A Point of View 1

A point of view

By Andy Cox 

A philosophy

Happiness is the vivid bloom

of lives lived in a rich loam.

Our humanity a humus for those to come,

but we too are the beneficiaries of

others amongst us or gone.

So, death is undone through life’s legacy,

ceaselessly so in our common soil,

our commonweal in which the passing of one

seemingly brings forth others.

- No reincarnation :

Only others informing us as we inform others -

from which we can pick precious purpose.

Dark weeds there may be amongst us

that would forswear our mutuality and leech,

as there are some who would set themselves apart

in manicured beds corrupted with sterile soil.

Neither acknowledges the give and take.

Yet it is our bonds that set us free -

knowing what binds us unbinds us.

And when one day, this becomes religion,

then may we find a capacity to rejoice

every time a bud opens

                                                                                        2002

 It’s like this: For a good many years, my head has been a pot for a sort of intellectual stew, the ingredients of which have managed to retain their separate identities, even if they’ve become a little soggy over time. A splash of good wine has surely enhanced the flavour: (In vino veritas, no doubt). And many a good argument has provided the spice, adding nuance to the creation. I say creation, but, in fact, none of these ingredients is novel: One or two of these old roots have been around since antiquity. What interests me, however, is their interrelationship, the alluring possibility that they may, so to speak, enhance each other. Their integration into something bigger, a worldview if you like, is the thesis of this polemical exercise. Five of the larger entities in this stew, which I intend to slice apart, are:

• Analogy as a spurious source of knowledge.
• The non-survivalist notion that we have no identity or existence after death.
• Atheism
• The idea and ideal of a moneyless, stateless, propertyless world in which each has free  access to the products of humanity, and contributes according to his or her  ability and inclination.

These, I would contend, contribute to a fifth ingredient, namely:

• An ethic which enjoins one to better the lives of others.

But before I begin to ladle this out, there is something I feel which needs to be said: Man, I believe, is doomed to be a philosopher. No one bar those devoid of abstract thought can escape this fate. Beneath all the internalised trivia, beneath the layers of received knowledge that crowds one‘s mind, there lies a philosophical construction addressing the very nub of one’s existence, whether this is acknowledged or not, whether this construction is fashioned on the hard anvil of critical thought or represents merely a concatenation of conventional responses to the big questions of life. In other words, everyone has a worldview. In presenting my own, I am merely laying bare a philosophical construction that seems to make sense to me. To be honest, I am not unquestionably certain about it: It tilts in places and contains many a threadbare rivet. But it coheres sufficiently to satisfy my own need to understand the world around me.

 So here’s a taste of that intellectual stew: I have no idea at all why we are here on this earth, or, indeed why earth should be here in the first place. Any suggestion that our existence and that of the universe serve some purpose begs more than a few questions. What I think draws people into this sort of thinking is a deep-seated, almost reflexive, propensity for analogical thinking in which one phenomenon is explained by comparing it and drawing parallels with another. It seems to me that in our ordinary lives – when not engaged in philosophical discourse – we are sometimes implicitly informed by all manner of delusions, as well as truths, which we do not pause to consider, and which are extracted from the mud of our mundane existence, primarily, through the mechanism of analogy. Our ordinary world is the base from which we peregrinate on philosophical excursions. One might argue that this base itself occupies philosophical terrain. But the philosophical grounding of our everyday existence is necessarily implicit and ‘out of mind’: When we engage with the ordinary, we are rarely impelled towards philosophical reflection. Philosophy, in any case, competes with many other disciplines – psychology, biology, and economics, amongst others – in respect of our proclivity for abstraction. I am not suggesting that analogical thinking is without use: All I am suggesting is that if you scratch beneath many of the taken for granted notions that have taken up residence in  our minds, you may well come across analogies that don’t stand up to scrutiny. Sometimes one is not even aware that an analogy is being drawn, let alone that an analogical fallacy is committed in assuming somehow that the comparison proves something to be the case rather than merely suggests - usually in a graphic or picturesque manner -  how the phenomenon in question could be explained. Moreover, in some cases, the analogy is plainly flawed. Nothing exemplifies this better than certain arguments purporting to prove the existence of God. The Argument from Design, for example, has it that the order and beauty of the universe demonstrate that it must have been designed. Not only is the premise of this argument debatable - order and beauty are clearly not universally present and could be attributed rather to the eye of the beholder, but the conclusion is simply a non sequitur: It relies, of course, on an implicit analogy with, say, a craftsman creating a beautiful artefact - a  microcosmic event which is thought somehow to serve as a parallel for a macrocosmic event, the creation of the universe. But,

(a)  It simply does not follow that what holds good in the microcosmic situation - namely that the artefact has self-evidently been made by someone - holds good in the macrocosmic situation, where one is confronted with an infinite universe. At most, one might allow that an inference is being made. But this requires comparability between these situations, which is simply not the case: In the microcosmic situation, the craftsman is responsible for just a limited number of products in a world of innumerable objects, including other craftsmen. The putative God in the macroscopic situation is deemed to have created everything on his own.

(b)  The analogy is thus flawed for that reason, but also because in the microcosmic situation, the craftsman produces the artefact from materials to hand, for example, wood. God, however, is believed by the religious apologist to create the  universe ex nihilo, from nothing.

For these and other reasons - such as attributing certain manifestations of order instead to evolutionary forces - The Argument from Design is totally unconvincing. But it is important to observe that it is basically the unwarranted drawing of conclusions on the basis of an analogy, as well as the flawed nature of the analogy, which undermine this argument. Moreover, as is the case with all philosophical arguments, there is a meaning problem which needs to be addressed even before the logic is questioned: What exactly do we mean when we say that God created everything ex nihilo? I would venture to suggest that the whole idea is incomprehensible, and that any attempt to clarify what is meant by this is likely to rely on yet more unwarranted inferences drawn from yet more flawed analogies. Simply stringing together a number of words in a grammatically correct sentence, as in ‘God created everything’, may create the illusion of meaning, but grammatically-generated meaning is no substitute for conceptual clarity. Anyway, such is the nature of analogical thinking, which pervades our language and reasoning.  Unsurprisingly, it characterizes much discussion on the dreaded subject of death.

