Words are powerful tools. This is true both for labels, like "Communism" or "collectivism", and for parables, like Anthem. Like any tool, they should be used carefully and with discretion, like a potential weapon. As someone from a military family who saw the close of the Cold War, as well as being encouraged to read both sides of the socialism debate and being involved with Communists myself, I think it is unfortunate that today all forms of socialism are considered "wrong", as if the American labor movement is somehow irrelevant or as if socialism had been somehow "disproven", instead of simply distorted and brutally suppressed. Many systems of thought and much wisdom is being lost through the wholesale dismissal of centuries of political evolution, and thought has been replaced by brainless conformity to capitalist assumptions. Whether one considers collectivism right or wrong, it is important that collectivism be considered. In that light, I propose to reply to the essay "Report on Anthem" by the CIB Man (Gopher 1.5.5), looking first at the context of Anthem, and then at some of the concepts addressed, in an effort to redeem collectivism.

Anthem must be read in context. It was written in the United States in 1937 and revised in 1946. By that time the American labor movement had been largely destroyed by the American government. On the night of 2 January, 1920, alone, J. Edgar Hoover oversaw a seventy city raid with the Department of Justice. Ten thousand activists were imprisoned, workers were beaten; printing presses were destroyed. The International Workers of the World had been destroyed by the government during World War I. The Knights of Labor had been destroyed. The American Anarchist movement was largely destroyed following the Haymarket frame-up. Anyone wanting to see the opinion of the State to labor need only look at the facts around the Sacco and Vanzetti case before they were martyred for being Anarchists. The American labor movement has never recovered from the brutality of the first part of this century, and by the time Anthem was written what little labor movement there was largely consisted of the underground Communists. (As far as I know, it remains a crime to be a Communist here in Texas.)

Furthermore, Anthem was written and revised in the time of Stalin. He took power against Lenin's wishes on his death in 1924, and continued to rule until Stalin's own death in 1953. Whatever one's picture of Communism may be, Stalinism is probably not it (non-American Communist Party members tend to call it "state capitalism", showing that private property still existed, simply in the hands of the State rather than individual citizens), but even so the American Communist Party was dominated by Stalinism through its loyalty to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the Stalinist dominated International. Anthem was written in response to Stalinism; Rand only thought she wrote in response to collectivism.

Rand herself is also a factor. Rand was a rabid anti-socialist. Among her books are Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal and The Virtue of Selfishness. Apparently, Rand honestly believed that a totally selfish person would be virtuous, but her idea that business entirely unregulated would protect the workers is naive at best. She continues to have a kind of cult following in Objectivist circles across the country -- and one suspects the membership greatly overlaps that of the College Republicans. But while Anthem may be a gripping afternoon's reading, her perspective of collectivism is distorted, at the least.

Before going on, I suppose I should, in fairness, explain some terms myself. I am not using Communism and collectivism indiscriminately here. Rand says in her introduction that she is writing against collectivism in general. To the best of my knowledge, she means here what I mean by socialism -- any social system involving communal ownership of the means of production. I would hope I need not point out that no system of socialism believes in outlawing all forms of private property, but, just in case, I recount Reich's words, from The Mass Psychology of Fascism:

The vulgar Marxist concept of "private enterprise" was totally misconstrued by irrationality; it was understood to mean that the liberal development of society precluded *every* private possession. Naturally, this was widely exploited by political reaction. Quite obviously, social development and individual freedom have nothing to do with the so-called abolishment of private property. Marx's concept of private property did not refer to a man's shirts, pants, typewriters, toilet paper, books, beds, savings, houses, real estate, etc. This concept was used exclusively in reference to the private ownership of the *social* means of production, i.e., those means of production that determine the general course of society. In other words: railroads, waterworks, generating plants, coal mines, etc.

In my opinion, it is no accident that this concept of the abolition of private property was distorted. The ruling class is involved in an ideological war, and in war propaganda is used. It is as understandable that the ruling class invented this concept of private property as that the Allies invented stories about Jewish soap and lampshades, or that both the socialists and the capitalists claimed the other side would destroy the concept of sex within marriage. Understandable, yes, but it is unfortunate that these misconceptions -- or outright lies -- enter into the public mind and become subjective truths.

