WHY SOCIALISM IS SATANIC
When given a basic explanation of what socialism actually is, many Satanists will probably find themselves much less hostile to it and disgusted by it.
Socialism IS NOT the pure equal redistribution of all goods and income. It may involve the redistribution of substantial amounts of income and wealth, but this is more of a halo effect of the core of socialism.
Socialism ALSO IS NOT governmental bureaucracy administered from the top down by government executives. It may, however, involve a bit of this, like any other state.
SOCIALISM IS: A system based on workplaces seized, owned, and managed democratically by the people who work them. Out of these workplace councils form city councils and a national council which functions as the supreme body of the land, disrupting and replacing the capitalists’ state. Thus socialism is workers’ self-management in the workplace, a workers’ state federated therefrom, and whatever associated considerable changes in the laws and wealth distribution that the working majority might implement – changes that the working majority has previously been disallowed from implementing due to a narrowness of political choices created by the influence of the rich over politics, an influence now neutralized because the rich have lost the foundation of their power with the workers’ seizure of workplaces.
(Any major owners denied a vote by this process because they did not work can feel free to get a job like everyone else, and thereby regain their vote.)
Socialism does NOT mean that nobody has to work anymore. On the contrary, socialism is the rule of the working majority. Instead it means that all major economic institutions – the major banks, the major factories, the shipping zones, hospitals, power plants, offices, whatever – are property of the working majority. It means that your boss is now the working majority, which is quite different from your current bosses because it is made of people like you, who will be affected by the “management decisions” they impose just as much as you will. (Allow the implications of this to sink in.) Your previous managers may have been hardly different from the working class, but they were always helds accountable to a private owner. Truly, this will create the genuine self-rule imagined by democratic revolutionaries, never truly possible in any other system. Unless you are the most impractical of anarchists, this situation is probably more, not less, closer to your vision of a just and democratic society. Certainly it is a far cry from the Western stereotype of totalitarian Stalinist dictatorships.
It is worth noting that the USSR started out more or less fitting this definition of socialism, and the word “soviet” is actually Russian for “council,” alluding to the workers’ councils on which the Russian system was originally based. For reasons why the USSR degenerated from a workers’ state into a bureaucratic dictatorship, check the Recommended Reading section.
Personal Liberty and the Left
Some Satanists disparage Leftism as anti-individualist and anti-egoistic. If we look to one of leftism’s most crucial figures, Karl Marx, we find that his philosophies are not in opposition to egoism but are practically entirely founded on it. In his Notes of 1844 he wrote “Authentic common life arises not through reflection; rather it comes about from the need and egoism of individuals, that is, immediately from the activation of their very existence.”
For Satanists, the point of Leftism is not primarily a moral obligation to help others, to cut down on our already-meager bank accounts in order to donate to others. In fact that sounds identical to what we have to do in capitalism, except we tend to donate to shareholders more than to hobos. The point of Leftism for Satanists is taking more freedom and wealth for ourselves. The right-wing Satanists say “Greed is good!” and I see no reason we shouldn’t say the same thing. We simply carry it out differently.
Somehow capitalism has gained for itself the status of liberty’s champion. Even the word “libertarian” is assumed to be a pro-market position, besides simply a statement on civil rights. This is ironic, because the “freedom of completely unrestricted trade” permitted by capitalism is in reality not so “free” for most of us, for whom it simply means an “agreement” to rent ourselves out like sharecroppers, not at gunpoint but at hunger-point.
If a state federated from workplaces seized by their employees took over, the change in our daily lives would be dramatic. Marx wrote in The German Ideology that “the reality that communism creates is the actual basis for making it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals.” In other words, literally everything will be the product of the fact that a human being chose to make it so. The boundaries of our possibilities would no longer be uncritically inherited from the dead weight of tradition, nor from situations of “necessity” created by capitalism's artificial scarcity of resources, nor from the continual enslavement to meeting the standards of competition (on the levels of the individual, the firm, the nation, etc.).
The section of our lives in which we are locked away carrying out rote tasks at work – the productive sphere – would diminish considerably in favor of that part of our lives in which we are free to spend the fruits of our labor as we please – the sphere of consumption. But with a massive increase in free time, our free time would become something greater than merely consumption. We would actually have the time and energy, on a mass scale, to be free to create and re-create the world around us as we please. We would finally have the free time, and a say in the use of large-scale resources, required for paving new roads of invention and innovation in the scientific world, or saturating the world with artistic beauty. We could be truly ambitious with the resources freed up from the massive weight of the rich – bio-engineering against diseases and against old age itself, a worldwide zero-fossil fuel electricity grid, an end to world hunger, cities designed to have both economic sense and the beauty of fantasy, reaching out into the stars, and new possibilities in communication, transporation, medicine and entertainment which we have yet to imagine. Furthermore, with more power over our workplaces, the difference between our working lives and our more personally selected creativity could break down.
