Re: Re: J.S. Mill on Communism

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Louis Proyect wrote:

> "In proportion as success in life is seen or believed to be the fruit of
> fatality or accident, and not of exertion, in that same ratio does envy
> develop itself as a point of national character. The most envious of all
> mankind are the Orientals. In Oriental moralists, in Oriental tales, the
> envious man is remarkably prominent. In real life, he is the terror of all
> who possess anything desirable, be it a palace, a handsome child, or even
> good health and spirits: the supposed effect of his mere look constitutes
> the all-pervading superstition of the evil eye. Next to Orientals in envy,
> as in activity, are some of the Southern Europeans. The Spaniards pursued
> all their great men with it, embittered their lives, and generally
> succeeded in putting an early stop to their successes."
>
> J.S. Mill *Considerations on Representative Government*, Chap. 3

"How can I accept a doctrine [Marxism] which sets up as its bible ...
an obsolete economic textbook which I know to be not only
scientifically erroneous but without interest or application for the
modern world? How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to
the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the
intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and
surely carry the seeds of all human advancement? Even if we need a
religion how can we find it in the turbid rubbish of the Red
bookshops? It is hard for an educated, decent, intelligent son of
western Europe to find his ideals here, unless he has first suffered
some strange and horrid process of conversion which has changed all
his values....
   I do not mean that Russian Communism alters, or even seeks to
alter, human nature, that it makes Jews less avaricious or Russians
less extravagant than they were before...."
- John Maynard Keynes, Collected Works, IX, pp. 258, 259.