Death is personal: To us in the West, it is something which can consume our inner lives as surely as it consumes the husks we call our bodies. It is the raison dêtre for so much in life, a rallying point, a border post of the everyday world. It is a concept shot through with powerful emotions: fear, anger, revulsion, sadness, love. And it too is something which is conceived in terms of analogies. Already I have unwittingly resorted to analogical thinking in my references to our inner lives and outer husks: I have evoked the ghost in the machine. I might also have suggested that death is like a sleep, adding the corollary that in the ’sleep of death, dreams may come’, that a life of sorts awaits us ’when we have shuffled off this mortal coil’.  But on what basis would I have arrived at this conclusion? The rub of the matter is that this belief is founded primarily on analogy, and that below it may lie a deeply entrenched fear of losing one’s ego, a fear that is particularly conditioned by the individualistic ethos of so-called advanced societies. I would like to propose instead that we calmly consider the alternative; namely, that there is no afterlife. I would like to suggest that when we die no heaven or hell awaits us, because, to put it simply, we shall no longer be. This being the case, we can have no cause to fear death, because it carries no implications for us beyond our complete annihilation. I am aware, of course, that, to someone like me, the product of a Catholic upbringing, a faint angst haunts this construction on death.  But this hardly detracts from the argument. It is surely preferable that the head and the heart should concur, but like an old married couple, these two faculties will not always see eye to eye.

Though profoundly personal, death is a social phenomenon as well: On a small scale, there are the bereaved, of course, who not only feel the loss, but whose lives are more or less, subtly or significantly, altered. These effects may cascade far and wide. For example, a death may loosen ties, or bring people together, and this may influence the pattern of affiliations and interactions of the generations that follow. Macrocosmically too, death is something with which society as a whole has to contend. I’m not referring here to, say, the preoccupation of various organs of the state with morbidity indices and the implications these may have on governmental spending. I am referring rather to a more profound way in which society is taken up with the phenomenon of death: to the fact that death is something which is ‘culturally mediated’. Without getting into a debate about the nature of culture – it has variously been construed as comprising the symbolic and acquired aspects of society, as something distinct from nature, as something distinct from the social structure, as something akin to ideology, or as a way of life – in the present context this phrase relates to a societal resource which is drawn upon to bestow meaning on what is in a certain sense a unintelligible event, and provide the rituals with which order and ordinariness are re-established. Death, particularly when it is unexpected and dramatic, is often extraordinary in various ways, and has the potential to thoroughly trivialize the construct we know as society. We see this manifested sometimes in a phase of withdrawal and detachment in someone who is actually dying. And death, of course, takes one beyond the reach of society. Thus, society needs to assert itself – via culture - by countering the bewildering sense of life being insignificant, goals and ambitions being pointless, and norms being irrelevant, which may potentially also accompany the experience of bereavement. This is something which is proactively addressed during the socialization process, when how one is to live in general, rather than how one should cope with death in particular, is the focus of attention. As far as society is concerned, what is not needed is that individuals grow up believing that, as there is no point to life, they  may as well take whatever they want from life, and act however they please, regardless of the consequences. Society could just not operate as an aggregation of nihilistic egoists.  In other words, society abhors anomie, much as nature abhors a vacuum. If one chose to talk of society in some reified sense as having a separate existence, one might say that, if its constituent members did not to some extent subscribe to a set of shared beliefs and values, then the fabric of society might itself unravel. Returning to the subject of bereavement, one could say that if, because of the death of someone close to them, individuals were left feeling that life was of no importance or that nothing was worth pursuing, then they might not be able to adequately fulfil their social roles, and this too could have all sorts of repercussions for others; not just emotionally unsettling the latter.  When a death occurs, individuals need to feel that, in some sense, ‘life goes on’. The comfort and support provided by friends reinforces this message, and subliminally impresses on the bereaved that they continue to belong within a network of other social beings. The colloquial expression about someone’s world falling apart in the aftermath of a death often sums up the experience of bereavement. When culture is deployed to hold that world together, it is chiefly one particular component of culture that is tasked with this, and that component is known as religion

Now, I’m not suggesting that religion necessarily comes into play when someone dies. But this certainly seems to happen most of the time and in nearly all societies. Religion is, of course, the principal (though by no means exclusive) sponsor of the notion that we somehow survive death. Moreover, religion generally-speaking also declares that what happens to us after death is determined by the manner in which we conduct ourselves in life. There can be little doubt that in promoting such ideas, religion serves society well by immunising individuals against anomic tendencies in the face of death. Its priests and preachers, mullahs and rabbis have for centuries officiated over the rituals of death, and comforted the bereaved with promises of paradise. However, there is much more to the relationship between religion and society than that: For one thing, in most cases, the former generally serves to facilitate mass conformity to most societal norms through pushing an ethical agenda, the bottom line of which – at least in the Abrahamaic religions - is that if you are good you go to heaven and if you are bad you go to hell. Moreover, religion and the state are institutionally enmeshed in various ways in most countries: In theocracies, they are practically indistinguishable. In the West, religion may have retired to the back benches, yet it still manages to insinuate itself to various degrees in the political life of countries, sometimes in a moderating way. Even in avowedly atheistic states, a sort of quasi-religion fills the breach with absurdities like Kim Jong-il of North Korea assuming a god-like status. Thus religion has played a role in adding a sacred aspect to the profane business of running the state. It is also hard to deny that for many, many people, religion is a balm, a consolation, an ‘opiate’, and, as such, takes some of the pressure off the state, which might otherwise have to contend with unmanageable levels of social unrest. In fact, one of the ironies of modern history is that it has often been in the afore-mentioned atheistic states, erstwhile or existent, where consolation has perhaps been mostly keenly sought, that religion of a more conventional character has flourished fungal-like in the shadows. Why religion should be an opiate is not hard to see: When life is unrelentingly grim, as it is for the vast majority of people all over the world, and denies them significant political or social leverage to effect a change in their circumstances, then it makes sense for these people to console themselves with the thought that at least after death, there will be some redress, some righting of wrongs. Psychologically too, such a thought also addresses the lack of self-esteem which so often accompanies poverty, relative or otherwise: That it is harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle probably plays well to most of the religious-inclined poor of many a teeming barrio. And in fostering an otherworldly orientation, religion can have an enervating effect upon political activity, particularly in conservative societies where religion and the state work closely together.

