Misanthropic Communism
It would seem to be a contradiction to espouse a negative view of the human race and uphold communism as the only system of government capable of saving it from itself.
Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. - Ecologist Garrett Hardin
A purely determinist view of the human race is a dim one. The human animal is the culmination of a process of survival of the fittest in which less resilient species were unsentimentally and unwittingly outbred and eliminated by fitter ones, a life and death competition that rewarded only adaptability, avarice, and violence. From this behaviorist point of view of human nature, we are no better than any other animal, just as driven by our base instincts as any other primate and similarly capable of only minor and largely constrained introspection and problem solving skills. The problem with this outlook should be immediately obvious: it is intentionally valueless and can be used to justify any kind of “might makes right” philosophical outlook, just like its inverse—the assumption that all humans are perfectly rational actors who are always fully aware of the consequences of their actions and therefore always fully consenting to suffer them—excuses any negative economic externalities encountered by the less well off. If we are either fully irrational or fully rational animals, everything that happens to us, and everything we do, is morally permissible because decisions either take place in a fully informed, contractually sound vacuum, or are the product of irrational impulses we can never hope to understand.
These extremes are both incorrect. We human beings are constrained by our nature, but not entirely, nor are we wholly rational actors under the profoundly unequal distribution of resources engendered by capitalism. Evolution has gifted us the capability to rise above our nature and act in a potentially sustainable way that benefits us in more than just the short term, but it is clear from the ongoing destruction of the biosphere and looming mass extinction and civilizational collapse that somewhere along the way, we failed to do so. This failure is one of shortsightedness, the triumph of immediate gain and pleasure outweighing the potential consequences, which we’ve known about for at least a century but chose to ignore out of convenience and proudly irrational thinking.
It didn’t have to be this way. The human race had many opportunities over many centuries to heed the lessons of overconsumption and its dire local and global consequences, which to a thinking creature should have been obvious. The problem, and the main indictment of our sapience, is the collective nature of the issue. In 1689, Enlightenment philosopher John Locke published Two Treatises of Government, in which he laid out the case for a form of responsible property ownership in what would come to be known as the Lockean Proviso: working to improve or enclose communal resources is just so long as doing so does not inhibit the ability of others to access similar resources. To summarize, investing one’s labor to improve, cultivate, or otherwise acquire a resource confers the right to own or consume it, but only if there is enough left afterward for everyone else to have an equal chance to do the same:
27. Though the Earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. It being by him removed from the common state Nature placed it in, hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joyned to, at least where there is enough, and as good left in common for others.
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32. But the chief matter of Property being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all the rest: I think it is plain, that Property in that too is acquired as the former. As much Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common. Nor will it invalidate his right to say, Every body else has an equal Title to it; and therefore he cannot appropriate, he cannot inclose, without the Consent of all his Fellow-Commoners, all Mankind. God, when he gave the World in common to all Mankind, commanded Man also to labour, and the penury of his Condition required it of him. God and his Reason commanded him to subdue the Earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of Life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in Obedience to this Command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his Property, which another had no Title to, nor could without injury take from him.
33. Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of Land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other Man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use. So that in effect, there was never the less left for others because of his inclosure for himself. For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. No Body could think himself injur'd by the drinking of another Man, though he took a good Draught, who had a whole River of the same Water left him to quench his thirst. And the Case of Land and Water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.
A crucial aspect of Locke’s justification for enclosure of the commons is awareness: to ensure responsible consumption, everyone must be aware of each other’s actions, lest one or multiple occupiers of an area take up all of its land and resources while unknowingly (or uncaringly, as is most often the case) leaving nothing for the unlucky late arrivals or others who lacked the ability to access them. This results in what is called the tragedy of the commons, or the overuse of shared resources in which a series of individual actions results in a collective problem:
So our story begins... Picture a pasture open to all...... It's a classic story, something that has occurred in medieval villages of England, and in colonial times in Boston, and in the rainforests of Brazil. Land is held "in common" and everyone has the right to let cows or goats or other animals graze there. What happens?
Each goat, cow, or pig is only a small burden on the land. But more and more goats, cows, or pigs get added. Over time the land is degraded by too many of them, and each animal has a harder time surviving. Soon the grazing land is worthless -- denuded of grass, compacted by hooves, and prey to draught and erosion.
In the Boston Common of colonial times, it was wealthy families that kept adding extra goats. Soon the town fathers decided to disallow grazing altogether in the Common.
