A Democratic Marxist Condemnation of the Soviet Regime

A few days ago I put up a post about the 18th century communist Morelly. He had some interesting ideas, although I made it clear that I am not a supporter of communism because of the tyranny, poor economic performance and poverty of the Soviet regime. One of the great commenters here remarked that describing the USSR as a tyranny probably wouldn’t go down very well with the Socialist Workers Party, now renamed the Socialist Party. I’m not sure, as the Socialist Workers were, in their day, a Trotskyite party, and therefore opposed to the communism of the USSR over the issue of Stalin’s dictatorship. The impression I had was that the Trotskyite parties wanted a communist society, but one where the workers themselves would hold power through soviets, rather than controlled by the communist bureaucracy.

As well as the Trotskyites, there were democratic Marxists in the west, who believed that socialism should be achieved democratically and rejected violent revolution and the dictatorship of the USSR. Karl Kautsky, an Austrian Marxist and one of the leaders of European Marxism, took this position. Another was the French Marxist, Lucien Laurat, who made the following scathing condemnation of the Soviet tyranny in Russia in his Marxism and Democracy, published by the Left Book Club in 1940.

‘In the fascist countries we can still observe the existence of capitalist characteristics, where as in Russia these characteristics have been radically destroyed as a result of the absolute seizure by the State of all the means of production and distribution. Although the Russian economic system has often been called “State capitalism”, and although the term “State slavery” employed by Karl Kautsky seems to us a more appropriate designation in our opinion, the present Russian regime is not slavery, or serfdom, or capitalism, but something of all three. It is related to slavery and serfdom by the absolute and total suppression of all freedom for the workers, who are tied by domestic passports to their places of residence, and often to their places of employment, like the feudal serf to the glebe. It is related to capitalism by the preservation of a great number of economic categories and legal forms. However, it is fundamentally different from any of these systems.

With more reason, and, of course, with all those reservations proper to such historical comparisons, we may rather compare the present Russian regime with the social and economic regime of the Incas, who dictatorially governed Peru before the discovery of America: an authoritatively controlled economic system strongly marked by numerous communist traits, but with a division of society into classes. No one can say how and toward what this curious social system might have developed had not a brutal and rapacious conqueror brought it to a sudden and premature end. It is quite certain, however, that on an infinitely larger scale, with an incomparably higher mass culture, and provided with all the achievements of twentieth-century science, our modern Incaism over what is called “one-sixth of the globe” reproduces from the social and and political point of view the most characteristic traits of Peruvian Incaism of four hundred years ago.

Just as the Russian State disposes absolutely over the material elements of the economic process, so it disposes dictatorially over the human element also. The workers are no longer free to sell their labour-power where they like and how they please. They no longer enjoy freedom of movement in the territory of the U.S.S.R. (domestic passports) The right to strike has been suppressed, and if the workers expressed even the slightest desire to oppose the methods of Stakhanovism, it would expose them to the severest punishments.

The Russian unions, strictly under the orders of the governing party, are merely organs charged with the execution in their own province of the political instructions of the Government. The instruments destined to defend the working class against the directive organism of the economic system have become instruments in the service of these organisms. The working class thus finds itself subjected to the discretionary power of a bureau-technocracy identical with the State apparatus.’ (Pp. 200-2).

There, and if you only listen to the Libertarians, you would think that only von Hayek believed that communism was slavery, although in his case he all meant all forms of socialism. Not that I think he had any hatred of right-wing dictatorship. He served in Dollfuss’ Austro-Fascist regime, which ended with the Nazi invasion and supported the various fascist dictatorships in South America. This, too me, shows how far Libertarians really believe in freedom.

Sargon of Akkad Spreads Alt-Right Lies about Death of Heather Hayer in Charlottesville

This is a piece by Kevin Logan, containing material which looks like it come from Reichwing Watch, an anti-Fascist blog. Logan’s a funny, incisive critic of the manosphere and its appalling denizens, and the Alt Right generally. And Reichwing Watch has posted some excellent videos laying into Far Right American politics, including the roots of the Libertarians in the real Fascism of the Austrian dictatorship of Dollfuss and their support for Pinochet and the other thugs in Latin America.

Sargon of Akkad’s real name is Carl Benjamin, and he comes from Swindon. This ain’t doxing. He’s put it out there himself. I think he came out of the militant online atheist movement that arose in the early part of this century. Richard ‘the Dick’ Coughlan, another atheist and anti-Fascist blogger, has commented on how, after the atheists drove the Christian apologists off the net, they realised that the religious people they’d been arguing with were actually better people than some of the atheists they’d made common cause with. Because those atheists then turned out to be raging Fascists.

