Leftism is a religion, made up of many tiny cults, all of which seem to hate each other, and are only ever united by their shared ire of “capitalism,” whatever that even is. Leftism is defined by its opposite, and yet, most leftists cannot define their own opposite, much less themselves. Press them on the issue, and most will tell you that leftism is all about de-constructing things that already exist, rather than building anything new. In short, it is a cynical death cult, its former members all agree. Holly MathNerd, who probably still has me muted because I terrify her apparently, has some valuable articles on the subject of abandoning wokism, however, that is only one of the leftist cults. It is the craziest cult, and while most leftists outside of the North American continent see it as “Yankee garbage” (their words, not mine), some components of modern wokism, such as the denial of sexual dimorphism, actually come straight out of Mao’s China. The Substacker who has adopted the mantle of Yuri Bezmenov could probably tell you more about that than I can, since my knowledge of Chinese Communism is rather limited compared to my knowledge of Soviet Communism. Anyway, because wokery is so silly and because plenty of people already write dedicated anti-woke blogs, I see no reason to spend any time writing entire articles on the subject. My purpose is to debunk old-school leftism, otherwise known as “Orthodox Marxism,” a term I was introduced to by a wokist, and yes, he was using it in a derogatory fashion. Anyway, before getting into today’s thesis, I need to tell you a story.
When I first created my Substack profile, I made no hint to my political leanings whatsoever. Welp, that turned out to be a mistake, because I joined right in the middle of the SAN debacle, and let’s be honest; if you don’t signal that you are some kind of leftist, leftists have this nasty habit of automatically assuming that you are a “rightard,” and will use that as an excuse to dismiss everything you say. I should probably have learnt that lesson from my days on LinkedIn, where I was excoriated in a private message for not explicitly stating my political positions by some coronatarian cultist who immediately blocked me after doing so. Anyway, I first added the term “ex-communist,” and later, because it is technically more accurate, “ex-Bolshevik.” As of my writing this article, this is what it looks like:
Now then, while I can certainly appreciate the wisdom and fortitude of those who were never taken in by the lies of the left to begin with, not all of us were lucky enough to have such an upbringing. Those of us who were duped by the false promises and later learned better, for that very reason, tend to gravitate towards those thinkers whose own philosophical journey was somewhat similar, such as Fëdor Dostoevskii, Thomas Sowell, Aleksandr Dugin, and Lewis Barton, among others.
But Sasha, you’re a lifelong dissident from the Soviet Union, how were you ever a commie in the first place?!
I was born in the Soviet Union, I did not grow up there. Honestly, I don’t know when I was actually born because my backstory truly is FUBAR, but when the Soviet Union collapsed, I was, at the oldest, about two months. At the youngest, I wouldn’t have been born for another three weeks. So yes, even though I like to say that I was born in Leningrad for the sole purpose of carbon dating myself, that might not be quite accurate. Point being that I have no memory whatsoever of life under Communism, my family moved to the US before I could even form memories, and I didn’t return to my birthplace (by which I mean Saint Petersburg, specifically) for the first time until I was fifteen. Anyway…
One of the greatest deceptions of leftism is identifying problems caused by government and then blaming capitalism. Regardless of how you define “capitalism,” problems with government-run institutions, such as public schools, are in no way caused by market forces, but by policy makers. How does this fit into my life story? Easy. After seeing the terribly low standards of the American public school system, my mother tried a few different private schools before ultimately deciding to homeschool me. She and many other adults in my life told me that I “would have done well under the Soviet system” because of the, ironically, more individualised and meritocratic (“from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs”) teaching methods employed in Soviet schools. I won’t say “Russian” schools, simply because my friend from Kerch has been kindly keeping her audience informed of the seriously falling academic standards in Russian public schools over the past few decades. She and other Russian homeschoolers use re-prints of textbooks from the Stalin era, which should tell you how bad the problem is. Anyway, shortly after homeschooling began, I read The Communist Manifesto for the first time. I was nine years old. What? Don’t look at me like that, it’s an important historical text, everyone should read it.
Now then, I already wrote an entire diatribe detailing some of the reasons that I left the left, which I’m not going to link to because it’s a shit article, though if you still want to read it, let me know. The article you’re reading now isn’t meant as a sequel as much as a different angle. There is one event that I deliberately left out of the earlier article anyway: a peculiar conversation with my sister.
Considering how much my family had suffered at the hands of the Soviet regime, from getting kicked off their family farm, fighting on both sides of the Great Patriotic War, getting kicked off their family farm, disappearing under suspicious circumstances, getting kicked off their family farm, to constantly being fucked with for having foreign names, in hindsight, I haven’t the foggiest idea why my parents let me be a tankie and didn’t tell me any of this until I was already calling myself a libertarian. My father, who is laid back almost to a fault, once said “it’s a phase, you go through it.” He was, naturally, referring to the particular sense of purpose that collectivist systems tend to instill in people (autists especially), one which was deeply ingrained in Russian people for decades. Tessa Lena explained this far better than I ever could, mainly because no such sentiment existed in my dissident family. Anyway, my sister disagreed (after all, she never went through a commie phase… but she’s much older). She could probably sense that I wasn’t going to simply grow out of the commie phase unless I learned the truth.
