communism” of complete regimentation of all aspects of life. Marx and Engels sarcastically attacked this “communism,” as follows:
“What a beautiful model of barrack-room communism! Here you have it all: communal eating, communal sleeping, assessors and offices regulating education, production, consumption, in a word, all social activity, and to crown all, ᴏᴜʀ ᴄᴏᴍᴍɪᴛᴛᴇᴇ, anonymous and unknown to anyone, as the supreme director. This is indeed the purest anti-authoritarianism!” ix
Marx and Engels’ project for a socialist society was far different, as revealed in the journal of their Communist League in 1847:
[Our goal is] “a democratic State wherein each party would be able by word or in writing to win a majority over to its ideas…. We are not among those communists who are out to destroy personal liberty, who wish to turn the world into one huge barrack or into a gigantic workhouse. . . . We have no desire to exchange freedom for equality. We are convinced … that in no social order will personal freedom be so assured as in a society based upon communal ownership.”x
Under genuine, Marxian socialism, as opposed to owning nothing: no, we will not own everything, collectively. Individually, we will still have our own personal possessionsxi. What we will collectively own, and control democratically, is the means of production, in which we work: factories, offices, mines, etc.--so that:
our labor can no longer be exploited.
everyone’s basic needs will be fulfilled.
we will never again face the threat of genocide or enslavement from these WEF maniacs: all of whom would now be in jail, serving life sentences.
Ok, but why, you may well ask, did the Russian, socialist revolution not turn out that way? Why did all other movements for “national liberation”--Eastern Europe, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba—all turn out the same totalitarian way?
The latter is easily answered. They turned out that way, because these “revolutions” occurred in backward, peasant societies, and were led by Stalinists who believed in creating a totalitarian caricature of socialism. But why did the first, Russian Revolution turn out that way? For similar reasons, as we will explore now.
Years after the death of Lenin, and the descent into Stalinism, one of Lenin’s great teachers, Karl Kautsky, analyzed denouement well in his pamphlet, Communism and Socialism (1932).
By that point, Kautsky, had unfortunately become what we now describe as a reformist and a social democrat. He supported the German Empire’s entry into World War I, for example. When he and other intellectuals broke away from the pro-war policy of the formerly anti-war, Marxist German Social Democracy, for form the Independent Social Democrats (the USPD), he and they failed to offer real leadership to the working class during the failed German Revolution of 1918.
I am not opposed to many of Lenin’s ideas (or what became known as his ideas) about leading the working class to take power. Let’s call this particular body of ideas, organizing principles, and strategies “Revolutionary Leninism,” as opposed to the Blanquist strategies and policies of “Leninism-in-Power” (which we must by and large oppose). The very idea that the intellectuals should try to work together with intellectually and politically advanced layers of the working class to build a “vanguard party,” actually comes out of Lenin’s teacher, Kautsky. It was the latter who said that socialist consciousness must be introduced to the working class by the socialist intellectuals. Unlike Kautsky, Leninists believe that this vanguard party should be disciplined, that it take a “party line” democratically, and stick to that line, so that all of the members of the party be accountable—leaders as well as followers. Nothing wrong with that, either—even if the actual members of the Bolshevik Party was much more interested in towing Lenin’s authoritarian line than was advocated by the theory of democratic centralism.
The problem was with Lenin’s ideas about how power should be maintained, once the working class attained it. Here, unfortunately, he fundamentally confused Marxian socialism with Blanquism.xii Blanqui was a French communist leader who believed that communism could be attained purely by the efforts of a small conspiratorial minority. To this, Marx counterpoised his “dictatorship of the proletariat” concept. Instead of a dictatorship by a small minority, as Blanqui desired, Marx called for the entire working class to rule the new socialist society, and move it toward communism, a society of democratic, communal ownership.
