Communism Doesn’t Go Away Until Egalitarianism Dies: The Works of David Stove 3

We at last meet Francois Babeuf, the impetus behind Stove’s first essay in his book On Enlightenment. Our story picks up just after The Terror—i.e., the inevitable point in every leftist purity spiral in which the left convinces itself Peace On Earth begins once the right people are killed. Stove:

The Revolution had stopped inexcusably short of abolishing inequality, [Babeuf] said, because it had not abolished private property. To take that last but most essential step, and to install the reign of universal equality forever, Babeuf and a few friends secretly formed what they called “The Conspiracy of the Equals.” But they were arrested and tried, and guillotined in 1797.

Babeuf’s Conspiracy of the Equals demanded absolute equality of all persons. They opened their Manifesto with a sincere pained shout: “EQUALITY! The first wish of nature, the first need of man, the first bond of all legitimate association!” The salmon in nature and in the jaws of the bear wishes with them. But not the bear. Failure to understand that this brutal inequality can never be eliminated is what separates egalitarians from realists. Just ask PETA.

The Conspiracy insisted near-Equality in people existed in fact. They said “all have the same faculties and the same needs”. They weren’t Woke, though, and allowed a fraction of Reality to shine through: “Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex.” We now have grown men pretending to be baby girls and asking for diaper changes. Here is a depressing thread of 40-something women who believe they can still have kids. You will know many, many other examples.

Here is the key. The Conspiracy deduced what “EQUALITY!” meant, what it really meant: that is, “…the community of property! No more individual property in land: the land belongs to no one. We demand, we want, the common enjoyment of the fruits of the land: the fruits belong to all.” Their italics.

Community of property was the first, and not the last, name communism flourished under. We don’t use Utopia any more, the word, or communism or Marxism (Stove: “Marxism is simply egalitarianism plus intellectual pretensions.”). We say Equity or rights. All these words are all equivalent in spirit.

One problem for Equity is that the state in which nobody owns anything is an impossibility, a delusion caused by worship of the theory of Equality. Adoration of theory is indeed the same thing that happens in The Science (which you must Follow). Men cling to bad theory in spite of all evidence, because the theories are so beautiful. And what could be more beautiful than Utopia?

Still, it is possible to imagine forcing a “level playing field.” Emphasis on forcing. The Conspiracy knew that for Equity/community-of-property to instituted there would be pain: “Let the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains.” Nothing can be allowed to stand in the way of paradise. Equality is thus rightly called the Great Leveler. Any and all distinctions must be wiped out or blessed Equity can never be reached.

Here is a prime example of the unbearable brightness of Theory: “The day after this real revolution, [the angry critics will] say with astonishment: What? Common happiness was so easy to obtain? All we had to do was want it?”

The Conspiracy called their efforts to Level All Things—and stop me if you’ve heard this one before—a  “holy enterprise”. All we have to do is want it.

When I used the word impossible, I meant it in its strictest sense. There is no possible way, with one sole exception, to create the utopia of Equity. And that is to leave only one sole standing. That one soul left alive would by definition be equal to all others. Leave two alive? Equity vanishes. With two people, there are necessarily ineradicable differences. With millions or billions? The very idea of Equality, or Equity, should be laughable, a black joke. Yet, as Stove says, “It was the hunger for equality, at any cost whatever, and that hunger alone, which made Marxism [Equity] formidable.”

Stove makes the point many times — and I absolutely insist we memorize this — “Even with communists, community of property is not an axiom: it is a theorem, derived from the moral axiom of equality.” It is not that community of property (i.e. communism) is always the first theorem deduced once a person is in the grip of “egalitarian fever”, but it always is eventually. We have seen it many times. Stove on the most memorable instance:

The civil and international war in Russia, between 1917 and 1921, was a turning-point in European history for this reason: for the first time, the egalitarian side in a war won. This was an omen uniquely appalling; and ensuing events have fully lived up to what the omen portended.

The victorious communists embarked at once on a campaign against privilege: a campaign carried on not only in Russia, but all over the inhabited earth; a campaign against privilege of every kind whatever, conducted by whatever means—military, political, or (as they say) “educational”—were judged most appropriate. How much success this campaign has enjoyed, it cannot by now be necessary to state.

