Posts Tagged communism
All But the Clergy Believe
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary on July 21, 2025
As the accused man approached the glowing iron, his heart pounded with faith. God, he trusted, would shield the innocent and leave the guilty to be maimed. The crowd, clutching rosaries and squinting through the smoke, murmured prayers. Most sought a miracle, some merely a verdict. They accepted the trial’s sanctity, exchanging bets on the defendant’s guilt.
Only the priest knew the fire wasn’t as hot as it looked. Sometimes it wasn’t hot at all. The iron was cooled or quietly switched. The timing of the ritual, the placement of fires and cauldrons, the priest’s step to the left rather than right. He held just enough control to steer the outcome toward justice, or what he took for it. The tricks had been passed down from the ancients. Hidden siphons, pivoting mirrors, vessels-within-vessels. Hero of Alexandria had described such things. Lucian of Samosata mocked them in his tales of string-pulled serpents and mechanical gods. Hippolytus of Rome listed them like a stage magician blowing the whistle on his rivals. Fake blood, hollow idols, the miracle of wine poured from nowhere.
By the thirteenth century, the ordeal was a dance: fire, chant, confession, absolution. The guilty, trembling at the priest’s solemn gaze, confessed before the iron’s touch. The faithful innocent, mindful of divine mercy, walked unscathed, unaware of the mirrors, the second cauldron, the cooled metal that had spared them.
There’s no record of public doubt about the mechanism, and church records support the above appraisal. Peter Leeson’s Ordeals drew data from a sample of 208 ordeals in early‑13th‑c. Várad. “Nearly two thirds of the accused were unscathed,” he wrote. F.W. Maitland, writing in 1909, found only one hot-iron ordeal in two decades that did not result in acquittal, a nearly 100% exoneration rate among the documented defendants who faced ordeals.
The audience saw a miracle and went home satisfied about heaven and earth. The priest saw the same thing and left, perhaps a faint weariness in his step, knowing no miracle had occurred. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test,” he muttered, absolving himself. No commandment had been broken, only the illusion of one. He knew he had saved the believers – from the chaos of doubt, from turning on each other, from being turned upon. It was about souls, yes. But it was more about keeping the village whole.
Everyone believed except the man who made them believe.
●
In the 1960s and 70s, the Soviet Union still spoke the language of revolution. Newspapers featured daily quotes from Lenin. Speeches invoked the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the coming utopia of classless harmony. School kids memorized Marx.
But by then – and even long before then, we later learned – no one believed it anymore. Not the factory workers, toiling under fabricated quotas. Not the schoolteachers, tasked with revising Marxist texts each summer. And the Politburo? The Brezhnevs and Andropovs mouthed slogans by day, then retreated to Black Sea dachas, Nikon cameras in hand, watching Finnish broadcasts on smuggled American TVs, Tennessee bourbon sweating on the table.
They enforced the rituals nonetheless. Party membership was still required for advancement. Professors went on teaching dialectical materialism. Writers still contrived odes to tractor production and revolutionary youth. All of it repeated with the same flat cadence. No belief, just habit and a vague sense that without it, the whole thing might collapse. No one risked reaching into the fire.
It was a system where no one believed – not the clergy, not the choir, not the congregation. But all pretended. The KGB, the Politburo, the party intellectuals, and everyone else knew Marx had failed. The workers didn’t revolt, and capitalism refused to collapse.
A few tried telling the truth. Solzhenitsyn criticized Stalin’s strategy in a private letter. He got eight years in the Gulag and internal exile. Bukovsky denounced the Communist Youth League at nineteen. He was arrested, declared insane in absentia, and confined. After release, he helped organize the Glasnost Meeting and was sent back to the asylum. On release again, he wrote against the abuse of psychiatry. Everyone knew he was right. They also knew he posed no real threat. They jailed him again.
That was the system. Sinyavsky published fiction abroad. He was imprisoned for the views of his characters. The trial was theater. There was no official transcript. He hadn’t threatened the regime. But he reminded it that its god was dead.
The irony is hard to miss. A regime that prided itself on killing God went on to clone His clergy – badly. The sermons were lifeless, the rituals joyless, the congregation compulsory. Its clergy stopped pretending belief. These were high priests of disbelief, performing the motions of a faith they’d spent decades ridiculing, terrified of what might happen if the spell ever broke.
The medieval priest tricked the crowd. The Soviet official tricked himself. The priest shaped belief to spare the innocent. The commissar demanded belief to protect the system.
The priest believed in justice, if not in miracles. The state official believed in neither.
One lied to uphold the truth. The other told the truth only when the fiction collapsed under its own weight.
And now?