In a society where the proletariat numbered in the majority, it is easy to see that this can take place within radical democratic forms. But what about in societies like Russia in 1917, with a working class that was only a minority? The Russian working class was only 10% of the population. Most of the other Russians were peasants.
As always, Marx and Engels believed that multi-party democratic forms must be respected. The proletariat would still rule, by virtue of the fact that it was concentrated in cities, better organized, etc., than the peasantry. Thus the workers could exercise a profound influence upon the majority peasantry, help them understand the need for socialism, build peasant cooperatives. This process would be accelerated, as Marx and Engels wrote in their 1850 Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, if the rural workers took over the lands of the gentry, and farmed these collectively. This would provide healthy competition to the peasants, encouraging them, with state sponsorship, to form cooperatives to better compete.
Nevertheless, this leadership of the revolution by the minority proletariat would be respectful of the interests and desires of the peasants. A member of the Communist League, Karl Schapper, expressed his—newly acquired Blanquist--view that the proletariat in Germany, and in France, (in both, the proletariat still numbered only a minority), should just take power and use the guillotine, just like the bourgeois Jacobins in the French Revolution of 1789-1795, to suppress anyone among the majority who got in their way. This was at the last meeting of the Communist League on September 15, 1850 (no accident that this was the last meeting—Marx and Engels left over their disagreement with Schapper!). But Marx responded by saying that Germany was still too backward for any workers revolution. (Like Russia in 1917), France in 1850 was advanced enough industrially for such a revolution. Even here, however, since the workers were in the minority, if the workers took power, “we would have to carry out the peasants’ program—not ours.” That would be the democratic—and the only practical--thing to do.xiii
Russian “Marxist” followers of Blanquism like Lenin, accepted Marx’s idea that the working class of Russia was the only class that could overthrow Tsarism. But once this occurred, they believed they could do as Schapper advised, by creating a state of Terror in the society they controlled.
For Kautsky, this insidious, disastrous ideology grew prevalent in Russia, and especially with Lenin, precisely because of the backwardness of Russian society. Unlike the more advanced society of Germany, capitalism, and the working class, had not developed sufficiently enough to make clear to revolutionaries like Lenin that the working class could rule society democratically. Consciously, or unconsciously, Lenin believed that the intellectuals that led the Bolshevik Party, most notably, of course, Lenin himself, would need to rule Russia, autocratically. Naturally, he would be interested in the views and the welfare of the workers—but only the workers. And even there, if a minority, or, what actually occurred a few months after the October insurrection, even a majority, of the workers chose to support socialist parties other than the Bolsheviks—well then even their votes, wishes, interests, could be justly disregarded, because their consciousness had been corrupted by petit-bourgeois consciousness. In that instance, only the vanguard—the Bolshevik party itself, and then, only the Central Committee—embodied “true” socialist conscioiusness. And thus, according to Lenin’s Blanquist ideology, they alone should rule.
Thus Lenin sabotaged the demand of the other socialist parties—and of the great majority of the workers--to share power with the Bolsheviks after the October insurrection.xiv Instead, he created the Sovnarkom, or the Council of People’s Commissars. This executive body, controlled predominantly by the Bolsheviks, was in theory accountable to the Soviets, but in actual fact, was not. Then, in the Spring of 1918, the opposition parties began to win votes of majority support from the workers and peasants, because of failure of the Bolsheviks, like the previous, bourgeois, Provisional Government, to provide material improvements. Instead of sharing power and honoring these victories, however, the Bolsheviks repressed these parties. At first this repression carried out by local branches of the Bolshevik party where these opposition parties had won their victories. But Lenin, on the basis of his Blanquist ideology, did nothing to stop it. Out of this repression there grew a corrupt, parasitic bureaucracy, the Terror as instituted by the Cheka, and finally the growth of Stalinist totalitarianism. All of this is well documented by Karl Kautsky, as well as more recently by historian Orlando Figes, in his A People’s Tragedy and Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism..xv
But neither Kautsky, nor any other socialist who is unwilling to deny the ugly truth that Leninism in Power was tyrannical, and Blanquist, would accept the idea that there is something intrinsic to socialism which led to this. This was instead about the backwardness of Russian society, and the Blanquism, to which it led.