Most Marxists are materialists, in that they focus on the material needs of people, and in their mind, the purpose of the State is to provide those needs. However, what a lot of supporters and critics alike of Marxism don’t seem to understand, the former best represented by my old history professor and favourite proverbial punching bag, and the latter by a certain Hyperborean, is that Karl Marx himself was not a materialist, at least not in the sense you’re thinking of… unless you’ve been following my work for any significant amount of time. Karl Marx was a dialectical materialist, which is completely different from a materialist in the colloquial sense, and the exact opposite of a scientific realist. If you are a scientific realist, you cannot be a Marxist, simple as. This is why an awful lot of Soviet “science” is actually pseudoscience, and it is rooted in the occult. If you’ve ever wondered why some of the weird shit that communists say is remarkably similar to the shit creationists say, wonder no further. In fact, this was a pattern that I noticed long before I had ever even heard of dialectical materialism (obviously this was before I read Das Kapital or anything by Iosif Stalin), and in hindsight, is probably why I was totally unprepared to argue against creationists back when I was still calling myself a communist. In a future article, possibly even the very next one, I will explain precisely how both creationist philosophy and socialist philosophy come to similar conclusions on the subject of morality via dialectical materialism.
Mind you, none of the above is what my sister told me. All she did was give me a crash course on the history of Soviet mysticism. No, not Russian mysticism in the Soviet Union, Soviet mysticism, specifically. Yes, it was a real thing. Stalin may have had an allegorical Rasputin in the form of Kliment Voroshilov, but he had a few literal ones as well, e.g. Trofim Lysenko, and one could argue they were the ones who were actually running the country after Khrushchëv “took over,” and none of them got the sack until after Khrushchëv was deposed. I will go into the details in another article (who knows when that will be), but the point is that the Khrushchëv era was arguably the zenith of secret Soviet pseudoscience before the Kosygin Reform of 1965 shut it down.
Anyway, what was the point of all this? Simple, if you are going to de-convert a leftist, you must first learn two things: what leftism means to them, and why they believe in it. If you are arguing with someone who proclaims to be a socialist but cannot even define socialism (something I was able to do at age ten), then just drop them a link to my article breaking down the three types of socialism and don’t bother responding further until they’ve caught up on some much-needed reading. On the same token, if the person tries to deflect with some variant of “critics of socialism never acknowledge the failures of capitalism,” ask them to define capitalism. If they define it as “a free market” or some variation thereof, point out that’s not what we have, and any politician who says that we do is lying, because they know that the disgruntled proletariat will fall for the old socialist grift of “identify problem, blame the market, propose government control as a solution.”
Assuming you are actually dealing with someone who can define both socialism and capitalism, this is where things get a little interesting. A lot of socialists are working with a skewed picture of history (because most “professional” historians are Marxists trained in the tradition of the Frankfurt School), so they will believe weird things such as “the Holodomor never happened,” or “the Holodomor happened, but it wasn’t planned, and it wasn’t that big of a deal, Russia has famines all the time,” or the weirdest of them all, “Hitler crushed the trade unions and privatised German industry.” The most prevalent form of distoriography is to say that every socialist regime that does stuff we don’t like “was actually capitalist.” Nazi Germany is easily the best example out there, and unlike Soviet Communists, there aren’t enough actual Nazis out there pushing back by saying (and I just know someone is going to take this out of context) “no, we are socialists, we advocate for state control of the economy for the benefit of the Aryan Race in their struggle against international Jewish finance.” However, almost no-one is stupid enough to try saying that the Soviet Union was capitalist… almost. Adam Something exists.
The over-arching thesis of all this is that leftism is a lie. Whatever the leftist thinks it is, it is not, and that should be fairly obvious by now.
Socialism is avarice masquerading as altruism, madness masquerading as rationality, and enslavement masquerading as emancipation. – Karel Antonovič Janáček
Socialism is a religious conviction and a blood-soaked vanity project. – Carl Benjamin, in this video
Whatever the leftist individual happens to value, point out that leftism will not give it to them. In my case, I was labouring under the delusion that socialism is somehow scientific, which is why my sister never bothered trying to argue the inefficiency of central planning (pointless with an industrial engineer anyway, central planning is literally my job), and instead pointed out that Communism is rooted in mystical spooky woo. What must be done in order to de-convert leftists of all varieties is to show them that they are, indeed, subscribing to a religion masquerading as a secular philosophy. It is for this reason that leftism seeks to replace all other religions before moving on to corrupt the sciences. The leftist must be shown what their religion truly teaches, and why its inevitable conclusion is disaster. Some, however, want the disaster, they wish to bring about the end of history just like every evangelical doomsday cult, and these people are not worth your time. Not every soul can be saved because not every soul wants to be saved. Na shledanou.
Sasha V's Sesquipedalian Soliloquies 