Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Communism

  • Trotsky’s Faith

    Leon Trotsky died on this date in 1940.  Here is something I posted about two and a half years ago: The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009). …

  • The Last Words of Leon Trotsky

    On this date in 1940 in Mexico City Ramon Mercader drove an ice axe (not an ice pick as some accounts have it) into the skull of Leon Trotsky.  He died the next day.  Here we read: Mercader later testified at his trial: I laid my raincoat on the table  in such a way as…

  • Ron Radosh on a Useful Idiot Who Thinks Castro’s Island a Paradise

    Required reading

  • The Story of Oh: the Terrible Price of a Korean Defection

    By Richard Fernandez (HT: Bill Keezer): The BBC tells the melancholy story of Oh Kil-nam, a South Korean man who, convinced by his Marxist education that North Korea was a worker’s paradise, decided to defect there with his wife and two children in 1986. Oh, who had just completed his PhD in Germany in Marxist…

  • Whittaker Chambers and Totalitarian Islam

    Here.  July 9th was the 50th anniversary of the death of Whittaker Chambers.  His Witness, a book of high literary merit, is a key document for understanding the politics of the 20th century.  But now it is the 21st century and radical Islam is the new Communism.

  • Fidel Castro on the Cuban Model

    Here.

  • Douglas Hyde: From Communist to Catholic

    I am now reading Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism (HarperCollins 2009).  Over 700 pages.  The author's name is hardly donnish, but he is Emeritus Professor of Politics at Oxford University.  There is a chapter entitled "The Appeals of Communism," and in it I came across a reference to Douglas Hyde: For some who joined…

  • Best Evidence of the Greatness of This Country

    Keith Burgess-Jackson writes: The best evidence of the greatness of this country is that people are clamoring to get into it. Almost nobody—including self-loathing progressives—wants to leave it. It is also the best evidence of the failure of Communism and those socio-political schemes that are ever on the slouch toward Communism.   They needed walls to…

  • Marxist Utopianism Illustrated by a Passage from The German Ideology

    Here is a famous passage from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology (ed. C. J. Arthur, New York: International Publishers, 1970, p. 53): . . . as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which…

  • Intellectuals’ Flight From Politics

    A 1947 essay by Irving Howe.  It is perhaps not unnecessary to say that to link is not to endorse.  Remember my motto: Study everything, join nothing.

  • Trotsky’s Faith

    The last days of Lev Davidovich Bronstein, better known as Leon Trotsky, prime mover of the October 1917 Russian Revolution, are the subject of Bertrand M. Patenaude's Trotsky: The Downfall of a Revolutionary (HarperCollins, 2009).  It held my interest from the first page to the last, skillfully telling the story of Trotsky's Mexican exile, those who…

  • Ernst Bloch on Law and the State

    Ernst Bloch, like Theodor Adorno, is a leftie worth reading. But here are two passages replete with grotesque exaggeration and plain falsehood.  Later, perhaps, I will cite something from Bloch that I approve of. The offensive passages are from the essay, "Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse" in Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy…

  • Stalin on Philology

    For insight into the depredations suffered by science and scholarship in Stalin's USSR, I recommend Chapter 4 of Volume III of Leszek Kolakowski's magisterial Main Currents of Marxism (Oxford, 1978). It is astonishing what happened to literature, philosophy, economics, physics, cosmology, and genetics in the Workers' Paradise. Not even philology was spared. Kolakowski, pp. 141-142:…

  • Anti-Commie Haiku

    Utopic heads in fog,They broke real eggsFor an unreal omelet.

  • Dorothy Healey on Political Correctness

    Communism as a political force, though not quite dead, is moribund; but one of its offspring, Political Correctness, is alive and kicking especially in the universities, the courts, in the mainstream media, in Hollywood, in the Democrat Party, and indeed wherever liberals and leftists dominate. This is one of the reasons why I am interested…