Angel
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{PICTURE TO BE PICKED}
João Leal Rodrigues
Student at CATÓLICA-LISBON
Political Science and International Relations
Institute of Political Studies
The 25th of April postponed, in a certain way, the decadence of the Leftism, but the influence of the masses (in this case in the student youth) was substituted for the organic influence and with this, the first was slowly lost.
It's not about an atom of combat against the Dictatorship and the war, it's not event about arguing ambiguous terms of knowing or not knowing what was more effective, but about about questioning, in a country populated by fear where there was a general collective moral cowardliness.
The idea that the model, the practice and the ideas of the Communist Party (more or less reviewed and corrected) were the most legitimate forms of resistance as the unique bearer of the antifascist standard.
The Leftism, in particular that of the decades of 60-70, was not a global totalitarian phenomena, and the violent reactions of the CPs have the virtue of drawing attention to the real danger that they themselves represent to totalitarianism.
Many of the most severe critiques against the Leftism find motives on the extreme character of the mimetic effects it has: the completely formalized language, the obscure ideological debates, the dogmatism, the organic insanity, the violence and the terrorism.
But it is in the Leftism and in its' excessive character that it best transpires the totalitarian ideology and terror, by shinning so many times in a brutal manner that relation between terrorist groups, of leftist root, the danger of deriving politics from system ideologies. The "logic of terror", when you understand it, has an immunizing effect and works against the CPs, that despite criticizing the leftist terrorism of today, do the exact same thing in Third world countries and in the East when they have the guarantee of not being caught.
The Leftist groups were always small, and that fact - associated to a certain consciousness of marginalia - lead, in some cases, to a pure process of irrealism, while in others, lead to a self-knowledge, giving politics and political debate, made with conditions of infinitely more freedom that in the CPs.
Leftism worked as a vaccine, taken in rapid and brutal dosages, in the same way that communism in its harder years generated Koestler and Orwell, but also gave the origin to an experience of global refusal of totalitarianism.
Contrary to today's popular belief, the formulation of a theoretical anticommunism, even to the Right, is pretty recent and had, almost always, origins in the dissident thinking of the East or in old Communists.
The Right's anticommunism, in the 20s and then after the cold war, always had a poor analysis of the communist thinking, based on conspiratory thesis of world scale, with a complete disregard for the social, intellectual and political phenomena that generated a totalitarian will. Besides that, the anticommunist right's flirting with Fascism and Nazism worked as a blocking mechanism, in particular in the decade of 30, to their own ability to criticize the totalitarian system.
Until the Post-War period, only the Social-Democracy formulated critics to the communist system, with a spotlight on the German Social-Democracy (Kautsky) and to the books of the like of Popper criticizing history-cynicism and to the totalitarian thinking from the likes of Plato, Hegel and Marx. In the previous years, the Trotskyists, wanted all over the world by the Soviet Polices were hardly able to convince anyone of the reality - the machine of massacres in which the USSR had become. It is important to highlight that even the most violently anti-soviet right did not accept the reality of the concentration camp, and only in the post-war during the debates caused by the revelations of David Rousset and the Kravatchenko process, did people start having an idea of the concentration-nary soviet reality.
It can be said that, despite that the critics to communism made by the right were formulated long ago, that anticommunism is irrelevant, unless in a metaphysical sense, in other words, when it is made as a meditation regarding the inefficiencies of democracy. This is where I believe the "Left's" anticommunism might be more consequential, because it can be formulated outside the defense of privileges and the status quo, that almost always concentrates on the 20s anticommunism, that is the right's model of anticommunism, differently from that of the intellectuals of the cold war (Orwell, Koestler), that came from the left.
The existence of an anticommunism of interests (General Pinochet, Champallimaud, who's notorious disregard for living free or not, as long as you don't touch their money and their peace in the streets), was always the main reason that the liberal anticommunism (which was of actual principle and formulated critics to the system) didn't work to the left. When the genesis of totalitarianism is situated in outside ground, almost as a pure manifestation of "evil", the critic against communism is hardly able to not be conspiratory and of enforcement.
In a world of scarcity, where the resources are insufficient and very diversely distributed, democracy works in a conflicting and contradictory manner, being able to transform itself in a game, with groups of pressure and finally dis-aggregate in an open social war - this is where the totalitarian perversion inevitably assaults one of the sides, or both. The work of the Communist Party in our democracy is that: substitute (or in the portuguese case, of democratic initiation: stopping the creation), a political solidarity, based on citizenship and in the free game of rights and duties, for a conflict of groups and classes that assume the front of a "social" (by derogation of course! Because at the bottom of it, it is the politician - theirs, the totalitarian) that ends up reducing a country to "proletarians" and "bosses", "women", "intellectuals", small, medium and big, "reformed", etc. -- that transform the parties, from parties of opinion to parties of pure interest and, in the right's case, that reduces them to mere pressure groups, easily identifiable and removable.