In medieval villages, it was often poorer villagers attempting to feed their families who degraded the land. The degradation was used as a justification to remove the land from common ownership, to literally "enclose" the land for the benefit of wealthy landowners -- simultaneously improving the land and causing massive hardship among the landless.
In the Brazilian rainforest, large-scale ranches sprang up after 1975, exponentially increasing deforestation in the Amazon basin, and primarily benefitting large ranchers.
Overgrazing is a classic example of a phenomenon that has been called the "Tragedy of the Commons". The land held "in common" is the starting point which allows the "tragedy", which includes soil compaction, erosion, loss of pasture and human suffering.
The tragedy of the commons is playing out right now on a global scale as international capitalism utterly fails to adhere to the Lockean Proviso, ensuring that a series of shortsighted, greedy actions by a few super-rich actors results in the most common problem of all: biosphere collapse (see: overfishing, the draining of aquifers, and air pollution for just a few examples). The instinctual avarice of bad actors, should it go unchecked, meets its unfortunate end in a scenario of global scarcity. A form of collectivist thinking that is not the natural product of evolution would have been necessary to sidestep the ongoing and upcoming climate-driven disasters, but though many raised the alarm for centuries, the signs that our inborn greedy consumption would have to be curtailed were comfortably ignored and the evolutionary instinct to consume first and ask questions later won out. In the end, we as a community failed to rise above our base impulses and create a livable, sustainable world for all.
Similarly, we must rise above biological determinism in order to argue that the human race is anything but a disparate individualistic grouping of savage animals; if we are not required to rise above our base genetic savagery in one case (to excuse our inaction in the case of sustainability), we are not required to rise above it in the other (to avoid the “misanthrope” label)—either we expect something more from the community of earth, or we do not. If we do not, then we are all either honest misanthropes anyway (or amoral apologists for unfettered avarice, who do exist), but if we do, then we are misanthropes with a purpose: enlightening and uplifting the human race despite its very clear failings. We have arrived at the basic goal of all normative political philosophy, which is to elevate our lives through conscious reasoning. It is no surprise that the most optimistic of us are therefore the least introspective and the most likely to apologize for the current state of things. They lack imagination and miss the many areas of potential improvement because explaining why we’ve thus far failed so thoroughly is uncomfortable and unfashionable; no one wants to be called a misanthrope and they are willing to argue actually quite hopeless and pessimistic positions to avoid it.
Misanthropic communism is all the more robust for its healthy distrust of certain sectors of what might be considered the proletariat (or more generally, the non-bourgeoisie). Marx and Engels warned of this class in the original Communist Manifesto pamphlet, a document that avoids appeals to the incontrovertible good nature of human society in its portrayal of proletarian revolution as the culmination of worldwide class struggle:
Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class. The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product.
The lower middle class, the small manufacturer, the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant, all these fight against the bourgeoisie, to save from extinction their existence as fractions of the middle class. They are therefore not revolutionary, but conservative. Nay more, they are reactionary, for they try to roll back the wheel of history. If by chance, they are revolutionary, they are only so in view of their impending transfer into the proletariat; they thus defend not their present, but their future interests, they desert their own standpoint to place themselves at that of the proletariat.
The “dangerous class”, [lumpenproletariat] the social scum, that passively rotting mass thrown off by the lowest layers of the old society, may, here and there, be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution; its conditions of life, however, prepare it far more for the part of a bribed tool of reactionary intrigue.
The poor are indeed perfectly capable of exhibiting worse behaviors than the rich, and the undeserved lionization of the working class and all its prejudices and misconceptions is a common misstep among modern leftists. The religiosity of the poor is commonly cited as a criticism of atheism, and their prejudices and ignorance are excused (not explained) by their lack of equal access to education and information. The poor are disadvantaged, and this leads to negative outcomes which limit their ability to develop intellectually, but in holding up the working class as unassailable paragons of virtue, as one would need to do in order to maintain an unflinchingly positive view of the proletariat, the incidental failings are redefined as acceptable if not desirable outcomes. This goes beyond rational support for the impoverished, which is the ultimate goal of any good communist—in the minds of some less astute reformers, the poor’s weaknesses are taken to define them and therefore the movement.