 However, religion and its relationship with society are changing all the time: In some parts of the world, religion is in retreat; in other parts, it is resurgent. What is more, its consoling function is sometimes belied by a proclivity for politicisation, as is evidenced by liberation theology in Latin America or the activities of various Islamic movements. But other social and economic developments obviously cloud the picture too: Page though a Sunday supplement and there’s a chance you’ll come across the odd picture of destitute people in some third world country huddled beneath an advertising hoarding extolling deluxe objects of desire; an image symbolising something that’s becoming more and more apparent, which is that, today, more conspicuously than ever, material wealth is promoted despite being beyond the reach of so many. Materialism has become a sort of quasi-religion too; it’s Episcopalian priests being those louche style gurus whose parishioners are the readers of glossies and it’s more fundamentalist ministers those glaze –eyed corporate leaders intoning the mantra: ‘Greed is good’. What’s more, the gospel of the market - relentless advertising - now penetrates the sanctuary of the home more profoundly than ever, subtly mind-forming each up and coming generation via television and other mass media. Consequently, aspirations rise, and when these are thwarted, anger results. This anger may find expression in a variety of ways, from mere self-seeking criminality to various types of political action; nationalist liberation struggles, terrorism, trade union activity and protests, to name but a few. And in some cases it feeds into political action by religious groups; vide my reference to liberation theology and Islamic movements. Even so, religious dissent of this sort still retains its otherworldly point of reference. In fact, there are more than a few religious groups around wanting to impose a revanchist ‘otherworldly’ agenda on this world, whether by bloody force or the use of mass media.

But, of course, there is a major philosophical flaw with religion which affects its credibility, and that is – as has already been suggested – that it is premised on spurious analogies. One might wonder whether religion can nevertheless survive a convincing refutation of this analogical reasoning. I do not believe it can. To me, these analogies are central to any religious apology. That such reasoning should be deployed at all demonstrates the poverty of this apology. You don’t deploy analogical thinking to prove the existence of tables and chairs (I fear for the physical safety of philosophers who doubt such things); you do when seeking to prove the existence of a putative entity that cannot otherwise convincingly be shown to exist. Furthermore, what is unseen can only be apprehended through, or with reference to, what is seen. Of course, there are other categories of proof advanced by those wanting to show that God exists. But I think that the analogical argument is crucial because, in the absence of direct empirical evidence of his existence, analogy ‘informs’ the substantive picture we have of God. Whether viewed as an ancient with a beard and flowing robes, a powerful uber-warrior wielding an axe, a gigantic bird, or some nebulous power, God has been described by likening him to observable phenomena. In short, by deploying analogy. And since the analogy fails as proof, the entire deck of cards that is religion comes crashing down, along with the card setting out the religious premise of an afterlife. When this begins to dawn on people, then, of course, the contribution of religion to social order will begin to decline. There are other problems with religion too; many of them are psychological as opposed to philosophical in nature. Take, for example, the peculiar and somewhat hypocritical attitude religions exhibit towards the ‘sins of the flesh’: Although they may object that they are concerned rather with less sense-bound feelings, such as joy and despair, ultimately religions implicitly acknowledge the hedonistic principle that human beings are driven by the need to seek out pleasure and avoid pain. (This I would regard as ancillary to the most profound need driving us: the desire for happiness). The extremes of such experiences, after all, are supposedly afforded by heaven and hell respectively. Even if it is argued that these are states of mind or ‘planes of existence’ rather than physical locations, heaven and hell are seen as conditions that happen to and are imposed upon people, to which people react in ways which bear comparison with reactions to pleasurable and painful stimuli. Yet this all sits rather uncomfortably with the puritanical disapproval evinced by most religions – particularly those in the Abrahamaic tradition – of any display of a life-affirming sexuality outside strict social boundaries. Thus we find certain Muslim fundamentalists self-righteously demanding the lash, or even the bullet, for women transgressing the rigid mores of their societies. In the same breath, they will wax rhapsodic at the prospect of eternal orgiastic rutting in paradise in the company of seventy two virgins should they lose their lives whilst attempting to butcher innocents in some squalid Middle Eastern marketplace or in the anonymous streets of some Western city. (More recently, there have been unconfirmed reports from Iraq – that bastion of Western-sponsored freedom– that religious militias have taken to gluing the anuses of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, and then giving them a drink causing diarrhoea, which results in a horrible death). Whilst these barbaric acts may not be in accord with the Quoran – somewhat hypocritically, religiously-minded people tend not to be too bound by their holy books – and owe more to the backward-looking societies in which it they occur, the point of view informing them is nevertheless a religious one, and mainstream Muslims would well to consider what succour they give to these deranged fanatics  (Not so long ago, for example, we witnessed the Karzai regime in Afghanistan introducing legislation effectively legitimising rape within marriage in order to appease conservatives within that benighted country). Christianity is no less hypocritical. Witness the spectacle of millionaire preachers in the American Biblebelt surrounded by their business managers and power-dressing spouses, spluttering about hellfire and damnation only to be found with their pants down being pleasured by some vacuous young congregationalist. Or have a look at all of those dreary Catholic priests with a furtive craving for altar boys, intoning their baleful sermons on the evils of masturbation. The more vehemently religion proscribes; the more sordid-seeming are the infractions that inevitably follow. However, it is not just in matters sexual that religion casts an angst-laden pall over everything. In all sorts of ways, religion, I would contend is a sort of neurosis that weighs heavily on the human soul. Verily, it is the ‘sigh of the oppressed creature’, as Marx so eloquently put it. It engenders a sense of dread, a hesitancy, about living life to the full and without reservation. One might even construe the story the Garden of Eden in which God forbade Adam and Eve from eating the fruits of the apple tree as some sort of parable admonishing people against indulgence and extolling restraint instead. No wonder that the rise of consumerism in Western societies since the war has closely tracked the fall in religious observance.    

