Socialist Rights

“Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of Opinion--How a doctrine so illogical an dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and through them, the vents of history.” J.M. Keynes “The End of Laissez-Faire”

It was necessary to define Slavery before anything useful could be said about Socialist Rights. The definition of a Slave was, “A slave is an unpaid laborer who has no hope of earning his freedom through his labor and is subject to punishment especially corporal punishment as the only means that his master or employer has of motivating his labor.”

Socialist Rights by applying the principle “From each according to his ability to each according to his need” attempt to guarantee equality of outcome to all instead of equality of opportunity. This principle destroys the relationship between work and reward. This relationship has proven to be the bedrock basis of Natural Rights and good economic policy.

A citizen of a socialist or Communist state has the right to food, shelter, clothing, medical care and education. With the exception of education all of these rights were guaranteed to Slaves in the South. A citizen of a Socialist or Communist state will not be paid more or gain personally by working harder or inventing better ways of doing things. Neither would a Slave in the Old South. There were exceptions to both these rules, but this is a discussion of general principles. A Citizen of a Socialist or Communist state has no more expectation of being paid for his work than a Slave. Both receive a minimum determined by their owners. This cripples normal human motivation to work and forces the authority guaranteeing these outcomes as rights to assume the power to force the slave or subject to work through external coercion.

The Bill of Rights of the USSR also included a list of duties of its citizens.

Not a lot of freedom and liberty left their. Being late to work was a crime, missing work was a crime, in WWII it would get you sentenced to suicide squads on the front.

There went the freedom to choose your work supposedly guaranteed above. When you break the relationship between work and reward it becomes necessary to provide some other motivation to force work. Since the worker cannot be self-motivated when he has no personal motive to work harder or better, external force is the only possible solution. The development of a slave worker system is inevitable. This is the difference between a slave and a free person, whether he is motivated by personal desire or by external threat.

Socialist rights destroy this relationship and produce this result. The citizens of states in which Utopian Communism is fully developed completely match the description of Slaves developed here. The worker is the ultimate means of production, when ownership of the means of production is vested in the state, the state owns all the workers as surely as a master owns his slaves. They had to build walls around the Communist countries to keep their slaves from escaping.

Senator Calhoun from South Carolina before the Civil War sounded so much like a Socialist defending the peculiar institution of slavery that his speeches were an embarrassment to members of the Communist Party in the US who wrote books on Black history and oppression in this country. Herbert Aptheker author of “American Negro Slave Revolts” was the head of the American Communist Party.

An example of Senator Calhoun’s famous defense of slavery. He discusses the class war,

He then goes on to maintain that the slave system is more generous and concerned with the welfare of the working class than the capitalist system of Europe and by implication the North.

As you can see, he maintains that slavery is more merciful to the poor laborer in illness and age, than a free enterprise system.

In the antebellum South a small political elite the Plantation owners controlled the state and owned the workers. In the Communist system a small political elite the Communist Party members controlled the state and owned the workers. The elites in both system lived lives of privilege and had great power to abuse the working class. Both claimed that by confiscating the production of labor and redistributing it more wisely they were benefiting the workers. Any difference between the two systems is probably more due to the difference between an agricultural and an industrial society than anything else. Industrial workers must be better educated than agricultural and industrial societies produce greater wealth. The standard of living in the USSR was higher than that of slaves in the South, but the South was poorer than the USSR which imitated much that was developed in the West. The slaves in the South had legal protections against various forms of abuse while in the USSR, you could be sent to labor under conditions in Siberia much harsher than any form of slavery in the South.

The reason for this is that when you apply Communist or Socialist Ideals in practice you destroy the springs of normal healthy human motivation. This makes anything but a slave system impossible. Such a slave system inserts itself automatically into the most personal areas of human life. As we can see by inspecting the Soviet Constitution.

So much for personal freedom or choosing what values and beliefs to teach your children.

All the rights in the Bill of Rights of the USSR most of which are also present in the UN list of Rights which destroy this relationship between work and outcome are not Natural Rights because they violate Natural Law.

Throughout this book it has become apparent that frequently two things which appear to be completely opposite to each other are essentially the same. The rights to hospitality, property, liberty, and due process are all methods of guaranteeing the same basic thing. That thing being a strong relationship between work and outcome. Though these have often been misused and abused for other purposes, their relationship in their proper places is plain.

Similarly though being guaranteed home, food, medical care regardless of labor sounds like the opposite of slavery, it cannot result in anything but slavery in the long run. This is the Catch 22 of Utopian Systems.

Take the Soviet right to housing for example.

If a person owns a house he is naturally motivated to take care of it. If the house is issued to him without his personally struggling to buy it, he doesn’t care as much and an external threat of punishment is needed to motivate him to take care of it.

Or consider this one from the Soviet Constitution.

Not much in the way of freedom there is there? It is a duty to maintain what the party designates as cultural or historic regardless of your personal feelings or beliefs.

In addition to this, when a living organism ceases to use abilities it is predisposed by nature to possess, it tends to lose those abilities. Doing mental exercises and games keeps the mind sharp. Not doing them is associated with a greater likelihood to come down with Alzheimer’s and other problems. Physical exercise and games promote physical health. Physical inactivity produces weak muscles and bones and poor health. Work is necessary to human health. In the absence of real work people tend to invent work to do. Those who do not will atrophy away into something almost less than human. In the absence of freedom to choose one’s own employment and choose ones own course in life, initiative and creativity become atrophied. On an individual by individual basis this difference is small but multiplied by a population of millions or hundreds of millions and the difference in creativity and productivity between the two systems is profound and striking.

