None of these thinkers quite did it. None of them hit a homerun. The worst of all these was of course the Stalinist diamat . Here you have the idea that the material conditions (the means of production and who owns them, and by what structure they are governed) in the last instance determine all that “softish woo-woo”, like culture, behavior and psychology (even if Stalin, like Marx conceded that ideas and theories also affect society). In this view, it is hardly surprising that these people believed—including Trotsky—that if you can change these “hard” or “material” conditions, all else can and will follow. You will have a fair, free and non-exploitative society if you only make everything publicly owned: at any price ! So that’s why these people are prepared to purge and kill others and disrespect any traditions and cultures and social structures. They believe that all of these “superstructures” are made of clay, whereas economic conditions, the “base structures”, are made of steel.
But the exclusive emphasis on concrete behavior might be even more murderous. Sartre’s ideas, reworked into an anti-colonialist theory by the angry young Haitian Frantz Fanon—and with clear parallels in Mao Tse-Tung—held that struggle, the concrete action of struggle itself , is most real, and that a just society flows from it. This led to some of the most mindless “revolutionary” activities and mass killings, notably in China’s Cultural Revolution and Cambodia in the late 1970s.
Cambodia, under the Khmer Rouges, was arguably the most brutal site of the 20 th century, looking at per capita kills: some 20% of the population dead in four years (contested figure, though). Pol Pot, the nicknamed Cambodian dictator, spent his student years in Paris forming a separate Cambodian communist party there. He wasn’t very smart, but he read, I believe, Mao, Sartre, Fanon, Stalin and Marx. Maybe—as some historians have argued—the US carpet bombings in Cambodia (during the Vietnam War) played a part in the rise of this brutal power, the Khmer Rouges. But so did, indisputably, poor Marxist and pseudo-Marxist theories about society.
What unites the spectacular failures of these theories? It is the fact that they don’t see that society consists of (at least) these four different fields of development—psychology, behavior, culture and system—and that you cannot spur development in the three other fields by forcibly driving the development in only one field, but not the others .
[158] . Friedrich Engels sought to describe the workers in the urban factories as potential socialists—he noted, in his ethnographic work, that they seemed to abandon their religious beliefs once they had moved away from their villages. There were also some significant workers’ movements and short periods of impressive solidarity and self-organization. See: Engels, F. 1845/1969. Condition of the Working Class in England . Moscow: Institute of Marxism-Leninism. (cont.)
But was he describing people at the Postmodern value meme? No. The impressive displays of solidarity and self-organization only show up when there is a clear common enemy (such as during a period of major strikes). The only time self-organizing syndicalist (anarchist) socialism has functioned on a somewhat larger scale was during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, where there was a very clear common enemy: the grim rise of the fascists.
[159] . Dearya, I. J, Battya, G. D., Galec, C. R. 2008. Childhood intelligence predicts voter turnout, voting preferences, and political involvement in adulthood: The 1970 British Cohort Study. Intelligence . Vol 36, Issue 6.
[160] . “Stratification” means that society is divided into strata, such as classes or other grouping.
[161] . It’s true; there have been some attempts made. One Scottish computer scientist, Paul Cockshott, has teamed up with an economist, Allin Cottrell, and tried to work out what a computer-driven communist system might look like for the European Union. Computer algorithms would coordinate the economy. But this is not a very convincing move unless they can show us the institutional analysis of how we get from here to there (i.e. unless they show us the societal attractors and how they work). And it’s highly questionable if these two writers got the algorithms right; indeed, if it is possible to do so. That’s a lot of trust to put in faulty single human minds.
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