Translated by D. Klimenko

Our modern capitalist society is full of blatant injustices. This is not a secret, and there are not many zealots of the “invisible hand” who will deny the obvious evils of capitalism. Moreover, these vices are discussed and condemned, and not only by working men and clerks in their factory canteens and offices, but also by business tycoons with gold pins in their ties and cufflinks on their sleeves. Here, for example, is an article from the BBC Russian Service:

“Capitalism, as we know it, has outlived its time. It’s time for the rich to share, to pay more taxes, and for businesses to prioritize the common good rather than maximizing profits. Otherwise a revolution is coming.

These are not slogans from a leaflet of militant Marxists [obviously, the author mistook Marxists, that is, revolutionaries armed with scientific theory, with socialists—these lapdogs of bourgeois politics.—R.O.]. These are quotes from recent speeches by billionaires, bankers and economists. The pharaohs and priests of capitalism suddenly began to speak with one voice about its reform. And they don’t mince words.”

The author of the article cites eloquent statistics:

“Until half a century ago, a tiny elite of wealthy Americans (0.1% of the population) controlled 7% of the wealth in the largest economy on the planet. And now it’s already 20%. Overall, in the US, Europe and China, which account for two-thirds of the global economy, 10% of the population owns 70% of all assets. Almost all the change ended up in the pockets of the middle class, which makes up 40% of the inhabitants of these countries. The rest—that is, every second person—have to be content with the crumbs from their table: they have at their disposal only 2% of the total wealth. And the further, the more this concentration of money, land and property in the hands of an entrenched handful of wealthy citizens accelerates. The vast majority, on the other hand, have had their incomes effectively frozen since the financial crisis ten years ago.”

Of course, these statistics do not reflect the cultural and spiritual squalor in which the so-called middle class vegetates, not to mention its extremely precarious position within the urban food chain. We can say that from a purely psychological point of view, being poor is easier: when you live in poverty from birth, you get used to it and adapt. But when you have “status”: a house, a car, fancy gadgets (all on credit, of course) and then suddenly, during another market crisis, you—so successful and self-actualized—find yourself thrown out into the street, being unable to pay back the credits… Some people prefer a noose.

Nevertheless, the oligarchs consider the “middle class,” i.e., well-fed lackeys and small owners dreaming of growing into large ones, their main support, and they say it openly:

“The middle class is shrinking and society is polarizing. It was much easier when the middle class was growing and voted for reforms that opened up the economy and allowed the fruits of economic growth to be distributed more evenly,” the BBC journalist quoted Boone, the chief economist at the OECD.

The World Bank chief economist Goldberg echoes a similar point:

“Once the gap between rich and poor becomes too large, a threat appears. We remember the French Revolution, the October Revolution. Popular unrest is on the way, and we are already seeing it [meaning the ‘yellow vest’ protests in France—R.O.].”

It is noteworthy that the French bourgeois revolution is equated with the October socialist revolution. The oligarchy forgot that it was the French bourgeois revolution that put an end to the remnants of feudalism in Europe, allowing the third estate to move into the palaces of kings and become a new aristocracy, not by blood, but by purse. Today’s oligarchs have no gratitude whatsoever towards Danton, Robespierre, Marat and other revolutionaries who laid down their lives for the triumph of bourgeois freedoms. For them they are extremist radicals, bloodthirsty maniacs; the executed Louis XVI is closer and dearer to them.

To prevent the mob from rebelling, “business, for its part, must fork out money to solve the problems that force people to vote for opponents of capitalism.” In short, you need to throw off the fatter scraps from the master’s table, and everything will be fine.

At the end, the words of billionaire Dalio, who is somewhat concerned about the global situation, are quoted:

“We have reached a critical point, beyond which everything will depend on our ability to reach an agreement. We have enough resources to sort out problems, both fix inequality and increase productivity, so that the common wealth was growing and there was something to share.

However, I am afraid that the parties will take irreconcilable positions and as a result either capitalism will be abandoned altogether, or it will never be reformed, since the far right will fight to preserve it unchanged, and the far left will fight to completely scrap it… Or reasonable people will be able to change the system so that it works for the benefit of the majority.”

