Quote (inkanddagger @ Nov 22 2021 05:08pm)
“We Communists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labour, which property is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.
Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of petty artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that preceded the bourgeois form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has to a great extent already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.
Or do you mean the modern bourgeois private property?
But does wage-labour create any property for the labourer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e., that kind of property which exploits wage-labour, and which cannot increase except upon condition of begetting a new supply of wage-labour for fresh exploitation. Property, in its present form, is based on the antagonism of capital and wage labour…
Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriations.”
The communist working man exists to behead Zuckerberg and Bezos and Gates. They fight to break the chains laid upon us by the elite so we can forge a path of hard work and self acquired success made supreme.
Men who bow to the capitalists aren’t rugged individuals. They are boot-licking slaves arguing on behalf of their own slavery.
That is an apology, in the rhetorical sense not in the "I'm sorry sense" and then a lament. There is nothing there indicating encouragement for the individual to individually solve their own problem.
In fact if you are intellectually honest about it . . . the whole concept of communism revolves around the idea that the individual is utterly helpless to solve his plight on his own, and why? Because the rich elite he is up against are too powerful. So what is the solution? Band together and use force to "break the chains" etc. etc., there is no solving your own problems on your own in communism, only the solutions that can be obtained through the unity of the movement.
If you want real pure individualism and self reliance its old school Austrian classical economists, free market types, libertarians. . . about as far away from communists as you can get.
By way of analogy, the communist would be the group of guys who cannot get a chick on their own, but they are pretty sure they are entitled to get to have a woman, and that it must be the rich elites keeping them from it, so they band together as a group and just go rape one. And then write beautiful prose about how it wasn't rape at all, and how if any violence transpired its some rich persons fault really.