by Eric Peters
Many people know about Sir Thomas More in the context of the play (and movie) A Man For All Seasons, which details the life (and death) of More, who was King Henry VIII’s Lord chancellor as well as his friend. Until he declined to publicly affirm the king’s papally unsanctioned divorce of his first wife, Catherine of Aragon and subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. After which, in due course, King Henry had Thomas More’s head chopped off.
But More also wrote a book, which he titled Utopia – meaning no place. This is worth recalling given the modern usage of the word, which most people take to mean an ideal place.
The juxtaposition is interesting given Moore’s Utopia was an authoritarian communist society in which no one owned anything and thus everyone was the slave of everyone else, which is what communism is in practice as opposed to theory. The theory – which is rarely subjected to scrutiny by communists – is that all property is owned in common. This is an absurdity. The same species of absurdity that says “the people” rule.
Which people, exactly?
And that gets at the truth of the thing.
There is a truism that the problem with all collectives is that someone has to run them. More finely, someone – perhaps a few someones – inevitably control it. There may be some sort of “democratic” method of selecting these controllers, as via a pubic vote. But no matter the outcome of the vote, it is a fact that only a portion of the voters voted for the controllers who were elected and the rest did not. This is important because even if it is 99 percent who voted for the controllers, 1 percent didn’t and that means “the people” is a lie.
It is some of the people.
It is usually far fewer than 99 percent of them. In an American presidential election, it is – roughly 26 percent of the roughly 50 percent of the people who actually vote.
So much for “the people.” And that is in a “democracy.”
In a communist utopia it is worse because the only thing you’re allowed to vote for is communism. More finely, this communist or that communist. But communism itself is never up for a vote.
The controllers always win.
Just as the controllers in a communist society also own not just everything but also everyone. This is the fact as opposed to the theory. The theory says property is owned by everyone. Absurd. “The people” own nothing. Including themselves, for it is absurd to speak of self-ownership when you are utterly controlled by other people.
“The people” are perhaps allowed use of things that the government – which is to say, the controllers – own. Because they control those things. For example, wherever they allow those under their control to live. They may live there as long as the controllers wish to allow it.
But “the people” do not own so much as a single piece of the linoleum on the kitchen floor.
On the other hand, the controllers effectively own everything – precisely because they control it. Stalin’s many houses – these were called dachas – were technically “Soviet state property.” But because Stalin controlled the government, they were effectively his property. “The people” did not get to use this property, notwithstanding the risible assertion that “the people” owned all of the property in the Soviet Union.
This is how it goes in the real utopias created by communists.
More’s utopia, on the other hand, was a place that didn’t exist because it could not exist. At least, not in the sense that communist societies exist. Moore’s utopia is the kind of place communists assert can exist and that communism’s useful idiots believe can exist but which never has and never will exist, because there can never be such as thing as common ownership of property and “equality” of condition. The majority can be rendered equally enslaved, impoverished, stifled and miserable. But there will always be the controllers – who enslave and impoverish and stifle and make miserable the majority while they themselves enjoy the things that most people in societies not yet beset by the cancer that is communism either actually do have or can have, if they have the willingness to work for it.
Because they are not enslaved, which means that when they work, they enjoy the rewards of that work – as opposed to being made to work so that what they work for can be taken away from them by the people who control things in a communist society. Which renders pointless the work. Which is why – in a communist system – “the people” are forced to work, often for those who don’t.
Which is a very good working definition of slavery.
More’s point in writng his book was to skotch the idea that the kind of utopia envisioned previously by Plato – and late by Marx and currently by the inheritors of Marx – could ever exist in fact and yet latter-day utopians continue to seek it. This suggests that either they do not really understand or that they really do understand – and hope the useful idiots never do.
Or at least, don’t – until it no longer matters whether they understand it.
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