Bird’s Eye View: Quayle, Reagan, Carlin, Debs, Sade, Bukowski and Sanders (2023)

The Bird’s Eye View Column from the January 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

’I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change’ – Dan Quayle

Andy Borowitz’s new book Profiles in Ignorance divides America’s recent history into three phases. In the first, “ridicule”, ignorant politicians do their best to pretend they are smart. This is the age of Ronald Reagan and Dan Quayle. A fellow California politician said: “You could walk through Ronald Reagan’s deepest thoughts and not get your ankles wet”. Of Quayle — who, as George HW Bush’s vice-president, was most famous for having told school children to spell “potato” with an “e” at the end — one professor observed: “When I looked into his eyes I could see to the back of his head.” In an effort to appear smart, Reagan once tried to quote America’s second president, John Adams, on facts being stubborn things. Instead, he said: “Facts are stupid things”….’ (Financial Times, 3 November).

The sad fact is, before these jokers were born let alone elected by our class, socialists were already asking ‘In the light of experience, why should you vote for either the Republican or Democratic parties?’ (Eugene Debs, Quotations from Speeches Made on the 1908 Campaign Trail, bit.ly/3zMOyj3).

Today, the vast majority of the working class blindly support capitalism. None of them can escape responsibility for the consequences. For the power wielded by the rulers of world capitalism is a reflection of the political ignorance of the working class everywhere. Some dictators are homegrown and elected. They include the likes of King & Queen Ortega, Turkey’s ever power-hungry president Erdoğan, Rodrigo Kill ’em All Duterte of the Philippines and his replacement Marcos Jnr. Other odious examples include Hitler, the fundamentalist Islamic Salvation Front, Meloni, Orbán and Trump. Former Democrat Debs was clear: ‘I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, some one else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition; as it is now the capitalists use your heads and your hands’ (1908).

’It’s called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it ’ – George Carlin

‘President Biden on Saturday said people holding signs calling him a socialist were idiots…’ (The Hill, 5 November, ).

Correct. Do his Republican opponents really believe that Joe understands and accepts that capitalism is based on the legalised exploitation of the wealth producers by those who own and control the means of wealth production and distribution, that the state only exists to protect the power and privilege of the exploiting class and that he urges workers to abolish the wages system and establish a classless, moneyless society? Is Joe nothing less than a social revolutionary who wants to destroy civilisation as we know it where war and want are endemic and billions are compelled to accept wage slavery? Of course not.

Actually, the Marquis de Sade, a contemporary of the Founding Fathers, who died over 200 years ago in an insane asylum, has better claim to the label socialist. He championed democracy, was opposed to every form of punishment (‘it is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them’), saw the class-divided nature of society and sided with ‘those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat.’ Indeed, Geoffrey Gorer in The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1964) points out that Sade stood in opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer thus argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’

’Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors’ – Charles Bukowski

‘”at a time when half of American workers are living paycheck to paycheck, and millions of people earn starvation wages and struggle to put food on the table, the wealthy and powerful have never had it so good,’ wrote Bernie Sanders (Common Dreams, 4 November).

Fine sounding, but let us not be deceived. He went on in an email: ’What we are seeing all across the country and in every sector of our economy is that working people are standing up in the face of corporate greed, demanding fairer wages, better working conditions, and the dignity and respect on the job that they deserve’.

De Sade again: ‘you can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want…’ Sanders’ occasional use of revolutionary rhetoric should not obscure the fact that he has voted with the Democrats 98 percent of the time. Let us put his qualified support for $18/hour into context:

1865: ‘Instead of the conservative motto, A fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wage system’ (Marx, Value, Price, and Profit).

1928: ‘Earning a wage is a prison occupation’ (Wages, DH Lawrence).

1965: Workers still ‘don’t realise that they can abolish the wages system’ (Socialist Standard).

2009: Current federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour introduced.

2022: ‘Bernie Sanders Backs Historic $18 Minimum Wage’ (Common Dreams).

