The Historical Crisis of Marxism

I think it was Karl Marx who once said that ‘history repeats itself, the second time as farce.' When John McCain was running for President there were these horrified shrieks of fear coming from audiences at his rallies expressing the dread of that boogie man, the hordes of scary Marxists. Now in the previous century, during the last great crisis of Capitalism, the planet was crawling with Marxists, and in a place like Germany the Communist Party was one of the really big political movements in the country, running pretty much neck to neck in the race with Hitler's Nazis. This is the first decade of the twentieth century and it is quite easy to see that there are no scary hordes of Marxists to be found on the planet today, thus causing me to wonder why anyone would be shrieking about Marxists when there are no Marxists to be concerned about today.

No, there are no Marxists, and there are not going to be any mobs of Marxists today, for the average proletarian regards Marxists as threatening wanna-be dictatorial tyrants. Now when you recall that Marxists preach the ‘workers state' under the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat' and then you recall that last dictatorship set up by the Marxists, you can understand why the average proletarian would consider Marxists to be wanna-be despots, because they are wanna-be despots, and when you consider how disastrous was their last experiment in dictatorial Marxism, you have to wonder why any Marxist would be so adamant on trying that same failed strategy again. Not that it matters much, mind you, because a Marxist will not be trying that same failed strategy again, because that would require a mass movement.

Now you may be wondering to yourself just what it is about Marxists that makes Marxists such persistent tyrannical tyrants who are so adamantly insistent on re-establishing ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat'.

To understand this phenomenon you must take a moment to familiarize yourself with the proletarian. The average ‘working class proletarian' is an individual who has been shaped by his cultural influences and so we could say that the proletarian personality style is just one more of manufactured products of the capitalist system. It is typical for a proletarian to be stubbornly opinionated and dogmatically partisan, very rude, quarrelsome, and unreasonable, always complaining about everything all the time while constantly back talking against everyone and everything. A proletarian has an opinion about just about everything, which is unfortunate. If you are a proletarian the way you win an argument or dispute with someone is by bouncing partisan rocks off their skull with each hit earning one point for your team against that other damned team, with both of those feuding teams of Hatfields and McCoys just burning with outrage and anger against the other obviously wrong headed team. One of the root causes of this behavior is that a proletarian is a very poorly educated uniformed individual, and when you know, somehow in your gut, that someone is wrong about something, but you don't understand enough about how the way the world works to know what it might be, then a frustrated proletarian will begin throwing rocks. This lack of deep understanding of the world in which that proletarian lives is one of the products of capitalism, for the less a proletarian understands about capitalism the better it is for capitalists. It is difficult to have a deep understanding of capitalism and then remain a supporter of something so atrociously ridiculous, so absurd. It is for this reason that capitalism has never been a self confident ideology but rather resorts to oppressive measures such as McCarthyism or walled off media monopolies and so forth.

According to Karl Marx, and according to a Marxist, all of reality can be explained by resorting to the philosophy of ‘historical materialism'. There is a materialistic explanation for everything, and when you are confronted with any naturally existing phenomenon once you have correctly determined the materialistic basis for that phenomenon you have an absolutely correct understanding and therefore must from that point on become dogmatic for the truth demands such dogmatism and dogmatism in the defense of the truth is no crime.

Now it turns out that there is a materialistic explanation for such things as human behavior. You create the new socialist human being by changing the materialistic conditions under which human beings live. However, you are Karl Marx, and therefore you are inheriting human beings who were produced under less than ideal material conditions, and so therefore it is obvious that what is required by the historical material process is a transitional period of ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat' ruled over by the ‘vanguard of the party' in order to achieve this change in material conditions, which will then result in the required change in human behavior, at which time the dictatorial state would no longer be required and would just ‘wither away'.

