Το κείμενο που ακολουθεί υποδεικνύει πως αυτά τα δήθεν πεφωτισμένα και προοδευτικά που υποστηρίζουν όλοι οι πεφωτισμένοι και προοδευτικοί, φασίστες, σοσιαλιστές, κομουνιστές, εν γένει κρατιστές, όλων των αποχρώσεων, δεν είναι τίποτα παραπάνω από την βία ορισμένων ανθρώπων να εκμεταλλευτούν τους υπολοίπους. Για αυτό και βλέπετε πως οι εκάστοτε κρατιστές, είτε λέγονται φασίστες, είτε αναρχικοί πρεζάκια των εξαρχείων, την καταβρίσκουν στον να δέρνουν, να πλακώνονται, να επιδεικνύουν τον ανεπαρκή ανδρισμό τους και να θέλουν μετά μανίας να σφάξουν όλους όσους έχουν αντίθετη άποψη. (και επιπλέον να είναι και τεμπέληδες, να μην θέλουν να εργαστούν για να βγάλουν τον πλούτο που καταναλώνουν)

Ο σοσιαλισμός λοιπόν δεν είναι τίποτα άλλο από την τυφλή βία των πρωτόγονων ανθρώπων και όλα αυτά τα εργαλεία με τα οποία μας υπόσχονται ότι θα έρθει η Γη της επαγγελίας, π.χ. κατάργηση της ατομικής ιδιοκτησίας, κατάργηση του τόκου, κατάργηση της ανισότητας, κατάργηση της θρησκείας και της οικογένειας, είναι όλα αυτά τα πράγματα που μας κάνουν δυνατότερους απέναντί τους και από την στιγμή που καταργηθούν θα είμαστε απροστάτευτοι απέναντι στις ορέξεις των χειρότερων εκμεταλλευτών του κόσμου, για αυτό και τα μισούν και θέλουν να τα καταργήσουν. Ας αφήσουμε τον Shafarevich να μας τα πει καλύτερα:


The Primitive Nature of Collectivism
It seems that this was the form in which the state arose: "the world's first socialist states" were the world's first states of any kind.

If we turn to socialist doctrine, we see a similar picture here too. These teachings did not arise either in the twentieth century or the nineteenth; they are more than two thousand years old. Their history can be divided into three periods.

(1) Socialist notions were well known in antiquity
The first socialist system, whose influence can be seen in all its countless variations right up to the present, was created by Plato. Through Platonism socialist notions penetrated to the Gnostic sects which surrounded early Christianity, and also to Manichaeism. In this period the ideas of socialism were propagated in schools of philosophy and in narrow mystical circles.

(2) In the Middle Ages socialist notions found their way to the masses
In a religious guise they were propagated within various heretical movements, the Catharists, the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Apostolic Brethren, and the Beghards. They inspired several powerful popular movements, for example, the Patarenes of fourteenth-century Italy, or the Czech Taborites of the fifteenth century. Their influence was particularly strong during the Reformation and their traces can still be seen in the English revolution in the seventeenth century.

(3) Beginning with the sixteenth century, socialist ideology took a new direction
It threw off its mystical and religious form and based itself on a materialistic and rationalist view of the world. Typical of this was a militantly hostile attitude to [Christian] religion. The spheres in which socialist notions were propagated changed yet again: the preachers, who had addressed themselves to craftsmen and peasants, were replaced by philosophers and writers who strove to influence the reading public and the higher strata of society.

This movement came to its peak in the eighteenth century, the "Age of Enlightenment." At the end of that century a new objective made itself felt, that of bringing socialism out of the salons, out of the philosopher's study, and into the suburbs, onto the streets. There followed a renewed attempt to put socialist ideas behind a mass movement.

In this writer's opinion, neither the nineteenth nor the twentieth century introduced anything that was new in principle into the development of socialist ideology.

 Let us cite a few illustrations to give an idea of the nature of socialist teachings and to draw attention to certain features which will be important in the discussion to follow.

(1) Plato's Republic depicts an ideal social system
 In Plato's state, power belongs to the philosophers, who govern the country with the help of warriors known as "guardians". Plato's main concern was with the way of life of these guardians, since not only were the philosophers to be chosen from among them, but they were also to control the rest of the population. He wanted to subordinate their life completely to the interests of the state, and to organize it so as to exclude the possibility of a split and the emergence of conflicting interests. The first means of achieving this was the abolition of private property. The guardians were to own nothing but their own bodies.

Their dwellings could be entered by anybody who wished to. They were to live in the republic like hired laborers, serving only in return for food and no other reward. For the same purpose the individual family was also abolished. All the men and women in the guardian class were to share their mates with all the others. Instead of marriage there was to be brief, state-controlled sexual union, for the purposes of physical satisfaction and the production of perfect progeny. To this end the philosophers were to yield to distinguished guardians the right of more frequent sexual union with the more beautiful women.

