Special Opinion to the Mirror by Charles Landis
In the mid 1850’s the great issue leading up to the Civil War was the promise of the Declaration of Independence of “all men are created equal” and the denial by Chief Justice Roger Taney’s interpretation of the Constitution (Dred Scott-1857).
Lincoln said “I believe this government cannot endure, permanently if half slave and half free… I do not expect the Union to be dissolved… I do not expect the house to fall… but I do expect it will cease to be divided… it will become all one thing or the other.”
Today we are as divided and again it can be said we cannot be, permanently half of one thing and half of another. We cannot be half a constitutional democratic republic with capitalism and half a progressive socialist democracy dependent on government control of lives and livelihoods .
Party labels aside, our division is essentially the populism ushered in by election of Trump versus the progressive movement of the left. To simply view the divide as between Republican and Democrats is to ignore the existential essence of the divide.
Trump populism began when he announced his candidacy as an outsider Republican against establishment elites and progressive interests: main street media, the political class, academia, mega tech, and the deep state…the SWAMP. As with any populist movement, it was ordinary people (middle class, blue collar, and working folk) against elitists; assaults against time honored value precepts.
Th e one thing or the other question begins with two different views of the election process:
On January 11 (5 days after the January 6 official Electoral vote count) I participated in a briefing for members of Heritage Foundation on a meeting of the Heritage president with Vice President Pence that morning. The takeaway was the critical importance of the integrity of the voting/electoral process and what happened in 2020 must never happen again. Specifically, the widespread violation of Article 2 Sec. 1 of the Constitution which mandates the state legislatures as the sole authority in writing the rules in the voting process. Under cover and pretext of Covid considerations, Democrats persuaded election boards, governors, and judges to circumvent the Constitutional requirement and prejudice the integrity of the vote process.
Most important, was identification and verification requirements for both in-person and mail-in votes. The greatest and most egregious issues, of course, arose in contested elections in Democrat controlled battleground states. Democrats consider almost any identification or verification requirements as voter suppression.
The Heritage project is essentially a populist effort to insure integrity of the election process by working with state legislatures to enforce integrity by identification, absentee ballot controls, and verification standards to avoid abuses in 2020 election.
The progressive Democrat left has a different agenda. In HR 1, , The Peoples Act of 2019, the socialist Democrat party endeavors to federalize the election process by eliminating the Art. 2, Sec. 1 requirement of state legislatures and reconstituting the Federal Election Commission. A 5-member board, of which 3 members would be appointed by the president, would make election rules a federal partisan political n process. HR1 has passed the Democrat controlled House but may be defeated in the Senate. How the Constitutional challenge will be met without amendment is unclear.
What is clear, however, is the one way of the populist Republicans is faithfulness to the Constitution and a democratic republic. The other way of the Socialists Democrats reeks of Marxism. The Peoples Act is as of every other socialist/communist Peoples Republic. First there was the 1619 Project to rewrite our history. Now, on the 400 hundred year anniversary of that misguided assault, the socialist Democrats progress with the 2019 Peoples Act to the end of the great experiment.
Res Publica.
Paul Plante says
Frederick Engels
The Principles of Communism
Written: October-November 1847
— 1 —
What is Communism?
Communism is the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat.
— 2 —
What is the proletariat?
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.
— 7 —
In what way do proletarians differ from slaves?
The slave is sold once and for all; the proletarian must sell himself daily and hourly.
The individual slave, property of one master, is assured an existence, however miserable it may be, because of the master’s interest.
The individual proletarian, property as it were of the entire bourgeois class which buys his labor only when someone has need of it, has no secure existence.
This existence is assured only to the class as a whole.
The slave is outside competition; the proletarian is in it and experiences all its vagaries.
The slave counts as a thing, not as a member of society.
Thus, the slave can have a better existence than the proletarian, while the proletarian belongs to a higher stage of social development and, himself, stands on a higher social level than the slave.
The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general.
— 14 —
What will this new social order have to be like?