I have argued that in claiming we somehow survive death and that how we live our lives determines what this ‘afterlife’ is to be, religion does society a service insofar as it provides ready-made answers in regard to the meaning of life and reinforces socially acceptable behaviour. However, this contribution cannot be a necessary condition for ensuring that people do not adopt deviant or anti-social lifestyles. For, in truth, many people who reject the notion of an afterlife still manage to stay on the right side of the law. Many people are also atheists, and although the two notions are not conceptually equivalent, non-survivalism and atheism would seem to go hand in hand (Interestingly, both stand opposed to positions that are profoundly informed by analogical thinking. Moreover, the respective notions against which they are opposed; namely, belief in an afterlife and in God; are likewise linked: What’s the point in believing in a God if there is no afterlife? I should add, by the way, that although religion and atheism stand opposed to one another, there is one thing that they do agree upon, which is that man is a merest speck set against an inconceivably powerful force. For atheists, this force is the cosmos, and most atheists have a capacity for profound awe when contemplating the fact that mankind could disappear in an instant were some cosmic catastrophe to befall us, such as that which hypothetically occurred billions of years ago when Earth and the planet Theia collided – thereby creating the moon and hence the conditions propitiously conducive to life. Religionists are unable to countenance the nihilistic import of such a possibility, preferring instead to place their hopes in a benevolent God and a blissful afterlife, projecting an anthropomorphic fantasy - ‘God created everything in seven days’ – onto the vast indifferent canvass of the universe). So something else must account for the fact that this sizeable constituency of non-survivalists and atheists by and large lead ordinary unremarkable lives within the law. The unremarkable truth, of course, is that like everyone, those holding these positions undergo a socialization process as they grow up, resulting in them internalizing the norms and values of the society in which they live. Any religious rationale for these norms and values is either never ‘taken on board’, or is discarded later in life – though it must be said that some ostensible non-survivalists and atheists may subconsciously entertain some notion of an afterlife, as this is so deeply embedded in popular culture and may through a process of cultural osmosis come to find a niche within the most rational of minds. Some, of course, may retain religious baggage from childhood. Notwithstanding that, one is still tempted to argue that – because their adherence to societal norms and values is not underpinned by a powerful irrationality - those who eschew the essentially religious notion of an afterlife have a subtly different relationship to society. Consider, for example, the probability that, because society has no sacred character for them, atheists and their ilk are unlikely to regard themselves as a chosen people and may be  more disposed to humanistic and inclusive attitudes vis-à-vis other social groups.  It may also be no accident that, since the dawn of capitalism, many of the more radical figures have been atheists or agnostics. It certainly surprised me to learn from Richard Dawkins excellent book, ‘The god delusion’, that many, if not most, of the founding fathers of the American Republic were atheists and/or secularists. Secularism, or the belief that religion or religious institutions should play no part in the governance of society, has often trailed along behind full-blooded atheism. It owes much to the supercession of feudalism – in which religion played a major and overt role – by capitalism. That development was accompanied by an increasing compartmentalisation of society, and secularists merely insisted that religion confine itself to the compartment labelled ‘religion’.  Secularism does not necessarily entail a rejection of religion.

This, of course, begs a question: Given that society has evolved and consequently its complex relationship with religion has evolved too, is it not possible to have a society which did not depend on religion to shore up its ideological architecture, which could sit easily with both atheistic and non-survivalist views simply because it did not rely on the wrath of god or the prospect of eternal damnation insofar as the conflicts and tensions inherent in present day society no longer existed. I believe that it is, and this brings me to the third of the ingredients found in my intellectual stew.

The idea, often facetiously dismissed as utopian, of a society founded on the principle of common ownership has an ancient pedigree: Sir Thomas More coined the word, Utopia, in his book published in 1516, tendentiously depicting (as he meant thereby to draw attention to some of the evils of his own society) life on a mythical island south of the equator where private property did not exist. But elements of utopian thought can be traced back far earlier to Plato and others, and the notion of an ideal commonwealth has found fictional expression in the work of many writers, from Bacon, Campanella, and Harrington, to Morris, Hertzka, and Wells. The idea and ideal of common ownership specifically has also informed actual events in history – witness the Diggers in 17c England, or the various experiments in building communistic communities, such as those Robert Owen. Moreover – and this is often overlooked – for most of mankind’s existence, society has managed to get by without private property, bar the odd loin cloth, trinket, or flint axe intended for personal use. Marx argued that humans lived in a state of primitive communism for aeons prior to the advent of classical ancient societies where production came to be largely carried out by chattel slave labour.

