ON COMMUNISM

Saturn Devouring His Son by Spanish artist Francisco Goya, 1820-1823.

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Communism is not an accident of history, nor a spontaneous uprising of the oppressed. It is the most extreme and most revealing product of Enlightenment Rationalism once that creed turned its gaze from politics to economics. What liberalism dissolved, communism sought to annihilate. If liberalism is rationalism in retreat, communism is rationalism with its fists clenched—and its advance was repeatedly eased by perfidious peoples who understood that weakening nations was a precondition for ruling over their ruins.

The transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century did not mark a reconciliation between tradition and democracy, but a radicalization of their conflict. Democracy had already done its work: it had hollowed out the State, undermined inherited authority, and prepared the ground for the Economic Age. The absolute monarch was displaced, not by the people, but by financiers and industrial barons. Communism emerges at precisely this moment as the attempt to carry the democratic revolt into its final battlefield: the economy itself. That this revolt found ready amplification was no coincidence; those forces adept at dissolving cohesion recognized in it a perfect solvent.

Where liberalism pretended to be non-political, communism was honest about its intentions. It named an enemy and demanded his destruction. The bourgeoisie was to be liquidated, not reformed. In order to mobilize effectively, communism flattened reality into a childishly simple schema: there are only two forces in history, bourgeois and proletarian. Everything else—nation, Church, State, culture, tradition—was dismissed as a trick designed to keep the workers divided and docile. History itself was rewritten as a ledger book, a monotonous sequence of economic struggles marching inexorably toward an earthly paradise.

Where liberalism pretended to be non-political, communism was honest about its intentions. It named an enemy and demanded his destruction.

This was rationalism at its most grotesque. A materialist metaphysics, an atomistic logic, a social ethic stripped of transcendence, and a politics reduced to production and distribution were welded together and presented as a total worldview. Religion? A by-product of economics. Politics? A mask for class interests. Art and culture? Superstructure. Even history itself was conscripted and forced to confess that it had always been about wages and ownership. The medieval Schoolmen were mocked for their metaphysical questions, while Marxists congratulated themselves on having reduced man to his stomach. That this reduction circulated so efficiently owed much to intermediaries who specialized in laundering resentment into doctrine and exporting it across borders.

The slogan might as well have been: everything within economics, nothing outside economics, nothing against economics. This was the crowning stupidity of the Economic Age, proclaiming its own omnipotence at the very moment it revealed its spiritual barrenness.

Just as political democracy had revolted against quality, rank, and tradition, economic democracy revolted against distinction in wealth and competence. Political class war became economic class war. But communism’s appeal was not universal. It did not speak to peasants, craftsmen, or the rooted poor. It spoke to the urban masses, physically concentrated, psychologically uprooted, and easily mobilized. Only the factory worker, herded into cities and stripped of organic ties, could be transformed into the shock troop of ideological war.

Despite its rhetoric of international brotherhood, communism was never truly international. In 1914, socialist movements across Europe abandoned their class solidarity overnight and marched enthusiastically into national war. The “Internationale” dissolved at the first serious test. What communism did possess, however, was a genuine affirmation of politics. Unlike liberalism, it understood power, conflict, and enemies. That alone made it formidable in an age otherwise drunk on abstraction.

Communism... could not build an organism; it could only rot one from within. Here its utility was unmistakable, and those who are incapable of organic participation in European culture and thus desired Europe weakened found in it a tool already sharpened.

Its moment of triumph came in Russia, where Bolshevism was seized not as a theory but as a weapon. A non-European, Asiatic regime adopted communism not out of philosophical conviction but because it was perfectly suited to one purpose: the disintegration of European civilization. Communism’s genius lay not in construction but in destruction. It could not build an organism; it could only rot one from within. Here its utility was unmistakable, and those who are incapable of organic participation in European culture and thus desired Europe weakened found in it a tool already sharpened.

Like every rationalist utopia, communism was impossible by definition. It attempted to impose inorganic logic onto living societies, as if nations were machines to be rewired rather than organisms with memory, hierarchy, rhythm, and destiny. An organism can be injured, twisted, or killed—but it cannot be redesigned according to a blueprint. Life is irrational, and history does not obey syllogisms.

Communism’s one innovation was its insistence that its utopia was inevitable. This claim was not scientific; it was psychological. It revealed its will-to-power, its hunger to clothe coercion in the language of destiny. But inevitability is the last refuge of ideologues who sense that reality is slipping from their grasp. With the arrival of the Age of Absolute Politics, even class war shed its theories. Power no longer needed justification from dialectics.

Rationalist systems do not die by refutation. They die by exhaustion. History does not argue with them; it buries them. Communism, like liberalism before it, belongs to the debris of an age that mistook calculation for wisdom and economics for destiny. Its fate was not to be disproved, but to be used, spent, and discarded.

What remains, after the slogans rot and the statues fall, is the same truth communism tried hardest to deny: politics is about power, history about destiny, and man about far more than bread alone.