Notes from Upstream: “Communist” or “Socialist”

Who gives a flying Fig Newton

Three “Democratic” Socialists

The grinning politicians in this photo call themselves “democratic” socialists.

President Trump calls them “communists.”

Is there a difference?

My Ultimate Authority on Everything, the Internet, provides this definition of socialism:

“Socialism is a political and economic philosophy that advocates for social or collective ownership and control of the means of production, distribution, and exchange of goods.”

That same Ultimate Authority provides this definition of communism:

“Communism is a political, economic, and social ideology that advocates for the establishment of a classless, stateless society where the means of production, distribution, and resources are owned and controlled collectively by the community, rather than by individuals or private entities.”

Not much difference, is there? But in Marxist theory, communism

“differs from socialism in that communism typically represents the ultimate goal of a fully egalitarian society without money or classes, while socialism can involve state or worker ownership as an intermediate step.”

Watch that “intermediate step.” It’s a killer.

Decades ago, I stood in the streets of New York City while an officious Communist Party apparatchik lectured me on the socialism-communism distinction. His favorite country the Soviet Union was still only “socialist” and not yet “communist.” But it was on the path towards communism. He was sure that ultimately the state was going to “wither away.”

Historical note: the Soviet state never withered away. After 70 years, it just collapsed, which gave its mass-murdering masters the chance to grab all its assets, re-imagine themselves as Russian oligarch billionaires, and kill those who complained.

What’s in a word?

Back when the world acknowledged the Soviet Union as the leading communist country, its official title was the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

Its toady lickspittle, the notorious communist dictatorship generally known as East Germany, called itself the German Democratic Republic.

Even now, North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, which shows off the advantages of its particular democracy in this famous photo from space.

A Black Hole of Destitution

Of course, none of these places qualifies as democratic as most use the word.

When most say “democratic,” they mean a polity in which power is ultimately held by the people, who exercise it either directly or through representatives elected in free and fair elections.

Marxists don’t use the word “democratic” like normal people. They write and talk in their own terminology.

According to Marx, human society progresses in stages. The first stage was the allegedly classless primitive society, as in North American native tribes. Then came slavery, as in the ancient Roman Empire. Then came the feudalism of the Middle Ages, after which capitalism disrupted all the old feudal relations with its French and American and other revolutions.

Marxists call a capitalist revolution which overthrows feudalism the “bourgeois democratic” revolution.

By the word “democratic,” they are referring only to a stage in history. According to their theory of stages, the Soviet Union was only “socialist” and not yet “communist.” East Germany and North Korea are “democratic” only as opposed to the stage which came before.

Capitalism is “progressive” as against feudalism, but socialism is progressive as against capitalism.

Obama’s irritating phrase about being “on the right side of history” refers to doing things which help move society forward from one stage to the next.

That is all terminology from a theory. But socialists don’t operate just from theory; they are also demagogues, that is, they do not feel any obligation to mean what they say.

The more recent post-modernist theory that language is about power is only a refinement of its predecessor Marxist theory that one should use language to advance the cause of the revolution.

As one sixties revolutionary once wrote, “The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.”

During the Russian Revolution, Communists won the support of the Russian Empire’s vast impoverished peasantry with the slogan “Land and Bread.”

Ten years later, the new communist government stole all the farmland and all the bread on the grounds that these same peasants were ‘kulaks,” that is, greedy capitalist farmers.

All it took to qualify as a kulak was to own a cow.

“Land and Bread” in action

The Holodomor Memorial

All communist and socialist promises are conditional.

In the 1930s, then-socialist George Orwell volunteered to defend the “democratic” Spanish Republic against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.

Revolutionary Spain

Orwell’s experience with Spanish revolutionary politics serves as a prototype for the American future if socialists get their way.

Orwell joined the POUM, a communist faction which opposed Stalin from within the communist movement. Stalin and his Spanish Communist Party exploited their control over military supplies to impose power over the entire Republic. Then they crushed the POUM, killed thousands of opponent communists, socialists, and anarchists, and hunted Orwell and his wife, who had to flee to France in disguise.

This demoralizing and disillusioning experience helped shape Orwell’s anti-totalitarian novels Animal Farmand Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Spanish Civil War started in part because the elected socialist government of Spain was murdering opponents and committing unspeakable atrocities against priests and nuns.

Socialist revolutionaries in this country are more likely to follow the Spanish example and take government power via corrupted elections than to follow the Russian example and take power through a coup.

In any case, our current socialists are no more democratic than their Spanish role models.

Recently, Aron Ali-McClory celebrated the Wednesday assassination of Christian activist Charlie Kirk by tweeting, “Shut The F*** Up Friday has come early, dear comrades!”

What does that mean?

Ali-McClory is co-chair of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA). “Democratic” socialists use a “shut up” catchphrase to mock the permanent silencing of people they see as enemies. Ali-McClory intended his reference to “Friday” as a comic callback to the use of day names in phrases like “Freaky Friday” and “Stormy Monday.”