This is an article from 2019. As you might guess, “reasonable people” did not change the system. The rich continue to get richer, the poor continue to get poorer, despite the care of bankers and their tame economists. And the world has become even closer to the third world war, as the uncrowned emperors of the American credit-colonial empire feel a threat to their dominance.

Capitalism continues to rot safely; the stench of this rot sometimes reaches the beau monde and it betrays its reaction. Thus, in the same 2019, the film Joker caused a wide resonance. Under the guise of superhero escapism, a sharp social drama is presented, the apotheosis of which is a bloody riot of the mob, an illustration of what happens when “the gap between rich and poor becomes too wide.” Joker was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Picture category. The Korean drama with the self-explanatory title Parasite, which also won an Oscar, caused no less discussion. The attention of the COVID-19 era viewers was captured by the Korean series The Squid Game, where poor people, like gladiators, tore each other’s throats for the sake of money for the amusement of the rich public. Triangle of Sadness paints a vivid picture of the class stratification using the passengers on a luxury yacht as an example: the well-fed and arrogant rich talk about “all people being equal,” while the ship’s servants obsequiously nod and grovel before them…

Gone are the days when the bourgeoisie was terrified of any criticism of capitalism. In the last century, Charlie Chaplin was persecuted in the press and called “red” for his films, which were ideologically toothless but demonstrated the unsightly sides of capitalism. Today, films that demonstrate the ugliness of capitalism much more harshly receive golden Oscars… A paradox? Not really. After all, all this criticism ends with one main conclusion—there is no alternative to capitalism. Communism? Utopia! And all attempts to bring this utopia to life only led to a deterioration in life, terror and totalitarianism. As the Canadian writer and psychologist Jordan Peterson, popular in the West, put it, although capitalism produces wealth and inequality, all other systems produce only inequality. In fact, “inequality and hierarchies are inevitable since all people are different, what matters is that this inequality was not excessive.”

Bourgeois ideologists have created a whole bunch of theories, concepts, ideologies and ideas in order to prove to the robbed and humiliated plebs that capitalism is a “fundamentally solid system,” and the denial of this system is a terrible crime against society and nature itself. Professors from the lecterns, journalists from the pages of “reputable publications”, business coaches and other grifters explain to the victims of the next bursting financial bubble that the benefit of the capitalist is a benefit for the whole society, that today the capitalist will do well for himself, and tomorrow—for everyone else. The thirst for profit drives progress. So, fellow citizens, do not stop the capitalist from lining his pockets and do not complain if he “optimizes” your salary to the rations of an ancient slave…

Naturally, in order for this propaganda compost to be well absorbed into the brains of the proletarians, these brains must be thoroughly liquefied. After all, Capital: Critique of Political Economy has existed and been freely distributed for more than a century and a half, where, with all scientific rigor, all the main arguments of the adherents of capitalism are thoroughly refuted and an answer is given to the question of where wealth and poverty come from and why the mass of the people are forced to hunch all their lives for the “living wage” while an insignificant handful bathes in luxury. 175 years since Manifesto of the Communist Party was written—its contents are also available to anyone with Internet access. Let alone the experience of the USSR with its universal, accessible and high-quality education, medicine, guaranteed housing for every citizen without rent and with penny “utilities”…

It can be said without exaggeration that the most important condition for preserving the capitalist order is the idiotization of the masses. After all, only an idiot can be convinced that market anarchy—when store shelves are stocked with food and entire blocks of new buildings stand empty while millions of people are malnourished and/or homeless—is the most effective form of social organization. How else can we call a person, if not an idiot, when neither the two world wars, unleashed by the imperialists, nor the threat of the third one can shake their faith in the rationality of capitalism? Only an idiot is not prompted by any economic crises, “great depressions,” man-made disasters and tragedies to heed the call of the communists to overthrow the parasitic class of financial aristocracy and begin to build a new society without crises and world wars. How else, if not idiots, can we call the voters who, having brought yet another swindler and thief into power, still continue to believe in the goodness of democratic procedures? Look, in the neighboring once fraternal republic, six presidents have changed and each time people admit that the new president is many times worse than the previous one, but, like gambling addicts, they are sure that the seventh time they will definitely make the “right” choice! And at the same time they are also proud that they have a democracy, unlike the “authoritarian Russia” with its one long-serving president! The French, who have been fighting strikes for three hundred years, not realizing that trade unionism will not save them from the oppression of capital, can be called no less idiots. In the countries of Latin America, starting from the 20th century, there has been a leapfrog of left and right governments: the left comes on the slogans of justice and begin to inflate the “social system,” the capitalists respond to this with a rise in prices, the left government runs out of money and is replaced by the right, promising to “restore order in the country”; the right harshly cuts back on social services, this causes mass discontent, the left regains popularity, comes to power… The circle closes. In the end, whether under right-wing or left-wing governments, capitalists quietly exploit the masses, and all the masses can think of is to vote for another populist! It can be stated that all the peoples of capitalist states suffer from some form of idiocy.

