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The Historic Break between Marxism and Communism |
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"If Marxism faces a future in the twenty-first century, it will have to better its attempts at a unifying theory. Furthermore, it will have to formulate the means by which to reach a public increasingly stripped of the rational tools by which to understand the communist sentiment in human actions."
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Twenty-first century Marxism is already being defined by its historic break from communism. Irrespective of the drama it represents on the planetary scale of political and economic struggle, the break changes nothing regarding the underlying reality of communism. For communal desire for fairness is a sentiment or fact of human experience. No such desire can be separate from the prescriptive challenge whereby the ultimate measure for our actions is the good they create for all. In its unthought form, communism defines the ultimate human projection of collective and group living. Egalitarism, which is another name for communism, has never left the political landscape, regardless of oppression (oligarchies and dictatorships), counter-economies (market fundamentalism and derivative stock markets), or name changes (equity). The collapse of international communism is the immediate result of the vacuity of nation-state attempts at implementing a form of it that is devoid of individual liberty and non-colonialist or non-imperialist international collaboration. Whether communist regimes in Eastern Europe were democratic, as many had once claimed, is a moot point once the nature of democracies in the liberal West is examined with greater critical scrutiny. Therefore, democracy’s ties to communism remain an open issue. Like humankind’s physical existence, communism is no less inhabited by the desire of a unifying theory. (Early) twenty-first century communism is thus in need of theory in the most practical of senses. In hindsight, the fact that Marxism fell short of fulfilling its theoretical role for transforming communism from a desire to a norm was analogously pointed out long ago by J. Habermas in his rejection of postmodernism’s reduction of innovative thought to an aesthetic experience excluding practical and pure reason from its scope. [1] Theory is required more than ever, since the empirical ground-level situation is marred by such obviously banal injustice. The international communal reality is trivial to circumscribe. Bush’s post-9/11 ultimatum, you’re either with or against us, adequately describes what’s at stake. It’s simply a matter of sectarian choice. Either you choose to see the world situation as what it is, or you don’t. Such choosing doesn’t require much theory, however, for it’s primarily the result of persuasion. So long as the choice falls short of connecting with a theoretical construct it sits and seeps in its powerless form in the emotional mire that is the breeding ground for propaganda and commercial, that is, political-economic, advertising. Unthought opinions reinforce powerlessness. Power is on the march. Mere testimony places you at the mercy of how power chooses to dispose of opposition. The planetary situation is a banal one: the world’s energy resources, in the broad sense, are the stakes of three or four large nation-conglomerate powers (NCPs). For the time being, Bush’s mafia-like NCP controls the odds, with Iraqis, Afghanis and Palestinians paying the toll of division with their lives. Varying estimates bring to about 5 million the number of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees in the Arab world – a region clearly in the thick of the battle over energy resources. [2] Israel is the Bush NCP’s local enforcer in the Near and Middle East. The liberty it has secured amounts to the right to implement its own land grabbing claims from within the comforts of power’s lock on international multilateral organizations. In the meantime, Israeli ideologues hunt down voices of opposition to its combined politics of expansionist aggression and ethnic cleansing, acted upon beneath the tepid claims of a roadmap to peace while accusing political criticism of its actions as harboring latent anti-Semitism. China’s meteoric growth – and betrayal not only of Marxist economic principles, but of social democratic political morality as well – strains the world’s natural resources beyond the West’s abuse of them. The developing world, with which the People’s Republic has sought to be economically associated, awaits the potentially catastrophic consequences of reserving long-term and possibly emergency stock of grain and meats for China. In time, the rising taste of the Chinese for meat and bread will turn into a craving with no return. As for China’s environmental disaster, it primarily affects itself and its immediate neighbors at least for now. But one may ask the fateful question: what shall the world’s environmental situation be like if all Chinese, let alone Indians and Arabs, begin using toilet paper? As for the other main NCP, the European Union, it counters any claims for broader social democracy as anachronic remnants of bygone nationalism. All in all, democratic movements are rejected anywhere by NCPs when they bring to power groups that are hostile to their interests. So what, one might ask, is it that authorizes the claim that communism is a natural