Communism/Marxism

Satyr wrote:

At the core of communism - and any nihilistic ideology, including spiritual dogmas such as Abrahamism - is vulnerability and anxiety - often developing a concealed envy - coveting what the individual has failed to produce for himself, by himself.  

Miguel Serrano wrote:

I hid away in my room, carrying with me all the books I could about Marxism: Bukharim, Prenan, Marx himself. We knew the pro-Marxist Russian literature very well in our circle of writers: Boris Pilnak, Svolod Ivanov, Constantin Fedin, Gladkov, Gorki and etcetera. I studied them; I read them. And one day I rose from my study a declared ANTI-Marxist! I declared it was something false, a hoax, a philosophical and scientific aberration, a religion for the resentful and weak minds that had the power to move the bitterness andmisshapen feelings of slaves, against everything great, beautiful, just, against the truly strong. Marxism was a sinister conspiracy.

A.H. The Last Avatar

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

There are many who find the burdens, the anxiety, and the isolation of an individual existence unbearable. His is particularly true when the opportunities for self-advancement are relatively meager, and one's individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for. Such persons sooner or later turn their backs on an individual existence and strive to acquire a sense of worth and a purpose by an identification with a holy cause, a leader, or a movement. The faith and pride they derive from such an identification serve them as substitutes for the unattainable self-confidence and self-respect.

Hoffer, Eric wrote:

When watching men of power in action it must be always kept in mind that, whether they know it or not, their main purpose is the elimination or neutralization of the independent individual – the independent voter, consumer, worker, owner, thinker – and that every device they employ aims at turning men into a manipulable ‘animated instrument’ which is Aristotle's definition of a slave.

Camus, Albert wrote:

The earth for Maistre is nothing but ‘an immense altar on which all the living must be sacrificed, without end, without limit, without respite, until the end of time, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death.’ His fatalism, however, is active, as well as passive.
‘Man must act as if he were capable of all things and resigns himself as if he were capable of nothing.’
We find in Marx the same sort of creative fatalism. Maistre undoubtedly justifies the established order. But Marx justifies the order that is established in his time. The most eloquent eulogy of capitalism was made by its greatest enemy.
Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date. Another order must be established which will demand, in the name of history, a new conformity. As for the means, they are the same for Marx as for Maistre: political realism, discipline, force.
When Maistre adopts Bossuet’s bold idea that ‘the heretic is he who has personal ideas’ —in other words, ideas that have no reference to either a social or a religious tradition—he provides a formula for the most ancient and the most modern of conformities.
The attorney general, pessimistic choirmaster of the executioner, announces our diplomatic prosecutors. It goes without saying that these resemblances do not make Maistre a Marxist, nor Marx a traditional Christian. Marxist atheism is absolute. But nevertheless it does reinstate the supreme being on the level of humanity.
‘Criticism of religion leads to this doctrine that man is for man the supreme being.’
From this angle, socialism is therefore an enterprise for the deification of man and has assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religions. This reconciliation, in any case, is instructive as concerns the Christian origins of all types of historic Messianism, even revolutionary Messianism. The only difference lies in a change of symbols.
With Maistre, as with Marx, the end of time realizes Vigny’s ambitious dream, the reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb, the procession of criminal and victim to the same altar, the reopening or opening of a terrestrial paradise. For Marx, the laws of history reflect material reality; for Maistre, they reflect divine reality. But for the former, matter is the substance; for the latter, the substance of his god is incarnate here below. Eternity separates them at the beginning, but the doctrines of history end by reuniting them in a realistic conclusion.
Maistre hated Greece (it also irked Marx, who found any form of beauty under the sun completely alien), of which he said that it had corrupted Europe by bequeathing to its spirit of division.
It would have been more appropriate to say that Greek thought was the spirit of unity, precisely because it could not do without intermediaries, and because it was, on the contrary, quite unaware of the historical spirit of totality, which was invented by Christianity and which cut off from its religious origins, threatens the life of Europe today.
‘Is there a fable, a form of madness, a vice which has not a Greek name, a Greek emblem, or a Greek mask?’
We can ignore the outraged puritanism. This passionate denunciation expresses the spirit of modernity at variance with the ancient world and in direct continuity with authoritarian socialism, which is about to deconsecrate Christianity and incorporate it in a Church bent on conquest.

Communism and capitalism share all of the same fundamental assumptions - materialism, the desire for individual liberation, the emphasis on economism, and the belief that infinite growth on a planet of finite resources is not only possible, but desirable.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

— Keith Woods (@KeithWoodsYT) [You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]

Divergense wrote:

I think Marxism is a better system than communism, but only if it's historical idealist, pagan Marxism.

Engels, Friedrich wrote:

Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence of natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws and in the possibility this gives us of systematically making them work towards definite ends…
Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature which is founded on the knowledge of natural necessity.

McGilchrist, Iain wrote:

The denial of the divine was as important to them as the elevation of matter. This was itself, of course, an idea; and, if it could be said to be true, so was the idea of its truth. But there is more than a little of the Promethean about the materialists. When one of their number, Ludwig Büchner, emerged from a period of personal crisis it was with the proclamation:

Büchner, Ludwig wrote:

No longer do I acknowledge any human authority over me.