The Sage of Swindon no doubt took the name ‘Sargon of Akkad’, not just because the historical Sargon was a great warrior, whose name was deliberately taken to hark back to his heroic exploits by later Assyrian kings, but because his infancy story is similar to that of Moses in the bulrushes. He was conceived through an affair with his mother, a priestess in one of the temples, and an unknown father. As a baby he was set adrift down one of the Iraqi rivers in his cradle, where he was found by a poor fisherman, who raised him as his own. You can find similar stories amongst other, neighbouring peoples, such as the Hittites. It’s a folk motif, and in the case of the historic Sargon, it also serves to show his connection as a man of the people. Ishtar, the goddess of love, favoured him, and so he rose from being the son of a poor fisherman, Ulippi, to the lord of a great empire. This does not, however, mean that the tale of Moses in the bulrushes is also folklore, only that it has parallels elsewhere in the literature of the Ancient Near East.

In this clip, Logan reproduces a bit of the conversation Sargon had with the Scots Alt-Right blogger, Millennial Woes. Woes is so extreme, that it he wants the return of slavery. He’s gone to America, where he mixed with the leaders of the Alt-Right movement. As for Sargon, Benjamin still seems to think of himself as a man of the left, even though he hates everything the left stands for – feminism, welfare benefits, nationalised industry, anti-racism. For some reason, the right hail him as a great intellectual, despite – or because of – his massive ignorance. I think he’s one of the crowd trying to tell everyone that the Nazis were socialists, because it’s in their name. Despite the very plentiful historical evidence to the absolute contrary.

Heather Hayer was the young woman killed during the Charlottesville protests, when one of the Nazis deliberately drove his car into her. Sargon and Woes here lie about her murder, claiming that the brakes on the car had failed, and that the driver was really shocked by the accident.

Er, no! He deliberately drove into her and the others. You can see that on the photos, in the autopsy reports, and the statements from the cops, who were there and arrested him.

It’s a vile, mendacious lie. But what can you expect from the kind of people, who defend nutters marching around screaming Nazi slogans and wearing its regalia.

As for Sargon’s real surname, there’s an irony there. It’s an Old Time name derived from the Hebrew, meaning ‘Son of My Right Hand’, or ‘Son of Wealth’. Hebrew is a Semitic language related to the Arabic and other, more ancient languages, like Akkadian, spoke in the Ancient Near East. It is related to ‘Yemen’, which also means ‘wealth’. So Sargon has a name very similar to the language of the very Arabs he’s afraid are going to overrun us all.

Reichwing Watch on the Links between Libertarianism and Fascism

Reichwing Watch is a YouTuber, who puts extremely interesting and pertinent videos about the racist and Libertarian right in America. In this short clip, he shows the very strong similarities between modern right-wing Libertarian and Fascism, simply by putting extracts from the speeches and comments by Libertarians like Ron Paul, Ayn Rand, Hans-Hermann Hoppe and Alt-Right vlogger Stefan Molyneaux with Adolf Hitler and Nazi propaganda films.

Both Libertarians and Hitler shared a hatred of the state and a concern for the ‘race’ or ‘volk’, as well as a bitter rejection of parliamentary democracy, majority rule, humanitarianism and Socialism. Instead, they embraced Social Darwinism and the preservation of capitalism and private property.

The clips include Ron Paul stating that the Founding Fathers stood for individual liberty, not democracy, and decrying democracy as dangerous. This is followed by quotes from Hitler about the destructive nature of democracy on the ‘volk’, and how the man is always more important than the majority. Hans-Hermann Hoppe, described as a Libertarian theorist, stated that in a Libertarian state there would be no room for democrats and Socialists, and both would have to be isolated and expelled. There are also quotes from Ron Paul attacking majority rule, Stefan Molyneux stating that most Libertarians are Whites, and therefore peace will is threatened by demographic trends which means that they will be overtaken by Blacks as the most numerous racial group in America. Which is juxtaposed with Hitler stating, ‘We stand only for peace’.

Ayn Rand, her eyes bugging, talks about how humanitarianism is a threat, followed by Adolf saying much the same. There’s a clip from the Nazi propaganda movie, Die Erbe (‘Inheritance’) in which a group of white-coated scientists watch two beetles fighting, in order to demonstrate the ‘survival of the fittest’. Which is followed by another Libertarian arguing in a debate that freedom means that society shouldn’t be required to take care of the weakest.

Interspersed with these clips are comments from Noam Chomsky, observing that the existence of private property, owned and managed by an elite group, is a form of dictatorship.

This is a very effective reply to the argument you hear from the Right, and particularly the American Right, that Socialism, and by extension, state intervention as a whole, is Fascistic, ’cause the Nazis claimed to be ‘National Socialists’. This point of view was stated very firmly a little while ago by Jonah Goldberg in his book, Liberal Fascism.

