The way things are now . . .

As opposed to latterday Marxists, most of whom at least pretend to espouse democracy, Marx himself had little time for it, considering what he called ‘bourgeois democracy’ to be the ideal vehicle of capitalist political control.  Of course, most modern Marxists, despite their protestations to the contrary, don’t really believe in it either.  Revolution having failed, they see it instead as an alternative means of achieving their ends, which haven’t at all changed in the meantime, other than to become infected more and more with crazy liberal sexual politics.

The program is by hook or crook to get a political majority, and then, usually using the courts, to go full belt to implement the full Marxist-cum-Leninist programme, irrespective of the consequences that may ensue.

The fact is that democracy, certainly as we practice it, can only work to the extent that there is at root some shared foundation plinth of values, or at least restraints, among the different parties.  Rather like in snooker—an analogy I have used in a different context before—parties can twist themselves into whatever configuration they like, so long as they continue to keep at least a toe on the ground of those shared principles.  Should this common ground be allowed disappear, then democracy becomes impossible.

And such is the situation we find ourselves increasingly in today, to the extent that I really believe we are—and I am speaking here of the West in general—in the preliminary stages of civil war, for there seems no way for any former working basis of agreement to be glued back together.

Rather than the ‘preliminary stages of civil war’, perhaps I should speak instead of the ‘talking stages’; though the talking consists mainly of shouting, and that coming generally from the one side.

In such a situation, the temptation is often to retreat back into private life, until such time as the storm blows over, and things hopefully resume, equally hopefully, more or less as they were before.

But such, at the present juncture, is unlikely to be the case.

The following extracts are from The Philosophy Steamer, an excellent book by Leslie Chamberlain, published in 2006, and dealing with the enforced exodus of the liberal—and, strangely enough, the religiously motivated liberal—intelligentsia from Russia, in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution.

“No non-Russian reader and no reader in the twenty-first century should misunderstand what this offensive against religion, superficially justified as an attack on superstition, actually meant.  One of the key aims of Bolshevism was to destroy religion in Russia, both in terms of the Church as an autonomous institution and in terms of Christianity as a source of popular authority.  To this, Marxist-Leninist philosophy added an objection to religious faith because it sanctioned an ‘inwardness’ which in turn allowed for freedom of thought.  Soviet totalitarianism meant denying individuals the possibility of a discrete ‘inner’ life.  Everything had to be rendered to Caesar. . . . Lenin defined the modern effectively as totalitarian, and the result was the banishment of inwardness not only from philosophy but from life itself.  It became the task of propaganda and the political police in Russia to disallow individuality and privacy – the sources of imagination – in daily life and in the political lives of individuals. Under the Soviet version of totalitarianism there was no such thing as private thoughts; no possibility of an inner space in which a man might commune with himself.”

Looking at this, is it possible to avoid the conclusion that one is looking at the blueprint for what was to come to pass for socialism in, say, today’s North Korea?  It is a tradition in the revolutionary left to blame it all on Stalin; if he hadn’t gained control, then everything would have been different.  Yet reading here, it is impossible to disallow the idea that, Stalin or no Stalin, the end result was already written into the DNA of the communist movement from the very beginning.

The word ‘discrete’ in the quotation means basically ‘separate’; but equally its homophone ‘discreet’ could just as well apply.

Change of Direction . . .

“The urge to community seems to be inherent in society.  In mediaeval society the urge to simpler forms of community expressed itself in the cities and towns by a subdivision into rival districts and quarters called wards, where, as one description of it goes, ‘The ward is a social unit where people meet, congregate, celebrate, and gossip.  It is a true neighbourhood, where everyone knows each other, where people vouch for each other, and where people perform their everyday routine’.

Dundalk was at one stage divided into four wards, which seem to survive solely as vague memories.  Modern day Siena continues to have seventeen contrade or city wards, all of them still active and passionate, and which add a spice to life at odds with the otherwise drab uniformity of urbanisation.

Like a plant cut-back and cut-back, yet still struggling to grow, there seems to be a basic and hidden longing within humanity for a more limited and local identity than simply that of citizen.

Yet the atomisation of modern society makes it harder and harder to express this longing in any practical form.  To the extent that people are aware of this, it is as a vague dissatisfaction, an itch that can’t be scratched . . .”

The above represents the beginning of my third mailing to do with community, but even as I wrote it, I found myself diverting away from my original purpose in writing it.  My intention was to try and offer a rough template for the rescue of the better and more important elements of traditional community.  But the more I tried to do so, the more presumptuous it began to seem, and the more pointless.  At best one would be proposing starting again from scratch, something that would be quite impossible.

At most it would resemble those monkey compounds in the better zoos, where all sorts of climbing and swinging and self-hiding devices are provided in an effort to mimic the natural habitat of the animal, without ever at all being able to recreate the actuality of what really has been lost.

The ancients had a much simpler and deeper idea of what was involved in community building.  In the 5^th century BC, the Athenians undertook the task of re-establishing the southern Italian city of Sybaris, which had previously been destroyed in local conflicts.  And one of the first things they did was to create twelve separate tribes to inhabit it, and, it would seem, to give it an internal vibrancy—rather like adding yeast to dough—that would cause it to flourish, even as it presented a united outwards face to the world.

Rather like looking into the workings of a watch, the overall purpose would be achieved by creating an interior system of competition and divided communal allegiances and the various contradictory processes arising from the same.  In some sense, it would resemble a living body, full of circulation and movement.

Yet the fact is that nowadays we are way beyond that stage.  The ancient way was organic, a sort of ‘not by bread alone’ approach, as opposed to the twentieth century insistence on creating huge undifferentiated wodges of local government and other housing, on the patronising assumption that all people required was a roof over their heads and sufficient to eat in order to feel fulfilled.

It should also be recognised that the process of dividing ancient and mediaeval urban settlements into smaller internal communal areas, wards, or tribes, had the effect of recognising, however inchoately, the limits seemingly imposed by nature on the optimum size of community, something discussed in previous mailings.

It was in the bigger cities, such as Athens, where the system eventually broke down under sheer weight of numbers, resulting in the most fearsome of class warfare, leading eventually to the emergence of modern political democracy as we know it.

I considered deleting the previous two mailings, as a result of the change in direction of my thinking.  Nonetheless, I decided to lead them stand, in that they contain, I think, certain small things of value within them.

The matter requires a lot more thought . . .

I may return to it in time.

Until later  . . .

The third part of the most recent mailing will, along with other mailings, be held back for the next fortnight or so, due to other unavoidable commitments.  But it will appear.