This then leaves Marxists to struggle with such questions as how one goes about creating a dictatorship without a dictatorship being a dictatorship, for as we have seen, when Marxists create a dictatorship it is a dictatorship, for what else could it be but a dictatorship. This would then leave Marxists to struggle with the question of how to go about creating a benign dictatorship without having the thing mutate into a malign dictatorship, or when is a dictatorship not a dictatorship, or if a dictatorship emerges from a dictatorship, does that imply that the first led to the second, and so on and so on, for the historical materialist philosophy does require such a dictatorship if a Marxists is to ever have any hope of changing the bad behavior of those naughty proletarians who are only naughty like they are now because of their present material conditions, you see.

What this history of Marxism demonstrates that this narrow fixation on historical materialism and a material explanation for everything, including human psychology, is invalid, and can be seen to be invalid when we make note of the contradictory inconsistencies it produces when it is misapplied. Now a Marxist may disagree with me on this one, but at the end of it all what matters is what a proletarian thinks about it all, and for that reason Marxists can go on and on having conversations with themselves forever and a day, and it just won't matter to anyone other than another Marxist, for history has judged and as you can tell by looking around today, the verdict was summary and final.

The Original Pig

Modern secular American Liberalism emerged from the evangelical tents where the ‘social gospel' was preached during the 19th century, and you can sure tell that this is where its true origins lie. American Liberalism is infused with the old religious doctrine of ‘the originally sinful pig' as you can tell by some of those crude stereotypes employed by liberals. As just one example, one must assume that the only reason why our bankers seemed to be so much better behaved in times past was because all our Liberal Democrats had kept all those maniacs tied up in straight jackets for years. One of those stereotypes you often hear tossed around is that Liberals are all ‘elitist East coast intellectuals' but I find it hard to understand how anyone could imagine that our Liberals were all thoughtful, perhaps even snobbish, intellectuals. It seems to me that a lot of human behavior that we see can be explained when we understand that this is the behavior of human beings trapped within a sinful system. It is the system itself which is sinful and people will be found sinning up a storm when they are trapped within some sinful system and find themselves heading towards the economic Valley of Megiddo where they will meet their ruin in the Battle of Armageddon. It seems to me that their plots will become every more screwy and their schemes ever more crackpot as the Day of the Apocalypse draws nigh, and if they seemed more sane and rational in the past it was because doomsday was somewhere far off over the horizon and not right on their doorstep knocking on the door waiting to enter in.

With these thoughts in mind it would then seem to me that the ideological function of that doctrine of ‘the originally sinful pig' is to protect sinful systems from receiving the criticism such sinful systems so richly deserve by inculcating the myth that all the evil things that people are ‘just human nature.' So then we could say that people are scrooge-like and greedy hoarders of money because they are natural pigs in that way, although when you stop to think about how cruel and ruthless that capitalist system is, and you consider the way that people get lopped off with an ax and pitched to the wolves and it is considered just another day at the office, well then you can see how such a sinful system converts people into greedy hoarding pigs who hoard so that they can deal with the constant state of low level anxiety that must afflict everyone who is forced to live under that capitalist system. This would then be a fine example of that Marxist philosophy of ‘historical materialism' wherein ‘material considerations' are said to ‘precede consciousness' because in this particular case that is exactly what is happening.

A Great Depression - Not on my watch

I am just adamant and quite determined that I am not going to put up with any capitalist great depression. That doesn't mean that I might not be found holding my nose and trying to put up with something so offensive as waiting for rivalrous feuding capitalists to finish bankrupting each other, clearing out some room in the burned down forest for the fresh sprouts of a new boom cycle, which is the ideological and social function of a great bankruptcy. Crashes and Depressions do not happen without a reason in the capitalist system, and we know that there must be a really good reason for such great depressions, since capitalists have had so damned many of them so many times over the course of so many centuries.

I may find myself enduring some great depression through no fault of my own, since as I mentioned I am quite adamant and very determined that I am not going to do something so idiotic, and therefore it just remains to be seen whether or not other people agree. If other people decide to have a great depression, and that is their last word on the matter and their minds are just damn well made up, then I guess I will be joining them for the slide down that slippery slope and for the plunge over the edge of that cliff, since having a great depression is a group thing, you see, and not one of those things that you can opt out of while letting everyone else who wants one to have a go at it by themselves.