This shows that the reverse is also true. Libertarianism, which claims to be a right-wing form of anarchism, also shares very strong ideological links to Fascism and Nazism. Which perhaps isn’t surprising, considering that Von Mises, one of the founders of Libertarianism and ‘Austrian Economics’, served as a minister in Engelbert Dolfuss’ ‘astrofascist’ government before the Nazi annexation of Austria, when he fled to America. Both Libertarianism and Fascism are reactions against socialism, and the extension of liberty to minority groups. This meant the organised working class, women and ethnic minorities, who were attacked as the internal enemies of the racial group.

In the 1980s Libertarianism, or Anarcho-Capitalism, was presented very much as a form of anarchism. But now it’s becoming very clear that it’s a form of Fascism in its elitism, racism and anti-Socialism.

Cartoon – Thatcher and Von Hayek as Monstrous Idols

Welcome to the latest instalment in my series of cartoons attacking the Tories, the right-wing press, and the ideologues and economists responsible for today’s misery and exploitation.

Two of the cartoons I’ve previously posted up have shown Maggie Thatcher and various other Tories as malign pagan idols, and this is another portrayal of her in the same vein. The inspiration for it was a photograph of a place in Turkey where the statues of ancient gods from Greece, Rome and perhaps elsewhere from that country’s long history emerge from the hillside.

In this picture, the deities of the ancient Graeco-Roman world have been replaced by Maggie Thatcher on the left, and von Hayek on the right. Von Hayek was one of the founders of the Libertarian free market economics that Thatcher embraced as her official policy. He was another bitter opponent of Socialism, which he attacked in his book, The Road to Serfdom. He served the Austrian government in the 1920s formulating an anti-Socialist economic policy based on classical Liberalism. After embracing the free market economists of Von Mises and others in the 1920s, he fled to Britain in 1931, where he taught at the LSE. He wasn’t quite the worst of the leaders of the New Right free market economists, as he still believed in some minimal kind of welfare state. But he was highly influential in the Libertarian attacks on state intervention and the welfare state.

And Thatcher was a big fan. The Financial Times over a decade ago carried an article on him, which attempted to argue that some of his ideas can still be embraced by those on the Left. For example, he stressed the importance of central institutions for a country’s political and economic life. These were the fundamental parts of its political constitution. In Britain’s case, these would include the monarchy and parliament. That both of these are of major importance to the British constitution is unquestionable, but I don’t think you need to be any kind of Libertarian to recognise this. And of these two institutions, the monarchy isn’t indispensable to orderly government by any means. It’s extremely popular, and there is a very good argument for retaining a head of state, who is above politics. But at the same time, there’s also a sizable minority of people in Britain, who would prefer a republic as a far more democratic, and less expensive alternative.

As for parliament, constitutional theorists have also pointed out the importance of middle level associations, such as professional associations, trade unions, employers’ organisations and so on to act as checks on the centralisation of political power and defend the rights and liberties of the rest of the population.

Standing between them, if you can make it out, is a statue of a demon dating from Celtic Gaul, from a photograph of a sculpture in the Musee Nationale in Paris. The ancient Celts were head hunters, keeping and displaying the heads of their victims after death. This demon appeared to have been part of a temple or shrine displaying severed heads taken in battle. The monster has two human heads beneath its two front paws, and the space between the creature’s legs held circular depressions. These appear to have been the places were real human heads were placed for veneration or display.

Again, I thought this creature was a very fitting metaphor for Thatcher and von Hayek. Their economic policies have proven to be a dreadful failure. Rather than bringing prosperity and freedom, they have only brought poverty, misery and death. As I’ve mentioned over and again before, there are a hundred people forced to use food banks to keep themselves from starving. There are 7 million more people, living in ‘food insecure’ household. In 2015, 30,000 people were killed by austerity.

And instead of peace and security, we live in an age of seemingly endless war, as our government joins the Americans in military campaigns in the Middle East. These are supposedly against Islamist terror and brutal despotisms, but the reality is that it’s just more western imperialism with a very thin humanitarian guise.

At home, the government and the press are whipping up hysteria and hatred against immigrants, including refugees fleeing from the very wars and dictators the West has begun and installed in power around the world. Muslims are particularly singled out because of atrocities committed by Salafist terrorists, despite the fact that time and again the majority of British Muslims have shown they don’t support such outrages. The real responsibility for these terror attack does not lie with ordinary British Muslims. It lies with our government, who used radical Islamist groups as soldiers in the proxy war against Communism, the Soviet Union and secular, Arab nationalist governments in the Middle East, and the Saudis, who are backing them to export their brutally intolerant brand of Islam. These Islamist groups have killed far more Muslims, as they attempt to carve out their wretched caliphate, in attacks and massacres across the Dar al-Islam than other religious groups.

