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NOTES ON COMMUNISM Wrong Theory, Evil Practice By Patrícia Lança
extreme Left—anti-globalization and environmentalist militants—seem to think it does and that socialism is still the substitute for what they consider a hateful system. Only among such people can there be any consensus opinion to the effect that communism's failure was due to it having been implemented in backward countries and that in the West it could been successful. And they seem to believe that this is still the case. The economic disasters and human suffering caused by communist practice have been fully documented and require no repetition. However, it seems there are a number of people, particularly among the young, who believe communist theory still holds good. That this approach is not consonant with Marxist theory itself (which stresses the unity of theory and practice) is overlooked. But then communist, i.e. Marxist, theory is not usually much examined these days and it is doubtful whether many of its latter-day adepts are as familiar with it as were the old communists. These at least knew their theory and the history of the working-class movement and its heresies. Because they were educated Marxists, most of these old-timers abandoned communism when they began to recognize its consequences. This essay will attempt to get back to basics. Three premisses may be taken as a starting point. a) Modern professional economists no longer take seriously Marxist economics and the elaborations of surplus value theory. There is consensus that the application of Marxist economic theory can lead only to stagnation at best and economic collapse at worst. This is because its premisses are just plain wrong, something that was recognized by many economists in communist countries long before the system collapsed and is recognized in communist China today. b) No philosopher takes dialectal and historical materialism (Marxist philosophy) seriously. c) With the exception of a small minority numbering Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill and their ilk, there are now few historians who espouse the Marxist teleological philosophy of History. In the Humanities any dominant view that may exist today is the very wide and eclectic current known as post-modernism and its various forms of relativism. However, the irrationalism, nihilism and antinomianism to be found in this area are generally opposed by the few remaining self-confessed Marxists. (cf. Terry Eagleton's critique in this connexion). It can indeed be argued that despite certain Marxist borrowings (such as the notion that prevailing ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class) relativism is at the polar opposite of Marxist political theory. Marxists do, after all, claim to espouse a scientific theory: objective, empirical and testable. It can be convincingly argued that contemporary relativism has arisen precisely out of the the Left's disillusionment with Marxist dogmas. Just because a country has a nationalized (i.e. socialist) economy, we cannot talk about it as having a communist regime. Such a regime must have the ideology based on these three self-styled fundamental areas of Marxism (Economics, Philosophy and History). If we could do without them, there are a number of countries we would have to classify as communist, and we do not. Moreover there is no instance of any nationalized economy being successful beyond the short term. Not to mention the political defects of such experiments and their wholesale repression of basic human rights. II In the heyday of communism, that is, before the Khrushchev speech and the Soviet invasion and occupation of Hungary in 1956/57 (both of which provoked an earthquake on the Left), it was customary for communists and their sympathizers to bother little with rebutting their critics' theoretical arguments. Because it is an axiom of Marxist theory itself that practice (praxis) is paramount, communists always pointed to the alleged economic and social successes of the Soviet Union and the 'Peoples Democracies' as 'the proof of the pudding'. Because Marxists claimed to be scientific they held that the test of all theory was practice, that this was the ultimate proof of any theory and so there was little point in discussing the latter with adversaries: it had been proved to be correct. Any contestation of the alleged success of this practice was put down to 'imperialist' or 'bourgeois' propaganda. In the final analysis the objectors with their theoretical arguments and factual accusations were classified as, at best, to be suffering from 'false consciousness'. They were anti-communist because they subconsciously wanted to defend their own interests. So when communism imploded in Russia and Europe not only regimes collapsed but with them also the theory they had so long defended. With Khrushchev's revelations and mounting evidence of Soviet economic failures it thus became necessary for Western supporters to explain what had gone wrong and there arose on the New Left theoretical rather than factual arguments in defence of Marxism. Theory once again became paramount, as it had before 1917, and much of it was garnered from earlier dissident arguments. The Trotskyists came briefly to the forefront with their theory about the inevitable failure of trying to build 'socialism in one country'. But there were a number of sources other than Trotsky (for example Antonio Gramsci and later the Frankfurt School) where the New Left went for inspiration. Those, went on from Trotsky to the argument that it wasn't so much Stalin's 'socialism in one country' doctrine that was at fault as that the system had been tried in a backward country against the prediction of Marx and Engels