Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 40 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Question About Communism
I am reading (for the first time) Whittaker Chambers’ Witness. It is a fascinating and extremely engaging book.
That said, the Communists in his world are very concerned about advancing humanity. Communism seems to be awfully focused on people. And I genuinely do not understand why this is so.
After all, if you don’t believe that there is a Creator, then there is no soul. And if there is no soul, then there is no reason to value human life for its own sake. Indeed, Communism seems to agree with this — it was very good at killing people whom it deemed had no use for the Struggle.
But why did it care at all about people for their own sake? Was this an unexamined assumption, or did Communism somehow believe that there was a greater reason why mankind should even exist in the first place? If so, what was it?
I thank you in advance for shedding light on this for me.
Published in General
Better to divide this into two questions: (1) Why do atheists care… (2) Why do communists care…
With regard to atheists, it is clear that they do care and one should reconsider whether it makes sense to attempt to understand their opinions and feelings on theological terms which they reject–better to pay attention to what they themselves say.
With regard to communists, and the disconnect between their purported compassion and their long record of cruelty and violence, the ideology seems best understood as a religion calculated to appeal to malevolent and damaged personalities.
For the benefit of those who may have missed it, you wrote:
Under communism, we are all one and the same*. That is enforced by the power of the state, if necessary. It is a requirement of you being a properly functioning cog in the machine. State planning suffers if individuality is allowed to flourish.
* In theory. In practice, some animals are more equal than others. Of all the unintended jokes of communism, the classless society is the funniest. Or the sickest. One of those.
There is any number of philosophers that contributed to Marxist ideology, some that date back to ancient Greek philosophers and even ancient India. Far too many for a comment. You have Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao in the most recent group that have been in power. They modify and add their own theories of class struggles, and class struggles suggest that the class you are a part of is the only thing that matters, not the individual who disagrees with how to usher in the new socialist man and the new workers’ paradise.
Trotsky succumbed to blows from an ice ax in Mexico delivered by a Stalinist agent. During the Spanish Civil War Stalin started hunting down Communist sympathizers who were fighting for a Communist government in Spain to include George Orwell of Animal Farm fame. English Stalinists did their best to try and destroy Orwell’s reputation.
There is a quote attributed to Stalin; One man’s death is a tragedy; millions of deaths are a statistic. Whether Stalin said that or not that has been the result of Communist governments in Europe, China, North Korea, Cuba, Central America, South America, and other countries in Asia.
Yuri Slezkine addressed this phenomenon in his work The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution. Among the many themes of the book he compares the messianic and apocalyptic impulses manifest in the early stages of the Communist revolution. Many of the early revolutionary intellectuals saw their work as the next step in the postmillennial tradition – specifically, Communism as a way of bringing paradise on Earth. Nearly all these intellectuals were killed off over the subsequent decades as Lenin and then Stalin consolidated power.
I always commend Witness to people as the best autobiography I have read.
I have not heard a good answer from atheists either. Why should other people have rights?
A person of the left is one who has embraced the paradigm that their mind is reality. A person of the right is one who recognizes that reality lies outside their mind, and their mind’s job is to apprehend it.
A person of the right does not grant anyone their natural rights. A person of the right recognizes another’s existence to be similar to his own, and that both have natural rights, for example life, liberty, and doing as one pleases, as a simple corollary of their existence.
A person of the left must grant any right that anyone else is deemed to have. Other people, at some level deep in the leftist mind, are constructs of that mind and have only the existence it allows.
The question of why other people should have rights only makes sense from the leftist perspective.
I think it is mostly an unquestioning i pulse from Christianity.
It has often been described as a Christian heresy. I don’t know if that adequately describes the southeast Asian versions of communism where Christianity was never dominant, but I don’t know that it’s mistaken to call it that, either.
It might be different with Christian atheists or Jewish atheists than it is with Muslim atheists or Hindu atheists, etc.
Yes, Communists are very focused on “people”. “People” are much easier to focus on than individuals because “people” are abstract and not real thus very easy to be be part of your “cause”. Those that don’t buy into the “cause” are not “people” and thus can be exterminated.