 Children, from the moment of birth, would not know their own fathers or even mothers. They were to be cared for communally by all the women who happened to be lactating, and the children passed around all the time. And the state would take care of their subsequent upbringing. At the same time a special role was assigned to art, which was to be purged mercilessly in the name of the same goals. A work of art was considered all the more dangerous, the more perfect it was from the aesthetic point of view.

The "fables of Hesiod and Homer" were to be destroyed, and most of classical literature with them — everything that might suggest the idea that the gods were imperfect and unjust, that might induce fear or gloom, or could inculcate disrespect for the authorities. New myths were to be invented, on the other hand, to develop in the guardians the necessary civic virtues.

Apart from this ideological supervision, the life of the guardians was to be biologically controlled as well. This control began with the careful selection of parents able to provide the best progeny, and selection was based on the achievements of agriculture. Children of unions not sanctioned by the state, like those with physical imperfections, were to be destroyed. The selection of adults was to be entrusted to medicine: doctors would treat some patients, allow others to die, and kill the remainder.

 (2) The philosophy of the medieval heretics was based on the opposition between the spiritual and the material worlds as two antagonistic and mutually exclusive categories. It begot hostility toward the whole material world and in particular to all forms of social life. All these movements rejected military service, oaths or litigation, personal submission to ecclesiastical and secular authority, and some rejected marriage and property. Some movements considered only marriage a sin, but not adultery, so that this demand did not have an ascetic character but aimed at the destruction of the family.

 Many sects were accused by their contemporaries of "free" or "sacred" love. One contemporary states, for instance, that the heretics considered that "marital ties contradict the laws of nature, since these laws demand that everything should be held in common. - In precisely the same way, the denial of private property was linked with its renunciation in favor of the sect, and the common ownership of property was fostered as an ideal. "In order to make their teaching more attractive, they introduced common ownership," according to the record of one thirteenth-century trial of some heretics.

 These more radical aspects of the doctrine were usually communicated only to the elite of the sect, the "perfected," who were sharply set apart from the basic mass of "believers." But in times of social crisis the preachers and apostles of the sect used to take their socialist notions to the masses. As a rule these ideas were mingled with calls for the destruction of the whole existing order and above all of the Catholic Church.

 Thus, at the beginning of the thirteenth century in Italy the Patarene movement, led by preachers from the sect of the Apostolic Brethren, provoked a bloody three-year war. The Apostolic Brethren taught that "in love everything must be held in common — property and wives. - Those who joined the sect had to hand all their property over for common use.

 They thought of the Catholic Church as the **** of Babylon and the pope as Antichrist, and they called for the murder of the pope, bishops, priests, monks, and of all the godless. Any action against the enemies of the true faith was proclaimed to be permissible.

 A little over a hundred years later heretical sects dominated the Taborite movement, whose raids terrorized central Europe for a quarter of a century. Of them a contemporary says: "In the Citadel or Tabor there is no Mine or Thine, everybody uses everything equally: all must hold everything in common, and nobody must have anything separately, and he who does is a sinner.- Their preachers taught: "Everything, including wives, must be held in common. The sons and daughters of God will be free, and there will be no marriage as a union of just two — man and wife. . . .

All institutions and human decisions must be abolished, since none of them was created by the Heavenly Father. . . . The priests' houses and all church property must be destroyed: churches, altars and monasteries must be demolished. . . . All those who have been elevated and given power must be bent like the twigs of trees and cut down, burned in the stove like straw, leaving not a root nor a shoot, they must be ground like sheaves, the blood must be drained from them, they must be killed by scorpions, snakes and wild animals, they must be put to death.

 The great specialist on the history of the heresies, I. von Dollinger, describes their social principles as follows:

"Every heretical movement that appeared in the Middle Ages possessed, openly or secretly, a revolutionary character; in other words, if it had come to power it would have had to destroy the existing social order and produce a political and social revolution.

These Gnostic sects, the Catharists and Albigensians, whose activities evoked severe and implacable legislation against heresy and were bloodily opposed, were socialists and communists. They attacked marriage, the family, and property."

These features appeared still more clearly in the heretical movements after the Reformation, in the sixteenth century. We shall adduce one example, the teaching of Niklas Storch, leader of the so-called Zwickau prophets.

This teaching, as described in a contemporary book, included the following propositions:

A) No marital connection, whether secret or open, is to be observed.

B) On the contrary, any man can take wives when the flesh demands it and his passions rise, and live with them in bodily intimacy exactly as he pleases.

C) Everything is to be held in common, since God sent all people into the world equal. Similarly He gave equally to all the possession of the earth, of fowl in the air and fish in the sea.

D) Therefore all authorities, terrestrial and spiritual, must be dismissed once and for all, or be put to the sword, for they live untrammeled, they drink the blood and sweat of their poor subjects, they guzzle and drink day and night. . . . So we must all rise, the sooner the better, arm ourselves and fall upon the priests in their cozy little nests, massacre them and wipe them out. For if you deprive the sheep of their leader, you can do what you like with them. Then we must fall upon the bloodsuckers, seize their houses, loot their property and raze their castles to the ground."

