Illuminating SovEth: The Condition of American Philosophy
"Soviet Ethics And Morality" -- Dr. Richard T. De George, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, University of Michigan Press, 1969. 184 pages.
This is a hell of a book. To really understand the essence and scale of this requires enough of a grasp of human history to be furiously outraged that anyone ever wrote like this in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the very first sentence of his "Preface," De George flatly asserts that "Marxist-Leninist ethics and communist morality stem from and are part of the Western tradition." From that, and in the next sentence of the same paragraph, he sashays directly into explaining how the Soviets suddenly awoke in the 1950s to the idea that what they had done and were still doing demanded some sort of moral rationalization. The man presents no awareness that "the Western tradition" is well over two thousand years in widely available history books, but that the two most perverted theorists of robbery and murder of all time could not even mark two centuries, at De George's writing, since the Enlightenment first pointed mankind toward individual liberty. The very idea of breaking the eons-long grip of monarchy -- in no small part a general conveyance of "the Western tradition" -- was refined by people who, for the first time, stood on an entire continent without a king: this was the culmination of "the Western tradition".
It is cool, owl-eyed fraud to include Marx or Lenin in any of this. Their flagrant ignorance and rejection of it is proven in their adolescent infatuations with the likes of Maximilien Robespierre and Nikolai Chernyshevsky, where men like Samuel Adams and Ethan Allen had already shown the way for every single individual of our species. To the robbers and murderers, it was enough to smash down a throne and erect a state with the wreckage, on sheer materialist sensations of destruction and death. To the Westerners, it was better to cast off the most powerful king on Earth like a louse, and then actually produce a new world where they stood, with the human mind as the principal and most crucial tool.
State robbery and murder reached unprecedented heights under the philosophical authority of Marx and Lenin. There is no flourish of rhetoric or temperature of passion that can conceal this fact from any honest and thoughtful person. The plain facts of statecraft alone separate their adherents from the worst efforts of ancient savages: not Caligula or Genghis Khan could match the monstrous power and implacability of the Cheka. It (the Soviet state-security police) had been grinding human bones for nearly forty years before it dawned on them that they should start to work out the ethics of it, and for over half a century when this professor, De George, picked up his pen to explain to us why they had suddenly felt that they had to explain themselves.
There had never been a Marxist ethics (explicitly stated, although it was plainly implicit to any individualist) for the simple reason that he had dismissed individual human agency from human affairs. His big idea was that morality was a "form of social conscience" malleable under the press of economics. (Understand this to all its implications, and you will be well along the way to understanding Portland, Oregon, c. 2020.) He would have no way of accounting for, say, Jobs and Wozniak changing the world on their own powers. Therefore, there was no need to even take up the question why they would set out to do that and why they should be free to.
There had never been a Leninist ethics for the same reason. This cynical neglect continued through Stalin's conclusive performance of the entire logic, and then a curious thing was noticed. As De George retails the confession: "The new Soviet man had not yet emerged. Crime was still prevalent, as was drunkenness, parasitism, and rowdiness, and such 'bourgeois' traits as acquisitiveness and jealousy were all too obviously present. The new man had not appeared. He was still to be formed."
The issue was taken up six years before Stalin's death, when Andrei Zhdanov conducted a conference by order of the Central Committee CPSU. He "criticized Soviet philosophers for their lack of productivity".
Zhdanov was long-practiced at administrative murder. He could strike a human being -- or thousands of them -- out of existence from the comfort of his desk, and did. He was projected to succeed Stalin but drank himself out of the competition, dying two years after he'd lashed the state philosophers in 1947. A reader stops at considering the brutal and ignorant audacity of that: a drunken mass-murderer ordering philosophers to their work at producing a moral rationale for mass-murder.
A journal ("Voprosy filosofi") was founded! There was a significant increase in philosophical activity! Production soared after Stalin died in 1953.
De George points out two important "needs and demands of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union".
The first task at hand was to refute "bourgeois ethical theories". In brief; they had to find a way to halt sensible people from observing that they were robbers and murderers. De George grants that "its objective was primarily negative," but insists on "positive by-products".
"By attempting to refute bourgeois theories Soviet theoreticians were also forced to find answers to questions neither they, nor Marx, nor Engels had previously considered."
You see; they had to actually think-through what they had done. This is a resounding indictment in itself, fit for inscription on all the locks of the White Sea Canal and the mines of Vorkuta.
Attempting analysis of their past did not, however, stop them. The most important demand of Soviet ethics was continued construction of The New Soviet Man: "inculcation of communist values in the Soviet people".
This is where our real lesson unfolds.
Dr. Richard T. De George tells us:
"More of the Soviet ethical literature is devoted to the teaching and spreading of Communist morality than to any other theme. This trend has, if anything, increased since the 1961 Party Program and the announcement that the Soviet Union had entered the stage of the building of communism, with its achievement predicted 'in the main' by 1980. While force and terror had been used as instruments of social control in the Soviet Union during most of the reign of Stalin, it became evident by the 1950's and especially since Stalin's denunciation in 1956, that if communism is to be built it must not stand on a basis of terror but on a more tolerable popularly acceptable basis."
This man is offered here as a moral example, himself. The fact that in 1969 -- the very year after Leonid Brezhnev crushed Czechoslovakia with tanks and a half-million troops -- an American philosopher set out to illustrate Soviet ethics is a fireable offense of bloody stupid incompetence. "The Brezhnev Doctrine" was all we needed to know in order to understand.