Anatomy of the Communist

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The word ‘communist’ elicits mixed reactions, depending on whom you talk to. It is usually viewed as a way to create solidarity, communal ownership of the means of production, and a society without classes; or as a cause of death, famine, and cultural destruction. Experience has shown that when socialists and communists (terms that are often used interchangeably) take control, the latter outcome is usually the case. However, the typical communist does not typically seek to give their life for their community, nor do they feel any sort of communal sentiment. Rather, many communists (particularly those who are not members of a party) seem to be the utter dregs of society. As George Orwell once commented: “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

This is an important observation. When the term ‘communist’ was originally coined, it referred to people who believed in an economy where the means of production were owned collectively by the workers and aimed to create a classless, cashless society. Nominally, this still holds true. However, with the benefit of hindsight, it appears that communist aesthetics and rhetoric attract a particular type of person; one who is self-serving in their actions and temperament, and who does not care for their community or kin. There is a reason for this.

Debates on communism tend to focus on its economic program, as originally formulated by Marx, and how effective it would be if put into practice. But this misses the point—the focus on economic ideas is a smokescreen, distracting opponents from moving the conversation beyond the purely material and onto the metaphysical aims of the movement. Communism in practice is more than just an economic theory; it is a complete social vision that sets forth values and prescriptions for how humans should behave according to their nature. This is what attracts some people to its siren song, but also what makes it such an appealing vision for power-hungry politicians to sell. In practice, it is never implemented in a dogmatic, doctrinaire fashion, as shown by Lenin's quick economic about-face, and the institution of the ‘New Economic Policy’ in the infant Soviet Union. Harping on economic questions only leads to circular, insular discussions on esoteric points. These conversations will have no impact on anyone but ideological fanatics and academics, and the powerful will continue to impose an immoral social order on the rest of us.

What is this social vision that communists wish to impose? It seems to be the ultimate emancipation of humanity from nature - the forces that tie us together and those that constrain us from achieving true liberty, defined as the expressive ability to do and be whatever we want at any time without moral judgement from our peers. Their policy proposals are pragmatically designed to impose this social order from the top down; welfare policies that undermine the family, regulations that impose an aristocratic hierarchy based around technocrats and their children, and censorship of local traditions and cultural practices. Rather than communism being purely defined by its economic system, the true goal is emancipation from physical want and duty to others.

This is an important distinction, as under this definition, a free-market liberal can be recognised as a communist, so long as their goal is to use the market to free us from duties and obligations to one another. Their reasons for supporting the free market are the same as the communist's for opposing it. As we will examine in this essay, many of the core tenets of communism can be traced back to liberal thinkers, particularly John Stuart Mill. The history of communism and liberalism is more closely linked than some may be comfortable with, but it is the central tenets of both ideologies that tie them together inseparably. These tenets deserve identification and close examination, so that one will be better equipped to identify communists of all stripes in the wild.

Hatred of the Family

At the root of a communist’s thought lies a deep distrust and resentment of their own family. This extends beyond typical teenage rebellion and becomes pathological, eventually extending to a distrust of the Western family structure and calls to “abolish the family.” In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels call for this act. This is unsurprising given Marx’s own family history, and both men’s tendency to leech off their family’s generosity.

The communist is highly sensitive to anything they could consider as "oppression," and the family is, to the communist, the greatest oppression, built purely on irrational blood ties. This imposes constraints and guidelines on behaviour. In their heart, as we will discover, the communist has room for nothing but the purely rational and the hedonistic, preferring to indulge in immediate pleasures because, as Keynes once said, “in the long run, we are all dead.”

This feature of socialist and communist thought is not new, nor is it exclusive to Marxists. It recurs repeatedly in revolutionary leftist thought. In his book After Liberalism, Paul Gottfried notes that it was a prominent motivator of 19th-century French socialists:

“In France the revolutionary socialist Jules Guesde (1845–1922) sat in the Chamber of Deputies from 1893 on, and, as Lecky reminds us, Guesde, in the Catechisme Socialiste, presents the family as an ‘odious form of property’, one destined to give way to a multiplicity of sexual relations for men and women alike.”

This statement reveals the ulterior motive for abolishing the family: the indulging of base desires. Hand-in-hand with the demolition of family structures comes sexual and moral degeneracy. A family that loves its child is typically supportive and nurturing, yet also harsh, judgemental, and demanding—equipping them with the necessary skills and virtues to live a good and long life. These virtues include responsibility and commitment to culture and community, as well as knowledge of being part of a great chain of being that extends far into the past and future. This is done through family commitments, such as visiting grandparents and extended family. These are corrosive acids to the communist, who rejects responsibility, considering it just another oppression—a weight placed on him from the moment he was born. As a result, he identifies any and all constraints and structure with his hated family, using his malformed resentment to fuel the rest of his communist worldview. Ultimately, this leads the communist to see any and all hierarchy as oppression, something to be torn down. 

Sadly, this resentment can be born both from neglect and poor treatment from parents, which can breed justifiable grievances, as well as from the privilege common to many born into family wealth. In fact, this attitude can arise in any background; the harsh truth is that no amount of good parenting can fix some children.

