How Communists Think

There’s a lot of confusion in social media about what socialists should or shouldn’t do in the upcoming election. There are many who say “Don’t vote for Hillary Clinton because _____” You can fill in the blank, with anything from She’s a Corporate Shill to She’s a Liar to She’s Not Going to Support Single Payer Healthcare to whatever the concern of the day might be.

When these discussions occur between communists and other progressives, the progressive usually says something along the lines of “how could a communist support someone who will _____.”

Let’s clear something up here. Those statements are ideologically driven. If we unpack them fully, they really mean something very much like this: “If you’re a communist, then you must believe X, but Hillary believes Y, therefore you shouldn’t support her.” In other words, it’s an ideological litmus test.

The flaw in that argument is that communism is not an ideology. Dictionary.com defines ideology as “the body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group.” Doctrines, myths, beliefs, etc. are all philosophical constructs. Notions.

The basis for communist thought is not ideology. Marxism is not a philosophical construct. Philosophy is a tool of communist thought, not the foundation of it. “The point is not merely to understand the world, but to change it.”

What, then, is the basis of communist thought, if not beliefs or doctrines? It is a method. Specifically, that method is dialectical materialism.

“For Marx and Engels, materialism meant that the material world, perceptible to the senses, has objective reality independent of mind or spirit. They did not deny the reality of mental or spiritual processes but affirmed that ideas could arise, therefore, only as products and reflections of material conditions.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Materialism deals with objective reality, and proposes ideas which communicate that reality in a useful way. This is the opposite of ideology, which places “doctrines and beliefs” first and seeks to understand the world through the lens of those beliefs.

The reason why so much of the left is consumed by sectarian squabbling is because they are ideologues, not dialectical materialists. They have ideas which are dear to their hearts and which they believe explain the world around them. This is similar to the fundamentalist forms of religion, which proclaim that in order to be saved, you have to assent to the creed that they promote. It is fidelity to the creed that determines purity.

Marx described communism as scientific socialism. Scientific, because it is grounded in an empirical model, just as the scientific method is. We observe what is going on around us, then formulate hypotheses that help to explain or predict what happens. This guides the actions we take. We assess the outcome of those actions, and formulate new hypotheses based on what we’ve learned. Theories that are useful are retained and used, until subsequent experience suggests improved hypotheses. We are not bound to the hypotheses, we are proponents of a process.

Dialectical materialism is a particular form of scientific process.

“In opposition to the ‘metaphysical’ mode of thought, which viewed things in abstraction, each by itself and as though endowed with fixed properties, Hegelian dialectics considers things in their movements and changes, interrelations and interactions. Everything is in continual process of becoming and ceasing to be, in which nothing is permanent but everything changes and is eventually superseded…Marx and Engels started from the materialist premise that all knowledge is derived from the senses. But against the mechanist view that derives knowledge exclusively from given sense impressions, they stressed the dialectical development of human knowledge, socially acquired in the course of practical activity. Individuals can gain knowledge of things only through their practical interaction with those things, framing their ideas corresponding to their practice; and social practice alone provides the test of the correspondence of idea with reality.” (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Let’s use a practical example to bring this down to earth. We see that there is a pattern of violence against blacks by police. This is the thesis. Racist violence is being expressed in this form at this time. Blacks are not being hung from trees by angry white mobs as they were in the early 1900s. This overt racism has taken a modified form.

A movement called Black Lives Matter springs up in opposition to this violence. This is the antithesis.

Prior experience from the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s tells us that if blacks persist in their demands for racial justice, and enough whites reject their racist attitudes, then improvement will occur. That is the synthesis.

In response to this, we take part in the movement, blacks and whites each doing their part. We see what happens. If we’re right, then progress takes place. If we’ve misinterpreted, then there is a different result, a new set of conditions, and we start the process again.

We see that this approach is scientific because, like the scientific method, it proceeds from practical interaction with the world around us. This is the experimental method.

Paolo Freire understood this very well, and taught a method in Brazil functionally identical to what we’re talking about here. As described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed, the method of praxis consists of reflection and action directed at the structures to be transformed. “It is not enough for people to come together in dialogue in order to gain knowledge of their social reality.  They must act together upon their environment in order critically to reflect upon their reality and so transform it through further action and critical reflection.”

