Psychoanalysis of communism:
Communists are right. But not in the way they think.
The masters, the people who directed society and had power, had slaves and servants and employees, in England finally took such a leap forward in the economics of material and mechanical wealth that the old traditions, the cultural heritage, if you will, became unnecessary. What they did, of course, was the opposite of what communists accuse them of. But communists, representing the employed class, were angry. They were angry for the same reason a child of a nuveau rich couple might be angry: a perceived poverty of spirit. Not that the masters exerted too much control, but too little. That they no longer cared. That they were arrogant enough to think that meeting and exceeding their material needs beyond the wildest dreams of any previous state of humanity was all they owed their children. It is a perceived sense of alienation, of cultural orphanage. What communism represents is not any kind of logical or rational thought, but a lashing out, the servant class seeking to punish the master class. The same way the aforementioned children of the nuveau rich couple lashes out and punishes precisely by accusing their parents of being cheap, of failing them materially, economically, financially, of exerting too much control, not giving them enough money, enough freedom, providing them penuiary conditions of life. The vengeance is in accusing them of failing precisely where they succeeded, not only succeeded, but made their life about succeeding at. What they denounce most is what they crave most: control, direction, discipline. Why else would a movement purporting to stand against bondage and poverty produce two ‘solutions’ that involve a greater degree of bondage and enforced poverty, indeed making a virtue of poverty, than anything that has existed before (including formal slavery)? We refer, of course, to communism (including its ‘anarchism’ variants) and fascism (including nazism). And they are right. In giving these conditions of unimaginable wealth, the masters of what we now know as the industrial revolution, but which we could as easily call the banking revolution, destroyed an invaluable inheritance that they were custodians of.
The failing, it must be admitted, is not of the communists that lashed out blindly, they who have no tradition, no intellectual recourse to make sense of their feelings, but of those who were content to make humanity obscenely rich, and renounced their responsibilities as custodians of hundreds of thousands of years of tradition.