Nor can it be necessary to remind the reader that the success of this campaign has necessitated an altogether unprecedented amount of bloodshed, deportation, torture, arbitrary imprisonment, forced labor, starvation, and terror.

The two mistakes we make are to assume the egalitarian impulse that inevitably leads to blood has been quelled because the Soviet system collapsed, or that the impulse only applies to wealth. It always and eventually comes back to wealth, as we see unfolding in front of us today (“Let’s tax unrealized gains”, “Everybody has a right to this, that, and the other thing”, “Mandate equal opportunity”, etc.). But it corrodes thought in all areas of human endeavor, including such base things as attractiveness, sexual reproduction, and intellectual achievement. Egalitarianism is why we have men in dresses insisting they are “really” women. It is why our rulers enjoy open borders, because all people are “the same”.

Stove answered why the Woke always increases (though he did not know this word):

By now, no one is ignorant of these horrors [of Twentieth Century communism], and everyone knows well enough that they were the result of the most determined effort ever made to give the world what it had yearned for so deeply and so long: equality. But has this knowledge done anything to cool the world’s ardor for equality? No, nothing whatever, not anywhere, and least of all in the free countries. Quite the contrary in fact: exactly as in all the earlier cases, the more destructive egalitarianism has shown itself to be, both of life and of culture, the stronger and more widespread has the passion for equality become.

I will give three illustrations of this fact, all drawn from the free countries in the last few decades. First, there has come into existence a term of bitter opprobrium which is entirely new: “élitism.” Only one word, and yet, given the recency and the circumstances of its birth, what volumes its currency speaks! Second, the one feature of communist societies which everyone in the free countries now unites in detesting is their inequality, economic and other. Yet that is the one hopeful feature which they possess! Third, it is now assumed, more widely than ever before, that it is a duty of government to redress every under-privilege whatever; while at the same time, of course, in accordance with de Tocqueville’s law, new forms of under- privilege are discovered, or invented, every day.

Stove rightly says that Equality is “an idea unworthy of an intelligent child of eight”, so it is of special interest to discern the causes of Equality.

What are the psychological roots of the hunger for equality? They cannot be roots which are universal and irresistible in human beings; the counter-example of antiquity shows that. At the same time, they must be roots which go deep, and spread wide; medieval and modern history prove that. But what are they?

The obvious answer, and hence the answer which has most often been given, is this: envy, assisted by vanity and ambition. These are certainly things which, without being universal, go deep enough and are widespread enough to fill the bill, and I think that in fact this answer is not far wrong. But it cannot be the whole story, because many of the most fanatical egalitarians (Marx, Bakunin, and Lenin, for example) while possessing a full share of vanity and ambition, have been unusually free from envy.

Here, Stove says, is the real answer:

Now, I ask you, the reader, to perform a small experiment in introspection, if you are an egalitarian. First try to form a mental picture—any picture will do—of the happy future in which everyone is going to be equal. You find that “nothing comes to mind,” as they say? Don’t worry: everyone experiences the very same difficulty. But now try to form a mental picture of the overthrow of privilege which is, we all agree, a necessary preliminary to that future. Now the pictures come easily enough—don’t they?—and vivid ones at that. A hundred years ago they would have been pictures of bomb-throwing, hammers, sickles, and so on; but in your picture the technology will no doubt be more sophisticated, owing to the general progress of humanity. There is, however, one element in all these pictures which is invariant: namely, suffering inflicted on some defender of established privilege, whether it be a policeman, soldier, head of state, priest, or whatever.

I suggest therefore, that the missing piece in the psychology of egalitarianism is bloodthirstiness. Marx, Bakunin, and Lenin made up for their deficiency in envy by an unusually strong appetite for people being killed.

All true egalitarians know “an indefinite ocean of blood lay between them and their goal of equality; and it is agreed on all hands that this knowledge did not diminish [in Lenin etc.], in the smallest imaginable degree, their enthusiasm for that goal.”

Nor is this lust diminished in our modern egalitarians.

Next time we answer: should Equality be proscribed?

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