This time of categorization in groups and classes, in the economy and in society, closes democracy in an alley with no exit, trapping it in a contradictory game of conflicts of interest in the social domain.
In reality, the natural parties of democracy - the groups or factions, because in a developed society there is necessarily differentiation and contradictory plurality - do not result of a genetic hierarchy, nor from a social, but from the flow of the diversity in culture, and they are, in the end, movements of opinion (including the symbolic representation of interests).
In the positioning, facing the existing, the natural parties of a democratic society are those who represent the conservation and the innovation, the conservatives and the partisans of change. I repeat: Both - affecting each other, calibrating their equilibrium in their contradictory discourse. If you speak of conservatives and innovators, it is because you refuse reactionaries and revolutionaries, in other words, all those who believe that society is not globally okay how it is - and in that refusal want to give it another meaning.
Democracies do not support a global thinking, under the belief that is will destroy its natural plurality by imposing it a meaning - a thought about every and everything. That is what the "left" has not been with its flirting with totalitarianism: to be modern and to move away from terror, it can only assume itself as a movement to laicize the society, meaning, free the citizens of the existence of anything that is not their right as individuals to auto-determine themselves, in relation to their wishes and possibilities. In the past, the "left" fought many times, the good fight, against the clergy.
The totalitarian conscious of the left has started from a set of ideas that have become dominant in the past century, and which their reach has visible negative effects today. Those ideas have as basis in the fundamental critique to societies of abundance, and to "consumer societies", associated to the critiques to Political Democracy, starting from the utopia and the so called "economical democracy", with the "hidden violence" of the capitalist system as a gospel, accompanied by the complete disregard to the open violence of the "real socialism". These ideas have been developed not only on the political thinking level, but all in psychology, sociology and in the set of the intellectual production by the left.
There is a need to affirm the priority in every political thought, of freedom and happiness, developing the old liberal concept that the only criteria to measure progress in societies is the justice of a policy and the "happiness of the larger number" which expresses itself, in political terms, in the democratic selection of what we want or don't want. Such means the abandoning of any Hegelian or Marxist concept of "alienation". Happiness only makes sense in subjective and individual criteria: any individual has the right to define what he understand to be and what it is to him happiness and proceed in consequence. The only limitation - if you can call it a limitation - is that the actions of Humans in relation with each other have to be of mutual consent.
--
Might remove and add small/big portion, might edit accordingly
Not everything is properly translated, it is long and late.
I skipped some irrelevant bits to those in these forums (as this article includes direct connections to my country and the history it has)
If you see something that doesn't make sense grammatically, let me know
{PICTURE TO BE PICKED}
João Leal Rodrigues
Student at CATÓLICA-LISBON
Political Science and International Relations
Institute of Political Studies
The 25th of April postponed, in a certain way, the decadence of the Leftism, but the influence of the masses (in this case in the student youth) was substituted for the organic influence and with this, the first was slowly lost.
It's not about an atom of combat against the Dictatorship and the war, it's not event about arguing ambiguous terms of knowing or not knowing what was more effective, but about about questioning, in a country populated by fear where there was a general collective moral cowardliness.
The idea that the model, the practice and the ideas of the Communist Party (more or less reviewed and corrected) were the most legitimate forms of resistance as the unique bearer of the antifascist standard.
--
The Leftism, in particular that of the decades of 60-70, was not a global totalitarian phenomena, and the violent reactions of the CPs have the virtue of drawing attention to the real danger that they themselves represent to totalitarianism.
Many of the most severe critiques against the Leftism find motives on the extreme character of the mimetic effects it has: the completely formalized language, the obscure ideological debates, the dogmatism, the organic insanity, the violence and the terrorism.
But it is in the Leftism and in its' excessive character that it best transpires the totalitarian ideology and terror, by shinning so many times in a brutal manner that relation between terrorist groups, of leftist root, the danger of deriving politics from system ideologies. The "logic of terror", when you understand it, has an immunizing effect and works against the CPs, that despite criticizing the leftist terrorism of today, do the exact same thing in Third world countries and in the East when they have the guarantee of not being caught.
The Leftist groups were always small, and that fact - associated to a certain consciousness of marginalia - lead, in some cases, to a pure process of irrealism, while in others, lead to a self-knowledge, giving politics and political debate, made with conditions of infinitely more freedom that in the CPs.
Leftism worked as a vaccine, taken in rapid and brutal dosages, in the same way that communism in its harder years generated Koestler and Orwell, but also gave the origin to an experience of global refusal of totalitarianism.
Contrary to today's popular belief, the formulation of a theoretical anticommunism, even to the Right, is pretty recent and had, almost always, origins in the dissident thinking of the East or in old Communists.
The Right's anticommunism, in the 20s and then after the cold war, always had a poor analysis of the communist thinking, based on conspiratory thesis of world scale, with a complete disregard for the social, intellectual and political phenomena that generated a totalitarian will. Besides that, the anticommunist right's flirting with Fascism and Nazism worked as a blocking mechanism, in particular in the decade of 30, to their own ability to criticize the totalitarian system.
