Talking About Communism Insults My Intelligence

I love politics as much as I love academe and clogged toilets.  It all smells like crap.  Nevertheless, I’ve decided to teach you about some especially stenchful crap today.

Specifically, “communism.”

Ah yes, that oh so loaded word that everyone loves to throw around whenever it suits their purposes.  Depending on who you ask, it’s the scourge of civilization or an ideal to be emulated.

And since I love politics so much, I’m not letting anyone off the hook here.  Readers of all political persuasions (in the U.S.) will be forced to suffer today.  I even brought the necessary torture devices…

This Karl Marx memorial still stands in the former Karl Marx Stadt (now called Chemnitz) in Germany. (Photo credit: André Karwath)

 

I’ll start with conservatives, those elephants who never forget the mass murders and gulags, plus the economic destruction Communism wrought in so much of Eastern Europe.  Communism opposed us in the Cold War and, as such, it became an easy and convenient label one could use to destroy any unappealing legislation.  Fairly or not.

For example, enter Obamacare or whatever Orwellian name the current administration has given the law.  I’m no fan of Obamacare and I’ve written a few posts about it (here and here and here) but I’m always taken aback when critics call it “communist.”

Let’s start with a simple definition.  Communism means public ownership of the means of production.  (“Means of production” are factories, mines, restaurants, and anything else that is used to create goods and services.)  In pure Marxist philosophy, “public” does not mean “big government;” instead, the state was supposed to wither away and leave everything behind for the public as a whole.  Big-government communism was a 20th century political invention.

You read that correctly.  Karl Marx belongs in the Tea Party.  Not that they’d take him…

And so Obamacare creates public ownership of what, exactly?  Not the hospitals, not the insurance companies, and not the viruses.

Too bad, though.  I hear viruses are a growth industry…

And then the far Left (often humanities professors) reads and rereads the philosophy and writes theoretical tract after theoretical tract (which gets boring and boring and boring) but this group conveniently forgets that reality exists… and has existed for quite a while now.  Or they just want it to go away.   The gulags can be forgotten because they make communism look bad and academic “research” has to make the politics look good.

Sadly, I’m not joking.  Peruse any literary theory textbook and you’ll find entry after entry that proclaims the importance of putting political aims (always of the Left) ahead of any attempts to perform unbiased scholarship.  Of course, they’ve conveniently declared “unbiased scholarship” impossible.

Remember how Bush and Cheney were accused of “encouraging” intelligence researchers to produce reports that would justify a war in Iraq?  Same thing, different politics.

But back to communism.

With faculty like this, the curriculum ends up as propaganda because you can’t criticize the politics; it’s considered “anti-intellectual“ to do so.  Funny thing is, these professors conveniently don’t remember that the philosophy wasn’t reflected in the overbearing government entities that committed so many atrocities.  Marxism, at its root, was a small-government philosophy like the one the Tea Party supports.  And the far Left can’t allow its opponents to gain an advantage…

And that, my friends, is what you’ll learn if you choose to spend $100,000 to $200,000 of your parents’ money on a college education in the wrong major.  You could learn just as much by attending a Tea Party rally or watching your dog drink from the toilet.

In the meantime, just rest comfortably with the knowledge that the Tea Party is a bunch of communists who want to destroy America.