The Fallout of Equity Under True Socialism
For Marxism, with it focus on equity as the ultimate good, a human is only a node in an economic network. We have seen in the previous post, “Equity Is Incompatible with Personhood,” that Marxism requires the elimination of any exercise of personhood and free choice. Intimacy and trust are destabilizing to a society designed for equity. All family relationships must be dissolved.
Virtually all personal relationships must be forbidden. I say “virtually” because shallow relationships are allowed. By “shallow,” I mean fungible interactions, such as casual sex, which allow for the easy substitution of one human for another in the relationship, so that no special commitment or loyalty figures into the relationship. When “the personal is the political,” there is no personal.
A human is only a node in an economic network.
We can see now how progressive social values were preparatory for a Marxist society. The pleasure principle, which is the foundation of utilitarianism, endorses changeableness of desires and instability in relationships. One’s only duty is to maximize pleasure, which trumps marriage commitments, contractual obligations, traditional duties to society, and the very notions of desert and culpability.
Utilitarianism is the heart of progressivism. It teaches that desert, reward, and guilt are imaginary, that “justice” is only a matter of influencing future behavior regardless of one’s past. This is why progressives believe in rehabilitation to the exclusion of punishment.
Marxism welcomes and expands upon the progressive dissolution of traditional social obligation. Marx built upon the utilitarian foundation by substituting equity for pleasure. Goods are to be distributed according to people’s needs with no regard to concepts of reward or merit. No one earns or deserves anything in the final Marxian society. Rights are dismissed as imaginary, bourgeois constructs. Responsibility exists only to the collective as a whole.
The progressive endorsement of “free love,” to be practicable, required a government system for care of unwanted children. Marxism requires children to be raised by the state.
Progressives pushed for easy divorce, which, in turn, makes the government the spouse of last resort. Marxism goes one step further and makes the government the spouse of first resort.
Progressives, from John Dewey on, regarded private education as divisive. Marxism goes a step further and regards private education as subversive.
When the personal is the political, there is no personal.
Contra progressivism, the most meaningful relationship of all short of one’s relationship with God is an unconditionally committed marriage established as a divinely-sanctioned union. Such a deep commitment provides the emotional safety to drop one’s guard toward one’s spouse and experience profound emotional intimacy.
Progressivism, because it is built on utilitarianism, which is at its foundation a self-declared hedonistic ethic, leans toward shallow, pleasure-centric relationships. It demands that there be easy divorce to insure every marriage is a happy marriage by dissolving all the unhappy marriages. The marriage commitment becomes conditional, and dropping one’s emotional guard becomes imprudent given the likelihood the relationship will not be permanent. The final Marxist society disallows marriage and any other family relationship.
Progressivism denies the sacredness of parent-child relationships. We must ensure that every child is happy child by allowing the option of killing unwanted children before, or shortly after, they are born. The final Marxist society removes children from parents altogether.
[P]ersonal relationships . . . are considered a bourgeois indulgence.
Progressivism rejects natural design and purpose. Marxism denies the existence of human nature altogether. This denial is necessary to allow for the possibility of the “New Socialist Man,” the new kind of human who supposedly will thrive in the final Marxist society.
Progressivism diminishes the concept of a person by eliminating the concept of meaningful life in favor of a pleasurable life. Marxism diminishes humans further, conceiving of them merely as a locus of responses to stimuli and having no right to resist being conditioned to exhibit the new responses required by an absolutely equitable society.
Marxism ultimately reduces all relationships to the mediated “relationships” of producing and receiving goods. There is no direct human relationship in the transaction, not even a fact-to-face barter. One may produce as a member of a “unit,” but the members of the production unit do not use independent thought in their acts of producing. It is akin to working within a machine. Free-flowing personal relationships among people who are fully persons are considered a bourgeois indulgence.
Marx believed that absolute equality requires absolute engineering.
None of the above are arbitrary choices made by individual Marxists. In fact, most Marxists supplement their ideological beliefs with traditional values they have held since childhood. They say, “of course, there will be personal relationship,” or “of course, people will have freedom to earn by merit.”
Regardless of what they feel, to the extent that a society achieves and maintains equity and becomes what Marx espoused as the final, unchanging, socialist society final goal of history, the society must, logically, disallow personhood, personal relationships, free will, even free thought. These policies are necessary implications of the premises of Marxism. As the necessity of each step becomes recognized by Marxists, they will jettison any traditional values in conflict with equity and embrace the “necessary” step.
Marx believed that absolute equality initially requires absolute engineering. Marx said this “dictatorship of the proletariat” will whither away. However, after the achievement of absolute equity, its maintenance requires the continued elimination of all personal preferences, including personal relationships. Barring a miraculous change in human nature, the continued suppression of personhood requires a continuing absolutely empowered central power structure.
Even if the Marxist dictatorship withers away as predicted, what is left will be an impersonal society. There is no alternative that maintains equity.