A critical reader might say: “Ah, so everyone who doesn’t share your communist views is an idiot!” No, we do not think everyone who, for one reason or another, did not come to communism, is an idiot. But those who consciously reject Marxism in order to defend the capitalist order, from which they themselves suffer, are hard not to call idiots.

A leftist opponent may object: “It’s not a matter of idiocy, but class interests. Small owners support capitalism because they dream of becoming large owners. Proletarians are under the ideological influence of bourgeois propaganda. Their class consciousness is sleeping, and the communists must awaken it, and considering proletarians idiots is intellectual arrogance.” What can I say? Lenin did not shy away from using harsh expressions:

“The slave who drools when smugly describing the delights of slavish existence and who goes into ecstasies over his good and kind master is a grovelling boor.”

However, there is a difference between an ordinary serf and an idiot: if a serf understands his servile position and considers it quite beneficial for himself, then an idiot, being essentially a serf, does not recognize himself as such, considering himself a “free citizen of a free state.”

It’s easy to say, “class consciousness.” However, current conditions require much more from communists than being content with definitions and quotes from the classics of Marxism. The dogmatists propose to follow the easy path of schematism that the CPSU followed, forgetting that this path has ultimately led to complete ideological degradation and degeneration of party members and representatives of academic Marxism. In the era of open class struggle and revolutionary uprisings, there was no need to focus on issues of class consciousness. Now however, when we live in an era of temporary defeat of the forces of communism, we must answer the question: why do formally educated proletarians, having access to the works of the classics of Marxism and their popularizers, show low receptivity to communism? What changed?

A popular point of view is that modern proletarians have acquired property, become bourgeoisiefied, and now have something to lose, in contrast to the proletarians of the 19th century, who had “nothing to lose but their chains.” But wait, in the United States there are millions of homeless people, inhabitants of slums, ghettos and trailer “towns”—completely down and out people who definitely have nothing to lose. Nevertheless, there is no special support for local communists on their part. Most African countries are poor or extremely poor, but there is no widespread revolutionary movement either. In general, in any bourgeois society (with the possible exception of dwarf rentier states like Switzerland) there are always plenty of poor people who live not much better than the workers of Marx’s era. We have to admit that there is no direct connection between the property status of the proletarians and their revolutionary spirit. Yes, a sharp deterioration in the financial situation can cause an outbreak of discontent among the proletarians, which could potentially strengthen the position of the communists, provided that they will be able to take advantage of the situation wisely. But to claim that all proletarians have become bourgeoisiefied, having gained access to the benefits of civilization, and therefore support the capitalists, is an extremely superficial point of view.

What’s the matter? Well, the fact is that the world bourgeoisie took into account the experience of socialist revolutions and developed a set of “preventive measures”. It realized that in order to reliably guarantee the preservation of capitalist relations the intellectual development of the masses needs to be restricted.

So, let’s try to take a closer look at idiots and the concept of idiocy in general.