propensity of human collective experience? After all, it seems to make little sense when further contemplating the big energy/environmental picture of our small democratic planet. In 2001, Bush threatened potential opponents who might have seen things differently. In 2007, the State represents public interest so little that even the Bush mafia’s surreptitious attempts at stifling opposition is a waste of public energy against a movement that as of yet has no recognizable form. Fortunately, in terms of mere public opinion, Bush’s aggression has turned against him. His rule shall be cited as the moment when the American interpretation of the good tumbled from dream to nightmare. In terms of immediate action, it seems nothing can curb the Bush mob, short of a counter coup from grassroots organizations. The Democratic Party option is a one-way path to nihilism. Deciding doesn’t require theory to proceed. It surges forth as an inner tendency to voicing opinion most often with further doctrinal aims remaining concealed. The claims of opinion force the subjective to be thought of in terms of objectives. Sure, there are those who decide more than others, and those who can decide more than others. Nobody’s speaking of equating every individual’s will to decide. But individual idiosyncrasies are quite beside the point here. That’s because decision requires a concomitant theoretical construct to realize that in favor of which it is deciding – whether decision is understood as a Friedmanian “utility function” is irrelevant, for we seek to understand the innate sense of political, economic and moral commerce, instead of the ethics of consumer trends and tendencies. Analytic philosophers like to argue that no references or denotations of things by words operate independently from a theory-laden propositional framework. This might be an overly scientific attempt at explaining reference, for surely there are aesthetic contexts by which word-thing references are conditioned far from propositional content or attitude. Still, it is otherwise clear that without context, background or a theoretical matrix, decisions remain thoughtless acts especially when conditioned by precedence. Twentieth century Marxism was a tradition of thought that had integrated diverse theoretical expressions, and then practical and empirical attempts at implementing them. Its greatest success was to become the theoretical language through which the communist sentiment uttered its desire in the rare moments of outright revolution. Communism is a natural tendency of human experience. Its expression has guided all of the world’s great movements for collective change. Christendom was communist in its nascent forms. Saint Paul’s prototypes of the Gospels transformed the narratives of the Torah to formulate a bid at implementing God’s paradise here on Earth by stifling an aging empire at its sexual seed. The French Revolution began the slow destruction of feudalism on the international scale only when Robespierre’s Jacobins acceded to power with the theoretical construct of Rousseauist egalitarianism. And the soviet experience made Marxist economic principles more complete and complex by steering serfdom into becoming the post-capitalist proletarian self-governing state structure. Today’s communist desire grows through the Internet. Repression and control, whether commercial, political or religious, sweep behind it in all of its moves, attempting through spam, spy ware and pop ups to curb free representation. Internet’s reversal of the essentially undemocratic medium of television introduced the possibility of equating consumer freedom with citizen’s freedom once again. Yet this equation fails to square off in the mathematics of the NCPs, within which the consumer is only free to buy, but not to make, produce or create. Corporate self-representation is modeled on individualist freedoms in the neo-liberal economic doctrine for many reasons. The main one is to curb citizen’s freedom from projecting rights into the actual manufacturing and distribution of goods on a large scale. In the odd self-made-person success stories, NCP entities swarm in to buy and expand, setting their terms against the citizen-based legislation on regulating markets – and protecting themselves from NCPs. Open source and creative copyrights might represent vital protection for the Internet’s lasting communal potential. As humankind’s natural material philosophy, communism is clearly the target of entrapment by Internet centralizers. Pornography is sapping human beings’ inbred spiritual energy in the work-station cum peep show booths cum confessionals in which not sin, but ejaculation, is what the priest is prompted to prove. Semen and female secretion are the modern day penitence for spiritual redemption. That’s one reason tendencies in contemporary philosophy are increasingly receptive to sexual metaphysics. The changing subterranean nature of Christendom offers a possible restructuring of religious sentiment on the grounds of the communal will, though its chances of attaining its ends remain something to be spotted in the distant future. Politically, the governance option for communism can only be on-demand democracy. Nonetheless, sticking with democracy brings many ills. In Brazil, the experiences of voting for Lula in 2002 and 2006 led directly to the expulsion of former Senator Heloisa Helena from the PT, former Senator Cristovam Buarque from the Ministry of