One final note. Besides the scientism they share with the liberals, I firmly believe there is an “elective affinity” between the willingness of nearly all Leninists, Trotskyists (forget about the Stalinists or the Maoists, because they’re hopeless) to whitewash the sins of Leninism-in-Power—and their capitulation to Covid repression. If you believe that Lenin had the right and duty to systematically thwart the democratic impulse of many of his fellow Bolsheviks to rule in coalition with the other parties of the working class and peasantry, that he somehow had the right instead to be autocratic, to terrorize Russian society, promote mob violence and theft with the slogan “loot the looters”, express contempt for the presumption of innocence as so much “pacifist-Quakerism” (Trotsky), and set in motion a campaign to torture and murder hundreds of thousands of innocent people, suppress synagogues and churches, shoot clergy, etc., make a virtue of suppressing all individualism, as well as individual rights, in favor of the “collective,” and that he was somehow “forced” to do all this against his will, when the historical evidence shows quite the opposite, then you are promoting a “culture of the lie.” It is just as mendacious as W.E.B. Dubois, in his great work Black Reconstruction, described the “genteel” Jim Crow South. From this bad faith, it is not a big step away from believing that Bill Gates and Tony Fauci have, without any scientific evidence, the right to put a “spike shot” in every single human being on the planet. To paraphrase Forrest Gump, authoritarianism is, as authoritarianism has done. As Erich Fromm might have said, projecting one’s early feelings of filial piety upon sociopathic officials gets to be a bad habit.xvi
But our enemy, again, is not socialism. Socialism is the way out of this horror. Our enemy is technocratic fascism, based solidly upon the monopolistic tendencies inherent in capitalism, and the scientistic and authoritarian modes of thought that prop it up.
iNot to be confused with the pro-mandate, pro-cancel culture social democrats who call themselves the “Democratic Socialists of America”.
iiSee Kees van der Pijl, States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check. Clarity Press, 2022. He argues that the tiny ruling class is intent upon enslaving us via “transhumanism,” because they fear that their introduction of “artificial intelligence” will put so many of us out of work, that they will face a global rebellion, which was already happening before the “pandemic”: a new version of the Revolutions that swept Europe in 1848 (or a new 1968). See also Ted Reese, “Capital’s profitability now depends on lockdowns, acute social enclosure, and medical tyranny,” at grossmanite.wixsite.com And watch these interviews: interview by Dr. Bryan Ardis with Dr. Carrie Madej and Pfizer whistleblower and researcher Karen Kingston: they present evidence that these shots create self-assembling nanobot networks as the basis for biomechanical enslavement. Karen Kingston and Dr. Carrie Madej - The Dr. Ardis Show (1 of 2) (ugetube.com). And this interview with undertaker Jon Looney, who believes that these shots are “culling” the population: UK Undertaker John O'Looney: There Is Some Sort Of 'White Crap' Growing In People (brandnewtube.com)
iiiAt the root of this abject capitulation by most of both the liberals and the socialists, is the ideology of scientism. I’ve written about this ideology in another article, see The Politics and Social Psychology of Complicity with this Insanity – Red Fire (redfireonline.com) Within these liberal and socialist movements, this scientism blossomed and gave rise to much poisonous fruit, with the cult of denial that traditional vaccines caused any neurological or other damage, or death. This was the Trojan Horse that has encouraged authoritarianism and effective class collaboration to flourish in these movements: and a greater insensitivity to the concerns of working people, especially the victims/survivors of these jabs. The economic basis for these movements’ betrayals lies with the class nature of their members. They are either members of, or enthralled by, the “happy idiots” of professional managerial class, including the labor aristocracy and its well-heeled trade union bureaucrats, described by Kees Van der Pijl (States of Emergency: Keeping the Global Population in Check, Clarity Press, 2022) as the “cosmopolitan cadre” for the oligarchs and their Great Reset.