(3) In 1516 appeared the book which started a new stage in the development of socialist thought, Thomas More's "Utopia". Being in the form of a description of an ideal state built on socialist principles, it continued, after a two-thousand year break, the tradition of Plato, but in the completely different conditions of Western Europe of the Renaissance.

The most significant works to follow in this new current were "The City of the Sun" by the Italian monk Tommaso Campanella (1602), and "The Law of Freedom in a Platform" by his contemporary in the English revolution, Gerrard Winstanley (1652).

From the end of the seventeenth century and in the eighteenth, socialist views spread more and more widely among writers and philosophers and there appeared a veritable torrent of socialist literature. The "socialist novel" came into being, in which descriptions of socialist states were intertwined with romance, travel and adventure (for example, The History of the Savarambi by Verras; The Republic of 41 Philosophers by Fontenelle; The Southern Discovery by Retif de la Bretonne).

The number of new philosophical, sociological and moral tracts preaching socialist views constantly increased (for example, Meslier's Testament; The Law of Nature by Morelly; Thoughts on the Condition of Nature by Mably; The True System by Deschamps; and passages in Diderot's Supplement to the -Journey - of Bougainville).

 All these works agree in proclaiming as a basic principle the common ownership of property. Most of them supplement it with compulsory labor and bureaucratic rule (More, Campanella, Winstanley, Verras, Morelly). Others depict a country divided into small agricultural communes ruled by their most experienced members or by old men (Meslier, Deschamps). Many systems presuppose the existence of slavery (More, Winstanley, Verras, Fenelon), and More and Winstanley regard it not only as an economic category but as a means of punishment upholding the stability of society.

They offer frequent elaborations of the ways in which society will subordinate the individuality of its members. Thus, More speaks of a system of passes which would be essential not only for journeys about the country but for walks outside the town, and he prescribes identical clothing and housing for everybody. Campanella has the inhabitants going about in platoons and the greatest crime for a woman is to lengthen her dress or paint her face.

Morelly forbids all thought on social or moral subjects. Deschamps assumes that all culture — art, science and even literacy — will wither away spontaneously. An important part is played in these works by consideration of the way in which the family and sexual relations are to change.

Campanella assumes absolute bureaucratic control in this domain. Bureaucrats decide which man is to couple with which woman, and when. The union itself is supervised by officials. Children are reared by the state. Deschamps thinks that the menfolk of a village will be the husbands of all the women, and that the children will never know their parents.

 A new view of human history was worked out. Medieval mysticism had regarded it as a unified process of the revelation of God in three stages. Now this was transformed into the idea of a historical process subject to immanent laws and likewise consisting of three stages, the last of which leads inescapably to the triumph of the socialist ideal.

 Unlike the medieval heresies, which had attacked only the Catholic religion, the socialist world view now became hostile to any [Christian] religion, and socialism fused with atheism. In More, freedom of conscience is linked with the recognition of pleasure as the highest objective in life. Campanella's "religion" resembles a pantheistic deification of the cosmos. Winstanley's attitude to religion is one of outright hostility, his "priests" are merely the agitators and propagandists of the system he describes.

Deschamps considers that [Christian] religion will wither away, together with the rest of culture. But Meslier's Testament stands out for its aggressive attitude toward [Christian] religion.

In [Christian] religion he sees the root of mankind's misfortunes, he considers it a patent absurdity, a malignant superstition. He particularly loathes the person of Christ, whom he showers with abuse in protracted tirades, even blaming him because "he was always poor" and "he wasn't resourceful enough.

 The very end of the eighteenth century saw the first attempt to put the socialist ideology which had been developed into practice. In 1786 in Paris a secret society called the "Union of the Equal" was founded with the aim of preparing a revolution. The plot was discovered and its participants arrested, but their plans have been preserved in detail, thanks to the documents published by the government and to the memoirs of the plotters who survived.

Among the aims which the plotters had set themselves, the first was the abolition of private property. The whole French economy was to be fully centralized. Trade was to be suspended and replaced by a system of state provisioning.

All aspects of life were to be controlled by a bureaucracy: "The fatherland takes possession of a man from the day of his birth and does not let him go until his very death." Every man was to be regarded to some extent as an official supervising both his own behavior and that of others. Everybody was to be obliged to work for the state, while "the uncooperative, the negligent, and people who lead dissolute lives or set a bad example by their absence of public spirit" were to be condemned to forced labor.

For this purpose many islands were to be turned into strictly isolated places of confinement. Everybody was to be obliged to eat in communal refectories. Moving about the country without official permission was to be forbidden. Entertainments which were not available to everybody were categorically forbidden. Censorship was to be introduced and publications "of a falsely denunciatory character" were forbidden.