Above all, it will have to take the control of industry and of all branches of production out of the hands of mutually competing individuals, and instead institute a system in which all these branches of production are operated by society as a whole – that is, for the common account, according to a common plan, and with the participation of all members of society.
It will, in other words, abolish competition and replace it with association.
Moreover, since the management of industry by individuals necessarily implies private property, and since competition is in reality merely the manner and form in which the control of industry by private property owners expresses itself, it follows that private property cannot be separated from competition and the individual management of industry.
Private property must, therefore, be abolished and in its place must come the common utilization of all instruments of production and the distribution of all products according to common agreement – in a word, what is called the communal ownership of goods.
In fact, the abolition of private property is, doubtless, the shortest and most significant way to characterize the revolution in the whole social order which has been made necessary by the development of industry – and for this reason it is rightly advanced by communists as their main demand.
— 18 —
What will be the course of this revolution?
Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.
Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.
The main measures, emerging as the necessary result of existing relations, are the following:
(i) Limitation of private property through progressive taxation, heavy inheritance taxes, abolition of inheritance through collateral lines (brothers, nephews, etc.) forced loans, etc.
(ii) Gradual expropriation of landowners, industrialists, railroad magnates and shipowners, partly through competition by state industry, partly directly through compensation in the form of bonds.
(iii) Confiscation of the possessions of all emigrants and rebels against the majority of the people.
(iv) Organization of labor or employment of proletarians on publicly owned land, in factories and workshops, with competition among the workers being abolished and with the factory owners, in so far as they still exist, being obliged to pay the same high wages as those paid by the state.
(v) An equal obligation on all members of society to work until such time as private property has been completely abolished.
Formation of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
(vi) Centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a national bank with state capital, and the suppression of all private banks and bankers.
(vii) Increase in the number of national factories, workshops, railroads, ships; bringing new lands into cultivation and improvement of land already under cultivation – all in proportion to the growth of the capital and labor force at the disposal of the nation.
(viii) Education of all children, from the moment they can leave their mother’s care, in national establishments at national cost.
Education and production together.
(ix) Construction, on public lands, of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions while avoiding the one-sidedness and drawbacks of each.
(x) Destruction of all unhealthy and jerry-built dwellings in urban districts.
(xi) Equal inheritance rights for children born in and out of wedlock.
(xii) Concentration of all means of transportation in the hands of the nation.
It is impossible, of course, to carry out all these measures at once.
But one will always bring others in its wake.
Once the first radical attack on private property has been launched, the proletariat will find itself forced to go ever further, to concentrate increasingly in the hands of the state all capital, all agriculture, all transport, all trade.
All the foregoing measures are directed to this end; and they will become practicable and feasible, capable of producing their centralizing effects to precisely the degree that the proletariat, through its labor, multiplies the country’s productive forces.
Finally, when all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.
— 20 —
What will be the consequences of the ultimate disappearance of private property?
Society will take all forces of production and means of commerce, as well as the exchange and distribution of products, out of the hands of private capitalists and will manage them in accordance with a plan based on the availability of resources and the needs of the whole society.
In this way, most important of all, the evil consequences which are now associated with the conduct of big industry will be abolished.
There will be no more crises; the expanded production, which for the present order of society is overproduction and hence a prevailing cause of misery, will then be insufficient and in need of being expanded much further.
Instead of generating misery, overproduction will reach beyond the elementary requirements of society to assure the satisfaction of the needs of all; it will create new needs and, at the same time, the means of satisfying them.
It will become the condition of, and the stimulus to, new progress, which will no longer throw the whole social order into confusion, as progress has always done in the past.
Big industry, freed from the pressure of private property, will undergo such an expansion that what we now see will seem as petty in comparison as manufacture seems when put beside the big industry of our own day.
This development of industry will make available to society a sufficient mass of products to satisfy the needs of everyone.
The same will be true of agriculture, which also suffers from the pressure of private property and is held back by the division of privately owned land into small parcels.
