From the Pen of David Horowitz: December 12, 2009
After Betty’s murder, I ceased to be politically active. I couldn’t even think about politics apart from these events. In my heart, I knew that it would not be possible for me to work for a cause again until I had resolved the issues of her death. As New Leftists, we felt ourselves immunized from crimes that the Left had committed in the past, both by acknowledging that they had occurred and by resolving to change the attitudes that had caused them. But we had changed the attitudes, and now the crimes were being repeated. I began to ask myself whether there was something in Marxism, or in the socialist idea itself, that was the root of the problem.I was not alone in raising this question now. The Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski had been an intellectual leader of the New Left until his defection to the West in 1968, after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Five years later, Kolakowski organized a conference at Oxford, which asked: “Is There Anything Wrong With the Socialist Idea?” In a paper delivered to the conference, he suggested that there was: The goals which socialists had historically pursued contained the seeds of the socialist nightmare.
The ideal of human unity was one. The end of “self-alienation” was really the core of the socialist hope. Socialists believed that private property divided human beings, making some rich and some poor, some oppressors and others oppressed. Private property was the root cause of social conflict. Socialists proposed to abolish property and unite people in the socialist state. But the abolition of property was really the abolition of private association and civil society, and of the bourgeois rights they underpinned. Socialist unity could only be achieved as a totalitarian solution.
– Radical Son
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Spurred on by zeal for their independent yet aligned causes, and hatred for the opposition, they very likely “will come back into the fold,” like the sheep they are. Or, is that lemming?
There is more to the idea of private property than physical property. In its oldest sense property translates to “real property” or land, which in turn means fences, prohibited access, and clearly defined boundaries. The socialist ideal of equality of outcome supersedes any personal rights, including the right to own property. The justification for this usurpation of rights is always the ill defined common good. That the common good might not square with what is good for an individual is reconciled by the supposed benefits derived by the many at the expense of the few. This socialist justification I would argue is wrong both practically and metaphorically. I would also argue that the metaphorical injustice done by the “socialist ideal” far outweighs the damage done on the practical level.
On a practical level the socialist impulse runs up against a natural, albeit debatable, bound, and that is the level at which taxation morphs into confiscation. We can all agree immediately on two points regarding this taxation/confiscation boundary, it exists and it is different for each individual. Leaving aside the very real potential for the destruction of personal initiative, this is ultimately an argument over money, which is to say much less important than the metaphorical argument. As an aside, I would also add that this argument over mere money is what allows the majority to extort from the individual as it does for money’s importance is all too easily dismissed when compared to other supposedly more fulfilling aspects of life.
On a metaphorical level, trespass devalues all personal rights in direct proportion to the import of the right being infringed. If a property owner has no right to safeguard his possessions his right to bar more subtle intrusion is correspondingly weakened. The proof of this weakening of personal rights can be seen in the debate over issues such as card check legislation that unions would have enacted. The common good, which is to say the rights of the union, is deemed so important that mere conscience must be sacrificed. To argue against such a compromise in a union environment would be the equivalent of biting the hand that feeds. That an individual might see a potential pay raise for union membership as a personal threat to his income would in such an environment be seen as a threat to the collective. Yet if recent events at GM and Chrysler prove anything it is precisely this fact.
The Black Book of Communism proves some one hundred million times over that the only way the collective can be kept from killing is by holding the rights of the individual sacred, but to do this is anathema to the socialist.
The problem of motivation comes up when the notion of private property is eliminated. In a collectivity, what incentive does an individual have to do anything above and beyond what his fellows do? Moral approval and ribbons will not have much of an impact for long. In he end, even socialist societies are forced to reintroduce inequality(incentives)to forestall or contain economic torpor. Unfortunately, this is an inefficient work around that only partially makes up for the loss individual initiative or one’s ability to acquire private property.
I actually cried when the Supreme Court decision allowing seizure of private property for other private use was announced. To me, it was the final nail in the coffin for the personal right to property and essentially to equal protection for the individual. It was a blatant nose-thumbing to the Constitution, and allows for the “what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is mine” engine of the ideology of the left to chew up and spit out the individual with abandon. The freedom to accumulate property and its use falls inevitably to the nebulous “other” who may decide that your use of it is best decided by someone who knows better. God save the Republic, because the masses hardly seem to give a damn.
Although the early Christians (book of Acts in the Bible) were completely
sincere in their desire to “have all things in common” to promote the
general good and well-being of their group, this altruistic effort did not
result in their betterment. Rather, it produced a general, overall
poverty condition. So even under the best of circumstances socialism
has failed and has continued to do so throughout the centuries when
ever practiced. Why, under the sun does society seem determined to
repeat the mistakes of the past? There is an old proverb which says, “He
who dwells on the past will lose an eye; he who forgets the past will lose
both eyes.”
When confronted by their historical failures, socialists are asked why do you think it’ll succeed this time? The answer is always that the right people have not tried it yet.
Leftists rightly see socialism as a mechanism to project power. It is heady to control peoples’ lives.