Closed Minds

Little dissent is permitted in the public media. Debate is permitted at a relatively trivial level, but is kept well away from anything important. One mechanism, which slips easily from the world of the media into the minds of reactionaries, is to use debating points to deflect criticism of authority.

So, for example, even obvious questions about fundamental problems in a western country will often be met not by a considered response but by something like, “So you approved of the Soviet system, then?” The reasoning here is as follows:

  • ‘We’ (i.e. established authority, whether or not the reactionary in question can actually be considered part of established authority) possess certain virtues;
  • An opposing system (usually, in economic questions, the Soviet system, but sometimes the official enemy du jour) possesses none of these virtues;
  • Therefore anyone who questions our supposed virtues prefers the opposing system.

This can lead to quite idiotic misapprehensions.

Democracy in the Workplace

The suggestion that a non–unionised workforce would benefit from the existence of unions may be met by the reply that it would lead to Soviet–style communism. In fact, of course, there were no independent, democratic unions in the USSR; it was an owners’, not a workers’, paradise. It is the non–unionised workplace that more closely resembles the Soviet arrangement.

The other response might be that the transfer of wealth from the owners to the employees as a result of unionising would lead to a firm becoming less profitable and going bust, and everyone losing their jobs. The assumption here is that this process is an inevitable law of nature, not to be questioned. But as we know, there is no magic; everything has causes, and every social arrangement has social causes.

Capitalism and Communism

Use the word ‘capitalism’ critically and the automatic response of the reactionary will be to contrast it with communism, and then to read out a list of Soviet crimes.

Like almost every word or phrase that has acquired an ideological use, capitalism is taken to mean a variety of incompatible things. Independent of ideology, however, capitalism has two central elements:

  • economic capital, in whatever form it happens to take, is not controlled by the general population;
  • economic production and transactions are accomplished through the use of wages and prices.

Both of these applied to the Soviet system. The general population had no say at all in economic policy, just as in the west; and people were paid in roubles, which they spent in exchange for goods and services. The nature of the economic tyranny may be different in detail, but communism in its practical sense is just another form of capitalism.

Motivation

Reactionaries typically do not object in principle to the acts of unjustified authority that they cite. Many of the crimes which the reactionary deplores are crimes he or she approves of when committed by the form of authority with which he or she identifies. The reactionary uses the crimes committed by an enemy as a propaganda tool, not as a point of principle.