Council Communism Quotes

More pertinent, however, is that capitalism tends to stultify the worker’s creativity, his human urge for self-expression, freedom, mutually respectful interaction with others, recognition of his self-determined sense of self, recognition of himself as a self rather than an object, a means to an end. Karl Marx called it “alienation.” Capitalism alienates the worker—and the capitalist—from his “fundamental human need” for “self-fulfilling and creative work,” “the exercise of skill and craftsmanship,”8 in addition to his fundamental desire to determine himself (whence comes the desire to dismantle oppressive power-relations and replace them with democracy). Alternative visions of social organization thus arise, including Robert Owen’s communitarian socialism, Charles Fourier’s associationist communalism, Proudhon’s mutualism (a kind of anarchism), Marx’s communism, Bakunin’s collectivist anarchism, Kropotkin’s anarchist communism, Anton Pannekoek’s council communism, and more recently, Murray Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism, Michael Albert’s participatory economics, Takis Fotopoulos’s inclusive democracy, Paul Hirst’s associationalism, and so on. Each of these schools of thought differs from the others in more or less defined ways, but they all have in common the privileging of economic and social cooperation and egalitarianism.

After World War II, the United States, triumphant abroad and undamaged at home, saw a door wide open for world supremacy. Only the thing called ‘communism’ stood in the way, politically, militarily, economically, and ideologically. Thus it was that the entire US foreign policy establishment was mobilized to confront this ‘enemy’, and the Marshall Plan was an integral part of this campaign. How could it be otherwise? Anti-communism had been the principal pillar of US foreign policy from the Russian Revolution up to World War II, pausing for the war until the closing months of the Pacific campaign when Washington put challenging communism ahead of fighting the Japanese. Even the dropping of the atom bomb on Japan – when the Japanese had already been defeated – can be seen as more a warning to the Soviets than a military action against the Japanese.19 After the war, anti-communism continued as the leitmotif of American foreign policy as naturally as if World War II and the alliance with the Soviet Union had not happened. Along with the CIA, the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, the Council on Foreign Relations, certain corporations, and a few other private institutions, the Marshall Plan was one more arrow in the quiver of those striving to remake Europe to suit Washington’s desires: 1.    Spreading the capitalist gospel – to counter strong postwar tendencies toward socialism. 2.    Opening markets to provide new customers for US corporations – a major reason for helping to rebuild the European economies; e.g. a billion dollars (at twenty-first-century prices) of tobacco, spurred by US tobacco interests. 3.    Pushing for the creation of the Common Market (the future European Union) and NATO as integral parts of the West European bulwark against the alleged Soviet threat. 4.    Suppressing the left all over Western Europe, most notably sabotaging the Communist parties in France and Italy in their bids for legal, non-violent, electoral victory. Marshall Plan funds were secretly siphoned off to finance this endeavor, and the promise of aid to a country, or the threat of its cutoff, was used as a bullying club; indeed, France and Italy would certainly have been exempted from receiving aid if they had not gone along with the plots to exclude the Communists from any kind of influential role.

Children, however magical, are not immune to their parents; and as the prejudices and world-views of adults began to take over their minds, I found children from Maharashtra loathing Gujaratis, and fair-skinned northerners reviling Dravidian “blackies”; there were religious rivalries; and class entered our councils. The rich children turned up their noses at being in such lowly company; Brahmins began to feel uneasy at permitting their thoughts to touch the thoughts of untouchables; while, among the low-born, the pressures of poverty and Communism were becoming evident…and, on top of all this, there were clashes of personality, and a hundred squalling rows which are unavoidable in a parliament composed entirely of half-grown brats.

Lenin was once asked to define communism in a single sentence. ‘Communism is power to worker councils,’ he said, ‘plus electrification of the whole country.’ There can be no communism without electricity, without railroads, without radio. You couldn’t establish a communist regime in sixteenth-century Russia, because communism necessitates the concentration of information and resources in one hub. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’ only works when produce can easily be collected and distributed across vast distances, and when activities can be monitored and coordinated over entire countries. Marx and his followers understood the new technological realities and the new human experiences, so they had relevant answers to the new problems of industrial society, as well as original ideas about how to benefit from the unprecedented opportunities. The socialists created a brave new religion for a brave new world. They promised salvation through technology and economics, thus establishing the first techno-religion in history, and changing the foundations of ideological discourse. Before Marx, people defined and divided themselves according to their views about God, not about production methods. Since Marx, questions of technology and economic structure became far more important and divisive than debates about the soul and the afterlife. In the second half of the twentieth century, humankind almost obliterated itself in an argument about production methods. Even the harshest critics of Marx and Lenin adopted their basic attitude towards history and society, and began thinking about technology and production much more carefully than about God and heaven.