No human authority, notice. The unwillingness to acknowledge any authority was, in another parallel with the Reformation, at the very core of materialism: but these reformers, like those before them, had to acknowledge some sort of authority, even if it were the authority of reason (which is something in itself we can only intuit). So the materialists, too, had to have a superhuman authority: and this new divinity was science. Both scientific materialism and the dialectical materialism of Engels and Marx emerged from the view that science was the only authority.
In 1848, revolution spread across Europe, and its reverberations were felt most strongly in France and Germany. ‘For the scientific materialists, and to some extent for Marx as well, opposition to groundless authority was the task and natural science was its justification.’ Speaking in 1853, Lyon Playfair, one of the keenest evangelists for scientific materialism in nineteenth-century Britain, declared that ‘science is a religion and its philosophers are the priests of nature’: T. H. Huxley, Darwin's ‘bulldog’, described his talks as lay sermons. This was part of a broad shift whereby, according to Gaukroger, the West's sense of its own superiority shifted seamlessly in the early nineteenth century from its religion to its science. In doing so it swapped one religion for another; but these ‘priests of nature’ did not honour nature herself so much as the human capacity to control nature, and to make it apparently graspable by rationalism alone: the left hemisphere reflecting on itself. It is interesting that Marx called Prometheus, opposed as he was to ‘all divine and earthly Gods who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the highest divinity … the most eminent saint and martyr in the philosophic calendar’. It is an uncomfortable fact that Hitler, too, was later to write that the Aryan is ‘the Prometheus of mankind from whose bright forehead the divine spark of genius has sprung at all times, forever kindling anew that fire of knowledge which illumined the night of silent mysteries and thus caused man to climb the path to mastery over the other beings of this earth.’ In sweeping away the past, it seems that the concept of hubris, which the Greeks had understood as lying at the heart of all tragedy, was lost.
[The Master and His Emissary]

Camus, Albert wrote:

In contrast to the ancient world, the unity of the Christian and Marxist world is astonishing. The two doctrines have in common a vision which completely separates them from the Greek attitude.
Jaspers defines this very well:

Jaspers wrote:

It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique.

The Christians were the first to consider human life and the course of events as a history that is unfolding from a fixed beginning towards a definite end, in the course of which man achieves his salvation or earns his punishment.
The philosophy of history springs from the Christian representation, which is surprising to a Greek mind. The Greek idea of evolution has nothing in common with our idea of historical evolution. The difference between the two is the difference between a circle and a straight line. The Greeks imagined the history of the world as cyclical.
Aristotle, to give a definite example, did not believe that the time in which he was living was subsequent to the Trojan War. Christianity was obliged, in order to penetrate the Mediterranean world, to Hellenize itself, and its doctrine then became more flexible. But its originality lay in introducing into the ancient world two ideas that had never before been associated: the idea of history and the idea of punishment.
In its concept of mediation, Christianity is Greek. In its idea of history, Christianity is Judaic and will be found again in German ideology. It is easier to understand this dissimilarity by understanding the hostility of historical methods of thought toward nature, which they considered as an object not for contemplation but for transformation.
For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued. The Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to obey it. The love of the ancients for the cosmos was completely unknown to the first Christians, who, moreover, awaited with impatience an imminent end of the world.

Marx, Karl wrote:

…the devout and politically free inhabitant of New England is a kind of Laocoon who makes not the least effort to escape from the serpents which are crushing him. Mammon is his idol which he adores not only with his lips but with the whole force of his body and mind. In his view the world is no more than a Stock Exchange, and he is convinced that he has no other destiny here below than to become richer than his neighbor. Trade has seized upon all his thoughts, and he has no other recreation than to exchange objects. When he travels, he carries, so to speak, his goods and his counter on his back and talks only of interest and profit…
In North America, indeed, the effective domination of the Christian world by Judaism has come to be manifested in a common and unambiguous form: they preach of the Gospel itself, Christian preaching has become an article of commerce.

Heisman, Mitchell wrote:

Marx is probably the most influential modern example of the famous (and infamous) Jewish proclivity for the left wing socialistic causes. His vision of a communist culmination of human history that resolves the contradictions of the capitalistic world by turning it upside down was nothing less than a nineteenth century updating of the primal archetype of the first revolution: the Mosaic inversion of the Egyptian pyramid-hierarchy. Marxism could thus be interpreted as a ‘secularization’ of a Biblically based, messianic Weltanschauung. The issue behind secularization concerns the origin of ‘modern’ values. If reason, in itself, cannot decide fundamental values then so-called ‘secular’ values cannot be fundamentally rational.
The traditional idea of secularization, most strongly associated with Nietzsche, claimed that the modern idea of progress and its egalitarian values were residues of belief in God; Biblical values without Biblical faith. Modern egalitarianism and modern progress, in his view, were secularizations of Biblical values. And at the root of Biblical values was the slave morality that glorified Jewish national political failure.