The word “idiot” is of Greek origin and is translated as “an individual, a private person; a layman, an unskilled, ignorant person.” People who took no part in public life and did not participate in the popular assembly of the polis were called idiots; today such people are called more tolerantly “apolitical.” Dostoevsky significantly ennobled the image of an idiot in his eponymous novel, portraying Prince Myshkin as a naive and unadapted to life, but a highly moral person who is rejected by society because of his spiritual purity. Another famous literary image of an idiot is the soldier Svejk. He demonstrates exaggerated zeal and patriotism, a willingness to lay down his life for the “sovereign-emperor,” for which he is rightly defined by those around him as a numbskull and certified idiot. However, despite all his zeal, Svejk time after time, “completely by accident,” avoids fulfilling his “patriotic duty” to die for the sake of the interests of German imperialism, and eventually getting to the front, surrenders to the Russians. Thus, the Prague dog dealer Svejk turns out to be not an idiot, but a very prudent person, unlike the millions of Germans, French, English and Russians who valiantly turned themselves into mincemeat so that a handful of rich people could line their pockets. There is another, much less popular image of an idiot: the mayor Ugryum-Burcheev from Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel The History of a Town. This character is narrow-minded and primitive to such an extent that he loses the ability to experience human feelings and passions: “It was a gaze as bright as steel, a gaze completely free from thought, and therefore inaccessible to either nuance or hesitations. Naked determination and nothing more.” He does not recognize reason and considers it his worst enemy, “entangling a person in a web of seduction and dangerous pickiness.” Saltykov-Shchedrin writes about idiots:

“Idiots are generally very dangerous, and not even because they are necessarily evil (for an idiot, malice or kindness are completely irrelevant qualities), but because they are alien to all considerations and always go ahead, as if the road on which they find themselves belongs exclusively to them alone. From a distance it may seem that these are people of strong, although severe, convictions, who consciously move towards an intended goal. However, one should not be deceived by this optical illusion. These are simply tightly plugged from all sides creatures who rush forward because they are not able to recognize themselves in connection with any kind of ordered phenomena.”

Thus, from the point of view of the satirist, it is the absence of thinking, inability to understand the structure of the world that is the essence of an idiot. I think this is a very useful observation. We can say that idiocy is an extreme form of ignorance.

In medicine, idiocy is defined as a congenital severe form of mental retardation, when a person is unable to speak and care for himself normally. But what to do with people who can talk and serve themselves just fine, who have an education, but at the same time speak utter nonsense, like, for example, Andrei Sakharov at the Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989? Or take the draft constitution of the USSR by the same Sakharov, what is it if not an example of a severe form of mental retardation? Not to mention the speeches of Novodvorskaya, Alekseeva, Latynina, Akhedzhakova, Svanidze, the writings of Mlechin, R. Medvedev, Astafiev, Aksenov, Rybakov and other democratic schizophrenics? Formally, from a medical point of view, all of them are completely healthy, they received the best Soviet education in the world, but in terms of the quality of thinking they are not very different from a drooling fool. And most importantly, they, unlike such a fool, are dangerous to society. It was not without reason that measures of “punitive” psychiatry were applied to such characters. V.A. Podguzov wrote:

“History rejects a one-sided approach to idiocy as a congenital abnormality of the brain and testifies that in relation to idiots formed by social conditions, i.e., religious fundamentalists, alcoholics, democrats, drug addicts and the like, society, even Western society, at various stages of its development, pursued a policy of forced isolation.

An idiot should be called not only someone who lacks the inclination to master algebra, but first of all someone who, having mastered it, created, for example, a hydrogen bomb, guided only by the consideration that they could do this work… faster than Oppenheimer, or in order to deflect the threat of persecution by the NKVD for their anti-Sovietism. In their memoirs, neither Sakharov nor Ginzburg reported any other motivation that forced them to create hydrogen weapons.”

And if in Soviet society the appearance of such idiots can be considered as a relic of the past (we will not dwell in detail on this issue, which requires a separate analysis), then under capitalism the “production” of idiots is put on stream.

All available tools are used for these purposes. First of all, there is the education system, especially its humanitarian area. In general, the modern bourgeois education system is considered, not without reason, a system of brainwashing. The task of the school is to educate not a harmoniously developed personality, but a “competent consumer.” The teacher is placed by the state in the role of a clerk, a bureaucrat whose task is to ensure accountability and the results of the Unified State Exam. How well the students have learned the material is of little importance, even if they remain ignoramuses altogether—this is not the teacher’s problem. For example, in the USA—the citadel of imperialism—more than 40 million people cannot read and write, this is over 10% of the country’s population! It could seem that the bourgeoisie should be interested in educated workers, but no. In general, American schools are the most prominent example of idiotization, which is well illustrated by American TV shows about teenagers, where the best students—“nerds”—are portrayed as outcasts and objects of ridicule, and stupid jocks-basketball players as everyone’s darlings.

