On Communism

 I've been meaning to make a post on communism but I haven't been satisfied with earlier drafts; I'm still not satisfied, but I suspect that I'm not going to be satisfied no matter how much more study I do; so I figure I'd post it here. Take it as you will. 

The issue with communism is not an issue with whether it has been implemented correctly, but rather an issue in principle; communism rejects the fundamental human right to private property and enterprise; which is to say, that aspect of property which is not held in common by all men, nor is the personal property of any individual man, but is rather the property of many men but nto all, some group of men, where there are others outside of that group; so that the means and ends of the group are distinct from the means and ends of those outside of the group; private enterprise bieng the end, private property being among the means. 

It is a matter of fact that men are naturally inclined to make in-groups; to make families and groups of friends, who share some bond of virtue and love which is closer and stronger with each other than those who are not part of the group; it is in the nature of love and virtue to be exclusive in this manner; love is to will the good of the other, virtue is that which makes something good, and naturally if something is good, then it excludes all that is not good, all that is evil; and as friendship is a relationship built upon virtue (this was more or less Aristotle's definition of the term) then friendship excludes those who lack the virtue in question; family is built upon the virtue of blood, friendship upon the virtue of character, for blood is a good thing, as it is what keeps us alive, and character can be good, for through it much good can be attained. 

The existence of the in-group/out-group dynamic should not be confused with hostility to the out-group; one can be friendly without being a friend, indeed, one can be friendly even to their enemies; friendliness simply means behavior typical of a friend, and when it is aimed at one who is not a friend, it really just means openness to becoming a friend, and one can be open to becoming a friend with their enemies, provided of course, their enemies are willing to take upon the virtue that grounds the friendship. An enemy is simply someone who not merely lacks a virtue, but possesses a contrary vice i.e. a vice that inclines them to attempt to eliminate the virtue on question; and a vice is a bad habit, a habit being an ability, ease, and inclination to act in a certain manner. 

In either case, there are values inherent to the nature of groups; and when groups cooperate to shared ends, we say there is a shared enterprise; and if they wish to succeed in their enterprise then they need to gather their means to do so, and this is their property. Communism accepts this only on the level of the public; it is not open to it on the level of lower groups; excepting perhaps the individual; who of course would not have the means to defend himself against the state if the state changed it's tune; which is somehting which no communist can garuntee won't happen, since even if you have a genius and saintly set of leaders in a communist state, all it takes is a change of leadership, which is guaranteed to happen, for even if people aren't elected out, they will eventually die; and so will eventually have to be replaced; and this is in an ideal case; in truth, the state is going to engage in neglect and abuses more or less inevitably, both due to the vice of those in office, and due to honest mistakes made by them resulting in mismanagement; and in a communist state, which has eliminated all buffers and where all the collective power and property is in the hands of the state; the consequences of that are inevitably destructive and damaging. 

This is why there is a moral obligation for subsidiarity to exist in governing systems; for lower level systems, when they go wrong, won't go wrong quite so bad due to having so much less power and resources to ruin people, and likewise, when higher level systems go wrong, the lower level systems can pick up the slack; an overly top heavy system (which communism is inherently inclined to be; due to being inherently hostile to the idea of a private sector); so that communism will 'always' go wrong; and this is because it 'begins' on faulty premises; a faulty view of human nature and our natural rights, and so it's aims are against human rights from the outset; by nature, communism is aimed at crimes against humanity. 

To be clear, communism is a species of humanism, people are drawn to communism for a reason, even a good reason; but the issue is that humanism without capitalism (where capitalism is taken in the negative sense of anti-communism, rather than in a more positive sense of this or that specific view of things; the only thing uniting all forms of capitalism being a promotion of the private sector, and so private property and enterprise) is simply a form of humanism with an overly reductive view of humanity; it ends up attacking the very humanity it seeks to help; communism may have a great number of other things right about human nature, and indeed, this or that version of capitalism may have wrong precisely the things communism has right; but the issue is that when capitalism gets things wrong, it's not because it's 'adding' something to human nature that isn't there, but because it's 'failing to notice' something in human nature that is i.e. when capitalism is wrong, it is wrong not in principle, but rather 'for lack' of a principle, it is wrong for being too reductive a version of capitalism; and 'communism has the same problem' but wiht respect to humanism; as the evil forms of capitalism (like social darwinism; which basically sees nothing else to man 'but' his right to private enterprise and property, and even that only provided man has sufficient power and resources to avoid being overcome in the first place) are evil due to being overly reductive forms of capitalism; so too communism is evil for being an overly reductive form of humanism. 

Communism always calls it's main enemy by the name 'capitalism', and for this reason all good men must be capitalists, in the communist sense of the term; for the simple reason that communism is inherently evil, and being against something which is inherently evil is inherently good; and communism is evil because it is in error and forms all it's plans of actions based in that error; for evil is the privation of the good, moral evil being the privation of the good in the will, and so (when the will is not inhibited) a privation of it in action; but truth is the first of all goods; so that error is the first of all evils, and any act of will rooted in an error is a neccesery example of moral evil; for to plan to act in a way rooted in an error is to not simply fail to attend to some good (as one would if one acted rooted in mere ignorance without error) but to postively plan to act in a way contrary to the truth, and so not to merely neglect a good in the world conveyed to the mind by truth, but to actively attempt to undo that good; in this case, the good in the world that communism attacks is man's natural inclination to form in-groups in the economic order, his natural inclination to private enterprise and property; and the cost of doing this are as described above.