The world would be what it was because that is how we decided it should be, with nothing unconsciously inherited, except perhaps for our own bodies – and someday we could decide if we would like to change those considerably, as well. We would finally overcome that dreaded “lot in life” we can never seem to change, what Marx summarized as “the difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him.”
Democracy
The original democratic project was not a bad idea. Actually it is a perfect idea. The problem with democracy is not that, in its implementation, we have seen its failure to work. The problem with democracy is that it has never been fully implemented – it has never been applied to our real lives, our economic lives. The will of the majority is only brought to bear on a very narrow choice of candidates who share the same fundamental priorities. Seldom are actual policy decisions of significance put up to vote. Never are society’s spending priorities put up to national vote, and never are workers offered democratic workplace control by management, other than questions about how to increase productivity (for management’s profit). A democracy lived only every four years is a farce. True democracy must be lived every day, from the workplace on up to the government executive.
Some people argue that democracy stifles the individual, and refuses to let the truly most meritorious people rise to the top. However, it is actually the best testing ground of a leader’s character. The pathetic tendencies in mainstream politics such as public image worship stem from the fact that our “democracy” is so corporatized, and therefore so distant from actually offering us positions which express our needs and desires, that it has no option other than to be a shallow circus.
In a real democracy with real possibilities, which would include sovereignty over the decisive economic institutions, bullshit artists would find themselves out of a job. Democracy is the true survival of the fittest. It requires people to defend their ideas with knowledge and reasoning, and often to have the character to persist in their convictions despite the derision of the majority. In democracy you cannot simply crush your opposition with force -- force being something that any fool can obtain by a series of accidents. In democracy you defeat your opposition by truly having a superior understanding of the truth about humanity, the economy, geopolitics, etc., and by articulating proposals which better lead to the satisfaction of those needs and problems in a way that is publicly convincing. Open debate between civilians or political figures may be the best testing ground of all for determining who is truly worthy of leadership.
Thomas Jefferson wrote of a “natural aristocracy.” Democracy must always contain this. Humanity always has leaders – what we do not need is rulers. The "Satanic elite" in socialism would not be people who rule by force or wealth, but people who point the way forward with ideas, to other people who are formally, but not essentially, their equals. However, socialist democracy would also unleash the stifled potential of huge amounts of people, perhaps revealing that the "difference in quality" between people was as often a matter of circumstance as a matter of nature.
I hope that clears a few things up. That probably puts the whole "OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST!!1" hysteria in a different light.
Socialism IS NOT the pure equal redistribution of all goods and income. It may involve the redistribution of substantial amounts of income and wealth, but this is more of a halo effect of the core of socialism.
Socialism ALSO IS NOT governmental bureaucracy administered from the top down by government executives. It may, however, involve a bit of this, like any other state.
SOCIALISM IS: A system based on workplaces seized, owned, and managed democratically by the people who work them. Out of these workplace councils form city councils and a national council which functions as the supreme body of the land, disrupting and replacing the capitalists’ state. Thus socialism is workers’ self-management in the workplace, a workers’ state federated therefrom, and whatever associated considerable changes in the laws and wealth distribution that the working majority might implement – changes that the working majority has previously been disallowed from implementing due to a narrowness of political choices created by the influence of the rich over politics, an influence now neutralized because the rich have lost the foundation of their power with the workers’ seizure of workplaces.
(Any major owners denied a vote by this process because they did not work can feel free to get a job like everyone else, and thereby regain their vote.)
Socialism does NOT mean that nobody has to work anymore. On the contrary, socialism is the rule of the working majority. Instead it means that all major economic institutions – the major banks, the major factories, the shipping zones, hospitals, power plants, offices, whatever – are property of the working majority. It means that your boss is now the working majority, which is quite different from your current bosses because it is made of people like you, who will be affected by the “management decisions” they impose just as much as you will. (Allow the implications of this to sink in.) Your previous managers may have been hardly different from the working class, but they were always helds accountable to a private owner. Truly, this will create the genuine self-rule imagined by democratic revolutionaries, never truly possible in any other system. Unless you are the most impractical of anarchists, this situation is probably more, not less, closer to your vision of a just and democratic society. Certainly it is a far cry from the Western stereotype of totalitarian Stalinist dictatorships.
It is worth noting that the USSR started out more or less fitting this definition of socialism, and the word “soviet” is actually Russian for “council,” alluding to the workers’ councils on which the Russian system was originally based. For reasons why the USSR degenerated from a workers’ state into a bureaucratic dictatorship, check the Recommended Reading section.
Personal Liberty and the Left
Some Satanists disparage Leftism as anti-individualist and anti-egoistic. If we look to one of leftism’s most crucial figures, Karl Marx, we find that his philosophies are not in opposition to egoism but are practically entirely founded on it. In his Notes of 1844 he wrote “Authentic common life arises not through reflection; rather it comes about from the need and egoism of individuals, that is, immediately from the activation of their very existence.”
