I am just going outside and may be some time
Lawrence “Titus” Oates and the Communist Manifesto
Captain Lawrence Oates was a hero. On several counts, but for one of which he is most fondly remembered. Injured and proving a burden to the immense task facing the failed Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott, he spoke these words, including an admonition to not come after him, before quitting their hopeless situation and being lost in a blizzard of snow. For he realised they had little chance of survival, and no chance at all with him in tow. The rest did nothing to prevent him, honoured his admonition, and, they too, died soon afterwards.
On one view, he perished needlessly, since all would perish ultimately. On another, he died that others might live. As things turned out, either way, he had nothing to lose.
Image: Captain Lawrence Oates, a year before his death in 1912 on the Ross Ice Shelf. When this was taken, he had everything to lose; he was 32 years of age when he died.
“Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels – The Communist Manifesto.
Nowadays communism is a philosophy most closely associated with the likes of China and North Korea. It is despised by capitalists as anathema. Because it is viewed as denying opportunity and space for personal development, economic growth and financial advancement. Western nations point to these classic communist countries with disdain and laugh mockingly at the pitiful human rights that are accorded to their citizens.
There is a certain irony in the fact that a philosophy conceived as the encapsulation of the ultimate human right – freedom – is most closely associated with a lack of just that. This consequence, however, is not a result of the philosophy, but rather a fault of men who have put it to work. Communism has been adulterated and despoiled by men of ambition and greed, and it is not alone in that, for capitalism has likewise been adulterated and despoiled.
The curtailment of human rights in communist countries past and present is largely hidden from the world’s eyes by a shroud of secrecy, oppression and persecution (often to secure advancement for the few, and ensure the many remain unaware) and, because human rights are primarily an issue for the individual, the individual whose objections are suppressed lacks a voice to the outside world by which that outside world may concern itself with the domestic situation of those who suffer.
This is something by which communism differs from capitalism. Although capitalism is also shrouded in secrecy, oppression and persecution for exactly the same reasons as obtain under communism, it nevertheless vaunts high in its banner the aspect of opportunity, which it presents to its subjects, sometimes like the riches that flow from a cornucopia, at other times like the head of John the Baptist on a trencher.
But the main difference between communism and capitalism is that the subjects of capitalism dwell in a sustained belief in the prospect of betterment. Capitalism tells them that they too can achieve a situation of comfort, freedom, leisure and fulfilment by acceding to playing a role within the system. In failed communist systems, however, the subject is repressed to such an extent in his freedoms that the despondency that grows within him leads only to resentment and rejection. For it is achieved under the banner of the high aim of communism, which is to render all and sundry equal in footing.
The capitalist subject too becomes wan and tired for, in truth, the prospect of advancement is, for the many, none such. It is as illusory as the promise of riches from addictive gambling. Odds are brandished with an air that belies risk and cost. What, I wonder, if the betting odds of winning and the warning of addiction were to be printed in each other’s font sizes?
The exhortation to apply oneself and work hard is valid and yet it serves an ultimate purpose because it creates an educated intelligentsia from which the captains of industry are able to cherry-pick their minions and successors. That is its purpose: to feed the system. Those who fail to make the requisite grade are then left behind to function as the labouring masses, with promises of bounty as the product of the system that has rejected them, so that they may be cared for when they are ill and in their retirement. Economists are not hard to find; yet most seem to devote their energies to perpetuating the system they study, rather than to question it or even repugn it. Like competition lawyers whose quest is to seek loopholes. In the end, they forget loopholes and devise avoidance schemes.
Under communist systems such as the German Democratic Republic and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, life was far from rosy. The streets were absent the advertising that crowds the streets of capitalist countries, which entices and impels citizens to augment their effort and to, thereby, achieve materialistic fulfilment. Instead, materialistic achievement was sparse but, for the most part, nevertheless guaranteed, albeit at a level described by capitalists as pitiful – if you want to predominate, don’t ever give credit where it’s due. The workers of these countries could only dream of simple pleasures like beach holidays, oranges and denim jeans. But what they truly needed in life was on the whole provided to them: a roof over their heads, work to go to, and society.