who saw Germany and England as the first countries destined to implement a successful socialist revolution. The New Left, following Trotsky, hypothesized that had it been the United States, Britain, or perhaps Germany, to implement communism and even try 'socialism in one country', things might have gone better. This question was discussed endlessly on the New Left in the fifties and sixties. Notably absent from the discussion was any rigorous examination of underlying Marxist economic or philosophical principles. Questioning Marxist tenets continued to be a heresy and it was felt to be deeply improper to go back to all the traditional 'bourgeois' criticisms of the theory. Some people indeed took that path but they soon departed from the main current of the New Left and turned sharply to the Right. The New Left, in its eagerness to be faithful to the creed, veered more and more towards Maoism, Guevarrism and faith in salvation through the colonial revolution. III A key factor in all these discussions and its repercussions on their audiences was the basic ignorance of so many sympathisers of what communist theory really was. Most of these people had never read any of the Marxist, Leninist or indeed Stalinist, classics. The Communist Manifesto was about as far as they had ventured. Old-fashioned politically educated communist militants, however, knew what was being talked about. They had after all not only read the key classics but had regularly attended the Party's education classes for years on end. This may have been why so many of the latter abandoned Marxism altogether. The great mass of sympathetic fellow-travellers, however, had not done much reading, nor known the daily grind of the rank-and-file party militant. They had been motivated more by emotion and respect for the prestige of those Lenin called 'the useful idiots'. The revelations about the nature of 'actually existing socialism' proved truly shocking. But Utopian dreams are hard to abandon and thinking is difficult too, so people tended to cling to any straw that might be available. IV
a) Marxism's faulty economic predictions: • The falling rate of profit for the capitalist class which would drive them to ever more intense oppression and exploitation of the working class; • the consequent inevitable impoverishment of the working class under capitalism; • The requirement by capitalism of a 'reserve army of the unemployed' in order to keep wages down; • Stagnation and the end to technological innovation; • Central planning of a nationalized economy (means of production, distribution and exchange) would result in an increase of wealth. (A socialist economy, the first stage, would give to each according to his work; while a communist economy, the second stage, would give to each according to his need.) • With growing and properly distributed wealth in a socialist society the State would inevitably wither away and in full-fledged communist society would altogether disappear. Marx and Engels were quite simply wrong about all of these. • Profits in fact did not fall in capitalist countries but increased absolutely and became more widespread throughout society as evidenced by the impressive growth of the middle class. • The working class too gradually became better off, partly, but not only, because of trade unionism. (Engels's work on The Condition of the Working Class in England was based on figures produced by 'bourgeois' social reformers, which were, by his time twenty or thirty years out of date). Modern social and economic historians now all agree that despite Dickensian horrors, British workers became steadily more prosperous throughout the nineteenth century. Which, of course, is why the domestic market and production for it as well as for foreign markets expanded. • Far from desiring a reserve army of the unemployed to keep wages down, capitalists generally became more and more conscious of their own interests depending precisely on the enrichment of the workers, and not only for reasons of avoiding social unrest. There lay the market for consumer goods industries which were to reach their apogee in present-day consumer societies. (A fact which explains, as does no other, the overall capitalist conversion to one form or another of the welfare state and support for social democracy). • So far as predicted technological stagnation is concerned, the truth is there for all to see and requires no further comment other than to say that, except in the military sphere, technological stagnation and that of scientific research became one of the outstanding characteristics of Soviet-style economies. Where these did adopt modern technology from the West (as in information technology and military affairs) it proved largely disruptive for socialist systems. • As far as socialism being capable of solving economic problems and creating greater wealth than was possible under capitalism, this prediction too has been falsified and the consequences are there for all to see. • Not only was there no sign of the State withering away but in Soviet style economies the State reached overwhelming proportions. b) A faulty view of human nature lies at the heart of Marxism. This originates in Locke's 'blank slate' (tabula rasa) theory of Mind (derived ultimately from St Augustine) which influenced a number of Enlightenment thinkers such as Rousseau, and has been with us ever since. This holds that nobody is born with innate dispositions. Personality, moral inclinations and intelligence are produced above all by environment. With the environment changed by socialism people would sooner or later develop a socialist (i.e. collectivist outlook) and with it a taste for high culture. So it became a crucial point for the New Left to discuss how you could