Definitions II: None Dare...pp 35

 Apologies for last week, I spent it away from both the internet and electricity. The former wasn't so bad but that latter was rough. We left off discussing the socialist policies of Richard Nixon, and how absurd it was that Allen didn't mention what policies he felt were too socialist. A friend of mine, who I consider an amateur presidential historian (and that is NOT meant to be an insult) listed a few of them for me. 

This friend informed me that Nixon tried a few things: a guaranteed minimum income and during his presidency universal health care was first floated as an idea (Nixon was personally against this though according to tapes of his own voice). There's quite a decent amount of accomplishments from Nixon that we could think Allen is referring to as our inevitable march toward COMMUNISM; but as I responded to my friend's helpful suggestions, it's Allen's book--we should not have to work this hard to figure it out. What I suspect is that if he named the policies his readership might think that they weren't so bad. Just like how you can make a conservative agree with Obamacare as long as you only list its policies and never call it that. Until we get further clarification, we have to assume that Allen is working off of Nixon's enemies' opinions which he had not only on the left but also on the right from groups like the John Birch Society who didn't think that Richard Nixon was hard enough against Communism.*

Allen also wanted a new political spectrum so that socialism could be placed on it correctly. Neverminding that socialism is an economic system, not a political system because Allen is going to define the term for us: "Socialism is usually defined as government ownership and/or control over the basic means of production and distribution of goods and services."

That's, not bad actually. There are some nitpicky things here like the difference between ownership and control needs a bit more clarification, but that's not a bad definition. I'd give this kind of definition on the first day of a political philosophy course and then expand it with more reading. You know what though? I was expecting much worse and there isn't much of a difference between this definition and one we'd find in a dictionary. 

With that high point of the book out of the way, Allen is going to analyze this definition, "When analyzed this means government control over everything, including you. All controls are 'people controls."

So this is the point where I'd like to ask Allen if he is reading his own book. This definition doesn't say anything like that. If the government controls the production of cars, it doesn't have control over the people that drive them. It just has control over how many cars are produced and how they are made. This is different than mandating safety protocols and emission standards, but the government doesn't own the driver. If the government-controlled food production it doesn't own the eaters either, it just owns the distribution of the food. Now, this latter case is problematic if the food doesn't actually get produced and you have a state which follows a crack-pot who thinks there's such a thing as Communist science and capitalist science; but jumping from economic control to actual control is a bit too much. 

The larger problem is that this "analysis" is just a completely different idea. It's needless since Allen could have just defined "socialism" as the government's control over the people. We know he could have done this because that's what he did when he made the definition of COMMUNISM earlier. It's your book Allen, you can say whatever you want to and only your followers and people like me are going to read it. The former isn't going to question it and the latter is reading it almost forty years too late. 

The analysis continues: "If the government controls these areas it can eventually do just exactly as Marx set out to do--destroy the right to private property, eliminate the family and wipe out religion."

Sigh. This is going to be a one-page week. 

The great irony in right-wing attacks on Marxism is that they pretend to want the same thing that Marx wrote about. Marx wanted greater power for the working class and an end to the domination of the economy and political climate by the owners. In other words when American conservatives pretend that they favor main street over wall street--that's Marxism. Marx didn't want to eliminate the family. Out of context, it seems accurate, but the point Marx was making is that the family structure became a system of social control as the wealth never left the wealthy families. It's a bit much to go into but "abolition" would be a much stronger word that would be appropriate. It would be more accurate to say that he wanted to "change" the definition of the family. As for religion, yes. Marx famously considered religion to be the opiate of the masses. This means not that it gets us high but rather that it numbs us to the pain of the situation we are in. The Abrahamic religions want us on our knees and preach that suffering now is the only way to paradise. So this one, yes, Marx saw evil in religion (especially Christianity). 

This may be the first solid tie-in where Allen is going to wrap his conspiracy theory in with Christian nationalism. We'll have to see how this develops.

In closing it out this week, I must say that initially, I was keeping a tally of the rhetorical questions. However, this book is interesting in that it is attempting to make its own position unlike the modern conspiracy theorists of today. Anytime it has asked one, it's answered it--which is weird and refreshing so I'm going to abandon this tally idea since I literally haven't updated it in weeks. 

*Remember that Communism/communism is the normal definition of the term and COMMUNISM is Allen's version.