A Question for Socialists, part 3

By Zach Foster
Continued from Part 2

What worries the author is the very collective nature of the utopia maintained by the New Man, who seems more like an ant than a person.  Another question for Socialists is: other than the right to conform unquestioningly to dictated social requirements, does the New Socialist Man have any rights as an individual?  First and foremost, the entire idea of the New Man is founded on the assumption that every single human being will be happy to be a part of this society.  All that anyone who takes pride in living in reality must do is look around and see that there exist many individuals who simply don’t want to work hard, or who don’t want to work at all.  These are the students who ignore schoolwork in order to play XBOX, the obese who choose to develop diabetes rather than lose weight, and the poverty pimps who have another child every seventeen and a half years in order to stay on welfare and not have to work.  How can socialists explain what to do with these people?  Will they be forced to work or simply be cut off the dole?  And if the latter results in homelessness, then socialism has now caused one of the great “evils of capitalism” socialists claim doesn’t exist in their system.

What will socialists do about a human being who wants only to hunt, or only to fish, or only to criticize?  Will this person be ostracized?  Will this person be a social pariah?  What about the person who chooses only to work half the hours that his peers work?  People have the right not to be supermen.  Socialists can read their Marxist scripture at night before bed and imagine a wonderful world where everyone simply wants to work equally as hard, but this line of thinking is not only utopian, but completely unrealistic.  Human nature can be fought but not conquered.  This is why after countless years of evolution humans still kill, scream, cry, lust, and steal.  The idea of conquering human nature is also truly faith-based.  Socialist author Erich Fromm writes in his 1961 book Marx’s Concept of Man (chapter 6):

Socialism (in its Marxist and other forms) returned to the idea of the "good society" as the condition for the realization of man's spiritual needs. It was antiauthoritarian, both as far as the Church and the State are concerned, hence it aimed at the eventual disappearance of the state and at the establishment of a society composed of voluntarily cooperating individuals.

Thus, Marxist and other forms of socialism are the heirs of prophetic Messianism, Christian Chiliastic sectarianism, thirteenth-century Thomism, Renaissance Utopianism, and eighteenth-century enlightenment.  It is the synthesis of the prophetic-Christian idea of society as the plane of spiritual realization, and of the idea of individual freedom.

The only difference between Marxism and traditional religion is that the latter believes in an Intelligent Supreme Being while the former believes in the greatness of “society.”  What is brutally ironic (other than Marxism “liberating” the world from one type of faith by replacing it with another) is how the Marxist faith promises all kinds of individual freedom.  This is completely contradictory to Marxist doctrine.  Marx and his latter-day saints of socialism can chirp all they want about the individual freedom of man, but such claims are made a pack of lies by the collectivist nature of the New Socialist Man.  After all, the goals of Marxism are not to liberate individuals, but to liberate the workers of the world.  Marxism is only in favor of the working class as a whole and no other group.

The above utopian promises of freedom only address the faith-based predictions of how the individual will actually be a slave to society.  Frank Chodorov writes in the essay “About Socialism and Socialists”:

The socialist, however, has an intuitive urgency for power, power over other people, and proceeds to bolster this urgency with an ethic: he seeks power for a humanitarian purpose. He would "elevate" all mankind to his ideal. Since the individual does not wish to be "elevated," and lays claim to something called rights, the socialist undertakes to prove that the individual does not exist, that an amorphous thing called "society" is the only fact of reality, and proceeds to impose his set of values on this thing.

Having made this discovery — that society is something greater than the sum of its parts, with an intelligence and a spirit of its own — the socialist dons his shining armor and sets forth on a glorious adventure for its improvement. He works for the "social good" — which is what he wanted to do since first he became aware of his instinct.

The Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote an homage to Lenin during the early days following the Russian Revolution:

Who needs a "1"?

The voice of a "1"

is thinner than a squeak.

Who will hear it?

Only the wife...

A "1" is nonsense.

A "1" is zero.

It seems as if mankind can never escape slavery!  Socialists make all kinds of fuss over the enslaving of man by the capitalist class, or by the state, when the best they could ever do is impose slavery upon mankind by “society” and call it freedom.  Not only is the individual a slave to society under this system, but the bureaucracy of the Soviet or the Workers Councils grows ever more dictatorial (see the article The Problem With Libertarian Socialism).

One thing socialists will never do is admit to the genocidal solutions drawn out by both Marx and Engels.  They can deny and deny that Marx was a racist (which is surprising to no one, considering the seething anti-Semitism apparent in his writings), but they cannot erase the hard evidence.  In an 1849 issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx wrote:

"Until its complete extermination or loss of national status, this racial trash always becomes the most fanatical bearer there is of counter-revolution, and it remains that. That is because its entire existence is nothing more than a protest against a great historical revolution... The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties, but also entire reactionary peoples, to disappear from the earth. And that too is progress."

In the April 16, 1856 issue of The People’s Paper, he wrote “The classes and the races too weak to master the new conditions of life must give way.... They must perish in the revolutionary holocaust.”

Can socialists reading this argument still deny that Marxism is based on violence and killing?  Can they see that this faith will be exponentially more oppressive than the evils they see in Capitalism, which (unlike socialism) are driven not by the system itself but simply by corrupt individuals?  Or would socialists continue to advocate for the uprising and dictatorship of the proletariat?  God be with them when they are deemed either counterrevolutionary or of little use to society—unable to live up to the comic book qualities of the epic New Socialist Man—and they find themselves perishing in the flames of revolutionary holocaust.