Within the umbrella of socialism -- Rand's collectivism -- is a large selection of philosophies. Just as Ayn Rand appears to have thought she was writing against collectivism, the CIB Man appears to have thought this is the same as Communism. Just as I don't recall seeing the word "communism" in Anthem, the word "collectivism" does not appears in the CIB Man's essay. "Communism", strictly speaking, I try to reserve for Marxism-Leninism and its children, as found in the U.S.S.R., the American Communist Party, the Maoists (in China, in Peru as the Shining Path, in the United States as the Revolutionary Communist Party and the Maoist International Movement), the Trotskyites, etc. Marxism is, to me, an economic system that has influenced many socialist groups, but is not followed by all. Anarchism is, to me, inherently socialistic, which is why I consider Kropotkin's term "Anarcho-communism" redundant. (Self-centered "Anarchism" would inevitably lead to nihilism and dissolution.) This is aside from such less common philosophies as National Socialism, so-called Utopian socialism, etc.

By Capitalism, I mean conformity to the assumption that some people should sell their labor, and others should invest their capital, and the two should split the profit -- in other words, that some should live off the blood of others. Needless to say, while our society is somewhat socialistic, the assumptions by which we tend to be ruled are capitalistic, selfish, individualistic.

And therein, as they say, lies the rub. The concept of individualism is most addressed in Anthem, and in the CIB Man's essay. I will now, though, address several points brought up in the report in the order they appear. I will ignore polemical points, such as the fact that "medieval" and "regressive" are, by definition, not possible adjectives for Communism as Marx described it, and can only describe so-called primitive socialism, if that. Instead, I will concentrate on substantive arguments.

"Communism", says the CIB Man, is a "form of society in which new ideas and technology are rarely introduced because they can only be thought of by people who are selected as thinkers." The concept that socialism stunts technological development is, of course, a popular capitalistic canard. Is it true? To answer this in practice we can only look at the few examples of Communism we have. Russia before the revolution, in 1917, was a truly medieval system, feudal and underdeveloped. Even granting the reforms of Peter the Great, Russia lagged far behind the West in virtually every field. Even in World War II there was very little idea of the U.S.S.R. as a superpower. (In the proper sense of the term -- economic, political, and military.) In the roughly seventy years the U.S.S.R. was under one form of socialism or another, it was brought from this primitive state to be a true competitor with the United States, which had centuries of bourgeois society to draw from. Soviet technology did not always equal American, though in some cases, such as the AK-47 versus the M16, theirs surpassed ours. In the context of time, though, the advancements made by the Soviets are among the most rapid developments of any country, from medieval to modern in less than a century.

And how is the technology now? In the former Soviet Union, scientists simply are not getting paid. Scientists are being hired by outside firms for a fraction of what they should earn under a free market, though our capitalistic slavemasters assure us they are now "free". Someday, perhaps the market forces will stabilize. More likely, we see the beginnings of either a totalitarian coup or a pitiable "brain drain", as scientists flee the economic wasteland.

Here in the United States, the government subsidizes a great deal of research. Anyone who thinks we do not have socialism in our technology is living in a dreamworld. The space program and the military alone have been responsible for a great deal of the advancements in American technology this century, and previous to them we were not really a "modern" country, compared to the nations of Europe.

Outside of practice, it simply makes sense to socially subsidize science and technology. They are an investment in the future, and scientists can't eat dreams. Combined with the fact that if all scientific advancement was corporate monopolization would obviously increase, we have quite compelling reasons to subsidize.

The nature of art, by which I propose to address the "ideas" part of the CIB Man's statement, is more subtle. For ideological reasons, the Soviet Union censored its arts and literature. This, too, requires an historical context.

Censorship in Europe is not new. Censorship is, indeed, the norm in most societies to one extent or another. Here in the United States we like to pretend we don't have censorship because we permit obscenities on our television sets and pornography in our theaters. As long as they aren't forced to think, Americans tend to be quite happy, and forget that Wilhelm Reich died in jail for his medical beliefs, Sacco and Vanzetti in the electric chair for their political beliefs, that James Joyce and William S. Burroughs had to fight in court to publish their work. More insidious than that, though, we have other forms of censorship. I defer to Huxley's Brave New World Revisited:

Today [1958] the press is still legally free; but most of the little papers have disappeared. The cost of wood-pulp, of modern printing machinery and of syndicated news is too high for the Little Man. In the totalitarian East there is political censorship, and the media of mass communication are controlled by the State. In the democratic West there is economic censorship and the media of mass communication are controlled by members of the Power Elite. Censorship by rising costs and the concentration of communication power in the hands of a few big concerns is less objectionable than State ownership and government propaganda; but certainly it is not something of which a Jeffersonian democrat could possibly approve.