Megan Romer was and is co-chair of the National Political Committee of the Democratic Socialists Of America. She joked back, “when weeks are decades, shut the fuck up friday is not bound by linear time”.

By which she meant anytime is a good time to kill a religious conservative.

The gleeful back-and-forth of their foul “Shut Up” meme not only signifies the ongoing degeneration of our culture but also reveals the inherent violence of “democratic” socialism.

What is socialist morality? In his essay Their Morals and Ours, Leon Trotsky, a communist who never called himself “democratic,” wrote about the “Dialectic Interdependence of End and Means.”

“A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified. From the Marxist point of view, which expresses the historical interests of the proletariat, the end is justified if it leads to increasing the power of man over nature and to the abolition of the power of man over man.”

Trotsky continued,

“Permissible and obligatory are those and only those means, we answer, which unite the revolutionary proletariat, fill their hearts with irreconcilable hostility to oppression, teach them contempt for official morality and its democratic echoers, imbue them with consciousness of their own historic mission, raise their courage and spirit of self-sacrifice in the struggle.”

From Trotsky’s long winded equivocation it was but a short step to the more succinct “By Any Means Necessary.”

Like a lot of ideological crud, this phrase seems to have oozed out of France, where a character emitted it in Mao-apologist Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands). From France it made its way into the mouth of Malcolm X, who popularized it in the U.S.

On its way, the basic idea passed through the brain and pen of psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, who wrote in his book The Wretched Of The Earth:

“At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and from his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.”

With this as background, it was logical that the October 7 Hamas atrocities sparked so many “By Any Means Necessary” chants from anti-Jewish hate groups like the Columbia University Apartheid Divest.

It is revealing how often socialists employ the phrase “by any means necessary” to justify atrocities which are in obvious fact completely unnecessary, even if one believes in their ostensible purpose.

Is rape “necessary”? Is torture? Burning babies alive?

A psychiatrist smarter than Fanon might think that the revolutionary cause is just an excuse for the crime.

Fanon appeared silent on whether he actively recommends rape as psychologically beneficial to the decolonizer, but he did openly endorse massacring civilians:

“The colonized do not keep accounts... To the expression: ‘All natives are the same,’ the colonized reply: ‘All colonists are the same.’”

And Fanon noted the “look of lust” and “dreams of possession” in which the colonized person wants “to sleep in the settler’s bed, with his wife if possible.”

Some “democratic” socialists earn partial credit when they oppose crimes so embarrassing to their cause. But they support measures which will inevitably lead to those crimes.

The DSA finds the American constitutional system constrictive. They want to abolish the Senate, the Electoral College, and Supreme Court veto power over legislation. They see the U.S. Constitution as establishing a political order explicitly designed to obstruct their rule.

That much they’ve got right. Our Founding Fathers had studied history. They knew the dangers of mob rule. As Madison wrote in Federalist Number 10,

“A pure democracy... can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual….

“Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

With these words Madison anticipated the French Revolution, whose successive assemblies ruled and destroyed unobstructed by any constitutional system, just as the DSA seeks to do here.

Regardless whether socialists are aware of it, they base their scheme on an imagined past when life was idyllic. If we could just go back to that classless primitive utopia before anyone owned property life would be wonderful again.

Most think that people in America lived idyllic lives of harmony with nature and with one another before the Europeans arrived and ruined everything.

Which is a lie.

The facts are undeniable. Yes, Europeans were brutal when they got here. They committed atrocities.

But before the arrival of Europeans, American tribes engaged in a nonstop inter-tribal struggle of massacre, kidnapping, and theft, which included crimes up to and including slavery, torture and rape, and in some tribes, ripping the hearts out of living human beings.

Though some tribes were peaceable among themselves, against other tribes they waged a ceaseless struggle of each against all. They raided, they robbed, they raped, they massacred.

The savage was not noble.

It’s easy to criticize the inadequacies of our current polity. It suffers the disadvantage of actually existing. It titillates some to counterpose some imagined paradise which has never happened and never will.

If you press some socialist for details of his socialist future, you will get back only vague platitudes.

If you want to know what will really happen under socialism, look at Russia after 1917, at Spain in the 1930’s, or Communist China any old time.

What begins as a grab for power devolves into a ruthless and ceaseless competition among amoral power-grabbers until they kill one another off. In the meantime, they render most people powerless and at least destitute, if not dead.

Denied the limits on power imposed by a constitutional system such as ours, any socialist future will be a repeat of the primitive past, not in any imaginary idyllic peacefulness, but in its resurrection of the primitive war of each against all.

There’s nothing democratic about that.

Max Cossack is an author, attorney, composer, and software architect (he can code). His most recent novel is High Jingo. He lives with his wife in a dusty little village in Arizona. The day after this is posted the cats will finally come to stay.