Why neither communism nor fascism can never come back
Can we safely assume that postmodernity is the only paradigm destined to be our future? Is there a chance for humanity to stop at the current stage of neoliberal capitalism or to even get back to some formerly failed social formations? Both questions imply understanding the goal-settings of the society-centric systems no matter which particular regime is considered. To realize why we have to approach a post-social state of affairs it is necessary to observe some features and patterns that are inherent in such society-centric systems as, for example, communism.
Some may argue that nothing valuable is in such a regressive observation since communism lost the battle. Yes, communism is a loser, but it is still present in public discourse, however. And it means that communism seems to be able to get reincarnated in principle. The reasons for its failure could reveille what was wrong with the communist goal-settings. Do we really understand the reasons clearly?
And what about fascism? No chance to be reborn? The recent rise of the right-wing movements over Europe hints at something barely expected in the era of global democracy. Even if we are sure that both communism and fascism can never come back, we must realize why it is so. And the postmodernity perspective can assist in dealing with such a murky issue.
Despite various political theories available in liberal scholar sciences, communism crashed in the 1990s not because capitalism appeared more powerful with its rationale that was better matching global domination. Not capitalism but time has absorbed communism. The social system based on Marxist principles reached a particular limit of its vitality at a certain moment of civilizational evolution.
The communist rhetoric lost its persuasive power when the discourse of the socialist bloc started revolving around the outdated dogmas of the Marxist political economy relevant rather to the era of steam engines than to the age of booming communication technologies. It seemed to be the days of evolving individualism when socialists appeared with empty hands against the trend. Their communal ownership of property was in a great discordance with the rampant consumerism of Western capitalism.
Communists were trying to ignore the only law of natural greed “to own and wish to own more”. That’s why the communist ideology drove people to nothing but a covert cognitive dissonance. It was seemingly appealing to a natural desire of people to achieve more. But at the same time, the low of socialized ownership was depriving them of the right to own the results of what they achieved.
The thing is that neuron connections in our hypertrophied (in comparison with the other primates) neocortex are rearranged by the biological evolution in such a way that the survival of a population appears higher in the hierarchy of our vital values’ than our personal well-being. It might look like a biological prerequisite of the socialist principles.
However, it witnesses the opposite: each time you help your tribe escape from troubles, you can legitimately count on some reward from your mates — some tangible bounty you can personally consume (food, sex, weapon, etc) in addition to moral encouragement from the elders. Such a practice has created a natural motivation in our collective subconsciousness.
When the so-called socialist contests between Soviet workers took place, the winners could account for some public honour only. Thus, they had to unnaturally overstress their personal motivation to keep moving forward somehow. Eventually, the artificial purely ideological motivation was over and the communist idea appeared with an empty fuel tank.
That happened in the late 1980s when thriving information technologies started delivering consumerist values from capitalist societies to the other side of the iron curtain. The starving subconsciousness of Soviet people made them pounce on Coca-Cola and blue jeans as on material symbols of the so-desired personal well-being. Such a hyper-compensation brought the entire Socialist bloc to the grotesque and, oftentimes, ugly forms of the post-soviet quasi capitalism as a result.
Here, we should make an aside to realize what role the “natural greed” plays in our life.
A positive effect of greed is undervalued, probably, in any society. Greed still bears negative connotations in modern discourse. This is something reprehensible, something beyond the scope of virtues for which our children are taught in kindergartens.
But have you ever noticed who were the most generous philanthropists in recent history? The greediest fat cats were. Bankers, billionaires, rich celebrities, that is to say, the ones whose wealth status allowed burning money with a light heart. Have you ever heard about anybody who spent the first substantial earnings for charity? Highly doubtful.
Another factor for a cognitive dissonance may occur due to the current position of greed in mass consciousness. Namely, greed is what the very Western consumerist society is built on. It is dangerous to keep one of the fundamental forces of human volition out of public veneration. Those who deem greed worthy of condemnation make a rough mistake. It’s time to remove the mark of sin from such an indispensable virtue of the present days as healthy greed.
We must point out the wrong role that any linguistic palliative could play in this regard. All those seemingly positive euphemisms such as “a wish to own more” or “pursuit of material wealth” just make the issue even more complicated and, therefore, less solvable. The present-day language should name things in a straightforward and utilitarian manner. Greed means nothing else but greed. Period.
Greedy individuals should give up feeling ashamed when they publicly claim that they are greedy. Why is the basic freedom of demonstration of your true nature appreciated towards only LGBT activists? No simulacrum of total tolerance is valid. That’s why the condemnation of greedy people must be widely recognized as the darkest intolerance and miserable obscurantism.