Until the Post-War period, only the Social-Democracy formulated critics to the communist system, with a spotlight on the German Social-Democracy (Kautsky) and to the books of the like of Popper criticizing history-cynicism and to the totalitarian thinking from the likes of Plato, Hegel and Marx. In the previous years, the Trotskyists, wanted all over the world by the Soviet Polices were hardly able to convince anyone of the reality - the machine of massacres in which the USSR had become. It is important to highlight that even the most violently anti-soviet right did not accept the reality of the concentration camp, and only in the post-war during the debates caused by the revelations of David Rousset and the Kravatchenko process, did people start having an idea of the concentration-nary soviet reality.
It can be said that, despite that the critics to communism made by the right were formulated long ago, that anticommunism is irrelevant, unless in a metaphysical sense, in other words, when it is made as a meditation regarding the inefficiencies of democracy. This is where I believe the "Left's" anticommunism might be more consequential, because it can be formulated outside the defense of privileges and the status quo, that almost always concentrates on the 20s anticommunism, that is the right's model of anticommunism, differently from that of the intellectuals of the cold war (Orwell, Koestler), that came from the left.
The existence of an anticommunism of interests (General Pinochet, Champallimaud, who's notorious disregard for living free or not, as long as you don't touch their money and their peace in the streets), was always the main reason that the liberal anticommunism (which was of actual principle and formulated critics to the system) didn't work to the left. When the genesis of totalitarianism is situated in outside ground, almost as a pure manifestation of "evil", the critic against communism is hardly able to not be conspiratory and of enforcement.
In a world of scarcity, where the resources are insufficient and very diversely distributed, democracy works in a conflicting and contradictory manner, being able to transform itself in a game, with groups of pressure and finally dis-aggregate in an open social war - this is where the totalitarian perversion inevitably assaults one of the sides, or both. The work of the Communist Party in our democracy is that: substitute (or in the portuguese case, of democratic initiation: stopping the creation), a political solidarity, based on citizenship and in the free game of rights and duties, for a conflict of groups and classes that assume the front of a "social" (by derogation of course! Because at the bottom of it, it is the politician - theirs, the totalitarian) that ends up reducing a country to "proletarians" and "bosses", "women", "intellectuals", small, medium and big, "reformed", etc. -- that transform the parties, from parties of opinion to parties of pure interest and, in the right's case, that reduces them to mere pressure groups, easily identifiable and removable.
This time of categorization in groups and classes, in the economy and in society, closes democracy in an alley with no exit, trapping it in a contradictory game of conflicts of interest in the social domain.
In reality, the natural parties of democracy - the groups or factions, because in a developed society there is necessarily differentiation and contradictory plurality - do not result of a genetic hierarchy, nor from a social, but from the flow of the diversity in culture, and they are, in the end, movements of opinion (including the symbolic representation of interests).
In the positioning, facing the existing, the natural parties of a democratic society are those who represent the conservation and the innovation, the conservatives and the partisans of change. I repeat: Both - affecting each other, calibrating their equilibrium in their contradictory discourse. If you speak of conservatives and innovators, it is because you refuse reactionaries and revolutionaries, in other words, all those who believe that society is not globally okay how it is - and in that refusal want to give it another meaning.
Democracies do not support a global thinking, under the belief that is will destroy its natural plurality by imposing it a meaning - a thought about every and everything. That is what the "left" has not been with its flirting with totalitarianism: to be modern and to move away from terror, it can only assume itself as a movement to laicize the society, meaning, free the citizens of the existence of anything that is not their right as individuals to auto-determine themselves, in relation to their wishes and possibilities. In the past, the "left" fought many times, the good fight, against the clergy.
The totalitarian conscious of the left has started from a set of ideas that have become dominant in the past century, and which their reach has visible negative effects today. Those ideas have as basis in the fundamental critique to societies of abundance, and to "consumer societies", associated to the critiques to Political Democracy, starting from the utopia and the so called "economical democracy", with the "hidden violence" of the capitalist system as a gospel, accompanied by the complete disregard to the open violence of the "real socialism". These ideas have been developed not only on the political thinking level, but all in psychology, sociology and in the set of the intellectual production by the left.
There is a need to affirm the priority in every political thought, of freedom and happiness, developing the old liberal concept that the only criteria to measure progress in societies is the justice of a policy and the "happiness of the larger number" which expresses itself, in political terms, in the democratic selection of what we want or don't want. Such means the abandoning of any Hegelian or Marxist concept of "alienation". Happiness only makes sense in subjective and individual criteria: any individual has the right to define what he understand to be and what it is to him happiness and proceed in consequence. The only limitation - if you can call it a limitation - is that the actions of Humans in relation with each other have to be of mutual consent.
--
Might remove and add small/big portion, might edit accordingly
Not everything is properly translated, it is long and late.
I skipped some irrelevant bits to those in these forums (as this article includes direct connections to my country and the history it has)
If you see something that doesn't make sense grammatically, let me know
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