Socialism&Marxism

4.  ELIMINATION OF RELIGION The third main idea of socialists is elimination, abolition, or annihilation of religion. What is a background of this idea? The following statement of F. Engels may shed some light here: ‘A division of people into two sharply different groups, into humans and bestial humans, into good and evil, sheep and goats, is known, apart from the philosophy of reality, only to Christianity, which quite consistently also has its judge of the world to make the separation’. 1 First, a humiliating and mocking tone of F. Engels attracts attention. Second, there is little truth in his statement. Christianity does not know any groups of ‘humans and bestial humans'. It is an obvious F. Engels's invention. The division of people into good and bad is indeed a typical feature of Christian world view, in contrast to the socialist one. In principle, one may speak of a division of people into sheep and goats by Christianity. Such utterances occur in ...

3.  ELIMINATION OF PRIVATE PROPERTY The second main idea of all socialists, viz., elimination of private property is undoubtedly a derivative of the above-indicated prejudice about human equality. It would have been justified, if people had really been equally mentally gifted or would have had merely statically understood and working only in the productive direction alone abilities. But it suffices to recall the Aesop's fables about an ant and a bug as well as about an ant and a cicada and also the I. Krylov's fable A Dragonfly and an Ant in order to realize inadequacy of these ideas and also to understand that there are beneficiaries of the socialist ideas, viz., precisely those people whose behaviour resembles that of the dragonfly and other characters in the Krylov's fables. Once the socialist prejudice about human equality has been rejected, the attitude to private property must radically change, viz., it is an instrument to protect toilers-ants against i...

2. EQUALITY AND ELIMINATION OF HIERARCHY It is a long time since I paid attention to the following text from the first volume of Capital by Karl Marx: 'Equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour insofar as they are human labour in general, this secret of the expression of value can be deciphered only when the idea of human equality has already acquired firmness of a popular prejudice'. 1 I noticed this phrase as early as in 1981. I read then Marx in the original German and translated it as follows: 'The secret of the expression of value, equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour as and insofar as they are human labour in general can only be deciphered as soon as the notion of human equality already possesses firmness of a popular prejudice (Vorurteil)'. 2 In my opinion, my translation is better than the official one, in which the order of words has not been followed without any tangible ground, nor is there any word-for-...

Victor Artsimovich A CENTENARY OF TWO RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS AND THE MAIN ERROR OF MARXISM 1.  PREFACE Men at most differ as Heaven and Earth, But women worst and best as Heaven and Hell. (Alfred Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien ) This 2017 year marks a centenary of the developments that shook the whole world at that time. I mean the ruin of the Russian Empire and what is called the February and the Great October Socialist Revolution in Russia. Socialist ideas and people who followed them are known to have played a great role in those developments. Moreover, by no means only adherents of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolshevik) (RSDLP (b)), i.e. the bolsheviks followed them, but also the mensheviks did so. Also, there existed a Socialist Revolutionary Party. As one can see just from the name, it practised the socialist ideas too. It also played a great role in those developments. As a matter of fact, Alexander Kerensky, a minister at first, and th...