iv See Lewis Corey, The Decline of American Capitalism, 1934, at Lewis Corey: The Decline of American Capitalism (1934) (marxists.org). As argued before—see note ii—it is in anticipation of a global rebellion in response to the deepening crisis of capitalism today, that the ruling elite has resorted to their insane transhuman “Great Reset” scheme, to either depopulate the globe, or enslave the survivors biomechanically, via the passports and other social controls, and the 5G-directed self-assembling nano-bot systems they are placing in the bodies of the vaxxed.
v Karl Marx, Capital, v. I, Chapter 25. Economic Manuscripts: Capital Vol. I – Chapter Twenty-Five (marxists.org).
vi Dr. Michael Rectenwald is a former New York University cultural studies professor, driven out of his position there by faux-liberal woke snowflakes. He has since become a right-wing renegade from Marxism, and has attempted to revive the neo-classical economic theories of von Mises. Von Mises claimed that Marx’s labor theory of value is fallacious, and that marginal utility—how much people want or need a commodity--determines a commodity’s price. And this includes the price of workers wages. Thus there is no such thing as capitalist exploitation. Workers get the wage they deserve. Thus, a la Adam Smith, the capitalist system provides the best products at the lowest possible price, and meets our needs, far better than a socialist planned economy ever could.
But the labor theory of value was not invented by Marx. (And, btw, contrary to Rectenwald’s libelous, unfounded assertion, Marx never “admitted” that he could find no relation between value and price). Instead, the theory was invented by his bourgeois classical economic predecessors, Adam Smith and David Ricardo. They come to this through a process of deduction. There is no other possible stable basis for a comparison of prices between different commodities. Marginal utility is too subjective to provide such a basis. The basis for the price of any commodity is the value created by the human labor that produced it. And the same holds true for the price of the wage. The worker is not given the value of the labor he creates. He creates it—for the capitalist. His wage is based upon the labor required to produce his labor power: only the food, clothing, and shelter required to make it possible for him to come back to work the next day. By the lights of the market, this is fair. The capitalist is paying the value of the human labor required to produce the commodity—which just so happens to be the workers’ labor power. But in human terms, that is exploitation: the same as when the master exploited his slaves in ancient society, or the lord exploited his serfs in feudal society. As Abraham Lincoln said in one of his debates with Stephen Douglas, “It is the same spirit that says, ‘You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.’ No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.”Abraham Lincoln, The Lincoln-Douglas Debates, “You toil and work and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.” Lincoln | Rights.com
As for von Mises’ and Rectenwald’s assertion that a democratically planned economy cannot sensitively meet people’s needs, this has been refuted by Ernest Mandel, In Defence of Socialist Planning, New Left Review, I/159, September/October 1986. And in his recent States of Emergency, van der Pijl documents that cybernetic advances in recent decades have made sensitive democratic economic planning even more of a practical reality.
vii Wilson Carey McWilliams, The Idea of Fraternity in America. University of California Press, 1973. In the Epilogue: A Note on Generation and Degeneration
viii Paul Winkler, The Thousand Year Conspiracy: Secret Germany Behind the Mask. 1943
ix Marx, Karl, 1818-1883. (1988). Karl Marx, Frederick Engels : collected works, volume 23. New York: International Publishers. pp. 542–543. cf. Article, “Barracks Communism” wikipedia. Barracks communism - Wikipedia
x the Kommuniste Zeitschrifte, (Journal of the Communist League) September 1847.
xiAs a friend of mine recently wrote me: “Under socialism ownership of society's productive forces will be socialized. [This] does not mean EVERYTHING will be collectively owned. People will still have personal possessions, perhaps a home, etc. No one can march into my space and take possession of my garden hose without my consent. As long as I am alive my double bass will be my possession, after which it can be owned by someone else.”