Many poor do actually consider themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires, and vote and act as such. Many are purely self-interested and know that their modest comforts are the product of a colonial international monetary arrangement that parasitizes the workers of the third world to a much greater extent than those in the first world. Rather than seek solidarity with these workers, they externalize their suffering, preferring to wear the cheap clothing they manufacture or eat the food they die to bring to our tables, rationalizing the damning process as necessary for survival in a food desert or the result of limited options. Ask the poor to stop eating meat or wearing sweatshop clothing and these collaborators will reply that they cannot afford to, all while doing nothing to better their situation by organizing or even just voting for an actual leftist who would improve their conditions, often over prejudice and culture war issues manufactured by the capitalists to distract them from pressing issues. They are comfortable in their desperation, content to foist the worst of the capitalist system’s damages on those even poorer and more disadvantaged than they are. The same logic is used to great success in the defense of American military service: some enlist to escape poverty, and therefore their actions are taken to be justified even if they know they will be waging wars of economic imperialism and conquest and despite these actions doing nothing to ameliorate the underlying causes of that poverty, only selfishly temporarily abating their own suffering at the cost of others’ lives (who had no hand in that suffering). If they were enlisting to rain bombs down upon Wall Street, this excuse would hold water, but they are instead raining bombs down upon more victims of the same bloody order the military works to uphold. If their harmful actions undertaken with the aim of escaping poverty do not require a revolutionary character, then no one’s does—the enlistee is no different than a murderer who pockets their victims’ money to survive. Without that revolutionary element, the cycle will continue in perpetuity and profound suffering will continue to flow downhill.
If the roles were reversed and they suddenly found themselves in control of the nation’s riches, would the poor act any different within their newfound status? Are they any better or worse than those born into privilege or who strike it rich early in life and use their newfound wealth to reinforce the system that made them princes, and others paupers? If the answer is yes, the misanthrope is correct in that the poor and the rich are only different with respect to the circumstances of their birth and are united by their common human failings, which they too will unable to rise above if given the chance. History has shown this to be the most common outcome when these new elites fail to redistribute the nation’s vastly unequal resources and hold themselves accountable: these power holders will also take advantage of their positions should their number lack a courageous voice arguing for collectivization, which leads us to the second outcome:
If no, and the current poor are indeed more moral by virtue of their disadvantages and would collectively usher in a more responsible and sustainable form of resource distribution, then the misanthropic communists might be incorrect if not for the fact that in this scenario, the previously disadvantaged who now run things would need to act as the kind of autocratic force in order to keep the consequences of human nature in check in a justified revolution. This would not be a concession to a brighter view of human nature, but instead a powerful recognition of its failings and the need for a strong central authority to ensure that resources are distributed in an equitable and sustainable way. It is not humanistic to argue that a bona fide dictator is necessary to counterbalance human nature, but it is both misanthropic and unfortunately accurate.
In either case, the outlook for the realistic capacity for human rationality is grim even if we view the human race as fundamentally morally good, as the humanists do. Whether everyone’s capacity for moral deliberation is wholly defined by their class or by their genes, the view that the system or our very nature ultimately constrains us and defines our actions is deterministic in a way that argues for the necessity of a communist government featuring a central planning authority which is both impartial and internally checked in order to rise above the particular conditions of its members. This is why that communist dictatorship is necessary: either the tendency of power to corrupt is undeniable and makes plutocrats out of all unconstrained elites, or the lack thereof does the same to the ignorant actors of the marketplace as they reenact the tragedy of the commons repeatedly until the entire planet is exhausted—both princes and paupers must be subject to the rules of the proviso.
That we were never able to rise above our base instincts and avoid a tragedy of the commons outcome despite the loud, repeated warnings issuing from economists, ecologists, and experts of every stripe is an indictment of us all, our genetic makeup and social placement included. It is time to recognize that a justified communist revolution is not forthcoming, and our environment is irreversibly damaged—we should now come together and deny another base impulse, the urge to procreate.
There is no contradiction in recognizing the plain fact that an empowered international communist revolution was the only force that could have ever averted the coming disaster, while also upholding the undeniable truth that the human race never truly deserved its guiding light, even though it is a purely human invention and not some kind of extraterrestrial or unassailable heavenly wisdom. Misanthropic communism is in actuality an equalizing force and holds all accountable for their actions within the framework of their field of choice. It is more consistent and more realistic than the blinkered humanist form of communism, which in its fervor to excuse the worst impulses of the human race winds up facilitating the ideology that continues to subjugate it.