MY ANTI-COMMUNISM FLARES UP

MY ANTI-COMMUNISM is something like arthritis. It flares up now and then. This particular round was caused by a blog post on Steve Shaviro's blog. He had a positive discussion of a communist conference that took place at Birkbeck (a big British university in London), in which Zizek, Bourdieu, Michael Hardt, and other major communist lit-crit figures gathered together, and the conference actually ended with the singing of the Internationale.

In the comments at his post, many posters were very eagerly dismissing the past of communism, and arguing that it is all in the future. To which I wanted to salt the wound, with:

QUOTATION: Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
ATTRIBUTION: George Santayana (1863?1952), U.S. philosopher, poet.
Life of Reason, 'Reason in Common Sense,' ch. 12 (1905-6).

However, I am now so unfailingly polite, that I didn't toss this bromide.

I try very hard to be kind to communists, because I recognize that they have fallen into a kind of sickness.

But the fact is that communism is so horrifying that to me any mention of it is like news of an outbreak of the black plague. Shaviro was my chair at the University of Washington, and he was a monstrously erudite, and ingenious companion on that arduous journey. I loved him, and I even loved his cat, Weasel (in spite of being totally allergic to Weasel, at least he didn't have a single communist bone!). And yet when I see Shaviro falling into the grippe of communism, I want to sneeze. At the same time, I always wonder if this isn't just a fashion, like disco (I also failed to get with disco, and never once danced under the luminous ball, something I regret), and so, as with Flower Power and other peace movements that I never quite was able to flow with, I do think that the matriarchal philosophy of communism has at least one avatar whom we must resuscitate. If we are going to be communists, let's never forget the communes of the sixties, with Charles Manson's Family as its penultimate groupuscule.

Manson is the ultimate communist, who embodies all the quintessential traits:
1. He's anti-bourgeois
2. He uses race as a marker (racism of one kind or another is a pattern that you find in almost all Marxist thinkers including in Marx himself who said that the anarchist Ferdinand Lasalle had "the dirty blood of a negro Jew" (Letters to Engels, 245).
3. Manson shared everything except authority.
4. His vision of a perfectly happy human family in which God no longer existed, and in which he himself was God, is a trait that you can find in all other Marxist megalomaniacs from Ceausescu, to Tito, to Mao, to Stalin, to Pot, to our current Marxist megalomaniacs like Michael Hardt and Kim Jong-Il (whose father quite explicitly plays the role of God to N. Korea in that he is the leader of the country FOREVER).

However, I don't want to demonize Charlie Manson through association with these nutcases. Because in many ways Manson was the best that communism has to offer.

1. He killed very few of his followers (compare Stalin's purges, or Mao's Cultural Revolution, in which millions were offed, or Pot's destruction of half his population, or Ceausescu's silencing of all opposition). Manson, within the family, was almost egalitarian by communist standards. If you're thinking of percentage of people killed, Manson killed very few. He destroyed a famous actress, and perhaps as many as a half-dozen others. Again, in his favor, I would like to emphasize that he killed very few insiders. The ranchhand named Shorty is perhaps his only real insider murder. By communist standards, this shows a very enlightened individual.

2. Manson retained the loyalty of his followers during thirty years of imprisonment. (Only "Tex" and Linda Kasabian turned against him, and probably only in order to save their own hides. All or most of the others remained steadfast followers. Compare how Ceausescu's entire nation turned on him, and hunted him down, and today it would be the very rare member of Securitate who would come out as a Ceausescu-phile. Against all odds, the vast bulk of Manson's family has remained steadfast in comradeship.) This loyalty must be based on a fervent love that Charlie created in his followers. His Family was based on Love, not Fear, which is sort of different for communism, which thrives on terror.

3. In terms of theoretical and stylistic importance, Manson's writings are superior not only in style but also in terms of content to most of the communist dictators of the last century. He has imagination, and verve: something lacking in Stalin, Ceausescu, and Pot (the latter of which left no writings). Manson stands in a class of his own in this regard, and even contributed a B-side of lyrics to a Beach Boys record -- something no other communist dictator has ever achieved. The important rock artist Marilyn Manson named himself after the communist leader, and more than a hundred rock bands have recorded Charlie Manson's songs. Manson was also known as a fabulous dancer. No other communist dictator has overtaken a dance floor as Manson did just before the days of disco. It is said by some that Manson unleashed the movement known as disco, and that John Travolta studied Manson's moves in order to formulate his own, said to be only the palest of imitations.

If we really want to be communists, let's perfect our dialectical steps, AND GET THOSE HIPS TO SHAKE.

(Actually, as I reread this post, and Shaviro's post, I am not entirely certain that Shaviro and his commenters aren't joking about wanting to revive communism. Perhaps this is all a joke, and I was the only one who didn't get it.)