xiiIt is well documented that Marx and Engels profoundly disagreed with Blanqui’s ideas about how communists should attain as well as hold on to power, as advocated by Blanquists both without, and within, Marx and Engels’ Communist League. The above passage, calling for a democratic, multi-party form of socialism in 1847, was probably written by Karl Schapper. But, perhaps demoralized by the failure of the Revolutions of 1848, Schapper allied himself with Willich, and both of them supported Blanquist ideas about a minority workers dictatorship in Germany during the next revolution. Marx expressed his fundamental opposition to this idea, and it was a big part of why the League split up after that meeting, on September 15, 1850. See Richard N. Hunt, The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels, Vol. I, Marxism and Totalitarian Democracy, 1818-1850, University of Pittsburgh, 241-et al. 1974.
xiiiHunt, Ibid., and see Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, vol. 3, The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, Monthly Review Press, 1987, and the accompanying volume, ‘The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin. Monthly Review Press, 1987. For Marx and Engels, as with countless other intellectuals throughout the ages—Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Montesquieu and Rousseau, Tom Paine, Rosa Luxemburg, up through our own Dr. Mattias Desmet—tyranny is not practical, because it is not sustainable. It’s dysfunctional and bound to collapse.
xivKautsky “bends the stick” too far in a conservative political doctrine when he writes as though such unity should always be observed; that the Bolsheviks were wrong to break with the Mensheviks years decades before the October revolution. This idea of “unity for unity’s sake” makes it impossible to preserve socialist revolutionary radicalism against the co-optive force and conservatizing, reformist pressure of bourgeois society—which is what led to the betrayal of socialism in favor of voting for war credits for WWI by the German Social Democrats. The union bureaucrats became the real, conservative leaders of the SPD, turning the whole party to the Right. So much so, that after the war, its leaders, Ebert, Scheidemann, and Noske, hired the nucleus of the future Nazi movement, the Freikorps, to assassinate leaders, who had once been leaders themselves of the SPD, of the Leftwing Spartacist Bund: Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, and then later, Leo Jogiches, and suppress the German Revolution. As Sidney Hook observed, in his “Anatomy of the Popular Front,” within the “unity” Kautsky promoted, “The program of the group farthest to its right prevails and must prevail for this is the purchase price of its alliance.” (Partisan Review, v. 6, no. 3, Spring 1939, p. 34)
Instead of “unity,” what is needed is the Leninist united front: where different parties of the working class agree to “march separately”--free to express their own points of view, and organize on the basis of their separate programs—yet “strike together”: in mass strikes and other actions: including the formation of socialist governments! Lenin stressed the importance of this “front” in the Soviets during the summer of 1917, offering for the Bolsheviks to serve as a “loyal opposition” if the then majority socialist parties would take power through the soviets. But the day after the insurrection, now that they had gained the support of the majority, Lenin conveniently forgot about his previous offer (we would be the loyal opposition to your majority—but you can’t offer us any now that we’ve taken power as the majority!) in order to erect their one-party state. Here is a brilliant example of Leninism in Power coming into start contradiction with Revolutionary Leninism. They should have maintained, and the other socialist parties should have demanded (unfortunately, except for the Left SRs, they all just walked out instead), the continuance of this united front, in order to create a democratic, multiparty, socialist coalition in the soviets.
xv Karl Kautsky, Communism and Socialsm, 1932. See especially Chapter 4, at Karl Kautsky: Communism and Socialism (Chap.4) (marxists.org) . Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy. Jonathan Cape, 1996; Samuel Farber, Before Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy, Verso Press, 1990.
xvi See Erich Fromm, “The State as Educator: On the Psychology of Criminal Justice,” in Erich Fromm and Critical Criminology: Beyond the Punitive Society, by Erich Fromm, Kevin J. Anderson and Richard Quinney, University of Illinois Press, 2000.