My concern, however, is with advanced communism. If ever an idea had ‘arrived’ and merited serious attention it is this, particularly now that humanity stands on the brink of an ecological abyss of unfathomable depths for which global capitalism, through acts of omission or commission, can justifiably be blamed. So, how to begin laying out this notion? Perhaps one needs to initially look at what is being proposed: In a nutshell, advanced communist society would operate on a world-wide basis in accordance with that old Marxist dictum, ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. As such, it would bear no resemblance to extant and extinct ‘state capitalist’ states, ludicrously and cynically claiming to be ‘communist’ or ‘socialist’. It would be a democracy in the truest sense of the word, and would be established on the basis of a majority choosing to have it - most certainly not imposed by revolutionary vanguards. States and the geographical limits of their administrative operations – national borders - would no longer exist. Freedom of expression would be completely unfettered, and the only socially sanctioned limitations on behaviour being those intended to deter actions demonstrably causing harm to others. No longer straitjacketed by the need to make a profit, production would be undertaken on the basis of need and in a wholly rational manner: Manufacturing processes that might have deleterious environmental effects or pose unacceptable risks, for example, would not be considered, and every effort would be made to ensure that safe alternatives were used instead. People would contribute to the production of goods and services as and how they wished. That is to say, work would be both voluntary and co-operative - there would no longer exist competition between workers, companies and countries. And people would have free access to the fruits of human labour. In other words, neither money nor barter would play a role: If people needed something, they would simply go along to their local distribution facility and take it without having to hand over something in exchange. Sophisticated stock control measures would ensure that needs were anticipated as far as possible by flagging up potential shortfalls. The production of the items in question would then be undertaken in a wholly rational and planned way. Where an actual shortfall did exist then rational strategies such as considering alternatives, rationing, reserving, utilizing different manufacturing processes, importing from further afield, or simply making do without would be deployed. There is no need to suppose that people would in some way abuse the system: Why should they when goods and services were freely available? In any case, it is reasonable to suppose that a wholly different mindset would prevail in this new society; one that would be altogether more socially responsive, humane, tolerant and far less sullied by egotism and greed. Property being held in common, there would no longer exist the immense armies of personnel and the bloated resource-depleting structures dedicated to upholding property rights or access to resources inside and outside each state as obtains at present: I am talking here of the police and the military, the entire justice system, the prisons, the arms industry, the myriad agencies involved in administering property rights and claims, etcetera. Correspondingly, untold millions around the world would no longer be drawn to a life of crime or end up incarcerated because of this career move. The raison d’être for crime, war, terrorism, industrial strife, and internecine conflict, amongst other hideous stressors characteristic of the modern world would simply not exist. People would be able to travel and settle where they wished, but, as the current economic and political conditions driving people to uproot and seek refuge in other parts of the world would no longer obtain, mass migration (Not to mention the attendant angst and resentment in host populations) is unlikely to occur – except in the event of some catastrophic natural disaster. Education would be radically different from what it is today: Being both free and non-compulsory, it is to be expected that those seeking to further their education would do so joyously. The grim discipline-orientated schools of today, which seek to mould kids into industry and business fodder, would become a thing of the past. For once, art would genuinely be for art’s sake, not cynically foisted on a passive populace as a means of turning a quick buck. Quality, in other words, would be the watchword in all creative activity, from architecture and landscaping to music, theatre, film, and writing. Technological innovation, no longer fettered by patents or invested interests, would accelerate, albeit in a controlled, socially responsible way, and many of the more onerous tasks that need undertaking could be systematically automated. Medical research in particular (especially in areas that are currently under-researched – for example, tropical medicine – because there is less of a financial incentive to do so) would be prioritized in order to rid humanity of the misery of disease  and illness as far as possible. Moreover, it would be conducted in an open, coordinated manner, not in the fragmented fashion that it is today, with numerous research groups jealously guarding their discoveries for ‘commercial reasons’.  In this respect, and so many others, the establishment of world communism – or socialism – would utterly transform the way we live. Life would simply be incomparably more relaxed, enjoyable, fulfilling, and happy. Practically all of the so-called today’s ‘evils’ – if one might revert to pulpit language for an instance – would just disappear: war, ethnic cleansing, vandalism, robbery, prostitution, pornography, drug pushing, protection rackets, nepotism, corruption, repression, the cynical manipulation of minds for financial gain, people trafficking, slavery, mass hunger, poverty, unemployment, environmental destruction, the wastage of resources, the deliberate creation of soulless and ugly human environments, to name just some. And the reason for this is simply that each and every one of these phenomena has it’s origin in or is sustained by the current social dispensation, by the manner in which society is organized today. Money, in other words, is what these evils are all about. When humanity eventually chooses to embrace communism, then truly it shall have crossed a threshold between barbarism and civilisation.

I am by no means claiming that all will be perfect under communism: It is reasonable to suppose that after resolving to embrace communism, humanity will have to live with an assortment of ‘transitional problems’ for several decades before things begin to run smoothly. And, of course, the vexed question of the relationship between the individual and society will continue to demand attention. When discussing this relationship, political theorists sometimes refer to the notion of a ‘Social Contract’. To be literal-minded about it, this is, of course, a fiction, another instance of mistaken analogical thinking in which the individual and society are deemed to have a quasi-legal relationship with each party having obligations to the other, or in which society is formed after individuals enter into contracts with each other concerning the nature of the society. Strictly-speaking, as an analogy, this depiction fails: there is no analogical court or presiding judge (unless God in heaven fits this description – but then would he sanction some of the heinous societies in existence today, one has to ask – rhetorically) to rule on supposed breaches of this contract, and it is nonsensical to construe such a contract as having been negotiated at a given point in time, following which the individual was obliged to behave within the constraints laid down. Of course, what the notion of a Social Contract is actually trying to convey is that individuals derive all sorts of benefits from belonging to a society, but to do so requires them to act within certain constraints, and contribute towards society as well. However, what society affords the individual and the extent to which the latter may comply with social norms are variable. In other words, we have to consider the nature of the society in question when looking at this relationship. Tensions at the interface between the individual and society are perhaps inevitable: One or other may be compromised in all sorts of social arrangements. At one extreme, we may find ourselves living in a laissez-faire jungle where little or no social restraint is placed on individuals in their pursuit of wealth or hedonistic lifestyles, where law and order is minimally or corruptly applied, where a ‘dog-eats-dog’ ethos presides, and where little heed is paid to the social ramifications – be they the ruthless sequestration of what had been commonly held resources, the oppression of the poor, the weak, and the vulnerable, pollution and environmental depredation, the creation of antipathetic, violent, and often politically illiterate subcultures, or garish and architecturally discordant urban environments. Such a society lacks any sense of communality. Yet much the same can be said for the dystopian extreme where society lords it over the individual, crushing any flowering of individualism, demanding conformity and total allegiance. This nightmarishly fascistic model of society rests upon an all-powerful state. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, disparate elements of both models seem to co-exist in many contemporary societies; China being the most noteworthy example. Communism, on the other hand, whilst not likely to wholly eliminate the tension between the individual and society, is surely the only form of society able to radically reduce such tension as it would facilitate the greatest possible individual liberty within a socially harmonious framework.