Next come the universities. While school teachers, as a rule, shy away from politics, believing that it has no place in school, the university professors actively indoctrinate students with liberal market ideology. It is no secret that most universities—especially “prestigious” ones that receive foreign grants— profess liberal values ​​and choose their teaching staff accordingly.

From the above, however, it does not follow that bourgeois education is pure evil. A bourgeois school or university, albeit badly, fills the heads of students with basic knowledge, and communists are vitally interested in the masses being able to read, write, and work with information. Communists cannot not blame teachers for the fact that they often approach educational issues formally and do not act as educators in the broad sense of the word, given the humiliated and poor situation they are in. But communists cannot tolerate passivity and want teachers—as educated people—to advocate social progress, and therefore take a pro-communist position. Only this way will they be able to free themselves from the shameful position of being an appendage to Unified State Exam tests, take a worthy position in society, and serve the interests of humanity, and not a handful of oligarchs.

The next level of brainwashing is the entertainment industry. Dumb movies and TV shows that play on the basest instincts of the crowd, Hollywood escapism, pornography, graphomaniac pulp fiction, time-killing computer games, schizophrenic theatrical productions, “paintings” painted with feces, and other miscarriages of “modern art.”

Next come the “honest and independent” media, all sorts of «popular science” and, finally, bourgeois scientists and the “scientific picture of the world” they propagandize. And we are talking here not only about history, sociology and other “humanities” that directly deny Marxism; “exact” sciences contribute no less to the decay of brains with their positivism, relativism and agnosticism. Unfortunately, among people who call themselves communists, the prevailing view is that the partisanship of science comes down to the deliberate manipulation of data to substantiate political ideas. In fact, the partisanship of the sciences lies in the methodology: bourgeois “science” is based on idealism, and true science is based on diamatics (dialectical materialism).

What is science? It must not be equated with a body of specialists, a community of scientists. Science is a developing system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and their consistent interrelations, called laws. The task of science is the search and formulation of the laws of being, nature, society and thinking, discovering the essence of a particular phenomenon or law and its interrelation with other laws, while relying on a solid methodological basis, without which any experiment is like a “study” of an elephant by blind men. Yes, in the past there were many cases when scientific discoveries were made by chance, at random, but to make discoveries of a higher order, and most importantly, to build them into a single consistent system of knowledge is possible only on the basis of scientific—that is, diamatic—methodology.

Truth is always concrete, objective and confirmed by the entire socio-historical practice of mankind, and science is a system of objective truths about the essence of phenomena and the laws of being, nature, society, and thinking.

Bourgeois “science” is, in fact, pseudoscience, because its task is not to establish the truth, but to conceal it, not to serve progress, but to serve the interests of the oligarchs, receiving grants from them. It does not matter whether a researcher acts in accordance with the social mandate of the oligarchy consciously or not, for money or for free. If they do not stand for social progress, for communism, if they do not strive to use their knowledge for the benefit of society, then they are already objectively on the side of the bourgeoisie. I discussed this in more detail in the articles “On the Partisanship of Science” and “On the Partisanship of Popular Science.”

Thus, with the help of the education system, entertainment industry, media, so-called scientific picture of the world and propaganda of liberalism, nationalism, democracy and religion, the process of idiotization of the population is underway. From a very young age, people’s normal intellectual development is hindered by instilling illogicalisms such as “socially responsible business.” For this purpose, empirical data provided by such pseudo-scientific disciplines as sociology, psychology and marketing is actively used. These disciplines are excellent assistants in the subjugation of the masses, because they help to grope for those springs in the psyche of people, by pressing on which the desired effect can be achieved.

