Before, I say anything else, I am NOT going to start a Communist empire any time soon. But, I said it wasn’t itself a bad thing to a group of friends and am wondering if that was right or not. If I wasn’t, do I have to go back and tell them that? (It would probably be awkward)
I’m rather ill so I won’t give the expansive answer I normally would, but let’s look at a few points if you can bear with my scatterbrained condition.
Usually when you’re talking about “Communism” with a capital “C” you’re talking about some species of Marxism. You should have a look at the Communist manifesto, with its implicit threats against monarchy and papacy. Note that among the things that Communists seek to abolish is
the family. The goal of the abolition of the family actually runs through much Marxist thought, including Western Academic Marxism and post-modern thought… that the family is an institution which represents archaic values and needs to be abolished for the sake of progress.
Also keep in mind that Marx’s view, which I think will make understandable for you the various actions of Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and the others, is an essentially Hegelian one. The Hegelian philosophy of history (which essentially becomes imported into Liberal Catholic theology via de Chardin) is that history is a process of evolution, an awakening of a mighty spirit… and it comes fully awake when the historical processes select out the inferior states and produce the most perfect state. This takes place through conflict, especially war. For Hegel, you know who was in the right via a process of retrospection: the guys who were right were the ones who conquered… and the ones who were wrong were the ones who were conquered.
For Hegel there was a spiritual element to all of this (Modern Germans often looked eastward for their spirituality; note that one of the most recognizable 20th Century symbols of German political philosophy is an eastern luck symbol)… Feuerbach the atheist came along and got rid of all the spiritual elements. Marx notes that he and his circle were all “Feuerbachians”… meaning atheist Hegelians. Hence the “Materialism” in Dialectical Materialism.
Marx goes on, in his seminal but oft-overlooked Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, to argue that all
ideas are merely posterior rationalizations of existing economic relations. In other words, what we think comes after how we relate economically (Marxism is a pan-economism, which is funny given how bad Marxists are at economics) and therefore, essentially, all “ideology” is false. So philosophy, religion, etc. are all, on the Marxist view, things people make up to explain why they relate to one another economically in this or that way.
Still with me? So among the many things that just go ruled out here is the entire
subject of “morality”. Morality just doesn’t exist for Marxists.
Now perhaps that sheds some light on why they behave as they do. That is why Marxists can fight for ‘rights’, while members of the opposition, that they themselves intend to abolish once they win power. Because “integrity” and “consistency” are just more fanciful inventions of the Bourgeoisie (or Monarchists, or whomever) to trick people into acting against their own interests. Marxism is the supremely selfish philosophy where every rational agent is expected to act for its own interests, as brutally and efficiently as possible because there is no reason to ever hold back except for mere Tactics.
Now this would be mere atheistic brutality if not for the other wrinkle: the “Dialectical” in Dialectical Materialism. See, Immanuel Kant attacked traditional moral philosophy by adopting an essentially agnostic position: nobody, on his view, knows about God, Heaven, Hell, or all the rest of it. So man must be the author of his own moral law… he must be morally “autonomous”. To be autonomous is obviously to be an “auto-nomos”, a “self-law”. In other words, man is to usurp the role of God and become a law unto himself.
For Kant we’re still in the realm of the individual. But Hegel comes along and critiques the notion of the individual as a whole unit, basically. Actually, you have these competing interests clashing together, and it is the action of their clashing that reveals a higher and larger category. So you have this individual clashing with that individual, and all this competition and conflict is understood as a society or state. Kant’s focus was too small and particular: the truly autonomous entity is not the individual but the state. The state is what acts in history, not the individual, which is just a cog (total paraphrase/generalization here, but I think it’s right). So now we’ve got the Dialectical in Dialectical Materialism.
So the Marxist acts with brutal efficiency for his unit, which in Marx is not understood as the state (as in Hegel) but the
social class. Thus the Proletariat (industrial working class) figures out what is best for itself, and brings that about ruthlessly and crushes all other classes into servitude, and eventually out of existence entirely (“Communism”).
As I hope you can see, Communism is an entirely amoral and essentially violent philosophy and is, itself, a bad thing. Now, you might discuss “communism” with a small “c”, as in a type of economic and social organization wherein all means and produce are shared… there have been various experiments that are not in any way Marxist. I’m not sure that any such community has survived for very long except for monasteries. The apostolic community at Jerusalem seems to have such an organization. To have such an organization in a Christian context seems to be a purely prudential matter. However, Marxism as a philosophy is right out… it’s the antithesis of decency.