Remembering Deep-Pocket 9/11 Marxists
Posted by Bill Storage in Commentary, History of Science on September 10, 2026
A couple of days after the World Trade Center attacks, posters appeared around San Francisco in astounding density. You couldn’t walk fifty feet on Market Street without seeing one. Their message, as I read it, showed some sophisticated Marxist reasoning: 1. American foreign policy produced conditions leading to anti-American terrorism. 2. Our prosperity was dependent upon an unequal global economic system. 3. Americans had moral responsibility for the violence directed against them. 4. Abandon capitalism.
There is certainly truth in number 1. Number 2 is arguable and has been argued and assumed true in university education, but remains highly contested. It seems to me less plausible today than it might have 25 years ago. Number 3 is the gut punch. It does not follow from 1 or 2. Number 4 is standard Marxist/Marxian bs.
And by that I mean this is typical Marxist reasoning. You prepare a bunch of academic-sounding whereas and then pull a therefore out of your butt.
Let’s take a detailed look. The language is pure Marx. Alienation, social conflict theory, exploitation.
Seven different posters, as follows:
1. Unprovoked?
2. Fighting alienation with alienated means
3. “Today is a great day for the people of Indochina” – Simone Weil
4. The issue raised by social-conflict theory is ine<…> Members of rich societies consume most of the world’s resources and generate most of the p<…>. That is, we maintain our affluent way of life by exploiting the poor of the less-developed countries <…>ning our planet in the process.
5. “The chickens are coming home to roost” – Malcolm X
6. “Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING”
7. “got milk?”
The reasoning, plausible in the premises, asinine in conclusion, entails that understanding why someone like Bin Laden hates you is exactly equivalent to accepting their moral judgment of you.
We can dig into their epistemic machinery.
Their conclusion was completely formed before 9/11 happened. Obviously. These things went up in the hundreds or thousands almost overnight. At what cost? Professionally printed – while feigning low-budget – fully adhesive-backed posters appearing immediately says this wasn’t a few Berkeley students on a Kinko’s binge. Somebody had resources, organization, and a preexisting political network capable of turning an event only a day old into a finished ideological product.
They started with a conclusion, then looked at 9/11 through the available vocabulary of their political worldview. Every road led back to capitalism, imperialism, consumption, alienation, exploitation. The remarkable thing is how little room there is in the seven captions for the actual agency of the attackers.
“Unprovoked?” is standard Marxist catechism. It invites you to supply the answer the poster-maker already knows. The question can mean “Did the United States have a history that helps explain al-Qaeda’s hostility?” That would be a charitable reading, and a legitimate historical question. Or it can mean “Was the United States morally responsible for this attack?” At best, the poster exploits the slippage and the grief.
In San Francisco, 9/11 wasn’t an abstract geopolitical event occurring to people somewhere else. The social distance was extraordinarily small. Many people I worked with knew someone on one of those airplanes or in the towers. I did. The Marxist posters immediately converted an intensely human catastrophe into an illustration of a preexisting theory of global political economy.
“Brought to you by YOUR STANDARD OF LIVING” is a straight-out accusation. The photo supplies the emotional force, the caption tells you who is to bear responsibility.
I have, or probably had, a couple of devout and honest Marxist friends, innocent, somehow able to partition belief from evidence in their minds, the way they assure themselves the Christians do. Beyond them, I see only academic capitalists who lie about following Marx. They lie for their own economic gain, just like Karl Marx did.
Hey, Tithi Bhattacharya, Richard Wolff, Vivek Chibber, David Harvey, and Nancy Fraser. Got Ben and Jerry’s?
Epistemic/epistemological horseshit. Marxists cannot be wrong.
Marxism, as is obvious to anyone who has opened Das Kapital, is immune to disconfirmation. If workers become revolutionary, that’s evidence for the theory. If they don’t, that’s also evidence, because false consciousness, ideology, and bourgeois institutions explain their failure to revolt. The theory has an answer either way.
Americans have a high standard of living and are attacked. That is evidence that capitalism and imperialism generate resentment. The quarter century following is equally accommodated: the system is exploiting people enough to prevent resistance, and American cultural dominance is suppressing awareness.
Poor countries resist: class conflict.
Poor countries don’t resist: alienation and false consciousness.
We see a conceptual system absorbing unexpected observations without allowing the observation to alter the system.
The posters ask: What if the attackers had reasons? They don’t allow: What if those reasons don’t explain the attack so well?
Beyond the epistemological issue of a theory being immune to disconfirmation (Karl Popper’s criterion), we can use another idea from History of Science: explanatory adequacy.
The posters did not ask, even implicitly: “What does 9/11 tell us that we didn’t know yesterday?”
They announced: “9/11 tells us what we already knew.” Of course you did.
9-11, communism, history, Marxism, Philosophy, politics
6 Comments