The greatest distinction between communism and capitalism, however, lies in the fact that, under capitalism, despite its being grounded in hard reality, despite the exhortations to live the American life, and despite the depredations that workers go through in terms of their pay, conditions, and living conditions, they refuse to break faith with their aspirations and dreams of advancement. And, aside from the carrot dangled before them by capitalism’s ruling classes, they feel impelled to play their pre-destined part by the stick of financial penury. Capitalism is presented to them as the sole choice And any alternative is dismissed as tainted, failed oppression; and much of that is achieved precisely through tainted, failed oppression. For as long as oppression is alleviated at the edges with frills and fancies, it is deemed attractive enough to tempt the hungry who seek a piece of the pie, no matter how distasteful its filling.
Karl Marx’s exhortation to the workers of the world, to unite, for they have nothing to lose but their chains, was sincerely meant; Marx truly believed that the labouring masses were indeed bound in chains to their lathes, their production lines, to their coal mines, steel works and the other industrial leviathans to which they offered themselves body, mind, and soul in the service of Mammon. Where communism succeeds in becoming a state religion, the chains that workers have shed will soon be replaced by the chains imposed by the machinery of the state they have created.
Capitalism is not wrong. Nor is communism. Neither is wrong, as a system — provided, that is, that both be operated under a panoply of enlightenment. What communism’s working classes aspire to is not predominance; it is an enlightenment that puts care and consideration to work in equal measure as it puts work to work. And capitalist workers yearn for nothing less than that. And both yearn where it is lacking.
What makes capitalism and communism equally wrong is man’s willingness to bastardise them with his own greed and avarice. The yearning for personal betterment, which the climate change scientists tell us is now resulting in the destruction of the very planet upon which we yearn and for which we yearn, has banished from our minds any thought or consideration that the measure by which we better our own lot comes naturally and consequentially to rest in the diminishment of the lot of others. What globalisation did in this regard was simply to globalise the effects of systems that take from the poor and give to the rich.
For 15 months and more, I have searched my mind for what it was that impelled Vladimir Putin to wage his war on Ukraine. There have been many posited theories and political machinations and there has been much dismissal of his motivations, and they are all probably right. But one thing impelled him above all of these, and that was quite simply the prospect that, at very little cost to himself, he could assure himself a place in Russian history, for as good as nothing, with as good as assured success. Put quite simply, he had nothing to lose. Certainly, no chains.
When university education was free in the United Kingdom, students flocked to it to acquire a degree, an assurance of future prosperity and security. In more recent years, that assurance has been found wanting. The labour exchanges are crowded with people who hold high qualifications and who cannot secure a job. I sometimes wonder at what point a man comes to the realisation that what Karl Marx said back in 1848 applies, at last, to him: that he has nothing to lose but his chains. Because I suspect that every time that thought might enter his head, he falls under the delusion that the advancement and betterment offered by capitalism is a far surer path to tread than is revolution. That one more bet will recoup all his losses.
Many are the voices that utter outrage at the horrors inflicted by ordinary men of Russia on the ordinary folk of Ukraine. Mine has been among them and will continue to be among them. But many owners of such voices themselves embrace drudgery and disappointment, and scramble with their boots in the faces of those who follow, to achieve a perceived pinnacle of existence that, perhaps less brutally, nonetheless dismisses in disdain the lives and existences of their fellow man. They do not behold the faces and cries of those they rape and murder, and they return home, like Edward Bond’s airman high in the clouds, who embraces his children and own progeny, having destroyed those of them who would oppose him.
What holds men and women back from revolution is not their will to cling to the chains they perceive as capable of being cast off; it is their fear of the devil they don’t know, rather than the devil that they do. For, absent enlightenment, both are devils.