Lately I have been studying Marx’s raw and ultimate communism and am writing an essay over it, I have come across a problem with capitalism.
How is one to maintain a communist society with no law? There will always be those who hold their ‘no-possessions’ with contempt, not because they are greedy, but because they are human. It is human nature to seek comfort and comfort lies in knowing that you have enough to independantly survive.
Therefore, those who hold their live in contempt will lead revolts to bring back capitalism for themselves, they will desire to be burgeosii’s (I know I probably spelled it wrong) over the proletariats. Thus requiring law, and to have law you need law-makers, and to ensure the law takes place you need law-enforcers, and to give the enforcers power you need punishment, and to make sure the law-makers do not abuse their pwer you would need those to supervise the enforcers.
Now you have a whole governmental society beginning to take shape all over again and those ‘proletariats’ will hold the capitalist ‘burgesiis’ in contempt, and lead revolts to take it all back down to square one.
Communism is a most brilliant system of government and I support it strongly, but my only question is how to eliminate a need for a continuos circle, how do you keep the ‘natural capitalists’ in check without an entire government forming?
Marxist’s ideology claims it is not a circle, but a linear progression, capitalism being the last stop and perhaps the catalyst for communism–the ultimate form to end it all.
Which means-------we really haven’t seen real communism–but a bastardization of communism, Russia? China? Cuba?
arendt, you totally missed my questions, I know what Marx said, I am also thinking for myself and I just happened to see a social/political flaw in communism that was not explained in his writings and was seeking the new theories of others, not the restatement of what I have already read.
Ah, arendt, those whom you referred to believed that raw communism was the ultimate goal of their revolution, denying the fact of a two-phase communism.
This is why we are now afraid of communism, because we have come to se raw communism as the only type there is.
My original question was how it would be possible to eliminate the want for capitalism by those who are greedy without developing a whole new government.
Oh, and Imp, I still am a firm believer that there is a form of communism of which humans can become accustomed to, and that government will eliminate the problems of self alienation.
We start with the mind–it must be done systematically. Foucault (excuse me for bringing in an outsider, but you will see what I mean in a moment) says, power can function without force, without much surveillance to ensure everyone behaves according to plan. Power becomes automatic-----the most potent form of power there is–more potent than the guillotine, maybe the g does not even come close. People will behave as if they are being observed, and they would act as checks to themselves as well. THIS IS the kind of power that communism should perhaps, if it hasn’t been connected already, try to develop, instead of the visible uniform, ax, and prison.
So, arendt, you are reffering to silent control? And how will this overcome revolt? If you will remember your history, opression (silent or not) is the main cause of revolt. This will also alienate a man from himself if he is afraid of being watched, defeating the purpose of communism.
I’d rather call it the invisible power—it is there all the time, it’s just not seen. The formation of the body and mind of citizens in a communist regime is much different than the capitalist. In the capitalist, we are allowed too much to want, to excessive obsession, to the point of even the mediocre could potentially be the leader of the country. We are kept to want to want, to want to desire by the insidious culture that will ensure future generations of people who would want to do the same. Capitalism breeds its citizens. The same with communism. At the same time our bodies are being shaped to meet the demands of communism, our minds are also being made to adapt to its standards. Hence, power functions automatically—within us all. The presence of micro-power in every citizen. Awareness of this condition will make us behave according to plan.
Okay, I know, this may sound like a BS now, but it is happening already. In fact it is employed in doses in capitalist regimes.
Arendt, I utterly disagree with you, this power which does not exist must manifest from a fear of something, but since the revolution that brought us to Communism had eliminated that threat of power, it is far to flemsy a plan and would be extremely difficult and pointless to instate.
I believe the individual mind and body have nothing to do with a communist revolution. But then again, a strong leader of course will be requiered, maybe even a great band of leaders. Please redefine mind and body so I may answer you better.
We are indeed in disagreement because first of all, you don’t even believe in the things I say. Although, it is a fact.
A rule, by any other name, is a rule. You cannot say power is no longer needed just because…
Power has always been present and inherent in any form of government. The only question you must ask is, WHAT KIND? The kind that would be proper for a given regime.
Visereth, my child, you keep up with your curlicues and we won’t have even that glimmer of a dream of……COMMUNISM. Listen up.
The power I conceived (yeah, they’re my opinions, so sue me. Hehe) is not seen but felt. Fear will be transformed into something unrecognizable. Fear is a tactic used in capitalism------you fear for not wanting, for not measuring up, for not getting all you can, for not being greedy enough.
Fear no longer in communism, comrade ( or comradette—female, hehe). What you’ve got is a transformation of the body into a working, obedient citizen. Healthy, muscular, good-looking bodies able to withstand the rigour of the regime. No more flabbies and wigglies. Only well-toned, tanned bodies of upright citizens. Next, the mind. What say you of the mind? Well, my dear Visereth: Mind over matters. We obey with our mind, not with our eyes. We obey automatically. We have memorized the rules, and counted to three. Then, we move like real individuals no longer alienated, no longer shoved into tiny cubicles, where we viewed pornography when bosses are not looking.
Will do. It is buried somewhere in my bedroom–Marx that is. Memory is a tyrant sometimes. I have read Marx before.
One more before my sojourn starts------the words you use, NAIVE and SKEWED. They are very much the tools used in capitalism. Your psyche is screaming—capitalism. You must get rid of these words in your communist lexicon, if you want us to succeed.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.
It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.
George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.
On the television screen were ballerinas.
A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.
“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.
“Huh” said George.
“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.
“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.
George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.
Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.
“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.
“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”
“Um,” said George.
“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”
“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.
“Well-maybe make 'em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”
“Good as anybody else,” said George.
“Who knows better then I do what normal is?” said Hazel.
“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.
“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”
It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.
“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”
George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.”
“You been so tired lately-kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead blls. Just a few.”
“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”
“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean-you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just set around.”
“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it-and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”
“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.
“There you are,” said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"
If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.
“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.
“What would?” said George blankly.
“Society,”
said Hazel uncertainly. "Wasn’t that what you just said? “Who knows?” said George.
The television program was suddenly interrupted for anews bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.
“That’s all right-” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”
“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.
And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me-” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.
“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”
A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.
The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.
Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.
And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.
“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not-I repeat, do not-try to reason with him.”
There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.
Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.
George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have-for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God-” said George, “that must be Harrison!”
The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.
When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.
Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood - in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.
“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.
“Even as I stand here” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened-I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”
Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.
Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.
Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.
He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.
“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”
A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.
Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.
She was blindingly beautiful.
“Now-” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.
The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”
The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.
The music began again and was much improved.
Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.
They shifted their weights to their toes.
Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.
And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!
Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.
They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.
They leaped like deer on the moon.
The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.
It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.
And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.
It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.
Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.
It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.
Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.
George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying” he said to Hazel.
“Yup,” she said.
“What about?” he said.
“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”
“What was it?” he said.
“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.
“Forget sad things,” said George.
“I always do,” said Hazel.
“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.
“Gee-I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.
“You can say that again,” said George.
“Gee-” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”