Socialist rights remove the normal and natural human motivation to work by guaranteeing the satisfaction of basic human needs independent of work. This leads most people to not work, or not work as productively as possible, this lead to the erosion of their ability to do anything at all. A leisure society is possibly the worst thing that could happen to human beings. Humans must exercise their faculties to retain them. Even if Socialist rights were possible to implement without imposing a totalitarian state in which all the subjects were property owned by the state, compelled to work from fear of punishment, a leisure society would still be a great evil. Aristotle described this problem in his “Politics”,

In addition to the above, human nature is more complex than utopian theories take into account. Humans do not just need food and clothes, they have other needs.

It is useful to look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of needs in this context.

1) Physiological: hunger, thirst, bodily comforts, etc.

It is common to say that a need creates a right. However, consider this. If a person lives on the dole and does not work can he actually achieve the following level of Maslow’s needs?

4) Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition.

Not really. It is important to arrange for the opportunity to satisfy these needs in such a manner that it does not cripple or inhibit the needs higher or later on the list. Humanity did not evolve in the absence of work. Every organism has a job or ecological niche where a certain variety of effort satisfies its needs. The effort to satisfy those needs is as necessary and needful to the health of that organism as the physical needs are. In the absence of real work humans become neurotic and invent work. It is better that they should have work which is real than that they should judge and condemn one another on the basis of imaginary standards. The neurotic fascination of the leisure class with fashion and nonsense has provided the basis for comic theatre since there first was a leisure class.

When an entire group lives on the dole, they will invent rationalizations to claim it as a right, but they will still live with the contempt of those not on the dole. If everyone is on the dole you get another set of problems.

On this topic the UN Declaration of Human rights says.

How do you define what is out of someone’s control. It is within a persons control to save his own money or buy insurance for times of illness or retirement. If this is guaranteed to everyone, everyone will cease to do these things. So, you must make it mandatory for all. People have a right to crash and burn. In order for action and result, work and reward to be tied to each other, people must be free to suffer the consequences of their mistakes and to learn from them. People tend to test the limits of their environments. If they never find those limits, they keep pushing until something breaks. You cannot help someone by helping them to put off and off and off the admission that they are wrong. Government following policies like this is like the family of an alcoholic constantly enabling him to conceal his weaknesses. The government is doing it on a government scale which will eventually destroy it. Human beings have a need to suffer the consequences of their own errors so that they can learn from their mistakes.

There is a parallel here to the disease of Leprosy. Leprosy attacks the nerves on the surface of the skin deadening sensation, killing pain. Lepers do not feel it when they suffer minor scratches, and not knowing it do not treat them. The wounds being untreated become infected, and parts of Lepers bodies rot and fall off. Socialist rights, like most of the rights in the UN Declaration of Human Rights from Article 24 on create a kind of Social Leprosy which allows citizens to develop behavioral problems and weaknesses without any real world feedback. This creates rot in the society, factories and industries which do not work, nonproductive workers, inability to create or invent, etc. The normal response to these problems is the creation of a totalitarian slave state where work is compelled and basic physical needs are supposedly guaranteed.

To guarantee all things to all people you must compel all people to do all things you dictate.

There cannot be authority without responsibility in a working system of government, and there cannot be responsibility without authority.

Citizens cannot ask the government to take over responsibility in their lives without letting the government assume authority over their lives. The more responsibility they demand of the government for the things they need in their personal lives the more authority over their own lives they lose. The more legitimate the oppressive exercise of government power becomes.

Maslow’s next set of needs.

2) Safety/security: out of danger; (This is the only set of needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy which the Social Contract is directly concerned. Guaranteeing these guarantees the opportunity to fulfill the other needs through your own effort. The primary means that the State has of guaranteeing these rights is through by precluding violent abuse of one group of Citizens by another and protecting the Natural Rights of its Citizens from interference by the State or some form of establishment of religion. This is essentially a guarantee of peace between Citizens.) The later needs are such that you cannot satisfy them successfully except through your own effort.

3) Belongingness and Love: affiliate with others, be accepted; and (Freedom of Religion helps guarantee an opportunity to fulfill this set of needs.)

4) Esteem: to achieve, be competent, gain approval and recognition. (You have to follow your own path on this one.)

These later needs are subtly inhibited by Socialist rights. To achieve means to do things, to be competent means to actually perform to a set standard, not just to be awarded an equal mark with everyone else regardless of personal merit.

None of these needs can be actually satisfied as nature intended when reward is divorced from accomplishment. The feeling that they should be provided for by those who have for those who have not probably derives a great deal of its strength from the instinct to provide and receive hospitality and the sense of need which drives men to defend any means as just. This and the implicit contract which it supports is discussed under the section on Hospitality and the Right to Property. When the hospitality is all one way, the natural contract involved is broken and voided.

To quote Aristotle in his Ethics, possibly his most famous general principal, “Virtue, then, is a state of character concerned with choice, lying in a mean, i.e. the mean relative to us, this being determined by a rational principle, and by that principle by which the man of practical wisdom would determine it. Now it is a mean between two vices, that which depends on excess and that which depends on defect; and again it is a mean because the vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate. Hence in respect of its substance and the definition which states its essence virtue is a mean, with regard to what is best and right an extreme.” The principle here and the extremes involved are the same as those discussed under Liberty and Slavery (Property). This discussion merely presents the example of the recent collapse of Utopian Communist systems as an example of this lack of virtue in government.