Therefore, my task becomes clear, and it is that I must think of some damned way or another to talk other people out of the idea of going right ahead and having one of those great depressions, because I am quite adamant about not doing something like that, and so that means that I must therefore be just as adamant that they won't be doing something like that, because if they do it that means I will have to do it and as I have already said time and time again, there is just no damned way I am going to be doing it.

Therefore it has become clear to me that my task must be to forge a Grand Coalition.

I use the term ‘Grand Coalition' because it will be motley horde, by definition, since there is no way one could ever form a ‘Grand' coalition without it being a motley horde. Now it will not be required that we ‘put aside all our differences' so that we can be in a Grand Coalition, since it just doesn't matter what the hell our differences might be, just so long as we can agree on that one thing -no great depression. So then you can see that this will be a Grand Coalition consisting of what I am hoping will be a gigantic motley horde of people who don't agree about anything except for that bit about how there is no damned way we will be putting up with no great depression. That is my strongly held position, my bottom line, as it were, and so I am hoping to find perhaps at least one hundred million or perhaps a billion of two people on the planet who might agree with me on that point, just to make damn sure that I don't have to do it, by making equally damn sure that no one else does it thus forcing me to do it, as well, when I already made it so damned perfectly clear that I most certainly was not going to be doing that.

Buying Time

If you ever watch some of those old clips about the previous Great Depression you will find that it is typical for the capitalist system to give out such laurels as Phds from Harvard or Yale and Nobel prizes to economists who are incompetent and therefore are found making asses out of themselves by consulting spread sheets and then declaring that the economy is sound and nothing but growth and blue skies and such from now on, making such statements perhaps just one week before the crash and the Great Depression began. What we can learn from all of this is that when it comes to analyzing the state of a capitalist business cycle you don't want to become one of those blinkered jackasses who consults spread sheets, notices nothing but illustrious growth numbers and rosy profits going back for years and even decades, and then becomes that dumb ass who then pronounces the economy fundamentally sound, because it looked so good on paper. They call a capitalist crash a crash for a good reason, for you see it always looks just great on paper right up to the very bitter, bitter end and then it crashes suddenly into ruins. Therefore some other metric is required to judge the actual state of a capitalist business cycle. Anyone who could look back over the last decades and declare, based on those rosy spread sheet numbers, that the economy was ‘booming' rather than sliding towards a bust, must have an uncanny ability to ignore such obvious realities as the fact that the capitalist market was dodging a bullet by hollowing out and destroying its own market. When you see a damnable ruinously reckless thing like that happening you should automatically recognize that this is one of those canaries in the capitalist coal mine, and you should also think to yourself that here we have a place that is going to be flushed right down the crapper....someday. Only those blinkered types who look only at numbers on spread sheets would miss something like that.

Now it turns out that the capitalist system was able to dodge a bullet and avoid one of its frequently scheduled bustup crashes by pulling such stunts as NAFTA, which then received a real good flush when something even better came along known as China. As capitalists compete and ruin their own profits in the process, it is always possible to wring a few more profits out of the place one way or the other, and there are times when you might even receive an unexpected gift from China. When that runs out there are always these increasingly loony looking schemes and even crackpot scams, another of those dead canaries in the coal mine which typically only show up as the day of the Apocalypse draws nigh.

Now it is typical of capitalist to buy time and avoid a depression for as long as humanely possible. This they have done, at the expense of a lot of Americans, as just one example, who ran out of time, for when that capitalist purchased more time on the clock that meant cutting off the time on the clock for some American who then had their jobs shipped off to places like China. This sacrifice Americans were expected to make for the sake of the capitalist system.

Just recently capitalist have bought some more time by picking up cheques from the government worth, according to count, at the present time, about four and a half trillion dollars, with another two trillion or so now promised in the immediate future as announced by the Fed during that G-20 summit, for a total, so far, of a little under seven trillion dollars. Now as adamant as I am about not having a Great Depression I am not going to complain to bitterly about that seven trillion dollars, unless of course that capitalist now becomes stubborn and refuses to give that seven trillion back so that we can continue to buy some more time and stall for time and avoid a Great Depression for a little longer still.