Today, almost forty years later, we like to pretend we have overcome or are overcoming this economic censorship, despite the fact that television stations are owned by international conglomerates and only seven book companies are responsible for virtually every text in the stores. (Distribution is controlled by even fewer corporations.) In thinking this we deceive ourselves, however. Even if the new government internet isn't stringently regulated, even if political dissidents weren't pulled off the net by pressure from governments and special interest groups like the Simon Wisenthal Center, there is still the fact that not only do people generally not look for alternative perspectives, even if they looked at them they wouldn't see them. Huxley again:

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or it might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalistic democracies -- the development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions.

People see what they expect to see, they see what they are allowed to see, they even see what they want to see. People generally do not, however, see what is there. There is no perception without reason. A man who does not believe in unicorns, upon seeing a horse with a horn, will not see a unicorn. He will see a "trick", a "fraud", perhaps an "hallucination". He will not see a unicorn, however, because for him they don't exist. In the same way, most people in our "free" society do not see what is there, but rather what they want to see, what they are told to see.

People go out to look for what they want to see, and ignore what they are not interested in. Like the unicorn, people almost as a rule do not see the validity in other systems because, for them, they do not exist. People can only see what they have been programmed to by their society, and in ours that means they see through capitalism colored glasses. What does not amuse Joe Six-pack gets no distribution and no glossy posters or television advertising spots, and what threatens the capitalistic world view is not only suppressed actively (and anyone denying this need only consider what happens to Holocaust "deniers" in our "free" societies), but passively by brainwashing children from birth to see the world in a capitalistic -- read predatory and selfish -- way.

I suspect the CIB Man, though, was less talking about distribution than production, and I will set aside the obvious (i.e., that someone who sees the world in a capitalistic manner will see production only as a prelude for distribution, and very few people write totally without concern as to who will read), and deal with the concept directly. If a belief in socialism kills individuality and art, then why can I list so many socialistic thinkers and artists? Many people read 1984 and Animal Farm and pretend they are against the Communists, failing to realize that Orwell was a Communist, who fought alongside the Anarchists in Spain on behalf of the Party of Marxist Unification. (That story can be read about in his Homage to Catalonia.) Oscar Wilde wrote "The Soul of Man Under Socialism". (This is included inexpensively in the Penguin Classics edition of his De Profundis and Other Writings.) George Bernard Shaw was a prominent socialist, as well as an internationally renowned -- indeed, Nobel Prize winning -- playwright. Philip K. Dick and Jack London both were socialists at times when it was dangerous to be. Andre Breton, perhaps the greatest of the Surrealists, was a good friend of Trotsky.

Our market driven society tends to kill art, because the artist needs either to pander to the market or spend most of his time working in another career to survive. In previous times, art was subsidized by the ruling class on an individual basis. Today, we subsidize art governmentally in a poor attempt to make art survive. In a socialistic society, artists could survive without the need to produce marketable garbage in order to eat.

Immediately on the heels of that previously quoted statement, the CIB Man makes another statement with which I take exception:

Even then the idea must be known by everyone and thought by everyone so that it is completely communal.... [T]his ideology means that everyone would require the same amount of collective knowledge as everyone else. No field of study could be advanced or be specialized because then the information, and data gained would have to be known by everyone to be completely collective.

This is almost as great a misunderstanding of Marx's private property as the idea that the entirety of society would be sharing your soap and underwear. The collective ownership of property would not mean that everyone would have to own everything, the collective ownership of intellectual property does not mean that everyone would have to know everything.

I am not sure where the CIB Man got this interpretation from. Anthem has passages like:

Manuscripts are precious, for our brothers in the Home of the Clerks spend one year to copy one single script in their clear handwriting. Manuscripts are rare and they are kept in the Home of the Scholars.

It seems to me this implies that the Scholars read the manuscripts, and more or less states that the Clerks do, but under the collective ownership concept Equality 7-2521 would have to know what is in it, too, and so it would be ridiculous to risk life by stealing and reading them. (Of course, it would also be ridiculous to have taught the information to a street sweeper, and we reach a paradox.)