For Satanists, the point of Leftism is not primarily a moral obligation to help others, to cut down on our already-meager bank accounts in order to donate to others. In fact that sounds identical to what we have to do in capitalism, except we tend to donate to shareholders more than to hobos. The point of Leftism for Satanists is taking more freedom and wealth for ourselves. The right-wing Satanists say “Greed is good!” and I see no reason we shouldn’t say the same thing. We simply carry it out differently.
Somehow capitalism has gained for itself the status of liberty’s champion. Even the word “libertarian” is assumed to be a pro-market position, besides simply a statement on civil rights. This is ironic, because the “freedom of completely unrestricted trade” permitted by capitalism is in reality not so “free” for most of us, for whom it simply means an “agreement” to rent ourselves out like sharecroppers, not at gunpoint but at hunger-point.
If a state federated from workplaces seized by their employees took over, the change in our daily lives would be dramatic. Marx wrote in The German Ideology that “the reality that communism creates is the actual basis for making it impossible that anything should exist independently of individuals.” In other words, literally everything will be the product of the fact that a human being chose to make it so. The boundaries of our possibilities would no longer be uncritically inherited from the dead weight of tradition, nor from situations of “necessity” created by capitalism's artificial scarcity of resources, nor from the continual enslavement to meeting the standards of competition (on the levels of the individual, the firm, the nation, etc.).
The section of our lives in which we are locked away carrying out rote tasks at work – the productive sphere – would diminish considerably in favor of that part of our lives in which we are free to spend the fruits of our labor as we please – the sphere of consumption. But with a massive increase in free time, our free time would become something greater than merely consumption. We would actually have the time and energy, on a mass scale, to be free to create and re-create the world around us as we please. We would finally have the free time, and a say in the use of large-scale resources, required for paving new roads of invention and innovation in the scientific world, or saturating the world with artistic beauty. We could be truly ambitious with the resources freed up from the massive weight of the rich – bio-engineering against diseases and against old age itself, a worldwide zero-fossil fuel electricity grid, an end to world hunger, cities designed to have both economic sense and the beauty of fantasy, reaching out into the stars, and new possibilities in communication, transporation, medicine and entertainment which we have yet to imagine. Furthermore, with more power over our workplaces, the difference between our working lives and our more personally selected creativity could break down.
The world would be what it was because that is how we decided it should be, with nothing unconsciously inherited, except perhaps for our own bodies – and someday we could decide if we would like to change those considerably, as well. We would finally overcome that dreaded “lot in life” we can never seem to change, what Marx summarized as “the difference between the individual as a person and what is accidental to him.”
Democracy
The original democratic project was not a bad idea. Actually it is a perfect idea. The problem with democracy is not that, in its implementation, we have seen its failure to work. The problem with democracy is that it has never been fully implemented – it has never been applied to our real lives, our economic lives. The will of the majority is only brought to bear on a very narrow choice of candidates who share the same fundamental priorities. Seldom are actual policy decisions of significance put up to vote. Never are society’s spending priorities put up to national vote, and never are workers offered democratic workplace control by management, other than questions about how to increase productivity (for management’s profit). A democracy lived only every four years is a farce. True democracy must be lived every day, from the workplace on up to the government executive.
Some people argue that democracy stifles the individual, and refuses to let the truly most meritorious people rise to the top. However, it is actually the best testing ground of a leader’s character. The pathetic tendencies in mainstream politics such as public image worship stem from the fact that our “democracy” is so corporatized, and therefore so distant from actually offering us positions which express our needs and desires, that it has no option other than to be a shallow circus.
In a real democracy with real possibilities, which would include sovereignty over the decisive economic institutions, bullshit artists would find themselves out of a job. Democracy is the true survival of the fittest. It requires people to defend their ideas with knowledge and reasoning, and often to have the character to persist in their convictions despite the derision of the majority. In democracy you cannot simply crush your opposition with force -- force being something that any fool can obtain by a series of accidents. In democracy you defeat your opposition by truly having a superior understanding of the truth about humanity, the economy, geopolitics, etc., and by articulating proposals which better lead to the satisfaction of those needs and problems in a way that is publicly convincing. Open debate between civilians or political figures may be the best testing ground of all for determining who is truly worthy of leadership.
Thomas Jefferson wrote of a “natural aristocracy.” Democracy must always contain this. Humanity always has leaders – what we do not need is rulers. The "Satanic elite" in socialism would not be people who rule by force or wealth, but people who point the way forward with ideas, to other people who are formally, but not essentially, their equals. However, socialist democracy would also unleash the stifled potential of huge amounts of people, perhaps revealing that the "difference in quality" between people was as often a matter of circumstance as a matter of nature.
I hope that clears a few things up. That probably puts the whole "OBAMA IS A SOCIALIST!!1" hysteria in a different light.