The ones who disrespect greed are merely unable to comprehend what in fact pushes our today’s progress forward. Progress as a commitment to achieve more is based on a trivial principle of initial scarcity. This is nothing but a conflict between what we actually have and what we could have potentially. The conflict as progress implies a vector showing the direction of our movement.
Conflict in itself is so fundamental for understanding how things run in this universe that we may not leave this process beyond our context without a comprehensive remark.
It is not easy to recognize conflict as a basic system-engineering element of our civilization. Some may guess that the second signal system — language lies at the heart of all people’s interactions. The others may dig deeper to find human thinking as a foundation of everything we do. Both concepts seem reasonable but they both are looped over human beings while all the other phenomena of the reality are left untouched. If we involve the whole nature into our consideration, the best reflection of what is going on around is the ancient Chinese yin-yang symbol where dialectic of unity and diversity is available. It shows how things happen in this world. But why everything happens as it happens?
The entire reality unfolding before our eyes can be perceived as either evolution (paradigms of both modernity and postmodernity) or circulation (a paradigm of pre-modernity) — choose the model you like the most. Disregarding the chosen model, only one fundamental process generates interactions between everything and anything else — a conflict. Namely opposition in contrast to unity makes any movement possible in this universe. Dark and light, plus and minus, male and female as well as all the other polar extremes are in a state of permanent conflict. Just the divine conflict creates powers and forces that allow life to emerge.
If we apply this to a biosphere, we can find universal conflict as a reflection of a cruel but fair modus operandi — “eat up or be eaten”. The endless war of all against all is what makes living creatures evolve. Our motivation to survive by all possible means would be meaningless without the necessity to struggle against opposing powers. A never-ending conflict teaches the fittest how to win the battle. We humans fairly call it “progress” once we all are learning how to collectively resist our ultimate enemy — the death.
Despite all military conflicts available in human history, the global population keeps growing. The plague in medieval times killed ¾ of the European population, but in a very short period (in terms of history) the European civilization made a leap to another evolutionary stage — Renaissance. All revolutions that erupted over the last 500 years were shifting humanity into unprecedented social formations enabling technical progress to move forward.
Any warfare, pandemic, or revolution is nothing but a conflict that inevitably triggers progress. Any conflict is a broken status quo due to a lack of balance between what currently exists and what can come instead. Any social development is impossible if all opposing forces in society are well-balanced.
The so-fancy “sustainable development” propagated today by many eggheads through media is merely an oxymoron, if not a myth. Any development as a movement needs conflict in its background to succeed. The more contradictory interests we have, the more reasons for desirable improvements appear. A stable position implies a lack of movement. If sustainability implies any movement, it would be rather a circular mobility than progress.
Think of the Cold War in the last half of the 20th century: namely the then arms race indirectly made reading these lines on your gadgets possible today. The ideological conflict between two opposing political systems was pushing technologies to make progress. But the fastest progress was observed during WWII when the leap-frogging development of industries was far from any sustainability.
Conflicts happen every day due to the great social and biological diversities of humankind. The struggle against what is inherent in our very nature is as meaningless as a protest against the day and night sequence. The more we try to mitigate conflicts through the artificially created “social harmony”, the more our nature rebels against our biological organisms. Cancer is nothing but a conflict between the cells repressed by idiotic social conventions and biases in our minds.
We can never win the battle with our own nature. The increasing mortality due to cardiovascular disorders and cancer is a clear message from mother nature that our attempts to shift conflicts into the outer space of our societies will inevitably get conflicts inside the inner space of our bodies. We should accept and appreciate what is the essence of existence and movement — the life-giving conflict.
Our social organisms are no exception. Even such a simulacrum of conflict as the current “Trade War” between the US and China is better for both superpowers than a morbid degradation to which many “peaceful” European countries are sliding today. The ongoing civil war in Syria motivates the local population to migrate over the world so furiously that the only option for apathetic Germany is to watch how Syrian refugees are gradually occupying German cities. This is how ethnogenesis occurs, by the way. And this is great.
The thing is that prosperous but spineless Germans do not want to come into conflict with their government which is incapable of resisting the liberal public opinion that, in many cases, can be recognized as extrajudicial coercion. The latter mesmerizes German leaders to meekly accept the quiet Muslim invasion since an ethnic conflict in Western Europe wouldn’t look like a civilized European solution. This is how social conventions in our mind let cancer cells eat up the host’s native cells. Eat up or be eaten, indeed. There are no negative connotations in such a comparison. Cancer is just another form of life. Cancer cells fight for survival in the same manner as the host cells do. And only the life-greediest will survive.