Rear View: Constipated reformists (2017)

The Rear View Column from the March 2017 issue of the Socialist Standard

Constipated reformists

‘ANAL squatting collective takes over Qatari general’s £17m London townhouse’ (rt.com, 2 February). With a name like that, the Autonomous Nation of Anarchist Libertarians have achieved one of their aims – exposure! They wish to draw our attention to the ‘problem’ of growing homelessness alongside thousands of properties in London alone, and over 200,000 in England, which have been unoccupied for more than six months. ANAL is supported by a number of groups concerned with housing and homelessness, including Architects for Social Housing who tweeted Homes for people, not for profit. Indeed. But because housing is produced for profit there is no possibility of a rational approach to housing within capitalism. Engels made this clear as far back as 1872: ‘As long as the capitalist mode of production continues to exist, it is folly to hope for an isolated solution of the housing question or of any other social question affecting the fate of the workers. The solution lies in the abolition of the capitalist mode of production and the appropriation of all the means of life and labour by the working class itself’ (The Housing Question).


Clueless

‘Comments President Donald Trump made Wednesday at the White House during a Black History Month event left some people scratching their heads.

During a listening session, Trump praised abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who died in 1895. He mentioned Douglass as ‘an example of somebody who has done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice,’ Trump said’ (kansascity.com, 1 February). On this performance alone, Trump’s future is certain – as presenter of I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue. He could well be joined by the anarchist Professor David Graeber, who thinks that the clown Trump’s victory ‘had proved that anarchists’ diagnosis of society’s ills was correct’ (nytimes, 2 February) – not to mention their disdain for democracy – and that ‘people want something radically different’. The Doctor sees only symptoms – hence his fervent support for Occupy who ‘had elevated income inequality to the top of the Democratic political agenda’! – not the disease. Douglass was better informed: ‘The old master class was not deprived of the power of life and death, which was the soul of the relation of master and slave. They could not, of course, sell their former slaves, but they retained the power to starve them to death, and wherever this power is held there is the power of slavery. He who can say to his fellow- man,  You shall serve me or starve, is a master and his subject is a slave….Though no longer a slave, he is in a thralldom grievous and intolerable, compelled to work for whatever his employer is pleased to pay him..’ (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, 1892)


$ex and the 1%

‘One of the world’s most exclusive sex clubs for the rich and powerful has opened its doors to the public – but it will set you back a hefty £1,500-a-night. You’ll also have to jet to Los Angeles, where members at the Snctm sex club in Los Angeles – who sign a blood oath to join – are also splashing out an eye-watering £60,000-a-year for unlimited access to special rooms and privileges at the orgies’ (mirror.co.uk, 2 February). We the 99% are expected to find the means to raise the next generation of the working class. This has been so for centuries. Who better to comment on this situation than the Marquis De Sade: ‘Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery…I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would lose by it…’ (Aline et Valcour, ou le Roman philosophique, 1788)


Shafted

‘Canadian Mint Worker Sentenced To 30 Months For Smuggling $140,000 Of Gold In His Rectum’ (zerohedge.com, 2 February).

A headline you will not see in a socialist world without workers and crime – or your money back!

Rear View: Censorship (2018)

The Rear View Column from the November 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Censorship

The banning of books by governments is a form of censorship which took place in the Roman Empire and continues to this day. ‘No book, it seems, is too substantive or too insignificant to be banned in Kuwait. Recent targets of the government’s literary censors include an encyclopedia with a picture of Michelangelo’s David and a Disney version of The Little Mermaid.  David had no fig leaf, and the mermaid, alas, wore half a bikini. ‘There are no hijab-wearing mermaids’ said Shamayel al-Sharikh, a Kuwaiti women’s activist. ‘The powers that be thought her dress was promiscuous. It’s humiliating.’ . . .  Responding to the demands of a growing conservative bloc in Parliament, the government is increasingly banning books. In August, the government acknowledged that it had banned 4,390 books since 2014, hundreds of them this year, including many works of literature that had once been considered untouchable, setting off street demonstrations and online protests’ (nytimes.com, 1 October).

No to no platform

Socialists, by contrast, oppose any form of censorship. We have always been prepared to give opponents of socialism a chance to express their views from our platform. This is because we are convinced that our views are right and that this will emerge from full and free debate — and if we are wrong we want to know, so that we can stop wasting our time. Censorship, whether through the legalised violence of the state or that of self-appointed political and/or religious guardians is anti-socialist and anti-working class and must be exposed whenever it rears its ugly head. No view (not even religion) should be exempt from being criticised. The main case against censorship is that it considers that people are too ignorant to decide for themselves and so must be protected from hearing certain views. All censors, actual or would-be, consider themselves a cut above the rest. They are not corrupted by reading De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom but their servants would be. They are not affected by reading anti-Christian or anti-Muslim writings – Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses is viewed in this way by many faithful – but their followers would be. They are not affected by rants of the Left or Right but other, less enlightened people would be.

