Communist Word Salad

 

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 19^th 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.