What is the current migration crisis if not social racism reflected by the so-called “clash of cultures”. Both the local population and migrants divide all people into two groups: mates and foreigners. What makes them do so? Nothing but social conventions of different societies where they are brought up create numerous reasons for frictions and conflicts. People always establish an association of mates against an association of foreigners. The difference is only in the level of activity of each association. Some perceive an opposition with foreigners as a call to action. The others prefer to take the invasion as fate. None of them is right, none of them is wrong. They all are socially conditioned crowds in which only a few individuals are capable of getting above herd behaviour to look at the situation from the post-social perspective.
And here we can clearly recognize the main collective identity covering all humans wherever they live — society. The late modernity in which the majority of the Western population live today consistently fights against such particular types of collective identity like race, nationality, religion, and gender. But the true equality of humans cannot be achieved without neutralization of “the mother of all collective identities” — society.
Postmodernity offers to kill all birds with one stone through total dissociation of individuals when each human being implies to be an absolutely independent creature whose membership in one or another group of other individuals is absolutely voluntary and optional. Moreover, the very membership in the human race is proposed to be questioned as well. Transhumanism is working over this issue as the relevant technologies evolve. Can you imagine a religious massacre or an ethnic conflict between post-human cyborgs? Highly unlikely it will be possible if each particular post-human creature has no obligations to any collective. Only the postmodern dissociation can liberate mankind from the violence of society.
The absence of any social violence does not mean the elimination of conflicts, however. Conflicts live in our cells as necessary prerequisites of any movement and development. That’s why if we keep clinging to a conflict-less modus operandi in everything we do to survive in this world, we will turn into toothless and spineless creatures living in a fanciful harmony of our social utopia. Even if we defeat cancer, heart attacks, and strokes with some advanced pharmacological methods of treatment, we will hardly avoid both inner and outer conflicts at the end of the day. Something admonishing will arrive from the universe to shake us up for further progress like it once happened with plague in the middle ages.
Once conflicts imply progress, greed implies a conflict between the current lack (even if it is fictitious) and the desirable abundance. Greed for whatever we might have beyond our consuming capabilities is a specific state of consciousness inherent in humans only. Greed is impossible without imagination that can show people various opportunities on how to grab something extra. Nothing but greed in various forms is the basement of our social hierarchies. Just try to deprive any business leader or a policymaker of their power and you will see how furiously champions in greed can defeat their positions at the top of any social hierarchy.
Let’s take a look at the business sector from such a perspective. It is fashionable to speak ill of corporations today. Transnational giants are blamed for all the evils due to their greedy manner of maximizing profits by all means. In doing so they supposedly bring only harm to society. What a primitive way of looking at things! Corporations provide millions of talentless, powerless, spineless, and brainless individuals with jobs and livelihood. Corporations help a huge inert mass of the global population keep afloat. Namely hyperactive super-greedy persons establish corporations to hire plenty of those who lack enough natural greed to thrive independently.
The present capitalist order of things suggests every employee to stop throwing mud at the greedy rich if s/he works for them. Otherwise, only morbid ambivalence in actions and desires appears. You work for Amazon but you don’t want to assist the richest entrepreneur in the world Jeff Bezos to get richer. You feel discomfort with pissing in a plastic bottle since no toilets are available at Amazon’s warehouses where you work. No problem, you always have a choice. Leave your job and become an anti-globalist, anarchist, libertarian, or whatever you want. You can establish your own business to be like Bezos as well. But first, it is worth asking yourself whether your natural level of greed is high enough to struggle for your own piece of the pie.
A fair analysis of your personal greed is absolutely necessary to be an integral part of the current over-commercialized paradigm where consumerism (nothing but a legally appreciated version of greed) is fuel for progress.
Growing megalopolises with their omnipresent commercials and abundance of goods are the decent symbol of both the merchandised present and over-merchandised future. They are not for the people who are deprived of a desire to own more. If you stay indifferent watching lucky people in new shining Teslas, if you do not lift a finger to earn an extra dollar, if you are satisfied with what you have, your place is actually in a Buddhist ashram somewhere in the Himalayas rather than in a modern city.
Any sort of practical philanthropy is meaningless without a long initial period of overarching greed. First, you must spend your time, efforts and health to gain as much as possible. After that, when you own much more than you can personally consume, you may bestow your charity upon whoever else. Otherwise, your wish to support the others will always remain fruitless mind games.
The social value of human greed is so significant these days that it is worth teaching greed as a separate subject at schools and universities. New generations should not be misled by wrong definitions of greed. Their bright future depends on how deeply they comprehend the role of healthy greed in their life. “Human Greed Education Manual”, “Practical Greed Framework”, “Contemporary Capitalist Greed” and the other similar textbooks should appear at student libraries as soon as possible.