Corrupted by socialism?

The Marquis de Sade died over 200 years ago in an insane asylum, yet much of what he had to say remains relevant today. He championed democracy, was opposed to every form of punishment (‘it is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them’), saw the class-divided nature of society and sided with ‘those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat.’ Indeed, Geoffrey Gorer in The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade (1964) points out that Sade stood in opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer thus argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’

End censorship

The Ayatollah Khomeini called in 1989 upon all good Muslims to kill Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, a novel with a dream sequence in which the prophet Mohammed indulges in a few last temptations of his own. This fatwa resulted in numerous killings, attempted killings, bombings and book burnings. The Communist Manifesto was banned by Tsarist Russia and Nazi Germany. Along with volumes of Capital, copies were burnt openly in Berlin on 10 May 1933 by students from the Wilhelm Humboldt University, all of them members of right-wing student organisations,  and watched by some 70,000 people. Ironically, it was Marx’s friend, the poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote some one hundred and ten years earlier ‘where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings’ (Almasor: A Tragedy, 1823, as translated in True Religion, 2003, by Graham Ward). By contrast, ‘…communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!’ (The Communist Manifesto, Marx & Engels, 1848).

Are Socialists Sadists? (2015)

From the January 2015 issue of the Socialist Standard

It is two hundred years since the Marquis de Sade died – we examine his political ideas.

On 2 December 2nd, 1814 Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, the Marquis de Sade, died in an insane asylum. The words ‘sadism’ and ‘sadist’ are derived from his name. De Sade was incarcerated for about 32 years of his life (including ten years in the Bastille), often without access to the courts. During the French Revolution he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. He was given the task of reviewing sanitation in the hospitals. These were terrible places but thanks to de Sade, individual beds were given to each and every patient, whereas formerly one was obliged to share, sleeping alongside the dying and the dead in one bed. De Sade forced the hospital authorities to transform the clinics and hospitals into places fit for patients. He was also given the task of overseeing the renaming of the streets of Paris, abolishing the Christian names, renaming them after republican heroes, for example, Rue Spartacus.

He began to challenge the efforts by the new masters of France to sabotage democratic measures. But democracy was to be overtaken swiftly by The Terror. Unlike the English Jacobins (of the London Corresponding Society etc), the French Jacobins were not the representatives of the still weak and relatively new working class. They represented the petite-bourgeoisie. Only 6 percent of those passing beneath the guillotine during the Jacobin regime were aristocrats. The rest were minor clergy and workers, 80 percent of victims being manual labourers. The nascent workers’ movement was silenced by Robespierre, and not later.

As regards prison and the death penalty, de Sade was opposed to every form of punishment: ‘It is far simpler to hang men than to find out why we condemn them.’ Again and again he spoke for the release of those brought before the tribunal, and never once would he allow himself to vote for the death penalty. Finally, having stormed out of the tribunal, he wrote to his friend Gaufridy: ‘They wanted me to put through a bestial and bloody resolution, which I couldn't do.’ Then toward the end of the year 1793 they came for Citizen de Sade himself. He was pencilled in to be guillotined but avoided that fate by the good fortune of having been transferred to another prison. When Napoleon Bonaparte became military dictator de Sade’s temporary liberty ended and without any trial he was thrown into political prison once more, before being sent to an asylum.

De Sade held no illusions about the natural goodness of man, but he believed that with complete economic and sexual equality human conditions could be greatly bettered. He went far beyond the ‘advanced’ social thinkers of his time and even of the present day. One of his earlier biographers Geoffrey Gorer, who wrote The Revolutionary Ideas of the Marquis De Sade, pointed out that Sade was in complete opposition to contemporary philosophers for both his ‘complete and continual denial of the right to property,’ and for viewing the struggle in late 18th century French society as being not between ‘the Crown, the bourgeoisie, the aristocracy or the clergy, or sectional interests of any of these against one another’, but rather all of these ‘more or less united against the proletariat.’ Gorer argued, ‘he can with some justice be called the first reasoned socialist.’