But it should be understood that the oligarchs themselves and their ideological lackeys are by no means some kind of sophisticated puppet masters, there are also a lot of idiots who believe in various anti-scientific nonsense among them. Of course, the oligarchy tries to maintain intellectual superiority over the masses by sending its offspring to prestigious and expensive universities such as Cambridge or Oxford. But formal prestige and high cost are not yet a guarantee of quality education. After all, professors for these institutions come not from Mars; they themselves are a product of the bourgeois education system, with all that it entails. Professors simply provide “educational services,” and whether a child actually learns anything is not their concern. And these children themselves are not at all eager to learn. Why? Well, success in the form of dad’s business is already in their hands, and all management work is done by managers, what else does one need? Not to mention that representatives of the “golden youth” are known for their addiction to alcohol, drugs and other harmful practices. In short, the bourgeoisie itself is poisoned by its own poison, and with each new generation of oligarchs there comes a natural, almost biological degeneration, similar to that of the pharaohs or Habsburgs.

Finally, alongside the purposeful process of idiotization, there is also a natural one, so to speak. Under capitalism a person is constantly forced to engage in tiresome competition, to fight for a “place under the sun,” and to work at a hateful and sometimes humiliating job for the sake of earning money. As a result, proletarians simply have neither the time nor the mental strength for intellectual development. And that which does not develop inevitably degrades…

The question may arise: what to do? If capitalism makes everyone idiots, is it unstoppable?

Well, the situation is not as bad as it seems. Firstly, no matter what anyone says, it is impossible to turn absolutely everyone into idiots. There are quite a lot of people who are outraged by the injustice around them and see how poorly and wastefully capital manages the planet’s resources. Such people start searching for answers, and sooner or later they find them in Marxism. Secondly, capitalism periodically provokes global catastrophes, which leads to massive, albeit short-term, “clarification” in the minds of ordinary people. For instance, during the times of economic crises, the demand for Capital in bookstores increases sharply. As Lenin said, capitalism would be eternal if it did not constantly undermine its own foundations.

In general, the proletarians—if not with their mind, then with their gut—feel that somewhere they are being f… deceived. This, by the way, explains the popularity and persistence of numerous conspiracy theories about a “shadow government” and the like. Although these theories are usually created by intellectuals, they express the worldview of the masses, a naive attempt to explain all the “oddities” of market society. For example, in the West there is a popular idea that all US and European politicians are actually reptilians: the decisions that politicians make defy common sense so much so that it is easier to believe that they are actual aliens from the planet Niburu. People do not understand that it is not a lack of “common sense,” but the capitalist’s thirst for profit leads the world from one global disaster to another. No matter how hard the oligarchic political strategists try, it is impossible to turn people into mindless sheep completely, although Goebbels and Soros came quite close to this. Still, while one remains human, he thinks, which means he is able to perceive the world around him and strives for knowledge.

So today, it is not the police and not the army that guarantee the safety of decayed capitalism, but the mass idiotization of the proletarian masses. This is an objective factor. But the essence of any phenomenon is a combination of objective and subjective factors; eliminate one of them and the other is no longer valid. The subjective factor of the stability of capitalism is the weakness of the world communist movement. Almost every capitalist country has its own communist party, but the influence of the communists is extremely weak. And it is weak, first of all, because the communists themselves are not up to the task. Moreover, the сommunist parties, in practice, prove to be a bunch of opportunists for whom Marxism is just a system of slogans. And this is the main problem.

Among our leftists there is a popular idea that there is a certain magic button in the consciousness of the proletarian, and as soon as they find and press this button, the proletarians will immediately line up and—under red banners, singing “The Internationale”—will go to overthrow the bourgeoisie and build communism. The left is still trying to find a magic propaganda wand that will turn a sleepy average person into a fiery revolutionary. For example, the strike struggle is considered such a magic wand. But all these are misconceptions. There is no such magic button or wand. It is necessary to understand that, strictly speaking, under capitalism it is impossible to win the support of the entire mass of working people. Even the Bolsheviks did not rely on all the workers, but only on the advanced ones, of whom there were, at best, 1% relative to the population of the Russian Empire (this 1% later carried away part of the working masses, but not all).

Therefore, communists must organize themselves in such a way that competence, first of all, in the field of Marxist science is placed at the forefront. Without this, capitalism will continue to rot safely, making our little globe less and less suitable for life.

For the victory of communism, it is the high competence of the communist cadres that guarantees the neutralization of the factor of mass idiotization. The party, built on scientific-centralist principles, absorbs all the healthy, progressive and revolutionary forces of society, thus acting as the vanguard of humanity that the oppressed masses follow, just as a plant follows the sun.

R. Ogienko