If we do not stop these mar-makers not,...it will soon be too late. We are the only nation that can halt this crusade. It might be too late in America, but it isn't too late here. Without British support the whole scheme would collapse. For that reason the future of all nations depends upon the policy which is decided in this House. More than that, the final position of Britain in the world is being decided. If we support these anti-Communist crusades through the world as we have supported it in Greece, then our good name and existence will be threatened by the hatred of all free-thinking men. We cannot suppress all desire in Europe and Asia for social change by branding it communism from Russia and persecuting its supporters. Social change doesn't have to come from Russia, whatever the Foreign Office or the Americans say. It is a product of the miserable conditions under which the majority of the earth's population exist. There are fighters for social change in every land, here as well as anywhere.... We Socialists are among them. That is the reason for our predominance in the House to-day. The very men that we try to suppress in other countries are asking for far less liberty than we enjoy here, far less social change than we Socialists hope to initiate in Great Britain. Are we going to betray these men by labelling them Communists and crushing them wherever we find them until we have launched ourselves at Russia herself in a war that will wipe this island off the face of the earth? The American imperialists say that this is the American Century. ARe we to sacrifice ourselves for that great ideal, or are we to stand beside the people of Europe and Asia and other lands who seek independence, economic stability, self-determination, and the right to conduct their own affairs? Are we going to partake in an anti-Red campaign when we ourselves are Reds? ...... Some among us might think that there is political expediency in following this anti-Russian crusade without really getting enmeshed in it, creating a Third Force in Europe of their friends, a balancing force for power politics. In that you have the real policy of our Government to-day. But how can we avoid final involvement? Our American vanguard will stop at nothing. They hold their atom bomb aloft with nervous fingers. It has become their talisman and their faith. It is their new weapon of anti-Communism, a more efficient Belsen and Maidenek. Its first usage was morally anti-Russian. It was used to end Japan quickly so that Russia would play no part in the final settlement with that country. No doubt they would have used it on Russia already if they could be certain that Russian did not have an equal or better atomic weapon. That terrible uncertainty goads them into fiercer political and economic activity against the world's grim defenders of great liberties. In that you have the heart of this American imperial desperation. They cannot defeat the people of Europe and Asia with the atomic bomb alone. They cannot win unless we lend them our name and our support and our political cunning. To-day they have British support, in policy as well as in international councils where the decisions of peace and security are being made. With our support America is undermining every international conference with its anti-Russian politics.