A Grand Coalition

It was Michael Moore, that film maker and American Liberal, who said that given that capitalists need a bailout, and given that they received trillions of dollars in tax cuts during the Bush administration, why the hell don't they pay for their own damn bailout instead of expecting everyone else to pick up the tab. He also pointed out how they have doubled or perhaps even tripled their wealth in the last few decades. These tax cuts are allegedly supposed to ‘stimulate the economy' and as you can see we are being stimulated right down into a bottomless hole around this place.

Now I say that if even Adolph Hitler was able to stall for time and put off a Great Depression, then certainly those liberals should be able to do the same thing. I would expect a Liberal to show more common sense than Adolph Hitler, and not max out the credit card, but rather that Liberal should do what Liberals do best, which is to tax and spend. This would be a good way for the public to get back their trillions of lost dollars while everyone else takes a breather and does the hippity hop around that ditch known as the Great Depression.

Therefore I am proposing a Grand Coalition between a motley horde of revolutionary whatnots and standard variety liberals and church ministers and a large horde of disputatious quarreling American proletarians who cannot agree on anything, other than that one single idea that we are not going to be having no Great Depression, or at the very least, we won't be having one right now, but instead, what we will do is buy some time, stall for time, which will give us all time to think about it, think it over real well, and then, if later on we decide to go ahead and have a Great Depression after all the stimulus injected by those tax and spend liberals wears off, then we can go ahead and have a Great Depression. I will only agree to having people go ahead and have one of those things if I am absolutely certain that they have had time to think it over and have discussed the matter thoroughly and aired out all the issues properly, and, after having done all that, if they still think they want to go ahead and have a Great Depression then I will accept their judgment. You see, I just insist that the decision to have a Great Depression be a thoughtful well informed decision and that people are going to have one of those things because it was the democratic will of the people to have a Great Depression and thus they gave that idea their consent. Who am I to argue with that many voters?

Now I know what is going to happen. Those Marxists, followers of Trotsky, the Trots, are going to show up and issue dreadful warnings to everyone about the grave dangers of having the proletarians befuddled by the delusions of liberals, thus causing those confused American proletarians to conclude that by working with some tax and spend liberal on some stimulus plan, they were somehow ‘curing the Great Depression.' Now just because I am agreeing to go into a coalition with those tax and spend liberals does not mean that I am interested in deluding proletarians. Hell no. We are stalling for time. We are delaying a Great Depression, not curing one. Once the stimulus wears off we can all go back to having out guts ripped out by a competitive Velociraptor, or having the tail ripped right off our auto industry by a T-Rex, assuming that is something that people feel they want to be doing sometime later, somewhere further down the road.

Besides it seems unlikely to me that the proletarians are likely to become deluded by Liberals, because not only will they have Trots to warn them about that Velociraptor to come later, after that stimulus wears off, they will also have the increasingly militant extreme right wing capitalist press pounding out that exact same message, and we can assume that they will become even more militant the closer that dreadful day of cheque writing comes. So its not like the proletarians will not be constantly reminded of what a worthless long term solution that liberal idea would turn out to be, because even if they don't trust Trots because they are communist dictators, they will still be getting that idea pounded into their heads by the increasingly hawkish capitalist right wing, so its not like we need to worry to much about deluding proletarians just because we decided to join in a great big enormous motley coalition with those tax and spend liberals so that we could participate in that standard Liberal dream of showing up in Washington with a giant set of thumbscrews.

At this point a Trot might then issue a dire warning to the proletarians about how they must not harbor illusions about showing up in Washington along with some Liberals carrying a giant thumbscrew. Yes, yes, I know. If you are a capitalist and you need a few trillion to tide you over and stall for time, its just like going to an automated teller machine, but I am afraid for our huge and gigantic motley horde coalition it will no doubt be a taxing and exhausting social struggle, punctuated by moments of frustrated hopeless despair, not to mention the insult of being tossed some small change when we looking not for billions but rather we were thinking more along the lines of trillions. After all, as your engineers have been telling you it would take at least one and a half trillion to fix your rotted infrastructure just for a start. Now since George Bush saw fit to give out trillions in tax cuts, and left your infrastructure to rot, and that stimulated your economy into some giant ditch, it seems good to me to reverse the process and really stimulate the place real good, while at the same time fixing up real good so that even if people decide later to have a Great Depression at least the place will be in tip top shape in the year 2030 when the Depression finally ends and the boom times come again.

