 Within traditional Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, socialism and communism refer to different stages of a new mode of production. However, the usage of these terms as a form of political identification have always had different connotations historically. Often times, Right-Wingers love to repeat the fairytale - that 'communism,' promising 'utopia,' was a completely benign term that everyone was naive about. It was associated with rainbows and sunshine... Until it was 'put into practice' and 999 trillion people were massacred and starved. According to this mythology, naive 'idealists' did not realize how 'scary' communism was, until Communists actually seized power. But the truth is that communism HAS ALWAYS been a 'bad word.' COMMUNISM - THE SPECTRE HAUNTING EUROPE During the early 19th century, communism was associated with riotous working class revolutionaries throughout Europe. Masses of people, ordinary people on the street, believed there was something fundamentally wrong and rotten about the state of Europe. Meanwhile, 'Socialism' referred to enlightened reformers and experimental utopians, who posed no threat to the ruling capitalist class order. In fact, many members of the ruling class, in a philanthropic way, were actually drawn to 'socialism.' Both socialists and communists understood there was something wrong with the emerging capitalist society. But "socialists" treated this problem as something that could be solved without any real trouble. At this time, older, more traditional relations were breaking down. Peasants, forced off of their land, were being herded into cities to become proletarians. The old feudal order and everything upon which it rested fundamentally broke down. All it's vestiges took the form of a sick and twisted hypocrisy, disguising the naked brutality of the new capitalist order - founded upon the degradation, humiliation, and rapacious exploitation of man by man. Vast swaths of people were crammed into slums and factories, treated worse than animals. Children were not spared. Women were driven into prostitution on a mass scale. Diseased, overcrowded, overworked, and depleted of any spiritual morale - such was the fate of Western Europe's peasant majority. Enlightened 'Socialists' sought to provide relief from this brutality. But there was something a little bit twisted about this. They regarded the evils and ills of the system as mere 'quirks' to be remedied, thus treating a fundamental existential loss of humanity as a mere utilitarian question - treating the very evils of capitalism under the utilitarian and crude logic of capitalism itself. Today, this is reminiscent of the way Silicon Valley provides "solutions" and "hacks" to the outrageous problems of capitalism. No food? Have some soylent. No housing? Try pod sharing. The more "metaphysical" (Marx would say "human") questions - of justice, existence, morality, dignity, honor, meaning - were brushed under the rug by the "Socialists." There was something craven about the "socialists." They were conciliatory to the established powers. They did not have the courage to speak the truth. During this period, communists were those who recognized something fundamentally rotten, false, hypocritical, and bankrupt about the emerging and "restored" (after Metternich) Europe. They rejected the hypocrisy of the reactionaries. They rejected the "remedies" of the "Socialists." They insisted upon a FUNDAMENTAL position of existential truth and authenticity. However inconvenient, scandalous, and "terrifying" it was to high society. In the words of Fredrich Engels in his preface to the Communist Manifesto: "Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist." The French revolution revealed the great extent of the ancien regime's corruption. But it did not recognize the root cause of society's growing division. There began to emerge a great Elephant in the room. The people began to acquire the awareness - they were being deprived of their economic rights on a mass scale. In a manner so open, so notorious, and so brazen that not even the most exploitative of Feudal lords, ever faced with the prospect of peasant rebellion, could have conceived of doing against their serfs. Communists, from the beginning, represented an inconvenient truth. That something was killed with the rise of capitalism - the common, social substance of mankind. And yet it continued to haunt Europe, as a fundamental and unavoidable question looming over it. And all the great powers of Europe were terrified of the mere whisper of this - because they too knew it on an unconscious level. People could no longer ignore the obvious truth: Something was lost that MUST be restored. And it could not be restored by returning to the past, for its loss was an indictment on the entire history of private property itself. Thus, there was a "spectre" of Communism. The ghosts of voiceless and forgotten martyrs of not only of capitalism but all European history (which Micheal Hudson documents as the domination of creditor classes). A ghost that reminded Europe of a fundamental irrationality and problem it couldn't escape from. Communists were not politicians, policy makers, philanthropists, "problem solvers." They were those who insisted upon a fundamental and total "metaphysical" (as 'positivists' would call it) truth. They were also not anarchists. They insisted upon a LOST history, a LOST future, and a LOST civilization. By rejecting private property, they were rejecting the institution that disguised and obstructed a fundamental confrontation with a common historical