About Three or Four Years ago I read the first third of "The Black Book of Communism". For those who don't know, this was the first systematic attempt to assemble the evidence of atrocities under all communist regiemes and is the source for the "Communism killed 100 million People" statistic. It was published in France in 1997 and caused considerable controversy. Whilst it has been critised on a number of grounds, particularly in terms of how the causlty figure was calculated It makes extremely unpleasant and difficult reading, especially if you are a commie.
My inital reaction to it was the first time I ever seriously considered giving up communism. I read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Freidman's Capitalism and Freedom in the hope that it would convince me I was wrong and that I had missed something out. Far from actually changing my view of communism, it actually hardened it as what it showed is that in the long-run, Democratic processes based on competiting interests are incompatable with a system based on common ownership because they are based on two completely different conceptions of "freedom"; one is individual, the other is collective. If everyone is part of the whole and has to act together, it severely restricts the scope of what a democracy can discuss. Marxists talk of "Socialist Democracy", but the Socialist nature of the system takes precedence over the 'democratic' part. Hence you can have elections, but only if the communist party wins.
The arguments against Communism can be summed up as two overlapping positions:
1) Communism cannot be true because consciousness is not material or caused by material pheneomena and therefore subject to scientific understanding. i.e. you can change "human nature".
2) If Communism is true, it denies the subjective moral feelings of the individual in favour of a single all-embracing world view which everyone is expected to adhere to. As a collectivistic system it asserts that the rights of the group (and by default the state) as taking precedence over rights of the individual. Because Communism is a collectivistic system, it is by definition "totalitarian".
These two positions overlap because they assert that consciousness takes precedence over material forces in social relations; i.e. that our social relations are the product of our conscious choices. In otherwords, neither one of these positions can be substanciated as true in scientific/naturalistic terms, because ultimately, they come from god.
Communists are accused of being guilty of crimes against humanity. This is fair enough; they are guilty as hell. But the concept "crime against humanity" is a problem as it is an appeal to a higher law as a violation of a persons human rights. The concept of "crimes against humanity" is historically very recent and goes back to the Nuremburg Trials in 1945, but it belongs to a much older tradition of "natural law". "Natural Law" is fundamental to liberal ethics, since it is from the 18th and 19th century conception of 'natural rights' that we dervied the present day concept of 'human rights'.
For a materialist, if there consciousness exists only as a product of matter, then there is no god, as god is a form of consciousness which exists independently of matter. Natural law has the same properties; it applies to a person's actions irrespective of what the law actually is. it is thought to be an eternal and absolute system of law that applies irrespective of what a government says. From this is derived the authority of International Law to apply moral catagories such as Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes against humanity to nation-states regardless as to whether their own legal concepts.
The idea that crimes against humanity is a universal moral qualification is quite absurd, since human rights violations were particularly widespread amongst liberal colonisers and imperialists in the 18th and 19th centuries before they took on a 'totalitarian' form in either Nazism, Fascism or Communism. The cliam that any of these were uniquely evil is evidently false, or else, hypocritical.
If we think about why these actions are wrong, we are drawn into the discussion as to whether life has an intrinsic value, whether we have a "right to life". This is derived from a religious belief of the "sanctity of life" because man was created in gods image.
Now here's where it gets intresting. Natural Law does not 'exist' in material terms and as a materialist I would be obliged to reject it. The implication is that neither do human rights exist because they represent a form of 'dis-emobodied consciouness' rather than physically limited social activity. Therefore natural rights cannot exist because the process of social evolution means that ethics are not universal or eternal, but are relative and dependent on the level of social development. It should be noted that if I reject the concept of social evolution, it would impact on theories of natural evolution and I'd be arguing for some form of creationism if ethics were not the product of society itself and therefore had to be the product of some 'god'.
To a Materialist therefore, the concept of "crimes against humanity" actually translates into "crimes against god". As Communists are materialists who would not believe in god, that entails that logically I do not believe in natural law, nor human rights or crimes against humanity. To conclude, if I were to accept that Communism were a 'superior' moral system to liberalism based on a theory of social evolution, that would mean accepting that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot were the "good guys" and what they did was justified, which is pretty stomach churning.