I started this book on Kindle, but didn’t get far. I’ll have to take another crack at it.
It is extraordinary. Not exactly a pick-me-up.
misery loves company – its more like central planners (not just communists) love to run the lives of others (see Covid)
There’s a phone call for you from Tim Walz.
My personal shorthand is to see Marxism as a Judeo-Christian heresy.
I’m not in the position to know, and I’d love to hear from folks who have studied this.
But I can’t help but think that, in terms of simple practicality, if you happen to find yourself in the position of leading an evil movement to enslave people and drain the treasury, and you’re going to need to round up support, you’re probably going to come up with a virtuous sounding mission statement which is a total lie.
It emerges from a lack of careful reading. In the apostolic age there were Christian communities where congregants gave their property to the Church as an act of devotion to the Lord and the Church fed them the body and blood at worship. In typically demonic fashion, the Marxist seizes the community’s property at gunpoint and bread lines form.
They are unburdened by the truth.
I suppose they could offer some variation of Social Contract Theory, that rights are not granted by God nor Nature but rather by government, by social consensus. It is in my own enlightened self-interest to grant rights to others in order that they will grant me reciprocal rights, and so that we can all live in a well-ordered society, because the alternative life in the State of Nature is “nasty, brutish, and short.”
The Chinese are mafia. That is how they behave. They want to rip off their own people and the whole world. I’m not that smart, but I don’t think the communist moniker makes any sense. When you look at how people advanced in the USSR, etc., it’s similar to mafia if you ask me.
The idea that you can make a society work without believing in God seems stupid to me. If you don’t believe in God and fear hell to some extent, you are going to think it’s OK to kill people and take their stuff. Atheists get really mad at you when you say this, but I’m not sure what the ultimate logic would be with atheism on that.
Even with that look at society today. Why can’t you just stick some cash under a bed and not worry about what it’s going to purchase? Because people think inflation isn’t stealing. It’s a very, very, very stupid system.
But it always collapses into the French Terror. Liberty, equality, and fraternity in joyful kumbayah around the guillotine.
You think Lenin and Stalin and Mao were not mafia? Mafia are altar boys compared to the pillars of Marxism. Xi operates in the context of his idol, Mao, and makes pragmatic tactical use of alien concepts to further the Revolution. Bernie, for that matter, has three mansions on a Congressional salary. I have a friend who thinks that Bernie is the solution to the oligarch dominance in America. Despite my very long list of objections.
The problem with that is that anything the government can grant, it can also take away. Living contracts aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.
Precisely, and this comports with Progressive views as well: the right to bear arms can be taken away if guns are too scary, the right to free speech can be curtailed if “hate speech” makes them feel unsafe, or “misinformation” leads to undesired outcomes like lower vaccination rates. Rights are viewed as a means to some public policy end, rather than as ends in themselves.
-They are authoritarian or worse, totalitarian.
-We believe mankind has a sinful side. They believe mankind is perfectible and they are the ones to do the job.
-They want the best for mankind but their idea of what is best for mankind isn’t the same our idea of what is best for mankind.
-They prey on the 7 deadly sins to gain an advantage, especially lust and envy. Those they exploit to gain support.
-First, and, foremost, they are for whatever gives them power over the people. We believe those in power get their power from the people.
-Once the people no longer accept what they are peddling, they impose their wishes by force. Usually, once a politician doesn’t do what we want, we vote them out. We have weakened here.
Conversely, they also invent new rights when it suits their aims: the right to health care, housing, to kill your unborn child, to choose your own “gender identity,” and so forth.
Conservatives can help with this in the way they speak on the issue. The rights in question actually have nothing at all to do with the Constitution. All the Bill of Rights does is make that clear. We should stop speaking of “1st and 2nd Amendment Rights.” That just reinforces the Left’s premise, that these are government-granted rights.
This could just boil down to a theological difference between someone who believes in a soul and someone who doesn’t. The soul-believer might think that human value is soul-dependent while the soul-disbeliever might think that human value is soul-independent.
The right to take away your rights, you know, for the children (or was it the climate?).
And we ought to quote the Ninth Amendment more often.