I sat in the required Scientific Socialism class with eyes glazed over, pretending to pay attention to the daily indoctrination, a bona fide class which we had to pass in the communist education system to advance to the next grade. There was no science in such a class, just endless word salads in hundreds of paragraphs, each made more pompous by flowery euphemisms which did not reflect reality at all.
The rhetoric was the same and we had to memorize the word
salads by heart, essays devoid of reality which included endless, shallow in
meaning paragraphs. The word salads extolled the miracles of the proletariat
living in a just and happy socialist society that only existed in the confusing
theoretical explanation of Marx’s Communist Manifesto pamphlet and in the heads
of the Bolsheviks.
As a logical and thinking person, it was impossible to
believe the cleverly crafted communist lies when reality surrounded us with
misery every day – endless lines for food, services, medical care, and
transportation in rickety buses or dirty trains. These liars forced the
proletariat to survive on 200 g of food per day, while they ordered expensive
food from abroad. They robbed and stole from the exploited people and threw
dissenters in jail. They called us the proletariat and they ruled and
controlled us with their “dictatorship of the proletariat” nonsense. The
proletariat did not rule anything. We were controlled by the Communist Party
rulers.
While the working class had one pair of shoes and one
outfit per year, the dictator Ceausescu and his wife burned their clothes and
shoes every day. They never wore the same outfits twice for fear of contact
poisoning. Their obscene and wasteful wardrobe outdid Imelda Marcos’ 3,000 pairs
of shoes.
Propaganda filled the pages of magazines, newspapers, and
books with florid language and meaningless paragraphs about the virtues of
socialism and communism, hollow word salads written by many writers and poets
employed by the regime, crafty writings that we were forced to memorize and
regurgitate convincingly in class.
We were terrorized by fear by a Marxist tyrant who
deprived us of dignity, food, heat, electricity, medicine, medical care, decent
housing, and adequate clothing. He held endless monologues in front of the
nation while the attendees had to clap every other paragraph.
He had children, young people, and old adults killed. His
henchmen took orphans, abandoned children, and trained them to be murderers of
their own people. They cut off oxygen lines in hospitals and shot people in
their hospital beds. They hid food reserves that could have fed entire cities
for months.
In the communist tyrant’s word salad monologues (the dear
leader loved to hear himself talk), clasa muncitoare (the working
class) pops up constantly. He was referring to Marx’s proletariat, which
is the working class of the 19th century.
Marx wrote that the proletariat sells its labor, deriving
no profit from it, only the bourgeoisie does. Communists promised that such
unfair practices would end under communism, private property would be
confiscated, and distributed it to the proletariat. It was confiscated but
nothing was distributed to the proletariat.
The working class still sold its labor cheaply to the
only employer, the Communist Party, with its apparatchiks and informers who
lived well from the profits and from the stolen property of the so-called
bourgeoisie (the landed class).
Hegelian dialectic provided communists with convenient
excuses to exploit the proletariat by duping them that they were being taken
care of by the best social and political system in the world, a blatant lie.
Hegel was an idealist – his dialectic method of philosophy
stated that the universe was both rational and spiritual. Karl Marx borrowed Hegel’s
dialectic method to explain his materialistic concept of philosophy. Hegel
used the dialectic method to interpret the past and the present. Marx used the
dialectic method to explain the past and present and to predict the future, and
to understand “the general laws of development” of nature and of history.
Communists claim three laws which govern the function of
the dialectic:
1. The
law of unity and struggle of opposites (opposing classes that
struggle, example used was the breakdown of atoms into protons and electrons)
2. The
law of negation (a thesis is negated by antithesis and thus
produces the synthesis and then the synthesis becomes a new thesis against
which a new antithesis arises; each step is described as a higher stage of
development)
3. The
law of the sudden leap (quantitative changes often produce a
qualitative change; as an example, they use water to make the argument that
large quantity of it will be changed by temperature into steam (sudden leap and
quantitative change).
Using this line of reasoning, communists tried to explain
the development of man as follows:
-
Inanimate objects experienced quantitative
changes and became living organisms because of a sudden leap.
-
Animals became men following more
quantitative changes.
-
A sudden leap produced the human mind.
Applying this flawed line of reasoning to social order,
communists describe their revolution as a “sudden leap that ushers in a new
form of society.” Marx and Engels wrote that “the nature of a society at
any given time was the direct result of the means of production then in effect,”
which they called the substructure of society.” They identified the state, law,
morality, and culture as the “superstructure.”
Following this fallacious argument, the communist view of
history is a ladder which starts with the primitive-communal society, slavery,
feudalism, capitalism, and finally ends with communism, the stage of
a classless society in which the dialectical materialism process will
cease to operate. The communist man will no longer be motivated by
self-interest and there will be “no distinction between mental and physical
labor and material abundance, absolute equality, and true social justice will
prevail.”
This historical materialism which focuses on economics
may seem to support the social inequities theory. But the communists
cleverly cherry-picked historical occurrences that supported their flimsy
theory. It is certainly not consistent with all historical events. Marx and
Engels lived in the period of the Industrial Revolution when there were great
social inequalities and large differences between economic classes.
Historical materialism is
not a science of history, nor a science at all. Its five-stage communist
development fails to explain societies in Asia. “Unlike Western society,
which is based on private ownership of the means of production, the Asiatic
society was based on state ownership of the means of production. Such despotic
societies had two classes, state bureaucracy and the masses. The masses had no
power. The Asiatic society never went through the feudal era, and it was
notable for the absence of class revolutions.” (J.E. Hoover, A Study of
Communism, 1962, p. 45)
Communists were and are
wrong. History was and is influenced by many factors, not just economics and
social justice. Famous people, good and bad (Lincoln, Washington, Martin
Luther, Napoleon, Hitler, Karl Marx, Stalin, Mao) and inventors (Madam Curie,
Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Archimedes, Galileo, Copernicus) changed the
course of the world. Other factors influenced the course of history, i.e.,
patriotism, quest for justice, religion, service, personal power, love, hate,
revenge, beliefs, ideals, traditions, truth. Furthermore, the laws of natural
science can never be applied to history and sociology. And history and
sociology can never be exact like chemistry and physics.
The communists use the
standard, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his
needs,” but who will decide where the person will work and what will
satisfy his needs? Will each person determine his own ability and needs? How much
chaos will that entail?
A pamphlet from December 1959,
titled “Communist Illusion and Democratic Reality” states that “Communism
propaganda portrays peace, social progress, and economic prosperity as characteristic
of the communist world and claims that these make communism invincible. The
noncommunist world, on the other hand, is pictured as seething with political
instability, economic exploitation, and social upheaval.”
Having experienced on our
necks the heavy socialist boot of the Communist Party, we can attest that peace
comes from the ends of the communist guns, social progress is crowded in
concrete grey apartment complexes, and economic prosperity was expressed
painfully and daily while standing in long lines outside of stores to buy
bread, bones, milk, cooking oil, and other hard to find necessities for
survival.
The communist dictator’s
word salad monologues did not feed our hungry bellies and the desire for real freedom
outside the heavily controlled and locked borders, which kept us prisoners
inside, was burning hot in our souls.
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