situation and reality. One that, in a sense, already existed, but subject to continual erasure, forgetting, and being swept under the rug. All the wealth of society was increasingly and in a way unprecedented being produced in common, yet appropriated privately to a likewise unprecedented degree. Communists didn't propose a "utopia." They insisted upon a sober, authentic, and brutally honest confrontation with the present reality - of robbery, exploitation, injustice, and the destruction of humanity itself. Communists were not "proposing" a new system or alternative. They were, to the terror of Europe's crowned heads and capitalists - declaring the existence of an entirely different cosmology, a forgotten and repressed universal whole of existence. This cosmology was "different" - yet paradoxically so familiar. Because it's existence, weighing on the guilty conscience of all European society, was repressed. Everyone knew that the brutality and savagery of capitalism was contrary to the very place mankind, the highest of God's creation, had within universal existence. The inconvenient and unspeakable truth- that humanity itself had fallen in a fundamental way, that all older conventions were obsolete, that the true history of Europe, in its entirety, was too much for the established powers of Europe to bare. "Socialists" may have proposed a completely new "system." But they did not question the fundamental cosmology, the total horizon of symbolic meaning itself - within the established capitalist order. They did not recognize that from the perspective of universal existence itself, the prevailing order was condemned. They could only ever take a one-sided perspective, based on philanthropy, 'problem solving,' or even 'engineering.' They did not reckon with the whole of history and human existence itself - what Engels described as the demand for "total social change." THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC REALPOLITIK And after decades, Europe eventually did witness the rise of a powerful 'socialist' or Social Democratic movement. The phrase 'communism' was discarded for 'social democracy,' as a form of political realpolitik. Communism was treated as a later stage of consciousness for what was a growing yet persecuted movement. Because society was not ready - either legally or ideologically - for the total change implied by that word, it was regarded as more realistic to place less emphasis on it. The social democrats, because of their realpolitik, managed to create large and successful mass movements. But over time, they forgot their original mission. They became corrupted by the legalism, the convenience, and the institutionalization of the worker's cause. They ceased to be leaders of a totally new society. They, rather, became 'part' of society. COMMUNISM - LENIN'S REVOLUTIONARY DYNASTY It was Lenin who reintroduced the word Communism back into the political history of mankind. Not because Lenin was an anarchist who rejected realpolitik, and not because he was an ideological fanatic. It was because, after reading Hegel in solitude, he had the courage to accept the decisive significance of the Communist outlook in new and crucial situation. In the beginning, the communists goals were ambiguous and ill-defined. All they had was their authenticity, their willingness to accept the full and total implications of history, regardless of how terrifying the consequences. But Lenin, in his genius, succeeded in situating the whole development of Social-Democracy up until the decisive point as communism itself in the form of political struggle. Lenin restored the greater cosmological and "metaphysical" significance of politics. Rather than a "respectable" branch of bourgeois society, politics was the staging ground, the battlefield, and the fundamental dimension of "metaphysical" struggle. (By "metaphysical" one refers to the positivist pejorative - for of course, what is really meant is dialectical in the fullest sense) Politics was absolute struggle to the death. Politics for Lenin meant the same thing that it did for Gilgamesh or for Cyrus the Great. The whole of universal existence was imperiled in it. It is not a 'part' of society. It is the total existence of a society at war with itself. It is the active form of society's most fundamental contradiction, the class struggle. The goal of Communists was the revolutionary seizure of state power, under a dictatorship of the proletariat. Communists were MILITANTS fighting a WAR - as Clausewitz said, war is an extension of politics and vice versa. War for the seizure of state power from the capitalist class, from the bloodsuckers and exploiters of humanity. Lenin set all world imperialism ablaze. No Empire could survive the judgement of the stars. Lenin's flame was the seed of a new, revolutionary dynasty, whose dominion would be greater and more exalted than all the obsolete powers of old Europe. The dynastic succession was not based on individual blood. But on the revolutionary essence of history itself. The dynasty of Marxism-Leninism, and its five heads - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao. Lenin restored the cosmological significance of Communist struggle - the struggle for existence, meaning, humanity, etc. was now embedded in a nexus of global geopolitics that became the battleground for world history itself. Before and after Lenin's revolution, a new imperialist ruling class began to usurp all the formal and constitutional rights of the people. It was destroying their SOVEREIGNTY. Imperialism and fascism violated the very social