James Lindsay, anti-Communist on X
In some sense, Communism in practice really can be summarized in a single sentence: "All people are equal, but some people are more equal than others." It shares this trait with Fascism.
This sentence, derived from George Orwell (in Animal Farm) is not just a clever contradiction, though. It's dialectical. It is a statement indicative of Communism not only because its contradictions appear in practice but because the contradictions themselves are dialectically written into the program.
If we want to be able to fight Communism and Fascism, it is actually crucial to learn dialectics and how to pull this mode of thought apart. It is not optional. Leaving it as optional will invariably get us caught in far more dialectical traps than we would be in otherwise, and every such thing advances the cause of the ideology we're fighting.
Here's a concrete example to make it more vivid. Diversity.
We have spent the last several years (arguably 55) arguing about whether "diversity" is our strength, or what kind of diversity: demographic diversity or viewpoint diversity, or whatever. At no point were we understanding the dialectic behind the program called "Diversity."
This program was also used under the dialectical materialism doctrine embraced by the Soviet Union, implemented by Vladimir Lenin himself. It was called Raznoobraziya (Разнообразие), which translates literally and directly as "diversity."
Lenin did not mean just any kind of diversity, though. What he explicitly said he meant by Raznoobraziya is "diversity in form with unity in content," which can also be reversed to mean "achieving unity in content through diversity in form."
Sounds like Orwell: "everyone is equal but some are more equal than others." Why? Because it's a dialectical formulation of "diversity." Lenin defined what he meant by Raznoobraziya under the "dialectical law" called "the struggle and unification of opposites." Difference (diversity) and sameness (unity) were brought together into a single concept.
What it meant in practice is that diversity would be superficial, people from different backgrounds, while they'd all be Marxists in line with the Party. Diversity in outer form with unity in inner content. It also meant in practice that they would leverage socialists from different backgrounds to make more people socialists by using socialism as the basis for what it meant to be whatever background in an authentic way.
If this sounds like the Diversity in DEI, it's because it is exactly that Diversity. You cannot understand what it is or how to engage it without understanding its dialectical formulation or how to handle a dialectical formulation.
Arguing about the value of viewpoint diversity but the weakness of demographic diversity, for example, actually plays into the Diversity program, not against it. Many did this with totally good intentions.
How does it play into their hands? Because the Woke worldview holds that viewpoint diversity is intrinsically linked to demographic diversity and have a well-developed theory of how that allegedly happens (called "standpoint epistemology," which is somewhat derivative to cultural relativism). They also have a well-developed critical theory of each identity and thus a claim that the Woke view of being that identity is the only one that's "authentic" to the "lived experience" of that "social position."
That is, the Woke had already laid all the groundwork to capture "viewpoint diversity" on stronger terms than their critics could possibly mean it, and even though the critics holding up "viewpoint diversity" rightly perceived the trick (everyone is Woke no matter how diverse), they weren't equipped to defeat the dialectic being used against them.
If you don't think this perspective was all that powerful, I urge you to understand that the ONLY reason we have a Woke professional and legal environment at all is because this stupid trick about standpoint epistemology being the right interpretation of viewpoint diversity is one of two stupid Woke arguments that fooled the Supreme Court at least as early as 1978 (Bakke v. Board of Regents) into arguing that college admissions can and should prioritize discrimination in the name of "Diversity" because "diversity" provides an enriching educational opportunity consistent with the colleges' missions. Civil Rights law got turned inside out in favor of Woke more or less overnight. (Cf. Griggs v. Duke Power for the other stupid trick, which is the "disparate impact" doctrine case).
The correct way to deal with the dialectic is to point out its bogus terms in full (because the various parts point to various truths and cannot be dealt with separately). That is, in this case, Diversity has to be exposed as a cover story that isn't about diversity at all but is specifically designed to cherry-pick a single ideological view that gets channeled through the more superficial form of diversity. The focus has to be on the trick itself, that is, treating it as causal, not as an effect.
Of course, on the other hand, yet another dialectical trick awaited people regarding Diversity. Lenin's protégé, in a sense, and successor, Josef Stalin, had another take on precisely the same dialectic. Stalin's went like this, much more bluntly: "National in form and Socialist in content." This was the basis for another Soviet program he and Lenin implemented in the 1920s called Korenizatsiya (Коренизация), which roughly means "making indigenous" or "rootification," to spin a new term. The explicit dialectical formulation makes it more clear: "national in form and Socialist in content." (Its focus on "diversity" in nationalities and in "national form" led Lenin to refer to Stalin as "the national socialist.")
The difference here is that within the Soviet Union, Russian was also a nationality, in some sense part of the constellation of "Diversity" but differently. Eventually, therefore, when the favoritism of minority ethnicities and nationalities wore thin for the "Great Russians," who had been up to that point consistently accused of "Great Russian chauvinism" every time they disagreed with their minority-ethnicity comrades (who were more equal than others), they were led to assert their own nationality as well.
In our current anti-Woke day, that means a rising white racial consciousness, male sexual consciousness, straight sexual (other meaning) consciousness, Christian nationalist religious consciousness, etc., as an alleged antidote to the Woke reverse prioritization. Now rather than just the minorities playing the game, everyone is playing the game.
And what was Stalin's use and purpose with this reaction to the excesses, abuses, and failures of Korenizatsiya, arising roughly 6-8 years after its full implementation, btw? "Russification." Everyone would be Great Russian now, and the Soviet Union would just be "Mother Russia" again.
What he did was as explicitly "all animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others" as could possibly have been done, likely inspiring Orwell for the famous line in Animal Farm. Stalin said that Russians, under Soviet Russification, would be "first among equals."
This would have been roughly 1930, maybe 1931, and in implementation it required totally crushing the strongest ethnic minority who happened to occupy perhaps the most valuable land: the Ukrainians. Thus, in the winter of 1932-33, Stalin executes the Holodomor, the forced starvation of millions of Ukrainians under his new doctrines. No longer would Ukraine be allowed "self-determination" in its own "national form," however Socialist.
That is, the dialectic was forced into synthesis. National in form and Socialist in content was presented with its negation, Russification, and forced into a synthesis literally described as "first among equals," itself a dialectical formulation.
We have no choice but to understand this twisted, demented, manipulative logic if we want to combat Communism and Fascism. They operate on this logic. There is no other choice.
