Friday, 5 February 2010

What did Marx really mean by Peace? What do we all mean?

"peace is the absence of opposition to socialism" - Karl Marx (source)

This is often invoked by pro-war people to imply that peace constitutes a surrender to socialism. (odd, since I don't think there's anything more socialist than the military...state run, funded by theft, tells its minions they have no rights, tells them to just follow orders and become part of the 'hive mind'...)

I see the quote as being a fallacy not unlike the same claims of neocon fascists:

peace is the absence of opposition to Merika.
peace is the final victory of Judeo-Christian Oceania over those Islamic Eurasian vermin.

(when will that be, dear leader?)

well, it's going to take a long time of your continued unquestioning support for me...


Marx says socialism will herald peace, and that nothing else will.

Quite to the contrary, what happened when socialism came to Russia? Mass butchery. Germany? Uber butchery. (and don't even try that 'Nazis weren't socialists' rubbish, yes they were.) Nazis and Soviets engaged in a border dispute that resulted in the biggest mass battlefield butchery the world has ever witnessed. Even Che was a meat cleaving son of a, but he is cool so his crimes are forgotten and people buy his capitalist T-shirts.

No, Marx's peace was the tyrant's peace. Not what you or I would understand the term 'peace' surely to mean. He meant the peace a police officer gets when a suspect is handcuffed on the floor with a knee in their back. Not peace per se, rather a lack of resistance to 'authority'. Peace without freedom is no peace worth having.

But is that not what most people mean by 'peace'? Are we not all guilty of the same logical fallacy, just on smaller scales than Karl was? Perhaps by saying that we want a government that steals from us in order to safeguard our rights (how Orwellian), we are all making the same error. Many authoritarians, typically right-wingers, would say that order (they hate that damn hippy word 'peace', so probably would replace it with 'order') can only be upheld by a mighty force ready to stomp on anyone at any time. That in order to make peace, a climate of fear must be created...but does that not undo any prospect of real peace in the first place?

For all their supposed opposition to one another, the authoritarian police state lovin' right-wingers and Marx have a lot in common. Collectivists, what you gonna do.

Hate the anarchists if you want, but hate is all you can do, not debate - their logic is sound and the logic defending the state is not. IMHO

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