The true interpretation of information under socialism is, in the words of Bruce Sterling, "Information wants to be free." No one owns knowledge, in this envisaged society. Rather, ideas become collective property.

Copyrights are a very new concept. I think patents go back further, but even if they do they are not more than a few centuries old. These exist for a couple of reasons. In any society, they exist to give credit to the creator. In the world of Anthem, this would appear to be superfluous, although in a real collectivist society this would not be so. Books in the Soviet Union certainly had the authors' names attached. Marxism-Leninism practically has a copyright in the name. The big difference is that in our society copyrights and patents exist for economic reasons. One gets a copyright or a patent so that other people do not make money from your intellectual work. Obviously, in a collectivist society, this would be unnecessary, and no one need fear that a collectivist society could only have as much collective knowledge as can fit in a single head.

A later comment appears to be an axiom of the last:

Another problem is the possibility that the most intelligent people would get jobs that would restrict them from developing their own ideas (such as a street sweeper). Instead, it would put those of the least intelligence in charge of teaching and studying.

Again, I don't see this in the text. To me, it is quite clear Equality 7-2521 was given a job as street sweeper as punishment for his rebellious spirit. A more classically collectivist sentiment is Marx's "from each according to his abilities". Of course, there is a danger that one would enter into a career field for which one does not have an aptitude, and this happens in every society. Thomas Paine was thirty seven before he became a successful writer. Before this, he was an unsuccessful corset maker, an unsuccessful businessman, and an unsuccessful government employee, not to mention an unsuccessful husband. In the Soviet Union, children were tested to see what they had an aptitude for and what society would need in coming years, and were trained appropriately. Ideally, this would keep the market in balance. In reality, it is easier written than achieved. As with so much that made the Soviet Union worth fighting against, the United States government is now copying it. The domestic brand is called Outcome Based Education; look for it soon in a school near you.

(In the meantime, the educational system and the State are busy brainwashing kids with ideas like, "We shouldn't learn this unless it will help us in later life." The purpose of education is, of course, to make a better citizen, capable of appreciating the arts as well as operating a lathe, and has nothing to do with employment. Who was it that said, "Give me a child until the age of seven, and I will have him for life"?)

All these have been preliminaries, though, and now I can address the CIB Man's main thesis:

From Anthem people can perceive that individuality is one of the most important characteristics they can obtain. Humanity can't let it be taken or life shall be little more than an intricate beehive, each individual working just for the betterment of society, and never for the betterment of themselves. Communism is perhaps the greatest oppressor because it is self inflicted, enforced by peer pressure, and taught from birth. Its goal is a better society, but its side-effects are the loss of freedom, of speech, religion and individuality. "I" is a word to be cherished and used with care. To forget its significance is to forget what it means to be human.

And we see that, when all is said and done, Ayn Rand has won. Even from beyond the grave, she has won. The power to define is the power to control, and Rand has defined "collectivism" as the above, causing people not even to notice that capitalism, too, is peer pressure enforced, taught from birth, and antagonistic to individuality to a much greater degree than socialism ever was.

In a number of ways, the Soviet Union was opposed to individualism. This is not surprising; the Russian language does not even have a word for "private". In order to say that someone wanted to be separate and alone, one must imply that the person was mentally ill. This predated communism. The Russian language has no way to say "this is mine" in the way English can. I can say, "this is my keyboard," and in saying express ownership. Russian, on the other hand, implies something like, "this keyboard is to me," expressing a process, a vector, rather than a state. The language and the society did not know how to express individualism, and we cannot look to the Soviet Union for the cause of this problem.

Socialism need not eliminate individualism. Quite aside from the artists listed above, personalities and heroes play a major role in the labor movement. From Joe Hill to James Connolly, heroes are admired. The big thing is, though, they are seen as heroic not because they are better than other people, but because of what they did. As Black 47 says in "Paul Robeson": "The great are only great / because we're down on our knees." The individual is respected to the extent the individual deserves to be respected.

On the other hand, let us look back at ourselves. For the most part, the great in the West is the wealthy. Frequently enough, this is also an hereditary feature. The fact this is not total is not due to capitalism's lack of intent, but to capitalism's lack of time. As we go on, we become more and more commodified, turned into a commodity.

