Author: Alan Buddug

According to a statistic I’m making up right now, Americans conflate communism and fascism an average of 876 million times per day. The main reason is that fascists purposefully confuse people into believing that there’s absolutely no difference between their position (genocide) and the left’s position (preventing genocide), but there’s an important secondary reason: Communism is confusing. Since communism is the most well-publicized leftist ideology in the US, that confusion has rubbed off on every ideology left of Hitler.

In general, the left is in favor of democracy and the right is in favor of just a few people being in charge of everyone else. If you’re a smirking man who wears a trilby, you’re probably thinking, “If that’s true, then why is communism authoritarian?” The answer is that communist theory includes a two-step process for achieving communism — which is a world of full democracy. The first step is authoritarianism.

I can hear you scoffing.

But let’s review US history. There was this British colony, living under a liberal monarchy/parliamentary democracy which didn’t allow the colonists any political power. The colonists decided they wanted a more democratic society, so they all got together and voted and decided that they would be a representative democracy (for white men who owned land). The end.

No, wait! That’s not what happened at all! No, the colonists created a tyranny of the majority — a completely authoritarian nightmare — and wrested control of the colony away from British military forces and those colonists who were royal boot lickers. There were 7 long years of this authoritarian hell — nearly 24,000 colonists died and over 31,000 people died on the British side (including over 7500 Hessian mercenaries). The bootlickers were allowed to go to Canada — they were not allowed to participate in the new government — and the US became a significantly more democratic place than it was before.

Was there anything at all wrong about this? Seems A-OK to me.

Leninism is precisely this same strategy. First, you create a tyranny of the majority — a dictatorship of working people. Obviously, the ruling class assholes who created the situation you are rebelling against don’t get to participate. Then — in theory — after your dictatorship has ironed out the wrinkles — you slowly democratize everything until you’ve achieved communism.

Authoritarianism is an effective tool for getting rid of the ruling class, but it is a less effective tool for creating democracy — the tendency is to just replace one ruling class with another. Were you aware that some dingus proposed making George Washington into a king?

In Russia, the democratizing step didn’t really happen, and I blame the Bratva. The Bratva are the Russian mob. Lenin tried to get rid of them and failed, then Stalin took over and he was one of them. The Bratva remained in control of Russia and even today — with communism gone from the country — Russia is ruled by the Bratva. It’s almost as if the problem with Russian communism wasn’t the communism, but the Russians.

In Cuba, on the other hand, the switch between authoritarianism and democracy seems to have worked out just fine. Naturally, the Cuban ruling class (who were allowed to leave) doesn’t see it that way when they peer south from their homes in Florida, but that’s kind of like believing the drunk lying in the gutter outside of the club when he tells you that there was absolutely no justification for him getting kicked out.

This is a huge area of conversation on the left: How do we achieve the maximum possible democracy? There are certainly a lot of communists out there saying that we need to take power away from the ruling class, because they’re not going to just hand it over. And that’s certainly a very good point. There are also anarchists who say that we can lead by example and create a world that duplicates the functions of the corrupt state, and then the ruling class simply won’t have power anymore. Also a great point. The majority of leftists, however, are willing to do anything that works to increase the amount of democracy in their world — even voting — and do not see cruelty as an effective tool for progress.

The left is so wholeheartedly committed to democracy that it spends a lot of time internally trying to tweak processes to make sure that democracy is maximized. Leftists are constantly questioning their own assumptions about whether or not they are succeeding, and keep their eyes open for something going wrong. Things do go wrong sometimes — we’re all only human after all.

But unlike some people, leftists don’t just give up and say, “Well I guess we’re just going to have to choose the lesser evil.”

Republicans are freaking out today over the Biden administration’s nomination of Neera Tanden to lead the Office of Management and Budget. Lindsey Graham has gone so far as to call her a “nutjob”, and with this much bile aimed at her, you might think she’s a leftist. She’s not. She’s not even a progressive (despite being the president and CEO for a thing they call the Center for American Progress) unless you redefine the word progress. In fact, she is just a standard neoliberal who even helped sink the Sander’s campaign and opposes Medicaid for All. Sanders and MfA are both centrist positions (balancing the needs of the people with the desires of the powerful), making Neera Tanden a near-right politician.

Everything toxic about the corporate Democratic Party is embodied in Neera Tanden.