People who have never entertained the idea of communism before commonly respond with incredulity as soon as they become acquainted with it. Perhaps this is understandable: It is a profoundly revolutionary idea that calls into question many deeply embedded assumptions about man and society. However, the reader may care to consider the following list of points, which, though far from being exhaustive, ought to demonstrate that communism is indeed a feasible proposition, and that the arguments in its favour are actually highly complex. When doing so, it should be borne in mind that what I mean by capitalism is the currently universal economic system in which goods and services are produced primarily in order to be sold for a profit (what is known as commodity production), whether by the state or by private companies, and in which money, wages, and property, amongst other features, are to be found. Capitalism can either assume the form of state capitalism or private/laissez faire capitalism – or, indeed, anything in between. There is no such thing as state socialism or communism.

• One of the most convincing points in favour of genuine communism relates to what is tellingly termed ‘human resources’. With the arrival of communism, literally billions people around the world would be relieved of jobs which – although essential to the running of present day society – would no longer be required under communism: I have already alluded to the millions involved in upholding property rights or access to resources. But there are also vast numbers of others involved in similarly non-productive concerns, such as banking, insurance, advertising, social security departments, charities, custom services, stock exchanges, payroll departments, insolvency agencies, pension providers, tax departments, mortgage providers, to name but a few. These occupations would no longer be required in a society unencumbered by the cash nexus. Nor would people be obliged to undertake lowly-paid, unfulfilling work behind cash registers, checking meters, issuing parking fines, guarding premises, working for gambling or lottery companies, selling their bodies for sex, acting as drug mules, issuing tickets, indulging in dubious home business scams, sorting out other people’s pay, running market stalls, bartering, executing bailiff duties, and so on and so forth. And the enforced idleness of unemployment; arguably, another essential feature of capitalism; would be a thing of the past too. In short, it is reasonable to assume that the majority of people around the world – particularly in the so-called developed countries where workers are predominantly employed in the tertiary sector – would find their occupations obsolete. This doesn’t even reckon with the countless millions – particularly in the developing countries – engaged in arduous, ‘low tech’, labour intensive work, such as labouring, dismantling ships, building dams – a bucket of earth at a time. Most of such work could be rendered obsolete too through mechanisation and automation. Thus, what work was required to ensure everyone’s needs were met would be shared out amongst a vastly greater number of people.
• Apropos work, it is sometimes protested that people would not be motivated to contribute towards the production of goods and services in communist society. However, a little reflection ought to put paid to this particular objection: In the first place, it does not take into account the dramatic ‘sea-change’ in the social ethos, in the prevailing norms and values, that would accompany the establishment of communism; a development necessarily wrought by the democratic nature of the revolution inaugurating the new society. Divisiveness, cynicism, greed, and cruelty would necessarily give way to cohesiveness, social concern, and altruism because each set of attitudes is rooted in the modi operandi of capitalism and communism respectively. So it is inconceivable that vast majority of people, having voted en masse for a new way of life and all that that entailed, would opt to sit back and adopt an attitude of ‘Stuff you, Jack – I’m not going to contribute, I’m only going to take’. Secondly, much of the negativity informing workers’  attitude to employment in society today often derives not so much from the work per se, but from the conditions under which they find themselves employed, the hierarchical nature of the organisations they work for, and crucially, being compelled to work in the first place. Karl Marx’s theories on the alienation of workers are extremely illuminating in this regard. Thirdly, as I’ve said, given that several billion people around the world are currently engaged in occupations that would no longer exist in communist society, there would be far more people around to undertake what work was required. Correspondingly, it could be argued that only one or two days work a week would be required of people on average – taking into account too such considerations as the fact that many currently produced goods and services – for example advertising material, cash registers, weaponry, or ticket barriers - would not then be required, and the fact that a communist society would systematically seek to automate all forms of work considered too onerous or risky. This being the case, it is reasonable to suppose that people would be less disinclined to spare society some of their spare time. It is even conceivable that there might be too little socially useful work available. Fourthly, it could be argued that people, far from being motivated to avoid work, have, in fact, a natural aptitude for work, and a drive to engage in work, both of which are stifled in capitalism by inimical conditions of employment. Fifthly, it may be observed that, even in these cynical times, millions of people everywhere engage in voluntary work, capitalism notwithstanding, and that this flies in the face of the assumption that, all things being equal, people are inherently lazy and would jump at the opportunity to spend their entire existence on a sun lounger with a glass of tequila to hand. I could go on, but I’m sure the point has been made.
• Many paragraphs back, I argued that materialism has become a sort of quasi-religion relentlessly promoted through near-ubiquitous advertising. The constant backdrop of visual, auditory, and even olfactory prompts – a visit to your local supermarket will attest to the latter – be they subliminal or ‘in your face’, is bound to affect us all. Why else should companies spend literally billions of dollars all around the world on advertising? It is so that we buy, buy, buy, regardless of whether we actually need the commodities on offer. It is said that what the head doesn’t know, the heart doesn’t hanker after. Under capitalism, needs are often artificially created or stimulated, which is both wasteful in terms of resource usage and potentially stress-inducing insofar as people may lack the wherewithal to satisfy these needs. Nothing exemplifies this better than the fashion industry, which might dictate, say, that last season’s hipsters will simply have to go. This is a serious problem: In the UK, tons of discarded clothing are ploughed into landfill sites annually, which impacts on global warming, amongst other things. Then there is advertising targeted at kids, encouraging them to pester their parents for the latest ‘craze’ product. No wonder they grow up to be acquisitive. And talking of acquisitiveness, something else that may be observed about capitalism is that – particularly amongst the wealthy – status is often acquired through the acquisition of luxury products. But there is a huge amount of waste inherent in this charade of ‘keeping up with the Plunkett-Pembertons’: Thus we have the obscene spectacle of the archetypal tycoon with a fleet of luxury sports cars, several mansions - each of which contains enough rooms to house the local homeless, and a trophy wife with a shoe mania to rival that of Imelda Marcos., Not only are these items inevitably under-utilised; but time and resources have been expended on their production which might have more usefully been spent on satisfying more pressing needs. I would venture to suggest that in a communist society, status, insofar as it had some sort of psychosocial purpose in encouraging emulation, would be drastically different in nature: I could imagine that status would reside in the degree to which one actually contributed towards society, with those taking on the most onerous and dangerous tasks being accorded the highest status. Such attitudes would obviously serve society’s interests very well, and make for social cohesiveness.
• Not only does capitalism manipulate people into buying things they might otherwise not have considered buying, it sometimes also compels them to continue buying commodities time and again through the simple expedient of ensuring that those things do not actually last as long as they could. This is what is known as ‘built-in obsolescence’, and it is a feature of all sorts of products, from cars to the simple light bulb. Similarly, the general shoddiness of so many manufactured goods, for example, houses (particularly in the cynically termed ‘social housing’ market), which stems from a desire to cut costs to the bone, likewise results in a shortened period of use. The outcome in both cases is more waste and customer dissatisfaction. Waste in this context has to do with rendering a product unserviceable and therefore needing to be disposed of far sooner than otherwise would be the case.
• There are many other ways in which capitalism is wasteful: Take, for example, the tendency to ‘modulise’ parts. What I mean by this is that instead of selling a replacement item on its own, manufacturers will sometimes only sell the item as part of a bigger unit or a batch. Whilst this may sometimes make replacing the item easier, it is just as likely to be motivated by the manufacturer’s desire to fleece the customer out of more money. Insofar as the part is specific to a particular make of the product, the manufacturer will almost have a free rein to indulge in this practice.
• But this is virtually insignificant compared to the waste inherent in a system in which each of the millions of companies or corporations around the world competes with numerous others in producing particular goods and services for a particular market. Why is this wasteful? Well, just consider for a moment the sheer amount of duplication inherent in this set up: You might get dozens of companies producing a particular good or service within a specific locale, each with its own premises, workforce, management structure, and so on. Each will have a number of administrative and financial operations to execute over and above productive operations, which simply would not occur in a socialist/communist society, such as holding shareholder meetings, carrying out financial audits, running pay departments, operating security measures, and implementing marketing strategies. The latter is particularly noteworthy: Big companies, like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola spend literally billions of dollars trying to outdo each other in the marketplace, and have vast marketing departments dedicated to this aim. On the subject of duplication, it may also be instructive to consider the outcome of a previous Conservative government’s demented attempts to make the National Health Service in the UK more ‘efficient’ a few years ago, by breaking it up into hundreds of self-governing trusts. The upshot was a vast increase in administrative staff by comparison with clinical staff, as each trust had to have it’s own finance department, its own ‘estates’ department, its own pay department, and so on – verily, the economics of the madhouse! In capitalism, it is often the case that having numerous companies compete to sell particular products is often far more then market can bear. Thus it may be that a sizeable number of these companies will be operating below capacity some of the time. Indeed, a few may find themselves going to the wall, squeezed out by the big players. The under-utilisation or non-utilisation of resources in this respect amounts to waste. So does the fact many of the smaller companies, generally burdened with  proportionately higher expenses on such things as heating and electricity and having to purchase services that might otherwise be obtained ‘in-house’, lack ‘economies of scale’.
• The fact, too, that competing products are sometimes shipped from great distances is yet another instance of waste, as well as being environmentally damaging. Is it really necessary to have New Zealand butter stacked alongside English butter in UK supermarkets, considering that the European Community once had to scale down it’s notorious ‘butter mountain’.
• This ‘butter mountain’ actually exemplifies another appalling sort of waste found in capitalism: the waste generated by overproduction. Just as the market may determine that the very factories, offices, mines and farms are no longer economically viable and have to be  taken out of commission, it may also determine that the products and services flowing from these facilities are ‘surplus to requirements’ and need to be junked. We see this in the periodic trade cycles that beset capitalism, which essentially occur because capitalism has overreached itself.
• There are yet other ways in which waste can be generated. For example, companies will often do all they can to enhance the cosmetic appearance and thus the ‘saleability’ of their products without necessarily improving the quality of the latter, and this can result in profligate amounts of waste. Tristram Stuart, in his recent book, ‘Waste, uncovering The Global Food Waste Scandal’, claims, for example, that 25% of the fruit and vegetables produced in the UK is wasted in the process of production simply because these don’t look the right shape, colour or size. The taste and nutritional value are beside the point. On the subject of food wastage generally – both by consumers and the food industries – it has been estimated that what the US alone wastes each year is twice as much as that required to adequately feed the 923 million malnourished people in the world today (The Independent, 9th July 2009, p9)