All your decisions discount the Persians themselves, and that is the mistake of your ignorance and your plotting. To you the Persian is a stupid peasant who can't decide his own affairs; an uncultured wretch who will take all manner of deceit and oppression and diplomatic twisting. If you do see any signs, any glimmer of revolt, you blame the Russians and take it to the Security Council. But it isn't the Russians. It's the peasant himself who is revolting. If any of you understood Iran you would know that. Dirty and wretched they may be, opium-ridden and backward and dull, but they are really the people you should fear, not the Russians. It may take time and there may be set-backs, but sooner or later the Persians are going to throw us out and throw out all our corrupt and friendly governments. They don't need any complicated political excuse to revolt, however much you cry Communism. There isn't a simple man, woman or child in Iran who isn't landlord-ridden,m who isn't a slave by the way in which he works, who isn't preyed upon by corrupt officials, who isn't beaten and insulted and robbed by the police and the army. The peasants are impoverished by the tithes they must pay the Khans, and the mechanics are underpaid and underfed and overworked. There isn't an adult in Iran who isn't ridden with some chronic disease, there isn't a child who survives all the ravages of poverty and dirt and sickness. The whole government structure is rotten with bribery and extortion and petty cruelties, and there isn't a modicum of justice in the land. There are no real courts, no political rights, no representative government, no wage laws, no right to organize, no means of adjusting the bad conditions of life except by revolting as the Azerbaijanians and the Kurds are revolting. Thank heavens the Russians have given them a chance to revolt; and damn us for preventing it wherever we can. We will fail anyway, whatever the Security Council decides in New York. You can get the Russians out of Azerbaijan and you can give it back to your merchants and wazirs of Teheran, but after a little while it will all begin again because you cannot stop the Persian from deciding his own affairs. He is not ignorant and stupid to his political situation. He is not so wretched and afraid of revolt. He is not even uncultured: in the language he speaks and the use he makes of it there is more natural culture among the peasants of Iran than you can find among the world's diplomats a the Savoy Hotel. He is backward and poor and dirty, but that is largely due to the influence we have had on Iran for a hundred years or more. Now it is too late for us. These people have reached the breaking point and they don't care about the wise men of the House of Commons and the clever men of the Security Council. These people are desperate, and for our reckless methods of holding our power and our oil it ought to be a warning. It will all go. The oil, the power, and the last drop of influence. Rather than let us have any of it the Persian will wreck Abadan and the wells and every other sign of our presence and our strength there. They are beginning to hate us and that is beginning a battle which we can't stop, which you can't stop in the Security Council. Unless we are determined to kill every man in the country we will lose. We cannot help but lose.

The wave of anticommunism sweeping the Communist bloc has not had much effect on some diehard anti-anticommunists in this country. In the fall of 1989, just a few weeks before the people of Eastern Europe toppled their Communist governments, the Church Council of Greater Seattle adopted a statement of “Affirmations and Confessions” which it recommended for use as litanies in worship. The people of the “free world” were said to be infected with racism and militarism as well as with the “cancerous disease of ‘anti-communism.’” Americans were urged to liberate themselves “from the ever-growing disease of anti-communism.”82 Surely, one is tempted to remark, few ecclesiastical pronouncements have been issued in less appropriate circumstances.

The scythe went down the ranks, in cities and provinces, lopping the heads of the Party apparatuses, of intellectuals, activists. Nearly the entire Party Central Committee was killed; nearly the entire Soviet war council; nearly the entire Red Army command, starting with its head, Tukhachevsky; 35,000 officers; most Soviet ambassadors, almost the entire staffs of Pravda and Izvestia, most of the officials of the Cheka (including its head, Yagoda), most of the leaders of the Young Communist League . . . From late 1936 into 1939 the slaughter went on. The tortures and shootings that took place in the basement of the Lubyanka, headquarters of the security police, must have set a world record for one building.

British businessman Cecil Rhodes, “who founded the Round Table groups, a precursor of the Council on Foreign Relations and its offshoot, The Trilateral Commission.” Members of the Frankfurt School sought to develop a theory of society based on Marxism. They, along with the Tavistock Institute, were instrumental in aligning America and the EU with their Marxist vision of state control and management of the economy. These organizations have worked to create new forms of state-run capitalism—a euphemism for socialism, which became wildly popular among youth during the presidential campaign of Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed socialist. Marxism, socialism, communism, and progressivism are designed to destroy the individuality of men and women created in God’s image. The goal is to create a hive mind where everyone thinks the same. In Marxism and its variants, the infinite, personal, living God of the universe is replaced by the state or the “collective.” This permits totalitarianism under a godless state. The Frankfurt School, whose representatives later occupied key positions in important American universities like Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley, understood the importance of controlling the media in producing “massification.” Ultimately, ideas like massification, collectivism, conformity, and the New Age movement were designed by a secretive occult elite to control the masses. All these concepts contradict God’s plan for humanity.

The small and seemingly benign remit of student bodies has far-reaching effects. The whole idea behind student council is to prepare future citizens to run the country by exposing them to democratic practice. What lessons is it teaching them, then? That government is basically a popularity contest vested with the minor task of organizing fun events irrespective of actual responsibility. Because the really important decisions are quietly made by unelected people. Sound like any country you know? Student

wanted a council that would bring a halt to the continuing modernist heresy; including a resounding condemnation of atheistic communism.

observers at his Council that he had no intention of condemning any errors the world was putting out at the time. Errors like modern-day atheism, materialism, socialism, communism, Marxism. Oh, no. His would not be a council to refute errors; his would not be like the other 20 Councils in the history of the Catholic Church. His would be a pastoral, not a doctrinal council.