So What would you do if you were in my position? Would you reject Materialism and therefore Communism or reject the concept of human rights and crimes against humanity? If you can find an error in my reasoning, your very welcome to suggest a middle road as both of them look like 'wrong answers'.
My inital reaction to it was the first time I ever seriously considered giving up communism. I read Hayek's The Road to Serfdom and Freidman's Capitalism and Freedom in the hope that it would convince me I was wrong and that I had missed something out. Far from actually changing my view of communism, it actually hardened it as what it showed is that in the long-run, Democratic processes based on competiting interests are incompatable with a system based on common ownership because they are based on two completely different conceptions of "freedom"; one is individual, the other is collective. If everyone is part of the whole and has to act together, it severely restricts the scope of what a democracy can discuss. Marxists talk of "Socialist Democracy", but the Socialist nature of the system takes precedence over the 'democratic' part. Hence you can have elections, but only if the communist party wins.
The arguments against Communism can be summed up as two overlapping positions:
1) Communism cannot be true because consciousness is not material or caused by material pheneomena and therefore subject to scientific understanding. i.e. you can change "human nature".
2) If Communism is true, it denies the subjective moral feelings of the individual in favour of a single all-embracing world view which everyone is expected to adhere to. As a collectivistic system it asserts that the rights of the group (and by default the state) as taking precedence over rights of the individual. Because Communism is a collectivistic system, it is by definition "totalitarian".
These two positions overlap because they assert that consciousness takes precedence over material forces in social relations; i.e. that our social relations are the product of our conscious choices. In otherwords, neither one of these positions can be substanciated as true in scientific/naturalistic terms, because ultimately, they come from god.
Communists are accused of being guilty of crimes against humanity. This is fair enough; they are guilty as hell. But the concept "crime against humanity" is a problem as it is an appeal to a higher law as a violation of a persons human rights. The concept of "crimes against humanity" is historically very recent and goes back to the Nuremburg Trials in 1945, but it belongs to a much older tradition of "natural law". "Natural Law" is fundamental to liberal ethics, since it is from the 18th and 19th century conception of 'natural rights' that we dervied the present day concept of 'human rights'.
For a materialist, if there consciousness exists only as a product of matter, then there is no god, as god is a form of consciousness which exists independently of matter. Natural law has the same properties; it applies to a person's actions irrespective of what the law actually is. it is thought to be an eternal and absolute system of law that applies irrespective of what a government says. From this is derived the authority of International Law to apply moral catagories such as Genocide, War Crimes, Crimes against humanity to nation-states regardless as to whether their own legal concepts.
The idea that crimes against humanity is a universal moral qualification is quite absurd, since human rights violations were particularly widespread amongst liberal colonisers and imperialists in the 18th and 19th centuries before they took on a 'totalitarian' form in either Nazism, Fascism or Communism. The cliam that any of these were uniquely evil is evidently false, or else, hypocritical.
If we think about why these actions are wrong, we are drawn into the discussion as to whether life has an intrinsic value, whether we have a "right to life". This is derived from a religious belief of the "sanctity of life" because man was created in gods image.
Now here's where it gets intresting. Natural Law does not 'exist' in material terms and as a materialist I would be obliged to reject it. The implication is that neither do human rights exist because they represent a form of 'dis-emobodied consciouness' rather than physically limited social activity. Therefore natural rights cannot exist because the process of social evolution means that ethics are not universal or eternal, but are relative and dependent on the level of social development. It should be noted that if I reject the concept of social evolution, it would impact on theories of natural evolution and I'd be arguing for some form of creationism if ethics were not the product of society itself and therefore had to be the product of some 'god'.
To a Materialist therefore, the concept of "crimes against humanity" actually translates into "crimes against god". As Communists are materialists who would not believe in god, that entails that logically I do not believe in natural law, nor human rights or crimes against humanity. To conclude, if I were to accept that Communism were a 'superior' moral system to liberalism based on a theory of social evolution, that would mean accepting that Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot were the "good guys" and what they did was justified, which is pretty stomach churning.
So What would you do if you were in my position? Would you reject Materialism and therefore Communism or reject the concept of human rights and crimes against humanity? If you can find an error in my reasoning, your very welcome to suggest a middle road as both of them look like 'wrong answers'.