Marxian Basics- alientation

In a previous post I had talked about alienation and commodity fetishism in regards to recognizing the different character structures and the different sensibility in aesthetics they imply. I suggested that communism would derive its content and 'tablets of values' from characterology and this would unite individuals outside of familial, national, religious and other contingent and unessential facts about a person. However, this, as most of my work on this blog has been, is only the addition of the altruist's perspective to the egoist's which in no way diminishes the value of the latter's contribution.

The altruist appreciates the different types and the egoist appreciates the universal element in people.

There's no better description of the egoist's perspective on the communist future than Reich:

You'll have a good, secure life when being alive means more to you than security, love more than money, your freedom more than public or partisan opinion; when the mood of Beethoven's or Bach's music becomes the mood of your whole life--you have it in you, little man, somewhere deep down in a corner of your being; when your thinking is in harmony, and no longer in conflict, with your feelings; when you've learned to recognize two things in their season: your gifts and the onset of old age; when you let yourself be guided by the thoughts of great sages and no longer by the crimes of great warriors: when you cease to set more store by a marriage certificate than by love between man and woman; when you learn to recognize your errors promptly and not too late, as you do today; when you pay the men and women who teach your children better than politicians; when truths inspire you and empty formulas repel you; when you communicate with your fellow workers in foreign countries directly, and no longer through diplomats; when instead of enraging you as it does today, your adolescents daughter's happiness in love makes your heart swell with joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory joy; when you can only shake your head at the memory of the days when small children were punished for touching their sex organs; when the human faces you see on the street are no longer drawn with grief and misery but glow with freedom, vitality, and serenity; when human bodies cease to walk this earth with rigid, retracted pelvises and frozen sex organs. 

Listen Little Man, Reich

For the Orgonomists

who can only see communist plots for power in liberal kindness and guilt

“Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.”

—	Wilhelm Reich, Listen Little Man

The last sentence "When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed,”   however, seems to speak to the problems of the liberal project. There is undoubtedly a sense of entitlement and a perverse irreverence in liberal politics that are to be rightly criticized but the idea that moving towards universal healthcare and tolerance is a slippery slope to socialism is absurd.