It was the Gnostics, during Christianity’s early centuries, who first proposed that man could live in paradise “while still in the flesh.” Condemned as a heresy in every church council from then until now, the Gnostic viewpoint has never quite died out. Even Time magazine stated, a few years ago, that it was the most important idea in the modern world, underlying such tendencies as socialism, communism, anarchism and even liberalism. Even more, it permeates all the utopian heresies that have separated out from orthodox modern psychiatry – Reich and his Orgone, Brown and Marcuse with their prophecy of future societies that will exist without the repression of Eros, R.D. Laing’s theory of a mental state as far superior to normalcy as normalcy is to paranoia, the joyous hopes of the Gestaltists and sensitivity trainers, and the whole Human Potential Movement.

Creative activity at the grassroots is the basic factor of the new public life. Let the workers set up workers' control at their factories. Let them supply the villages with manufactures in exchange for grain […] Socialism cannot be decreed from above. Its spirit rejects the mechanical bureaucratic approach: living creative socialism is the product of the masses themselves.

[Khrushchev] took a trip to America and spent some time in the state of Iowa. He saw how vigorously the maize grows there and decided that the shortcomings of the collective farm system could be counterbalanced if the expanses from Kushka to the tundra were sown with this magical cereal. One word was all it took, and the entire country was planted with maize. It didn’t grow. They divided the party into agricultural and municipal regional committees. It didn’t grow. They transformed the ministries into national economic councils—NECs— and the maize still didn’t grow; it refused. They gave up on the maize and set about introducing a reform of the Russian language that would have meant a hare was called a “her” and instead of “cucumber” people would have written “queucamber.

a meeting of the National Security Council on March 20, 1958, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles made a rather startling admission. Visibly weakened by the terminal cancer to which he would succumb in a little over a year, he allowed that he had been quite wrong in regarding the nationalist and anticolonialist movements he had engaged in battle around the world as fifth columns for communism. As the scribe of the meeting paraphrased him, in looking at the three trouble spots that most concerned the Eisenhower administration at that moment—Indonesia, North Africa and the Middle East—Dulles had now concluded that “the directing forces are not communist, but primarily forces favorable personally to a Sukarno, a Nasser or the like. Developments in these areas had not been initiated by Soviet plots.

Some utopias become purer, harder, and harsher as they diminish, like an evaporating lake growing more saline every year in its shores of crystalline salt: think of the theorist-revolutionary Guy Debord, ostracizing and expelling people from the Situationist International movement until you could fit the future of artsy council communism around the back table of a Parisian bar. Some utopias dilute into the surrounding society that gives them context - the well-lit, spare, clean, glass-and-steel spaces of the Bauhaus are now the default settings for expensive apartments and bank lobbies, their mystic-visionary content reduced to homeopathic doses. Some die all at once with their founder or settle into a second act as businesses: silverware from the Oneida Perfectionists, hammocks from the Skinnerian behaviorist community Twin Oaks, or wind chimes from Arcosanti, which was once the be the germ of anthill arcologies honeycombing the planet. Of all these ways to end, a handful of utopian projects -perhaps the most successful - evaporate in practice but produce a persistent icon of the future for a group or a subculture, a shared arrangement of visions, a magnetic field by which other people unknowingly set their compasses. Extropy was one of these.

From the introduction by Arthur Livingston Page xxv: What is the secret of the amazing subordination of the armies of the West? Mosca finds the answer in the aristocratic character, so to say, of the army, first in the fact that there is a wide and absolute social distinction between private and officer, and second that the corps of officers, which comes from the ruling class, reflects the balance of multiple and varied social forces which are recognized by and within that class. The logical implications of this theory are well worth pondering. If the theory be regarded as sound, steps toward the democratization of armies—the policy of Mr. Hore-Belisha, for instance—are mistaken steps which in the end lead toward military dictatorships; for any considerable democratization of armies would make them active social forces reflecting all the vicissitudes of social conflict and, therefore, preponderant social forces. On the other hand, army officers have to be completely eliminated from political life proper. When army officers figure actively and ex officio in political councils, they are certain eventually to dominate those councils and replace the civil authority—the seemingly incurable cancer of the Spanish world, for an example.