Though there are other costs as well, psychological costs of stifling a natural inclination, for a man tends to intuitively expect what is natural, when it is forbidden, he might be enraged at the injustice, or being too quick to presume wisdom in others, he may be disappointed in his own presumption; and if his presumption continues to arise again and again, he may despair at it; become demoralized; and if this doesn't result in suicide, it is apt to eventually become resentment, which will be far more corrosive to any momentary rage of the first sort; though both are destructive and not good for the individual, nor society as a whole. People don't tend to cope well when the things that give life meaning are stolen from them; since 'coping' itself begins to seem among the meaningless things; and as family, friends, and work are among the key things that give life meaning, and as all of these are involved to some extent or another in private property and enterprise, needing these in order to have a shared aim to draw these groups together and shared means to cooperate in achieving that aim; then when one's state and culture are operating to go against that, then there is in fact, a just cause for outrage; though that comes with the typical problem of how mankind tends not to be very good at measuring the proper proportion to act out that outrage. 

In either case, again; I'm against communism ultimately because it by nature results in these sorts of things; due to it's fundamental error about the goodness of the private sector, and so about private property and enterprise. 

A second issue with communism is that it is essentially paranoiac; it engages in the hermeneutic of suspicion; seeing all non-economic social structures in a capitalist state as a superstructure more or less designed to hide an underlying economic base motivating it all; on this grounds communism tends to be against any serious consideration of every other aspect of society, up to and including religion, which is the most important and central aspect of any society's culture. 

Seeing the world through it's reductively economic lens, communism simply can't coherently entertain these alternatives as serious contenders for truth and value, their principles are seen as merely a smokescreen put up by the economic base to preserve it's power, all of them are seen merely as tools for oppression, and so are seen as things just as much to be subverted as private property and enterprise themselves; due to their cooperation and agreement with hte value of the private sector; and in an extended sense, they are all essentially part of the private sector anyway in the communist lens; since the communist lens essentially sees everything through the lens of the state and the individual on the one side, and 'all other possible social structures' on the other; with the former being the only acceptable groups (with even the state only being temporarily acceptable, as a means by which to combat the other groups. 

The point in any case is that the communists main way of reading society is one of suspicion, and so, paranoia; so long as communism is not in power, the state itself is subject to that suspicion as well, and even then it's only those in power who are apt to read things this way, those without power will remain just as paranoid as the communist with power, there is no point of culmunation for the view, no real end in sight, except the end of capitalism; the end of the private sector, and the subversion of all aspects of society and culture to cooperate to this. 

The tragedy of it is that, at least initially, many communists is sincerely persuaded of his righteousness; he is sincerely persuaded that he is doing the right thing, he has the approbation of his conscience in all he does; genuinely thinking that his view of human nature is correct, and that the private sector is essentially unnatural, when the exact opposite is the case. 

So the narrative of communism is the proletariat rising up to fight against the borgiouses, with the bourgiousees constantly hiding themselves ever more and more by the smokescreen of the social superstructure; and the communists hermenutic then is the one going about uncovering these heinous deceptions; and as the communist is willing to subvert the state, so they are also willing to subvert the other structures, up to and including the religious ones; all ultimately in the endevour to overpower the bourgiuosees, and install a proletariat government; whose sole purpose from that point onward will be to eliminate private ownership of the means of production (and so, the means of the perpetuation of all groups of men beneath their power, namely, the power of the state); perhaps the same process will enstate itself in any subverted group; the communist will usurp the power of the leadership of any given group of people, and use that power to break down groups bellow, to absorb their property (and so, eliminate their enterprise by making it no longer a practical possibility) and use that property to perform the same thing elsewhere; and then, when all the groups of men aside from the state itself are gone; there is 'supposed' to be some sort of distribution of the goods to all those who will need them; 'from each according to their ability, to each according to their need'; but whether the state will be somehow undone, and how the state will go about doing this distribution while also preventing people from ever actually using those goods to any meaningful purpose (for bieng social animals, pretty much everything that gives us meaning is done in communities, and so in the private sector) the communist leaves unstated. 

The issue is that property which can't be shared with those we love is useless to us; and communism is essentially against sharing with anyone except everyone; it is against the exclusivitiy involved in all such groups bellow the public and it's state, bellow the 'all' of society; it sees any other subset as irrationally and/or immorally discriminatory, when in fact it is precisely the opposite. 

This returns to the point of in-groups; it is good to have friends, indeed, it is good to have enemies; for at least then yous tand for something; the goal shouldn't be to elimiante all subordinate groups of society, one cannot be against the in-group/out-group dynamic without neccesery 'instituting' that very dynamic i.e. making one group of people (those who are against the dynamic) and another group of people (those who are for it) and making the former your in-group and the latter the out-group that you're working to destroy; this is obviously hypocritical; but it seems to me that this idea is implicit in communism, not as something essential to it per se, but as something a communism will inevitibly be tempted toward i.e. it seems implicit in being against private property and enterprise; this aspect of communism is simply inherently hypocritical, inherently pharisaical, I might say; insofar as communism seeks to avoid hypocrisy, this perhaps becomes why communism is ultimately against the state as well, it too ultimately being a means to an end; and communism would seem to take this means as justified by the end. This logic never works. 

I could perhaps keep on going but. I will stop here.