Policy of the "Stupid Pricks" (4)

"After having lunch with chinese cuisine in a well-known Chinese Food restaurant,' Peace lily went on, "our minister wanted to know, "'By the way, if this project is being implemented, who will work on it?'

'O don't worry, said our investor, 'we have abundant labors, so we will bring in workers from China to do the work.'

'But, what about the local labors?' asked the minister.

'Oh, they can take part, but on condition that they must master Chinese languages, including Beijingese, Hanyu, Putonghua, Mandarin, Cantonese, and even Tibetan.

'But, this is a local project, why does it have to be in Chinese?' asked the minister.

'That is our requirement, and that's your misery!' replied our investor.

The minister assumed, if he refused, perhaps, even 'five times of apocalypse,' there would be 'no development if no investment,' and also 'the money will be dissapeared!' he thought like a businessman managed a country.

Seeing the minister was a little tense, our investor telling a joke, 'A farm worker greets Josef Stalin at his potato farm.

'Comrade Stalin, we have so many potatoes that, piled one on top of the other, they would reach all the way to God,' the farmer excitedly tells his leader.

'But God does not exist,' replies Stalin.

'Exactly,' says the farmer. 'Neither do the potatoes.'

'Tell me what you know about Communism,' asked the minister. While putting away the plate containing Egg Foo Yung he'd finished, our investor said, 'People in 1989-91 had to pinch themselves to make sure they were not hallucinating. Something extraordinary had happened in world politics. Suddenly communism had collapsed. Until then it had been one of the most powerful and widespread types of modern state. Coming to power in the October 1917 Revolution in Russia, Lenin and his comrades established an order which was reproduced in eastern Europe, China, East Asia, Cuba and elsewhere after the Second World War. In 1989 this communist order was removed from the face of Europe. In 1991 the same thing happened in the Soviet Union. Although China still claimed to be communist, its fundamental economic reforms meant that this was no longer accurate as a comprehensive description. Communist parties clung on to office in a few countries such as North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba; their geopolitical importance was a long way short of the power and prestige of the ‘world communist movement’ in its years of pomp. Communism was fast becoming a historical relic.

If one hundred years after the October Revolution of 1917 communism has become history, it cannot simply be confined to the past. The projects and experiences of world revolution, noncapitalist economies and collectivized societies of the twentieth century are a matter for reflection in terms of historiography, memory and the legacies they left behind. The endurance of communist regimes in some Asian countries and the integration of their economies into globalized capitalism (with the exception of North Korea) have stimulated interest, analysis and questions. This is particularly the case in light of postsocialist China’s influence in the world economy and world politics.

The seeds of modern communism germinated long before the twentieth century. The word itself—communism—was invented late, gaining widespread currency in French, German and English only in the 1840s. It has consistently denoted a desire to dig up the foundations of society and rebuild. Communists have never been half hearted about their purposes. They have focused a constant hatred of the existing order on state and economy. They have suggested that only they—and not their many rivals the political left—have the doctrinal and practical potential to transform human affairs. Some kind of egalitarianism lasted in their objectives on Determination and impatience to achieve change have been permanent features. The commitment to militant organisation has endured. But communism itself has not ceased to defy attempts at definition. No final meeting of minds is likely. One communist’s communism is another communist’s anti-communism, and this is a situation unlikely to change, says Robert Service.

What became known as communism in the twentieth century was the outcome of many influences. Its principal expression was the official ideology of the USSR and other communist states. Marx and Engels themselves—the originators of the doctrines which became known as Marxism—acknowledged three main sources of inspiration. Politically they were deeply affected by what they learned about Maximilien Robespierre and other radical politicians in the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. In economics they admitted to having drawn strongly on the ideas of David Ricardo and other theorists who examined the extraordinary propulsive energies in production and commerce unleashed by capitalism in the United Kingdom. Philosophically they were fascinated by the writings of Hegel. Their fellow German had, insisted that history proceeds through stages which condition the way a humankind thinks and acts and that the great changes in social life not merely of a superficial or cyclical character: Hegel regarded the historical record as a sequence of progress towards an ever better condition of people and things.

Marxism’s co-founders were never uncritical admirers of Robespierre, Ricardo and Hegel. Indeed, Marx claimed to have turned Hegel upside down; and, of course, he neither accepted Robespierre’s specific political analysis nor condoned Ricardo’s advocacy of private enterprise.

Marx and Engels thought of themselves as working to synthesise the crucial discoveries of those who had influenced them; and they went on developing this synthesis through their middle and late careers. Both wished to be taken seriously as propagators of ‘modern’, ‘scientific’ and ‘contemporary’ communism. Their ideas were not to be sullied by association with most previous and contemporary thinkers. They were men in a hurry; they thought they were living at the end of the capitalist era and that the communist era was nigh. Neither had an introspective personality—and, apart from Marx’s brief comment on Robespierre, Ricardo and Hegel, they seldom enquired about the influences which had shaped their world-view.

Crucial to Marxism was the dream of apocalypse followed by paradise. This kind of thinking existed in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Marx had been brought up in a Jewish family which converted to Christianity; the Engels family were Protestants. Marx and Engels as atheists later in their lives denied that true believers would be rewarded by eternity in heaven; instead they contended that they and their supporters would create the perfect society down here on earth. Christian doctrine predicted that unbelievers would meet a miserable end at the return of the Messiah. Likewise, according to the founders of Marxism, those who obstructed the advance of communism to supremacy would be trampled underfoot. The ruling classes of the day would come to rue their lordship over humankind.

