Liberty and Communism

Communism is a liberation movement, which aims to free the proletariat, and eventually to create an oppression-free society, so to speak. It is also a movement which aims to create a tyrannical dictatorship.

This has begotten much hue and cry over the supposed treachery of the movement. Let us clean things up a bit.

I.

Our first order of business should be to define freedom itself. This shall be hardest; it is a question fraught with obscurantism and the sophisms of philosophical idealism – we must thus cut through the weed and re-establish the concept on a firmly materialist basis.

What is freedom? In a word, the ability to put one’s will into practice, or to put it more dialectically, a force’s lack of opposition – the extent of liberty is inversely proportional to the extent of opposition. This definition is universal and opposed to bourgeois notions of ‘political liberty’. Liberty must not be understood as non-intervention of a specific party, but in a dialectical manner, as expounded above.

II.

From this dialectical notion of freedom, it follows that, whereever forces irreconcilable exist, liberty is doled out according to the strength of these forces; for liberty in total may not exceed the undivided, absolute liberty, that is to say, total control.

Such a society is our class society, wherein the bourgeois and proletaires, the two counterposed forces, exist in irreconcilable contradiction. Thus, in our society too is liberty divided based on the strength of these classes: in times of relative peace and stability, a compromise is reached, in the form of the welfare state.

But in times of crisis, when the total to be divided is itself reduced, both classes wage a fiercer struggle and seek what now looks attainable, total domination, in the form of revolutionary Communism and fascism (respectively the total liberty of labour and of capital).

III.

Although for the libertarian philistine, it might seem unrespectable, for the proletarian class party, totalitarianism must be a principle. The genuine liberation of the proletariat can only be achieved once the rule of the proletariat is absolute and undivided; only then is the working class liberated, is its historical mission fulfilled. Only when proletarian rule has become totalitarian in the truest sense of the word does it fade away: once the proletariat has come to rule the world undivided, when everything is subordinated to the one community of really homogenous interest, communism is achieved.

Of course, perfect homogeneity in every matter will never be achieved. That would be a utopian pipedream. But here I speak of politics, i.e. of class struggle, that we know will end with socialism, and of economic and planning struggle, which shall end with communism, i.e. with the removal of the counterposition of town and city, of countries, etc., only; personal feuds are a separate matter.