{"id":71522,"date":"2025-10-07T01:00:43","date_gmt":"2025-10-07T05:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=71522"},"modified":"2025-10-08T09:21:05","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T13:21:05","slug":"qotd-that-wasnt-real-communism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2025\/10\/07\/qotd-that-wasnt-real-communism\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: “That wasn’t real<\/em> communism …”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Leftism has always been a ridiculously reductive creed, but the One Thing all Leftism reduces to has undergone a radical shift. For Marx, of course, the One Thing was that thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegelian schmear. Hegel’s ontology claims that the universe is talking to itself. Literally. That thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, summarized by the untranslatable German word Aufheben<\/em> (“self-transcendence”; something like that), is literally a debate the World Spirit (or whatever) is having with itself.<\/p>\n

All Karl Marx did was bring that down to the material level \u2014 it’s not the world spirit<\/em> having a debate with itself, it’s the world<\/em>, the material object. Both the debate and its conclusion are made manifest in History, capital-H, which is why Marx was one of a long line of gurus who claimed to make History into a hard science. That “wrong side of History” stuff the Left is always going on about? That’s why they use that phrase so much, and why it has such emotional resonance for them. If you’re a Dialectical Materialist, being against Socialism is like being against gravity. What could possibly be the point? You’re just being perverse, comrade, and on some level you must<\/em> know that …<\/p>\n

Alas, History isn’t a hard science. There are patterns, of course, any fool can see that, but those patterns are the intersection of human nature and emergent behavior. The proof is in the writings of Karl Marx himself \u2014 every prediction the man ever made was not just wrong, but ludicrously so, and after getting burned a few times he admitted in his letters to writing in such a way that he could never be “proven” wrong. See also: The complete history of the Soviet Union, 1917-1991, and as a side note, you can tell the intellectual caliber of Socialism’s defenders by the fact that they trot out the excuse “That wasn’t real<\/em> Communism; real<\/em> Communism has never been tried.” Ah, so Lenin \u2014 he of Marxism-Leninism<\/em> \u2014 wasn’t a true Communist. They’ll shoot you for saying that in, say, China, but do please go on …<\/p>\n

Severian, “Power”, Founding Questions<\/em><\/a>, 2022-02-02.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update, 8 October<\/strong>: Welcome, Instapundit<\/em> readers! Please do have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack<\/em> \u2013 https:\/\/substack.com\/@nicholasrusson<\/a> that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Leftism has always been a ridiculously reductive creed, but the One Thing all Leftism reduces to has undergone a radical shift. For Marx, of course, the One Thing was that thesis-antithesis-synthesis Hegelian schmear. Hegel’s ontology claims that the universe is talking to itself. Literally. That thesis-antithesis-synthesis thing, summarized by the untranslatable German word Aufheben (“self-transcendence”; […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,53,41],"tags":[780,1076,576,1462],"class_list":["post-71522","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-communism","tag-karlmarx","tag-philosophy","tag-severian"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iBA","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71522","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=71522"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71522\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98355,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71522\/revisions\/98355"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71522"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71522"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71522"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}