Here, existing improvements and scientific procedures will be put into practice, with a resulting leap forward which will assure to society all the products it needs.
In this way, such an abundance of goods will be able to satisfy the needs of all its members.
The division of society into different, mutually hostile classes will then become unnecessary.
Indeed, it will be not only unnecessary but intolerable in the new social order.
The existence of classes originated in the division of labor, and the division of labor, as it has been known up to the present, will completely disappear.
For mechanical and chemical processes are not enough to bring industrial and agricultural production up to the level we have described; the capacities of the men who make use of these processes must undergo a corresponding development.
Just as the peasants and manufacturing workers of the last century changed their whole way of life and became quite different people when they were drawn into big industry, in the same way, communal control over production by society as a whole, and the resulting new development, will both require an entirely different kind of human material.
People will no longer be, as they are today, subordinated to a single branch of production, bound to it, exploited by it; they will no longer develop one of their faculties at the expense of all others; they will no longer know only one branch, or one branch of a single branch, of production as a whole.
Even industry as it is today is finding such people less and less useful.
Industry controlled by society as a whole, and operated according to a plan, presupposes well-rounded human beings, their faculties developed in balanced fashion, able to see the system of production in its entirety.
The form of the division of labor which makes one a peasant, another a cobbler, a third a factory worker, a fourth a stock-market operator, has already been undermined by machinery and will completely disappear.
Education will enable young people quickly to familiarize themselves with the whole system of production and to pass from one branch of production to another in response to the needs of society or their own inclinations.
It will, therefore, free them from the one-sided character which the present-day division of labor impresses upon every individual.
Communist society will, in this way, make it possible for its members to put their comprehensively developed faculties to full use.
But, when this happens, classes will necessarily disappear.
It follows that society organized on a communist basis is incompatible with the existence of classes on the one hand, and that the very building of such a society provides the means of abolishing class differences on the other.
A corollary of this is that the difference between city and country is destined to disappear.
The management of agriculture and industry by the same people rather than by two different classes of people is, if only for purely material reasons, a necessary condition of communist association.
The dispersal of the agricultural population on the land, alongside the crowding of the industrial population into the great cities, is a condition which corresponds to an undeveloped state of both agriculture and industry and can already be felt as an obstacle to further development.
The general co-operation of all members of society for the purpose of planned exploitation of the forces of production, the expansion of production to the point where it will satisfy the needs of all, the abolition of a situation in which the needs of some are satisfied at the expense of the needs of others, the complete liquidation of classes and their conflicts, the rounded development of the capacities of all members of society through the elimination of the present division of labor, through industrial education, through engaging in varying activities, through the participation by all in the enjoyments produced by all, through the combination of city and country – these are the main consequences of the abolition of private property.
— 24 —
How do communists differ from socialists?
The so-called socialists are divided into three categories.
Democratic Socialists:
Finally, the third category consists of democratic socialists who favor some of the same measures the communists advocate, as described in Question 18, not as part of the transition to communism, however, but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society.
These democratic socialists are either proletarians who are not yet sufficiently clear about the conditions of the liberation of their class, or they are representatives of the petty bourgeoisie, a class which, prior to the achievement of democracy and the socialist measures to which it gives rise, has many interests in common with the proletariat.
It follows that, in moments of action, the communists will have to come to an understanding with these democratic socialists, and in general to follow as far as possible a common policy with them – provided that these socialists do not enter into the service of the ruling bourgeoisie and attack the communists.
— 25 —
What is the attitude of the communists to the other political parties of our time?
This attitude is different in the different countries.
In America, where a democratic constitution has already been established, the communists must make the common cause with the party which will turn this constitution against the bourgeoisie and use it in the interests of the proletariat – that is, with the agrarian National Reformers.
Against the governments, therefore, the communists must continually support the radical liberal party, taking care to avoid the self-deceptions of the bourgeoisie and not fall for the enticing promises of benefits which a victory for the bourgeoisie would allegedly bring to the proletariat.