Out-Group Preference

In his sociological studies of the moral foundations of the differences and animosity between political groups, Jonathan Haidt discovered that when tested, those on the left (deemed “liberals” in his research) scored exceptionally low on loyalty. To anyone with even basic observational skills, this was already obvious. Within the Anglosphere and Europe, we have been inundated with meaningless and condescending phrases such as “no person is illegal,” “educate yourself,” and “the unbearable whiteness of” followed by some benign activity, like hiking. There are even books published that deliberately exclude the majority population from the discussion, instead demanding that the masses hand over their power and privilege. If not content only being openly antagonistic, other authors write speculative fiction about the demise of the white race. These are obviously the actions of an opposing force, one who sees those in the West as a unified group and bands against them. Unlike many liberals, who simply deny that they belong to an identifiable group, communists actively side with the aggressors in these circumstances. A quick search for the types of article I have drawn from will reveal that invariably, it is white Westerners making these statements.

In the abstract, inviting an endless stream of immigrants may seem like the kind thing to do. However, it is not this superficial niceness that motivates such narratives, but rather, a hatred for the majority group and a desire to see them destroyed. Practically, mass immigration results in problems that last for decades, passing on the economic burden to future generations. The communists' response is to deny that the problem exists, blame it on something else, and then embrace the narrative. The consequence of this is a worldview that not only desires to destroy the majority demographic group, but denies their existence in the first place.

Commitment to Unending Social Upheaval

One of the hallmarks of much post-French Revolutionary thinking is the conviction that any cultural behaviour arrived at through non-rationalistic reasoning, such as adhering to local traditions or habits, is illegitimate as a form of social organisation. This extends to the most trivial of matters; French revolutionaries even attempted to implement their own decimalised calendar, which ended up an absolute mess. While a conservative or traditionalist may recognise traditions as a result of generations worth of trial and error, the ultimate science experiment, most people will not have thought that hard about them, and will do those things common to their community because it is simply what they know works. This will not do for the communist mind.

In his famous essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill devotes lengthy sections to railing against custom in favour of his idea of social progress. In his eyes, local peoples sticking with local customs and traditions have not made the intellectually rigorous and, therefore, morally worthy endeavour to scientifically analyse whether their traditions can be rationally justified:

“I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they live in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done.”

While it is accurate that most people do not exercise their own judgement and instead follow a herd mentality, arguing instead for a more scientific formulation of ethics displays an arrogant belief that abstract rationality when put into practice will produce a society more worth living in than one moulded by centuries of custom. It is a society for intellectuals and robots, not for people. With a 20th century death toll of almost 100 million or more, the empirical results from communism have not been promising. Furthermore, upon closer inspection, passages from this famous essay imply that Mill's aim was the explicit subversion of local cultures to lay the groundwork for the scientific technocrat society he obviously preferred. This is how I interpret the statement, “I have said that it is important to give the freest scope possible to uncustomary things, in order that it may in time appear which of these are fit to be converted into customs.” Such a statement may come across as a value-free call to examine the practical basis of local customs, until one comes across this passage from the same essay:

“The despotism of custom is everywhere the standing hindrance to human advancement, being in unceasing antagonism to that disposition to aim at something better than customary, which is called, according to circumstances, the spirit of liberty, or that of progress or improvement.”

In tandem, these two statements make clear that Mill's intention was to expand the realm in which people could challenge traditions in order to subvert them. Leon Trotsky's theory of ‘permanent revolution’ in the 20th century further explains that any revolutionary class must remain in a constant state of upheaval, as yesterday's liberation movements can become today's oppressors. This idea ensures that there is a constant push toward progressivism, as radicals are replaced by their even more radical descendants.

The Escape From Nature

We have returned to the conclusion reached at the beginning of this essay: that communism is motivated by the desire to escape the restraints imposed on us by nature—to break free from the cocoon and emerge as a free, untethered butterfly. However, I do not believe that this is a desirable outcome or even achievable, apart from a utopian fantasy. However impossible to reach, this ambition motivates their extremist methods, as communists consider any opposition to be the negation of human potential, making opponents not only political enemies, but existential threats to their desired way of life.

I must reiterate that philosophical communism is a more radical offshoot of the liberalism of Bacon, Mill, and others, who believed in the perfectibility of human nature and disdained tradition and the constraints that came with it. In Suicide of the West, James Burnham explained this extreme worldview with reference to the liberal philosopher’s own words: 

“If mankind would employ his method. Bacon promised, it would be able to ‘extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe’; disdaining ‘the unfair circumscription of human power, and ... a deliberate factitious despair’, human life will ‘be endowed with new discoveries and power … The Marquis de Condorcet explains his purpose with aristocratic candor: ‘The aim of the book that I have undertaken to write, and what it will prove, is that man by using reason and facts will attain perfection … Nature has set no limits to the perfection of the human faculties. The perfectibility of mankind is truly indefinite.” 

Radical ideology cannot be reigned in by reverting to an older, slightly less radical version of it; just as one cannot un-hit a rabbit by reversing back over it. The cat's already out of the bag. True liberation can only be achieved by freeing ourselves from presuppositions drummed into us by ideological thinking—that we can escape our human nature and transcend to a post-human rational order. Maybe tradition, custom, and good old-fashioned bias contain the traces of what we need to get back to reality.