And whatever the Libertarians have said about shrinking the state to expand the sphere of personal liberty, in practice nearly four decades of Thatcherite regimes, including Blair’s New Labour, have done the exact opposite. The power of the security services to intrude and monitor our private communications has been ruthlessly expanded under the pretext of keeping us safe from terror. There’s a real danger of Britain becoming a surveillance state, exactly like 1984. And Blair’s New Labour and the Tory-Lib Dem coalition under Cameron and Clegg passed legislation providing for secret courts. These are Kafkaesque courts, where a man or woman can be tried in secret, with critical evidence against him or her and his/her lawyer and even the identity of the person accusing them withheld, if it is considered necessary for reasons of national security. Which was exactly like the travesties of justice in Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Russia.

But Thatcher and von Hayek still remain idols on the right. The Daily Mail, Scum and other right-wing rags fly into paroxysms of rage if anyone dares to insult her memory, or point out that the terrible state of the country today, with a deliberately failing health service, mass poverty, poor and exploitative public services and utility industries, and the erosion of civil liberties are ultimately all the products of her policies and ideas.

And so Thatcher and von Hayek stand, like Ozymandias, on a desolate hillside, surveying the ruins they have created. While their followers kill and maim, offering terrible human sacrifices to them and their failed doctrines.

It’s long past time they were swept away, and replaced by a decent government, that would renationalise the NHS, nationalise the railway and parts of the electricity infrastructure, prevent the privatisation of schools, and reverse the benefit cuts and sanctions that are killing tens of thousands and forcing millions into poverty.

It’s about time May was forced out, along with the rest of the Tories, and replaced with Jeremy Corbyn and a Labour administration.

UKIP Are Libertarians Who Want to Privatise the NHS and Destroy the Welfare State

Jayne Linney in her recent post on UKIP highlighting their deeply unpleasant domestic policies support her points with links to the party’s own statements of their policies. One of these links takes you to the local UKIP party for Hillingdon. These state that UKIP is a Libertarian party that is opposed to redistribution. They say:

‘UKIP Policies

Latest:-

Libertarianism is the belief that each person has the right to live his life as he chooses so long as he respects the equal rights of others. Libertarians defend each person’s right to life, liberty, and property. In the libertarian view, voluntary agreement is the gold standard of human relationships. If there is no good reason to forbid something (a good reason being that it violates the rights of others), it should be allowed. Force should be reserved for prohibiting or punishing those who themselves use force, such as murderers, robbers, rapists, kidnappers, and defrauders (who practice a kind of theft). Most people live their own lives by that code of ethics. Libertarians believe that that code should be applied consistently, even to the actions of governments, which should be restricted to protecting people from violations of their rights. Governments should not use their powers to censor speech, conscript the young, prohibit voluntary exchanges, steal or “redistribute” property, or interfere in the lives of individuals who are otherwise minding their own business.’

In fact, Libertarianism the political creed of extreme laissez faire capitalism, formulated by Von Hayek and Mises, who both served the Austrofascist government of Engelbert Dollfuss before escaping to America. Von Hayek was then quite happy to travel to Chile to see how his policies were put into operation by the murderous dictator General Pinochet.

They go on to say they will

Launch partnerships with the private and charity sectors to increase efficiency and choice and bring in health care vouchers for those who wish to opt out of the NHS.

• Give parents school vouchers to allow them to choose their children’s schools.

This effectively means breaking up the NHS. Their statement about negotiating with the private and charity sectors should also ring alarm bells. In Britain before the introduction of the NHS, hospital treatment for the poor was mostly through charity. They wish to turn the clock back prior to 1945.

The idea of school vouchers also comes from von Hayek and the Chicago School. It has been introduced in Chile, and comprehensively wrecked that country’s education system. For the details, check out the article over at Guy Debord’s Cat.

On welfare benefits as a whole, they further state:

• Ensure that benefits are only for those who have lived here for over 5 years. Make welfare a safety net for the needy, not a bed for the lazy.

This means a further dismantling of the welfare state, beyond what has already been done by the Tories, Lib Dems and New Labour. Removing it from immigrants is simply the first step. As for the benefits system being a ‘bed for the lazy’, this can only come from people, who have never had to sign on in their lives and have absolutely no idea about the bullying, harassment and despair and you can now encounter in your local jobcentre.

UKIP are a disgrace. They are no friend to the working or lower middle classes. If they get into power they will destroy the last remains of state protection for the poor, the sick and disabled.