contract that the bourgeois class had disguised its dictatorship in the name of. They trampled on the liberties of their own people - while violating the right of self determination of other nations. They suffocated and destroyed all outlets for the people's sovereignty. And so on the basis of violating legitimate, historically constituted social contract of the people - they defined the terms of a new war. The war did not begin with 'communist idealists' proposing a new system from scratch. It began with Communists defending the integrity of the people's common history itself. Communism is not about forcing a new system on the people. It is about leading and educating the masses as they discover how the society, government, etc. familiar and legitimate to them is collapsing according to contradictions the Communists alone understand. Leninism is not a rejection of realism. It IS realism - the highest insight into the contradictions driving world history itself. It differed from social democracy precisely in that it refused to shy away from the naked Clausewitzean realism of class struggle, which was a WAR. The clausewitzean realism of the state, which is an instrument of violent dictatorship by the exploited class over the exploiters. Leninism was never a regress into infantilism and a rejection of professionalism or mature, legal activity. Leninism is, in addition to being a revolutionary outlook, also a wisdom: Not simply an active rejection of the entire social order, but a RECOGNITION that it is being broken down according to its own contradictions. COMMUNISM TODAY Now, in the 21st century, after the rise of many great Communist states, what meaning does Communism have? The new significance of Communism is that it has become a fully integral historical outlook. The LOST history and civilization it insists upon is REAL and TANGIBLE (the Soviet Union). The specter is real - the ghost of Soviet Communism and Lenin's revolution. Communism today re-litigates the so-called American-led "New World Order" at the fundamental level. It rejects the history written by the "victors" of the cold war. It insists upon the fact that the world is running away from the truth- the forgotten truth of world Communist struggle. Communists reject the entire American-led world order, and it's falsification of history. The Soviet Union did not need to "collapse." The Berlin wall did not need to "fall." In fact, there was no irreversible "collapse." Only an intermittent period of confusion and disarray. A period that is now on the cusp of ending. The "collapse" was the consequence of contradictions in the world Communist movement (the Sino Soviet dispute, the cultural revolution) not the supremacy or superiority of the capitalist bloc. The enduring strength of victorious China, which now drives almost all world economic growth, is proof of this fact. To be a Communist today, is to insist upon the integrity not only of all world-history, but of the history of Communism in particular. For this contains the key to everything about the nature of the current global order. Communists are not "Democratic Socialists" who compromise with the tall-tales and spooky-stories about "totalitarianism" spun by the prostitutes of the American plutocracy. We defend Stalin. We defend Mao. We defend dictatorship. We defend Cheka. We defend Soviet Justice (late 1930's). We defend Tanks in Budapest and Prague. We defend Cultural Revolution. We defend 'authoritarian' China. We are not "socialists." We are COMMUNISTS. We are not mere "socialists" who neglect the dimension of WAR and all its ugly realities in class struggle. War is ugly. Such is its nature. The question is - what war is worth fighting for? Communists rebuke the liberal and 'conservative' hypocrites who lament the brutality of 'Communist terror.' They happily facilitate, and at best, passively tolerate, several wars of unprecedented scale and brutality, responsible for the murder of countless millions and the devastation of entire nations, for the financial gain of the capitalist class. WAR will be fought either way. Which war are you fighting for? Communists ARE "tankies." We are here to herald the collapse of the entire global system with tanks, not flowers. Communists see the rational integrity of all world history since and even before Lenin's revolution. In all its cunning, its brilliance. We see the rational necessity of everything that has happened up until this point. Our mission is to remind mankind that this struggle, this war never ended. Only - one side stopped fighting. Not because of the invincibility of America's ruling class. But because they lost their morale, their spiritual conviction, their belief. Many declare Communism to be "dead." But when has that ever stopped communists? Recall the opening lines of the Manifesto: This fateful struggle began with a ghost haunting Europe. Now this ghost haunts the world. The restoration of the Communist cause on a planetary scale is inescapable and unavoidable. Resist it in vain. Continue to spin your fairy tales and mythologies in vain. Continue to lie and slander the heroic and sacred history. Your words will echo less into the future of world history than a dog barking at its own shit. You cannot stop the confrontation that is to come. You cannot stop history itself. AuthorHaz Al-Din This article was produced by Haz Al-Din on X. Archives September 2024
1 Comment
Siden04
10/6/2024 02:30:32 am
FWIW, long before his deification, Stalin's understanding of socialism was sound: Leave a Reply. |
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