Socialists say that society is divided into two antagonistic classes, the haves and the have-nots. This point is so fundamental for de Sade that he stresses it in every book. His definition of class can hardly be improved: ‘Don't think that I mean by the people the caste called the tiers-etat [bourgeoisie in the limited sense]; no, I mean by the people ... those who can only get a living by their labour and sweat ’. In his Aline et Valcour the good king Zamé begins his description of his visit to Europe by saying:

‘Everywhere I could reduce men into two classes both equally pitiable; in the one the rich who was the slave of his pleasures; in the other the unhappy victims of fortune; and I never found in the former the desire to be better or in the latter the possibility of becoming so, as though both classes were working for their common misery..; I saw the rich continually increasing the chains of the poor, while doubling his own luxury, while the poor, insulted and despised by the other, did not even receive the encouragement necessary to bear his burden. I demanded equality and was told it was utopian; but I soon saw those who denied its possibility were those who would lose by it...’

This is the beginning of a treatise on the class-war by the extremely savage Bishop of Grenoble who declaims ‘That is the [lower] class that I would abandon to perpetual chains and humiliation ... all others ought to join together against this abject class ... to fasten chains upon them, since they in their turn will be enchained if they relax.’

On theft, de Sade wrote that the oath taken by the nation with respect to the law of property is ridiculous: ‘How can you expect the man who has nothing to honour a law which protects the man who has everything? It is his duty, surely, to attempt to redress the balance!’ Property is itself theft, he says. The thief proposes a law to punish theft against himself, the original thief, and expects those with no other recourse than theft to respect such a law! Laws against theft are therefore absurd.’

Gorer, in his book, explains: ‘This distinction of classes is founded on property; and with unaccustomed epigrammatic terseness De Sade defined property as 'a crime committed by the rich against the poor ... theft is only punished because it attacks the right of property; but that right is in itself a theft, so that the law punishes theft because it attacks theft.’

On leadership, de Sade had this to say: ‘you can only govern men by deceiving them; one must be hypocritical to deceive them; the enlightened man will never let himself be led, therefore it is necessary to deprive him of enlightenment to lead him as we want ...’ Elsewhere, he says ‘Politics, which teach men to deceive their equals without being deceived themselves, that science born of falseness and ambition, which the statesman calls a virtue, the social man a duty, and the honest man a vice ...’

Religion is summed up by his view 'When the strong wished to enslave the weak he persuaded him that a god had sanctified the chains with which he loaded him, and the latter, stupefied by misery, believed all he was told.' Blasphemy can only exist if God exists. If there is no God, then blasphemy and all other ‘religious crimes’ are likewise non-existent. So how can you have laws against them? If one, on the other hand, believes in a God, can he really believe his God to be so petty as to take offence at being calumnied? Such a God isn't worthy of honour’.

De Sade also condemned war, which he said sent the wrong message to those abroad whom we would wish likewise to follow our example and liberate themselves. It is not our job to make war on them, but to show them through our peaceful example what a free republic can and ought to be. He claimed war is simply public and authorised murder, in which hired men slaughter one another in the interests of tyrants: 'The sword is the weapon of him who is in the wrong, the commonest resource of ignorance and stupidity.'

As mentioned, de Sade was no supporter of capital punishment. He wrote: ‘The state publicly honours those proficient in murder and encourages them. Yet it punishes the man who disposes of his enemy for a personal reason!’ As for the death penalty, he writes: ‘Either murder is a crime, or it is not. If it is not, why punish it? If it is, then by what perverse logic do you punish it by the same crime?’ It also is tantamount to bad arithmetic, since ‘now two people are dead instead of one!’

De Sade thought the greatest causes of misery were four things; private property, class distinctions, religion and family life. In the future societies he wrote of these institutions being abolished or transformed. In one section of Aline and Valcour, a brutal African kingdom is contrasted with the Pacific island utopian paradise of Tarnoé. He describes an imaginary island where all priests were banished, there were no temples and no vested interest in religion. There were also no professional lawyers and discussion of theology or law was punished as one of the gravest anti-social crimes. There was also no money.

Wherever you look in the world today you will find a parasitical minority suffering an embarrassment of riches while the toiling masses endure real and unnecessary pain as very much part of their everyday lives. The Marquis de Sade would find many examples of this obscenity in today’s class divided society. De Sade may not have been a socialist as we would now define one, but a man of his times, though he perhaps ought be remembered far more for raising important social questions than raising erections through his masturbatory sexual fantasies.

ALJO