Education, and is leaving Environment Minister Marina Silva isolated as she provides the only opposition within the government to hydro-electric damming plans on the Rio Madeira and to re-launching the country’s nuclear energy program. Regarding democracy, any deep-seated doubts ought to revert to the position adopted in the 2004 world elections, with calls to reject John Kerry through massive voter non-turnout. Democracy is a viable option provided (i) private campaign donations be prohibited; (ii) lobby groups be turned into political associations, legally prohibited from receiving private financing, and bound to rid its staff of insider political movers and shakers; (iii) power accumulation measures be outlawed. In light of deep-seated economic change, democracy is an otherwise futile option for communist governance. Moreover, if difference is to be the key to democratic upheaval, as Delegado Cero has maintained, it ought to be a vector that dissipates itself in due course into union. Nothing dictates that the increasing contradictions present in societies shall lead to collective reversals. Few categories of the collective, either those of class, interest group or minority, are stable; their contours shift with the rising tide. Brazil has accomplished democratic return from dictatorship. But its elected representatives and senators cost the public six times what they do the US’s and over eight times Spain’s, [3] for a GDP one sixteenth of the former’s and a tenth of the latter’s. [4] So is it that with or without Lula Brazil’s is a NCP social democracy. Yet it is only one of the international exceptions to the need for democracy as a condition for achieving the communal striving for the good. By contrast, prolonged non-conventional civil war spilling out in indiscriminate violence against ordinary citizens, in an atmosphere of inexistent gun control and corrupt prohibition of narcotics, is the fate of unthought decisions against power in international megalopolises. To ensure dispersed violence in the control state, NCPs persuade their citizens about the general availability of significant knowledge offered for their use and purposes, whilst withdrawing access to its content through increased privatization of critical tools. It’s only a slight shift from learning to punch in digits on a workstation to triggering a gun to enforce the technology of NCP plutocratic rule – or mob resistance to it. Twenty-first century Marxism ought to be restructured first as a philosophy of education. Its leading principles ought to be to universalize the existence of a communistic will in human experience as proof of an altruistic fundament – be it genetic or ontological. Its operational conception of truth ought to posit the vacuity of truth-claims outside of theoretical constructs. Its prescriptional objective ought to be recognized as the unification of reflected political assertions, similar to how the field of logic was reorganized in the early twentieth century. As for sundry claims about the cost ineffectiveness of universal, i.e. communistic, health care, it has long been plain that with the increased scarcity of work, its funding ought to be indexed to nominal GDP, instead of wages. Yet communism and Marxism are no longer related in the way that had once pointed to their natural and innate bond. The historic break of Marxism and communism, consolidated in the autumn of 1989, has released each component onto their respective journeys in the history of thought and human experience. The contemporary fact of pluralistic societies may not be adequately expressed through Marxism’s category of class, but analysis of economic disparity, from subclasses to the super-rich, emphasizes the best of what Marxism provided to the communist will. Beyond its past in religion, metaphysics and republican democracy, it gave voice to a breed of economic materialism in which no proposition was formulated outside of the moral boundaries justifying its claim to truth. Yet if Marxism faces a future in the twenty-first century, it will have to better its attempts at a unifying theory. Furthermore, it will have to formulate the means by which to reach a public increasingly stripped of the rational tools by which to understand the communist sentiment in human actions lest much of 19th century thought be proved to have been irrational. The main obstacle to such instrumentalized applications of rationality is that our planet houses worlds of literate civilizations. Their common bedrock points to the communal desire for fairness as the interpretative terms through which to face the rising fact of communism as the ultimate objective of human political will. Images of earthly redemption are no longer of use if deep seated change spells the end for which we strive. The gift of reason to human thought – the manifold of cognitive reasons, whether practice, pure, aesthetic, dialectical or cynical – is the means by which to decipher one of its deepest drives: the achievement of communism in punctuated periods of human history. Such moments spell the launching of our animal existence toward an encounter with the manifold infinite, and the patterning of sectarian forms of group association according to the open source of immanent inclusiveness. A Canadian, Norman Madarasz is associate professor of philosophy at Universidade Gama Filho. He welcomes comments at nmphdiol2@yahoo.ca.
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