This is, fundamentally, the basis of capitalism. Man is what man has, and for labor that is the sweat of their brow and their television set. In socialism, every man is equal, but not every man has the same knowledge and abilities. The leader is not "better" than the street sweeper; he is merely -- ideally -- best cut out to be a leader. Here in the U.S., kids are being turned out of schools not as people, but as job seekers and consumers. Producers and consumers. Muscles and mouths. Sex is commodified; pornography, prostitution, and sexual exploitation are products of capitalism. The body is commodified, and it is only a matter of time before organ harvesting begins in earnest. Even death is commodified, and the couch potato doesn't even realize that watching violent shows like Real TV, Faces of Death and the like does not make him "liberated" or a "rebel", but merely a participant in the horrifying process by which we are all being turned into beasts of burden. Capitalism, by its very nature, destroys the inherent dignity of the person, and makes him a statistic before he is even dead. In one point, though, the CIB Man is absolutely right. In a socialist society, "each individual work[s] just for the betterment of society, and never for the betterment of themselves." Except, of course, that by bettering the self one does better society, unless one benefits the self at the expense of those around him. Humans are social animals. It is in our nature to help people and to love people, and the predatory nature we exhibit so much today is a function of our ill society. The Brotherhood of Man is obscured, but it is there. In a socialistic society, where we were freed from the need to devour our brothers to live, we would be fulfilled through the helping of others, and in self-giving one finds much more happiness than in self-aggrandizement. Rather than protesting this altruism, when one comes to understand it, when one is healed of the sicknesses Capitalism breeds, one welcomes self-giving.

I am told socialism is inevitable. Maybe it is; I don't know. I do know that Capitalism cannot survive. Capitalism is the flesh eating bacteria of society. Capitalism exists by feeding on others, and then by feeding on itself. Capitalism leads to colonialism, slavery, the commodification of humans, and to planned obsolescence. Capitalism also leads to a centralization of wealth and the oppression of the worker. The big question is not whether wealth will be centralized, but who will control it. The question is not will capitalism fall, but what will replace it.

The Marxists are of the opinion that society, like any organism, cannot devolve. It can evolve, or die. Marxism sees capitalism as an inevitable stage, as inevitable as the feudalism preceding it, and Communism following it. I am less optimistic; I think it entirely possible that capitalism can precede a true dark age as easily as it can precede a workers' paradise. So, what will follow capitalism? The final answer is: It is up to us.

Both Communism and capitalism agree that man is inherently selfish. Capitalism believes that market forces can counteract this selfishness, and that the individual is unimportant. Communism believes that this selfishness inevitably leads to the workers' revolution. Apart from philosophical maxims like "all is flux", it is obvious that capitalism, at least, cannot continue in a stasis. Capitalism exists by exploitation and maximizing profit -- inevitably at the expense of those who need to buy to live. If man -- even if merely capitalistic man -- is inherently and unchangeably selfish, the workers' revolution is inevitable. Success is, in my opinion, not.

Anarchists take a different tack. Anarchists say that man is selfish as a result of society. Whether he is or is not by nature selfish, he does not have to act in a selfish manner. The biggest difference between Anarchism and Communism is the nature of free will. Anarchism believes man has free will; Communism does not. It is not that the dictatorship of the proletariat believes in taking man's freedom away. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not believe he had it in the first place.

Anarchists believe that man can be self-giving, and that he can be educated to use his free will in a free and fair society. This can only come about if we, as people and as educated individuals, choose to give up our selfishness and work for freedom. As I try to remind myself, "The Revolution is not about me; the Revolution is about you." That is to say, I am not an Anarchist because I want to be able to do what I want. I am an Anarchist because I want everyone to be free, to be able to do what they truly want. Fighting for my desires is not the Revolution. That is a temper tantrum. The Revolution is fighting for justice, and against unjust power.

In sum, no system can be adequately understood reading only those who oppose it. Collectivism cannot be understood by reading Rand any more than one could get an adequate understanding of politics from my high school government teacher, who taught that Anarchism is a form of totalitarianism, or my university ROTC brigade commander, who told me he would personally kill anyone under his command who exhibited National Socialist tendencies. To come to understand socialism, one would be much better advised to read something more sympathetic, such as "The Spirit of Man Under Socialism", by Oscar Wilde, or The Iron Heel, by Jack London. Balancing both voices, I suspect most will have a lot more sympathy for socialism than Objectivism.