This Freire quote is more than a little reminiscent of the Marx quote above, that our goal is to change the world and not merely to understand it.

Often, people read communist texts and like the ideas they find there. They believe that those ideas are the essence of communism. They’ve missed the point. It’s easy to understand how this happens.

Much of our educational system is devoted to convincing people to accept the conclusions of others, rather than teaching them how to apply the method by which those ideas were formed. People who have been trained this way will habitually assume that if they have grasped an idea, they have understood the situation.

They should be attending to the process by which those ideas came to light instead, and applying that process to current conditions in their own lives. Marx himself, using the framework of dialectical materialism, might come to different determinations under the conditions of today, then what he concluded in the 1800s.

So when someone says “how can a communist support someone who believes X,” they are displaying a lack of understanding of the nature of communism.

If it’s idealistic rather than practical, it’s not communism.

Fascism and the New American Caesar

There’s a lot of loose talk during an election year, especially one as heated as 2016. Not that we haven’t seen heat before. The Bush years were full of a blind invective from the Left. Bush Derangement Syndrome, I heard it called. If he had gone back to drinking, many would have criticized his choice of hooch.

Then there are the slurs that the booboisie has flung at Obama. Just as deranged, and made more despicable by the racism they just have to add.

This kind of thing goes back to the beginning of the Republic. In 1800, old friends Jefferson and Adams squared off for the Presidency.

Things got ugly fast. Jefferson’s camp accused President Adams of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

In return, Adams’ men called Vice President Jefferson “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” — Kerwin Swint, Mental Floss

This is far from pristine, principled discussions of issues!

It’s the issues that count the most, when the campaign’s over and someone has to govern. As much as possible, I try to keep things on that level. I avoid the simplistic characterization, the ad hominem attack, and the dumbing-down of important policy distinctions.

Most of all, I dislike hyperbole. I’m a staunch supporter of the frame of mind implicit in Godwin’s Law (1990): “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazism or Hitler approaches 1.” French author François de Smet refers to this as the “Reductio ad Hitlerum.”

There’s a corollary to the law, that says that whoever mentions Hitler or the Nazis first, loses the argument.

So far this year I’ve been avoiding using the term “fascism” to describe Donald Trump, for all the above reasons. But I’ve been studying fascism, too, because the parallels are too strong to ignore.

There is a time and place for everything. We can’t take this comparison off the table. Mike Godwin himself has said, “If you’re thoughtful about it and show some real awareness of history, go ahead and refer to Hitler or Nazis when you talk about Trump. Or any other politician.”

There are Nazis, and they are dead serious about it. And then there are those who are not Nazis, but who have fascist tendencies. They can be more dangerous than the out-and-out Nazis. First, they’re more numerous. Second, they’re not as obvious. I believe Trump falls into the latter category.

Let’s take a moment to describe fascism, so we’re all on the same page.

Robert O. Paxton defines fascism as “a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a massed-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.” [quoted in Fascism: The Ultimate Definition]

All of these elements can be seen in play in the Trump campaign.

“Obsessive preoccupation with community decline”: The very slogan “Make America Great Again” presumes that America, once great, currently is not.

“Humiliation or victimhood”: “When Trump called Mexican immigrants “rapists” and initially refused to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, he offered voters a toxic mixture of victimhood and pugilistic rhetoric tinged with nostalgia for a violent, unapologetically racist past.”— Gunter Peck, Salon

“Compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity”: Jesse Graham, associate professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, remarked “More than any other Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump has been appealing to a particular combination of in-group loyalty and moral purity concerns. On the purity side, he often expresses disgust, often toward women and women’s bodies (e.g., Clinton’s bathroom break during a Democratic debate). But his purity appeals are most commonly in the context of group boundaries, like building walls on our national borders to prevent contamination by outsiders, who are cast as murderers and rapists, both morally and physically dirty.” – (quoted by Thomas B. Edsall in the New York Times)

“Mass-based party of committed nationalist militants”: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” [Donald Trump, quoted in The Guardian] Sadly, this seems to be pretty much true. If that’s not committed, what is? And as to the militant part, I give you this. And this. It’s not Kristallnacht by any stretch of the imagination, and no one suggested that Trump is organizing Brown Shirts, but there’s no question that the raw material is there.

“Uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites”: Did you hear Paul Ryan’s speech? Uneasy collaboration is a pretty good description. We’ll see about the effective part.

“Abandons democratic liberties”: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.” (Donald Trump, quoted by Hadas Gold on Politico.)

“Pursues with redemptive violence”: There’s no way for Trump to carry out his plans to build walls, deport millions, ban Muslims, etc. without violence ensuing. And clearly he sees these plans as redemptive, making America great again.

“Without ethical or legal restraints”: Trump talks about doing many things without reference to how the Congress or judiciary would be involved. It’s as though he thinks that, with the stroke of a pen, he’ll be able to put all these ideas into action.

“Goals of internal cleansing”: the well-known wall, deportations, of course. He has also said he would consider tracking Muslims, perhaps with a form of religious identification. New moons sewn on their clothing? I know: Godwin’s Law. But the specific form of religious identification doesn’t matter; it’s despicable just that it would even be considered.

“External expansion”: no specific plans that I’ve seen. The age of colonialism is over, so there’s that. Economic expansion is another thing though. Trump is a businessman, and had made a major part of his appeal that he will create jobs. This suggests that some kind of corporate imperialism is on the agenda.

Brian Anesi notes some other characteristics of countries in which fascism has taken hold. Among them:

1. Polarization and deadlock: “In all cases where fascism was successful, its rise was preceded by a period of political polarization and parliamentary deadlock.” Case in point: Merrick Garland.

2. The political stance is poorly defined: “Fascist ideology was vague and protean. This is a source of endless frustration to those who expect to find a coherent definition of fascism in the writings of party ‘philosophers’. But it reflects nothing more than fascism’s pragmatic approach to attaining its goals and its unwillingness to be bound (like its predecessors) to failed dogmas. Like all popular movements, fascism tried to encapsulate ideology in terse slogans – ‘Believe, Obey, Fight’, ‘Strength through joy’, ‘Work makes you free.’  Or, as we’ve heard so often, Make America Great Again.

3. Emotionally appealing: “It is commonly observed that fascism was more a matter of the gut than of the head. Clearly those who joined fascist parties often did so from shrewd self-interest, but the same could be said of those who join any party. It was the emotional appeal of fascism – the notion that through sheer hope and force of will difficult and long-standing problems could easily be resolved – that set it apart. Triumph of the Will. This idea of course was not new and is still popular.” Trump is making a patently emotional appeal. Now, we know he has lots of good words, but primarily he is connecting to people through gut instincts. Fear, self preservation, anger.

4. Intolerance for dissent: “It would be trivial to observe that since the fascist model required individuals to serve the nation-state as the embodiment of the popular will, and subordinate their interests to it, dissent would be unthinkable for any true believer. A stronger reason for suppressing dissent can be found in the emotional characteristics of fascism. Accepting that ideas firmly held become reality, a dissenter imperiled the collective spell, and dissent was seen as a species of malefic witchcraft.” Even the stodgiest of media outlets – U.S. News – raises concerns about Trump on this issue.

In researching this essay, I found that all of a sudden, over the last week to 10 days, the number of respected journals that have identified Trump with fascism has exploded. When I first started writing it, it was hard to come up with enough varied resources that I wasn’t just repeating the same authors over and over. Now, there are so many, it became a major investment of time to read them all thoroughly in order to pick the sources I wanted to use.

We are at a crossroads. This is not exaggeration. Every country that has been taken over by an autocratic leader, be it Franco or Putin or Pinochet or Stalin, has found that once its democratic tradition has been destroyed, it is very hard to go back again. We must not let that disaster befall the USA.

It’s not enough for people to the left of Hillary Clinton, such as the millions who Bernie Sanders inspired with a vision for 21st century socialism, to stand up against the threat posed by the rise of this new American Caesar. As a lifelong socialist, I’d like to end with a high-falutin call to progressive ideals. Right now, that has to wait. What is most important now is for independent voters, who are the great majority, and for moderates in the shards of the Republican Party after it sold out to Trump, to set aside their differences and defeat him and all the people in Senate, Congressional, and statehouse races who are aligned with him. Having saved our nation, then we can go back to the usual arguments over policy.