Any hypocrisy is to be left behind when modern people say “greed” keeping in mind that the majority of us live in secular states where materialistic meanings prevail in our definitions.
Unsophisticated perception of greed as a normal desire to get more from life can eliminate any morbid ambivalence from the discourse of a happy consumer society.
Now, we can get back to the outdated society-centric political systems where natural human greed was heavily neglected. The deviations of both right-wing and left-wing colours are available in today’s neoliberalism. They slightly differ from what people understood under communism and fascism in the past. At the same time, all contemporary anti-liberal movements have many postmodern attributes despite being historically rooted in the pure modernity.
Today’s left-wing movements with their ideas of social justice start coinciding with a liberal agenda of globalization while the right-wingers tend towards values inherent in military communism. Russian radical traditionalists have crossed right-wing beliefs of Julius Evola, hyper Orthodoxy, and Stalinist socialism in a volatile mixture of the fury towards neoliberals. Not towards the conventional neoliberals, but to some heavily covered mythical globocrats who conspire against humanity — the very evil of nowadays as Russian traditionalists believe.
In terms of manipulation, such an approach is infallible: first, you create an image of an enemy whose nature, motifs, and destination can be neither confirmed nor refuted. Then, you put your followers before that image claiming that nobody but your party is the only opponent to the absolute evil. And of course, anything goes to fight such an enemy.
The entire pathos of the right-wingers is based on obscurantism. Moreover, obscurantism and intolerance are two main pillars of any radical right-wing movement. Just look at the perpetual denial of global warming by the President of one of the most developed countries. One of his former advisers was an ardent devotee of Julius Evola. Self-deprivation from facts is an illustrative feature of many smart idiots who oftentimes find themselves in a pretentious radicalism. But the most pitiful aspect of their vain efforts is the retrograde discourse that tackles nothing from the upcoming post-social state of the totally interconnected humanity.
Everyone who sees the future through the lens of the “glorious” past does not realize that any social phenomenon which defines itself in opposition to global trends of the present moment is destined to fail. Once globalization emerges due to the rapid development of information technologies, nothing but a global disaster can stop the inevitable unification of world cultures and economies. Isolationists who mostly belong to right-wingers are too arrogant to admit that the unfortunate instances of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany can be the only outcome to which the so-called anti-liberal traditionalism can lead its followers.
They live in a semi-magic environment of their beliefs in which mighty ancient powers can rise out of Valhalla to help them conquer the “present-day liberal mess”. Placing themselves into an artificially created psychological niche is quite an effective approach to their incapability to follow the ever-changing era of information.
Their inclination to conspiracy and obscurantism makes them look like those post-soviet pensioners who eventually appeared powerless and redundant without the socialist wealth unification. In their attempts to hide themselves from what is going on around, the pensioners gather every day somewhere behind garages to drink cheap alcohol, share rumours, recollect the glorious past, and scold the government. With each passing day, a gap between those poor old folks and the reality widens. Time in such a “behind-garage space” goes backward — anything from the progressive achievements of the humankind has no place there.
In an effort to protect such obsolete doctrines as nationalism, intolerance, religious and gender discrimination the traditionalist radicals of all stripes are trying to go against the forthcoming post-social order. Once the latter results from digital virtualization, their attempt is nothing but a miserable socio-cultural Neo-Luddism from which to a heavy paranoia only a step remains.
The entire history of humankind proves that the future belongs to free thinkers capable of disrupting old patterns with innovations. Innovations in a social context should be understood as various technical measures aimed at building a highly decentralized post-social system of governing. Needless to say that the motto of any former social-centric regime “public good above private interests” won’t work in the hyper individual postmodernity.
From a philosophical point of view, both communists and fascists are liberals, how odd it may sound. The liberals who consider that only the working class deserves to enjoy the benefits of life belong to the left-wing liberalism (communism). The liberals who consider that only prominent highly dedicated individuals deserve a better life belong to centrist liberalism (meritocracy). The liberals who distribute benefits of life on the ground of race (or nation) belong to the right-wing liberalism (fascism).
But all three divisions of liberals build their discourses upon materialistic postulates of modernity. All liberals bet on society as on the only possible way of human coexistence. All possible social transformations and revolutions are aimed at only colouring each particular deeply liberal chronotope in different shades: either in red (left-wing) or in brown (right-wing). Postmodernity has nothing to do with such well-worn standards of people management.
Humanity has already passed through the society-centric regimes honoured by the left-right-wingers — they all are in the past. Thus, the only place for obscurantists of both right and left wings locates in the dustbin of history, somewhere behind the civilizational garage where conspiracy, nostalgia, and self-depriving pathos are acceptable only.