And besides those Capitalists owe us about seven trillion dollars and we really do need the cash right now, since it is now time for people to stall for time and dodge a bullet and avoid a Great Depression themselves for a few years.

Now I know, I know, no doubt there will be some proletarian who will be influenced by the increasingly angry and militant capitalist right wing press, and who will want to know why anyone would want to do some useless Liberal type stimulating of the economy when we are all just going to get our guts ripped out by a T-Rex later as those capitalists, sensible sorts that they are and hard nosed realists to boot, will be reminding everyone all the time. It just isn't a long term solution. Well, that is true. No Liberalism is not a long term solution. But who said anything about a long term solution? And besides, as dreadful as that short term solution might be, as lacking in common sense and hard nosed realism as it might be to avoid a Great Depression for a few more years, at least some stuff will be getting some paint and spackle around the place and might last for fifty or hundred years, which is long term thinking for those who prefer that sort of thing.

Now let me think. I am trying to list off every possible objection anyone anywhere could have to joining my Grand Coalition. Let me think.

Someone might say, ‘but that capitalist needs those trillions to invest in stuff.' I would reply, ‘well, right at the moment there are trillions hidden under floor boards and stuffed inside of mattresses, where it certainly isn't doing anyone much good. And besides, at the moment the theme of the hour is not ‘investing' its cutting, cutting, slashing and cutting, and deflating, followed by more slashing, more burning, more deflating. This is the opposite of investing. And besides, sometimes I wonder why you people don't just cut out the middle man. Take Iraq as an example, and that ideology of ‘neo-liberal globalization' which states that Iraq must give their oil to a capitalist and that capitalist will then make profits off of Iraq's oil, and then perhaps might decide to invest those profits in a strip mall in Illinois, if it turns out that strip malls in Illinois are what that capitalist might think to be a great place to sink Iraq's oil money at that time. Now the people of Iraq might want to sink their oil money into fixing their infrastructure which has been destroyed by war, but that would be a problem, because they would be blackmailed and not get a dime of investment money, and would even be sanctioned, because you see they would need to go cap in hand to the middle man to get money, you see, thus explaining why it is that all countries must accept neo-liberalism lest they be bullied by a capitalist who for some reason seems to insist that it is required that we insert him into the middle of every investment so he can play the role of our middle man. So then my point is that not only is that capitalist going to invest those trillions, in my opinion he should not be doing so in the first place. It is very undemocratic.'

There may be those who say ‘why would we want to do all that stimulating when as the right wing capitalist press keeps reminding everyone, we are just going to get nailed with a Great Depression later, for liberalism solves nothing in the long term.' This is true. Only not having that competitive capitalism solves anything in the long term. But as for short term thinking, you were in a hurry to get started on that Great Depression, were you. Why wait for spring, do it now. Never put off till tomorrow a Great Depression you can start on today, is that your motto? Might as well just bite the bullet. Now there are those hard nosed types with a soft pillowy cushion of liquidity who will be ride out that Depression in relative comfort, provided that the revolution does not yank their cushion out from under the ass before they are in the clear and the boom starts, who, because they have such a cushion, will no doubt be in favor of being laissez faire and just allowing ‘the natural business cycle' to take its course. My solution is to send for that tax and spend liberal because I figure that task of outsourcing the job of shoving pins into that soft pillowy cushion is best outsourced to a tax and spend liberal. It's what they do. You see, it's a big planet. Lots of people live on it.