Briahna Joy Gray, former national press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders

Republicans are apparently angry because she had a lively Twitter feed where she constantly bashed Republicans — as if their own commander-in-chief didn’t spend about a third of his tweet time doing the same thing. Are they not the party of of free speech? I’m kidding — we all knew they were lying about valuing free speech. Tanden certainly didn’t say that any Republicans should be taken out and shot — which is exactly what one of Trump’s attorneys recently said about the Republican former cybersecurity czar.

Don’t believe the Republican party when they call someone a leftist — they are probably lying. They want to make the Democratic party sound like dangerous extremists in order to energize the Republican base. They want you to believe that anyone left of Hitler is a Soviet, even while they tacitly support all of the strategies that made Russian communism controversial.

Don’t believe the Democratic party when they claim to be “the left” or “progressive”. They’re conservatives. They want to make the Democratic party sound progressive in order to energize the left to take them seriously and support them with both votes and labor while party leaders continue to support conservative positions. They do, of course, seem progressive if you only compare them to the fascism of today’s Republican party. And yes, there are individual Democrats who are definitely progressive; they don’t control the party.

It’s no wonder so many Americans are confused about politics. America’s ruling class (billionaires) and their minions continue to destroy the meaning of political words to the extent that it’s hard to even talk about what is real. We’ll have to overcome that if we’re going to ever have any kind of real progress. I’m certainly not suggesting anyone should oppose Neera Tanden’s nomination — with the Biden administration, that’s as good as it is going to get.

The root cause of America’s ongoing material failures is our complete moral failure, which stems from over 50 years of pro-selfishness propaganda. Now, if you talk about morality with most Americans — including almost all Republicans and Democrats — they will tell you that:

1. All human behavior is based on selfishness, which is not only inevitable but basically a good thing, and
2. Anyone claiming to be behaving for the greater good or out of altruism is a fraud and hiding that they are actually more evil than most people.

Neither of these things are true. Cooperation, rather than selfishness, is one of the primary reasons for the success of the human specie, and although there certainly are a lot of con artists out there, most cons involve appealing to the mark’s selfishness — they’re not typically about a false display of caring for others. It is true, however, that when capital claims to be trying to solve a problem (like climate change or access to health care), typically it’s a mere performance of morality designed primarily to increase profits; they, not the altruists, are the real con artists.

While certainly not the only source of this cultural debasement, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is probably the most famous source text for American immorality. And they made a trilogy of movies about it that is apparently slightly better than the novel. Here’s a review from a progressive:

Atlas Shrugged is old material, but when an idea gets lodged securely in a culture, it starts reproducing itself everywhere, much like how a virus invades your body and starts tricking your own cells into making copies of it. Here’s an example of that: Rick and Morty, which is a show I definitely enjoy watching. You might have thought Rick and Morty was an example of leftists media (because of the naughtiness), but the text of the show clearly portrays the worst person in the universe constantly triumphing over the forces of idiocy.

Like American culture as a whole, Rick and Morty conflates selfishness with intelligence and altriusm with stupidity; this is directly counter to leftist ethics. Here’s a video about that from the same guy as the above, but after he was radicalized:

This meme of selfishness — and of altruism being the “real” evil — has a function whether or not an individual who is reproducing it understands that function. That function is to make evil people seem normal — or even good. This meme is the reason why voters choose the lesser evil in every election and dismiss good people as idiots or “dangerous leftists”. This meme is why we believe the Republican and Democratic parties when they tell us that a centrist political position like democratic socialism is a dangerous, impractical ideology.

If we want to make America great, we’re going to have to start by making America good, and to do that, we must end the meme of selfishness. Think about the media you consume. How often is the evil character the protagonist? How often is the evil character also the coolest character? What’s that doing to your mind?

Abraham Lincoln and Karl Marx were contemporaries who influenced one another. This is a more accurate article than the similarly-themed article in the Washington Post. I found it interesting that Marx was a regular contributor to The New York Daily Tribune which was the most influential Republican newspaper of the time.

Lincoln and Marx by Robin Blackburn (Jacobin Magazine)

Abraham Lincoln, as president, chose to reply to an “Address” from the London-based International Workingmen’s Association. The “Address,” drafted by Karl Marx, congratulated Lincoln on his reelection for a second term. In some resonant and complex paragraphs, the “Address” heralded the world-historical significance of what had become a war against slavery. The “Address” declared that victory for the North would be a turning point for nineteenth-century politics, an affirmation of free labor, and a defeat for the most reactionary capitalists who depended on slavery and racial oppression.

Here’s a link to the actual letter and the response sent by Ambassador Adams:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm