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.