One can point to the confusion created by heretical concepts, such as those found in so-called Liberation Theology, promoted chiefly by the Jesuits, which became very popular and influential in Latin America.519 We know, of course, that Liberation Theology was pervaded with Marxist sentiment. Some ultimate insiders, such as Lt. Gen. Ion Mihai Pacepa, the leading Romanian spy chief who defected to the West in the late 1970s, have gone so far as to claim that Liberation Theology was created by the KGB. “The movement was born in the KGB,” states Pacepa unequivocally, “and it had a KGB-invented name: Liberation Theology.” Pacepa, a very high-level Communist Bloc intelligence official, gave specific details: “The birth of Liberation Theology was the intent of a 1960 super-secret “’Party-State Dezinformatsiya [Disinformation] Program’ approved by Aleksandr Shelepin, the chairman of the KGB, and by Politburo member Aleksey Kirichenko, who coordinated the Communist Party’s international policies. This program demanded that the KGB take secret control of the World Council of Churches (WCC), based in Geneva, Switzerland, and use it as cover for converting Liberation Theology into a South American revolutionary tool.”520

It is obvious that if many bishops had acted like Msgr. de Castro Mayer, Bishop of Campos in Brazil, the ideological revolution within the Church could have been limited, because we must not be afraid to affirm that the current Roman authorities, since John XXIII and Paul VI, have made themselves active collaborators of international Freemasonry and of world socialism. John Paul II is above all a communist-loving politician at the service of a world communism retaining a hint of religion. He openly attacks all of the anti-communist governments and does not bring, by his travels, any Catholic revival. These conciliar Roman authorities cannot but oppose savagely and violently any reaffirmation of the traditional Magisterium. The errors of the Council and its reforms remain the official standard consecrated by the Profession of Faith of Cardinal Ratzinger in March 1989.

Having lived in a mythical country, a place neither here nor there, these intellectuals from Vilna and Gomel helped create another and called it the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Such a name! It was hardly a union. The Soviets - workers’ councils - ruled it for about six weeks; socialism impoverished everybody, and only machine guns kept the republics from turning into nations. But to Szarza and the rest it didn’t matter. He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years - until 1929, when Stalin finally took over - he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

The socialized factories (In revolutionary Catalonia) were led by a management committee with between five and thirteen members, representing the various services, elected by the workers in a general assembly, with a two- year term, half of them to be renewed every year. The committee selected a director to whom it delegated all or part of its powers. In the key factories the selection of the director had to be approved by the regulatory body. In addition, a government inspector was placed on every management committee. The management committee could be revoked either by the general assembly or by a general council of the branch of industry (composed of four representatives of the management committees, eight from the workers' unions, and four technicians named by the regulatory body). This general council planned the work and deter- mined the distribution of profits. Its decisions were legally binding.

Libertarian communists shun any particularist atomization into small units, communes, and workers' councils, and aspire to a federalist coordination, one which is both close-knit and freely consented to. Rejecting bureaucratic and authoritarian planning, they believe in the need for coherent and democratic planning, inspired from the bottom up.

One of the most horrifying practical applications of these liberal principles is the laying of the Church open to all errors, particularly the most monstrous error ever thought up by Satan - communism. Communism now has official access to the Vatican and its world revolution is made markedly easier by the official non-resistance of the Church, nay, by her regular support of the revolution, despite the despairing warnings of cardinals who have been through communist jails. The refusal by this pastoral Council to issue any official condemnation of communism alone suffices to disgrace it for all time, when one remembers the tens of millions of martyrs, of people having their personalities scientifically destroyed in psychiatric hospitals, serving as guinea pigs for all sorts of experiments. And the pastoral Council which brought together 2,350 Bishops said not a word, in spite of the 450 signatures of Fathers demanding a condemnation, which I myself took to Mgr. Felici, secretary of the Council, together with Mgr. Sigaud, Archbishop of Diamantina.

We should regard Guatemala as a prototype area for testing means and methods of combating Communism,” a member of Dwight Eisenhower’s National Security Council said, in 1953.