There may be those who complain and say that we could never form a Grand Coalition because we could just never put aside our disagreements long enough to form such a coalition, thus it is hopeless, I tell you, hopeless. But then who ever said anything about ‘putting aside our disagreements.' Look, I don't have a problem forming a coalition with some tax and spend liberals, while at the same time feuding, yes constantly feuding with those same liberals day and night, not to mention feuding day and night with anyone else who rubs me the wrong way. Works for me. Where is the big problem supposed to be. Just as long as everyone agrees concerning the pin in the pillowy pin cushion thing well then damn the torpedoes and let loose the dogs of war.

Now let's assume that I was determined to get a Trot involved in that coalition (yes truly I aim for the stars and there is no end to my ambitions). But let's assume that there was a Marxist from the Frankfurt School, the sworn enemy of all Trots, who joined that coalition and so, after tremendous effort getting that Trot involved, the Trot decided to walk. I tell you what. Why doesn't everyone write up a list of their greatest foes, and then we can feed the list into some sophisticated computer program and that program could come up with the best possible seating plan such that a Trot and a Frankfurt Marxist were always on the farthest opposite side of a room as was ideally possible for that computer to arrange things, as well as taking into account all the other rivalrous groupings that needed their space. Would something like that work for you people. Can we work something out?

Now speaking of Trots, if a Trot was out speaking to a proletarian, and a Trot was deeply embarrassed to be found in a strategic coalition with the rest of the motley horde, and even worse than that, a Liberal, well a Trot could explain to those proletarians that just because a Trot is some kind of revolutionary does not mean that a Trot is some kind of sinister bastard who would deny a bleeding proletarian a bandage in the hopes of keeping them pissed off enough to perhaps, just maybe, become more revolutionary. No, no even though a Trot is by nature sectarian it is possible for a Trot to sometimes, on rare occasions, be in a coalition because even though you are a revolutionary, that doesn't mean you are some kind of creepy bastard, hell no, you are still a really nice guy. And besides, think of all the political lessons that proletarian will learn. I recommend lots of readings from the increasingly militant right wing press where those proletarians will be getting the straight scoop.

I would also like to bring church ministers and churches into this coalition and there might be some revolutionary types who say, ‘churches...not in my revolution.' Now let's get something straight here, I am trying to create a disparate (and thus truly enormous) Grand Coalition here where some unity is found (for a change) and so would you SHUT UP! Keep in mind that these churches have something like sixty million members, and most of them are already liberals so its not like they need a lot convincing. There are millions of more churches where the minister may be a Nazi but given how the right wing grew overconfident because there was no Marxist around, and they decided to try to send out Hitler without a cheque book, a grave strategic error, well as it turns out that bad minister has a congregation of people many of whom will be hurting and since Hitler won't be writing cheques this time, it will be possible to split the right wing churches, and who could argue with a lovely idea like that.

As for ministers, you are preachers, and so I thought I would drop off a few sermon ideas. If you were preaching to some capitalist you might want to go with the ever useful all purpose sermon, ‘repent ye, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.' Other good ideas for sermons would be that psalm, the one that reads, ‘we dwell in a strong city, its walls are strong and tall. Open wide the gates and let a righteous people enter.' Or how about, ‘My God trains me for battle. I leap over walls.' The possibilities are endless.

Someone might say, ‘oh, sure, we stall for time. But what's the point. Why bother. Hopeless, I tell you, hopeless.' My response is that events may very well force those capitalists to create a giant centralized monopoly and then we can worry about democratizing the thing later. And even if that does not happen, well in the words of that anti-drug campaign, you just say no. Let us assume that the proletarians of the country decided, democratically, that they wanted the place democratized, but a handful of capitalists said, ‘NO', well then you just say ‘NO" to the capitalist. What's so hopeless about that?

Right at the moment I cannot anticipate another objection to this strategy of forming a Grand Coalition. Unless maybe, perhaps, your calendar is full...film screening on Thursday, workshop on Saturday. You are all booked up are you? Well I remain optimistic, because I am quite sure that this place will be able to scare the hell out of people from time to time, and soon enough they will be finding someway to clear some room in their otherwise busy schedule to start dealing with that problem before the whole gets out of hand and problems start dealing with them instead of having them dealing with problems.