• The raft of international laws and trade agreements governing all manner of economic activity around the world also creates a huge amount of waste by any number of yardsticks. These laws and trade agreements exist simply to impose some semblance of order and restraint upon the ferocious greed of different nation states competing for scarce natural resources, trade routes, access to markets, and so on. As such, they would serve no purpose at all in a world-wide communistic society. But in today’s world, these laws and trade agreements require vast armies of bureaucrats and other officials to administer and police them; these functions themselves necessitating elaborate monitoring operations that likewise require much in the way of resources and personnel. Were such regulations to be absent, of course, it is wholly conceivable that disputes around the world could degenerate into any number of wars. Nevertheless, these laws and trade agreements can themselves lead to bizarre consequences, thus tempting some to flout them. Let me cite a couple of examples: It is estimated that because of the European Union’s common fisheries policy, something in the region of 40 to 50 per cent of the fish caught by EU trawlers is thrown back dead into the sea (The Independent, ibid). Touching on my previous point, the European Union also has fairly stringent rules regarding the cosmetic appearance of 10 sorts of fruit and vegetables which between them account for about three quarters of all fresh produce sold in the EU. As I explained earlier, the effect of such laws is to create waste since a certain amount of the produce will be deemed unfit for sale – solely on cosmetic grounds. Incidentally, it is no co-incidence that such regulations favour big Western-owned agribusiness concerns at the expense of Third World peasant farmers.
• The proclivity for cutting costs in capitalist production is something else that gives rise to all sorts of other problems; perhaps the most notorious of which relate to health and safety issues. Thus we find aircraft crashing for want of adequate maintenance work, or the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (sic) in the UK ruling that certain forms of treatment do not constitute ‘value for money’ and may therefore not be prescribed, notwithstanding their efficacy in many cases. Michael Moore’s docufilm, ‘Sicko’, highlights just how single-minded capitalism is when it comes to money. In this revealing study of the American health system, he shows just how inhumane the richest country on earth can be when it comes to treating its sick and injured. Those without medical insurance often find themselves in desperate situations. Like the man who loses two fingers in an accident, and is faced with a bill of $60,000 to sew one of them back on, and $12,000 for the other. Well, it’s a no-brainer – the more expensive finger ends up in a landfill site. But even those who do pay insurance and find themselves in need of medical treatment often face a medical inquisition by HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) personnel, whose sole aim, I repeat, sole aim is to try deny them treatment (which. in the case of those personnel with a medical qualification, would seem to be in flagrant violation of the Hippocratic Oath). This is borne out by the fact their remuneration is contingent upon the percentage of denials they manage to issue. The film depicted the heart-rending case of a man with renal cancer whose doctor had urged a particular course of treatment. His wife met up with representatives of his medical insurance company and begged them to provide the funding for the treatment. But they considered the treatment to be ‘experimental’ and turned it down. Within three weeks the man was dead. Apart from the fact that there may have been a racist element in their deliberations, - the man was black and his wife white – the sheer psychopathic disregard for anything bar the company’s profit margins leaves one speechless. Such blinkered thinking would be anathema to a socialist society, where genuine need, rather than financial criteria, would determine whether or not something was produced or made available. Cost-cutting can affect the quality of life in many other ways. Take, for example, the poor provision of services afforded to rural communities, from post offices to buses. What underlies this, of course, are both the greater transportation costs inherent in servicing rural communities, and the fact that urban populations present a more lucrative market to would be providers. Who can forget the cherry picking practices of bus companies during the deregulating Thatcher years ( which persist in many major urban conurbations; for example, Manchester ) when buses arrived in two or threes on the more popular ( and shorter ) urban routes whilst rural services were cut back. Needless to say, the financial reckoning behind such developments would never arise in a society dedicated to meeting needs, instead of maximising profit.
• A year or so ago, there was much media interest in the subject of fake, or counterfeit, products; Channel Four’s alarming series titled ‘The Fake Trade’ being a case in point. Its not so much the fake Prada handbags or Rolex watches that concerns me: although the faking of such luxury items obviously hits the ‘legitimate’ manufacturers and allegedly promotes gun crime and terrorism, consumer surveys have, in fact, shown that many, and in some countries – the USA, of all places, for example – most people are not averse to purchasing some types of fake items; an activity which has even acquired a fashionable frisson. However, what really must appal most of us is the counterfeiting of certain sorts of items; medicines being a prime example. The statistics beggar belief: It is estimated that something like one million Africans die each year through purchasing counterfeit medicines. Let us be clear what is happening here: Tablets, capsules, ampoules, and so on, convincingly packaged but deliberately containing little or nothing of therapeutic value, are sold by traders, or sometimes unwittingly by ‘respectable’ outlets, to people – the vast majority of whom are crushingly poor – who go away hoping that the diseases affecting them or their loved ones can at last be tackled. But, of course, nothing of the sort happens, and these poor souls deteriorate. In the case of antibiotics, having just some but not enough, can also be dangerous because it can induce resistance (and incidentally lead to stronger strains of bacteria). With a disease like malaria, the resulting delay in receiving effective medication can be critical. No wonder that a fifth of the one million annual deaths caused by malaria around the world can be attributed directly to the consumption of counterfeit anti-malarial medication. In the developing world, the incidence of fake medicines varies from 10% to 50% and higher in some countries. But this is not just a problem in the developing world: In Russia, it is thought that 10% of medicines are fake, and here in the UK, fake anti-statins, for example, have recently infiltrated the supply chains. Here truly, we catch a glimpse of the dark heart of capitalism; its untrammeled greed and disregard for all else. One of the contributors to the above-mentioned Channel Four programme opined that capitalism really needed to be restrained and managed or anarchy and chaos would ensue. But this is to miss the point: Capitalism, like a rabid dog with an insatiable desire to sink its teeth into someone, can certainly be leashed (or, to put it differently, we can certainly attempt to save capitalism from itself). But, even with the most rigorous restraints, it would still seek to minimize costs and maximize profits. Those other shortcomings I mentioned earlier – shoddy production, built-in obsolescence, and so on – are really all of a piece with counterfeit manufacture: One might want to think rather in terms of a ‘continuum of dysfunctionality’ here. Moreover, those companies or countries who attempt to act relatively responsibly and with due regard to the environment and their workers will find themselves disadvantaged in the barbaric world of commerce; somewhat as the British slave-owner lobby in the 19c argued that liberating slaves would give the dastardly French a commercial advantage. What is particularly ironic about the situation with counterfeit production is that the main culprit being fingered is none other than that worker’s paradise, the ‘People’s’ (sic) Republic of China. Here we find capitalism in a truly fascistic mould; there can be no obfuscating the point. That China should present itself as a ‘communist state’; an Orwellian fiction that tends to be ignored or half-heartedly questioned by capitalism’s hacks in the ‘free world’ (again, sic) for cynical reasons no doubt; amounts to butchering reason. It is estimated that something like 15–20% of products made in China are counterfeit, and China is a major provider of fake medicines – notwithstanding some lackadaisical official attempts to stem the production of these. Chinese workers are themselves victims of this iniquitous industry; both as underpaid wage slaves and with thousands dying each year from misguidedly taking these drugs. The Chinese state allows its bourgeois overlords a lot of leeway to grind their workers, notwithstanding the vicious reputation it has for dealing with miscreants, or those who go a little too far in their pursuit of profit.  

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