Politics and economics were not the only matter exercising the minds of the radicals. By the early nineteenth century a strong trend had emerged among many thinkers. Physics, biology and chemistry made strides forwards greater than any achieved in the previous two millennia, For most thinking people—at least those who were not hewing coal, working weaving machines or digging canals—a positive excitement was in the air. They gulped it down. Then along came Darwin. Origin of the Species oxygenated intellectual life around the planet. Darwin’s achievement was to link the natural and human sciences. His theory of evolution postulated that the various animal species derived over millions of years from crude, simple-life forms which adapted themselves to their physical environment in a struggle which ended in the 'survival of the fittest.' Higher forms of life supplented lower ones. This way of thinking had enormous appeal for radical militants who eulogised the need for political battle and asserted that one specific group—the working class—would win it.

Marx and Engels thought in terms of stages of transformation which involved ruptures of a macroscopic nature. Despite their admiration for Darwin, they were drawn to notions of sharp breaks between one kind of political and social ‘order’ and another. A preoccupation with historical stages from the beginning of recorded time to the present was not new. The Greeks since the poet Hesiod, if not before, had believed that the golden age had yielded to the silver and then to the bronze. Hesiod was a pessimist: each age was worse than the one before. Later thinkers contended that big changes were inevitable but that deterioration was not inevitable. Down to Giambattista Vico in the eighteenth century, they argued that transformations were of a cyclical kind. Things underwent alteration but after time reverted to their original condition—and then, needless to say, they moved further round the old circle. Not everyone accepted such ways of thinking.

The founders of Marxism put class struggle at the forefront of their analysis; they said the working class (or the proletariat ) would remake the politics, economics and culture of the entire world. Messianism had crept in again here. Judaism and Christianity projected the arrival on earth of a Saviour who would strike down the enemies of God and raise up a community of perfection. Salvation according to Marx and Engels would come not through an individual, but through a whole class. The proletariat’s experience of degradation under capitalism would give it the motive to change the nature of society; and its industrial training and organisation would enable it to carry its task through to completion. The collective endeavour of socialist workers would transform the life of well-meaning people—and those who offered resistance would be suppressed.

Politics, they suggested, would cease to exist. This was no new idea. Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the late eighteenth century had suggested that public affairs ought to be guided by what he called the General Will. Marx and Engels followed Machiavelli in rejecting morality principle for action. They wanted to focus a glacial eye on their situation. They embraced scientific principles of analysis and recommendation. This was a legacy of the European Enlightenment. Scottish, French and English thinkers exercised a huge impact on them. David Hume and Voltaire had taken a scalpel to the fat of superstition and prejudice.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels provided the inspiration for twentieth century communism. No one else so effectively captivated minds on the political far left or drew other minds to that standpoint. The gusto of their writings and their politicking was tremendous. Few other variants of communist ideology any longer came under consideration outside the rarefied atmosphere of scholarly or sectarian groups. Marxism and communism for most people were co-extensive. The kind of Marxism which they knew about was to a greater or lesser extent linked to the interpretation offered by Lenin and the makers of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.

They died in exile in the United Kingdom. Marx expired on 14 March 1883 in his family house in north London. Engels lived a dozen years more; he passed away on 5 August 1895. Both were Germans. They were bright students. They were well schooled; they read voraciously in European literature and contemporary public debates—Marx was especially expert in ancient Greek philosophy. They quickly rejected the staid bourgeois life projected for them.

They had declared in The Communist Manifesto: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German policespies. They declared, with more than a little exaggeration: ‘Communism is already acknowledged by all European powers to be itself a power.’

The future was specified. Marx and Engels predicted a final struggle between the ‘bourgeoisie’ and the ‘proletariat’ under capitalism. The outcome, they said, was inevitable: the supremacy of the proletariat. The proletariat was the name used increasingly by socialist intellectuals for the working class. Marx and Engels saw employed workers as the future saviour of mankind. They gave little mind to the unemployed. They, like most bourgeois of the period, had no time for those people at the very base of society who had no regular occupation; they despised the so-called lumpenproletariat as a bunch of thieves and indolent ne’erdo-wells. The great revolution, they believed, required an active force of organised, skilled and literate industrial labourers.

The ultimate objective for Marx and Engels was the creation of a worldwide communist society. They believed that communism had existed in the distant centuries before ‘class society’ came into being. The human species had supposedly known no hierarchy, alienation, exploitation or oppression. Marx and Engels predicted that such perfection could and inevitably would be reproduced after the overthrow of capitalism. ‘Modern communism’, however, would have the benefits of the latest technology rather than flint-stones. It would be generated by global proletarian solidarity rather than by disparate groups of illiterate, innumerate cavemen. And it would put an end to all forms of hierarchy.

Politics would come to an end. The state would cease to exist. There would be no distinctions of personal rank and power. All would engage in self-administration on an equal basis. Marx and Engels chastised communists and socialists who would settle for anything less. They were maximalists. No compromise with capitalism or parliamentarism was acceptable to them. They did not think of themselves as offering the watchword of ‘all or nothing’ in their politics. They saw communism as the inevitable last stage in human history; they rejected their predecessors and rival contemporaries as ‘utopian’ thinkers who lacked a scientific understanding.'"

"You might say, 'Why talk about Communism, they have already disbanded anyway!'" said Peace lily. "But let's observe, forty-five years after democracy apparently triumphed over communism without a final struggle, nearly thirty years on, the anti-communist victory of 1989 seemed more problematic. Authoritarianism without a mass party has recovered in Russia, and even in countries earlier designated as 'the West'. The communist regime in China, of course, did not yield: 1989's demonstrations in Beijing were crushed. Still Chinese communism was on its way to developing a new hybrid authoritarian structure that allowed for capitalism without democracy.

We'll continue our investor story in the next session, bi 'idhnillah."

Then Peace lily sang a song,

Deep in the dark, I don't need the light

There's a ghost inside me

It all belongs to the other side

We live, we love, we lie ***)

[Session 5]
[Session 3]

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