make socialism without socialists. What about the makers, the inaugurators of this process? They wouldn't be able to do it unless they were free of bourgeois taint. Such freedom was what enabled them to see the truth and they would thus be able to impose on the rest the purity of their ideals and the correctness of their interpretations. This somewhat Calvinist idea has great attraction for the messianic vanity of a certain type of intellectual and helps to explain the peculiar ferocity of factional strife among revolutionaries, always suspicious of each other's purity of intention and fidelity to Marxism. Interesting in this connexion was Lenin's oft-quoted assertion that the working class alone could never rise above economic or trade-union consciousness. The intellectuals were the ones who must furnish revolutionary consciousness using the Party and its vanguard role as guide to the proletariat. So this provided an alluring prospect for some intellectuals. However, history was to provide an ironic destiny for these: the Bolsheviks' best intellectuals were among the first to be eliminated in Stalin's and subsequent purges. (The inclination to messianic arrogance of some intellectuals again came to prominence in radical egalitarian sociology, e.g. Peter Winch, with the idea of the 'free- floating intellectual' who could rise above environmental conditioning.) It was agreed in all these discussions, inspired partly by Trotsky, that you could not build socialism based on an economy of scarcity. If there weren't enough to go round, as in a backward country like Russia, then planning would inevitably implicate policing of distribution. People (not having yet developed socialist consciousness and its magnanimity) would quarrel and would therefore have to be knocked into line. This, (together with capitalist encirclement) was essentially why terror had developed in the Soviet Union and its satellites. But if socialism were to be introduced in wealthy, advanced and educated countries such policing would not be necessary. What was overlooked here was any rigorous examination of why such countries had come to be wealthy and educated in the first place. And also why in such places most people were evidently not keen to change the system. The answer to the latter point was that these were 'alienated', and the task for revolutionaries was to destroy their 'false consciousness.' Again the role of the illuminated vanguard. Where the wealth and success of capitalism was discussed their cause was said to lie in imperialism and the exploitation of the underdeveloped world. The rich are rich because the poor are poor and the poor are poor because the rich are rich, not only domestically but globally. There are a huge number of economic arguments and facts to show that this is not the case: not least the fact that most trade and investment are between capitalist countries themselves and that there has been gradual improvement in the developing world overall. The fact that the gulf between rich and poor has grown is conceptually a separate matter. Many rich have indeed become richer but most of the poor have become less poor. Had there not been improvement in the developing world there would have been no population increase, the best indicator of improving conditions in the early stages of modernization. c) A faulty view of History also lies behind all the above attitudes. It was held that mankind had started off under a state of primitive communism, essentially peaceful and egalitarian (straight from Rousseau and his 'noble savage' idea). The agricultural revolution destroyed hunter-gatherer societies and resultant production of surpluses gave rise to private property and a leisured class of owners who appropriate the surplus. The alleged course of History, propelled by class conflict, (through slave-owning, then feudalist, then capitalist society) was to culminate inevitably in a return, at a higher level, of communist society. And with the introduction of socialism and its development into communism there would occur the withering away of the State. One form of class society changed into another because of changes in the mode of production. True enough about the change from hunter-gatherers (who were certainly not communist) to pastoralists then agriculturalists. But it is difficult to see how slave production changed to feudal production and the latter to capitalist modes, purely on the basis of changes in the mode of production. This economicist interpretation leaves out of account all non-economic factors such as religion, art and the growth of knowledge and humanist conscience. There are societies where you get all three so-called stages within the same society. Much ink has been spilled in trying to fit History into the Marxist strait-jacket. From slavery to feudalism was a particularly thorny topic and so there arose a new category, that of oriental despotism, much written about by French theorists regarding the so-called hydraulic societies of the East based on large-scale irrigation works. Engels's famous work The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, was based on the now discredited findings of the American anthropologist Morgan. Modern anthropology makes it quite clear and indisputable that primitive man did not live in peaceful harmony with his fellows and that the intensity of violence prevalent in such societies would make the twentieth century look like an island of peace. So much for Marxist views about primitive times. It is also now accepted that feudalism did not occur everywhere in a kind of linear development from slavery. Marx based himself on the French model of feudalism and this was atypical. Moreover capitalism itself (the accumulation of stocks, buying cheap and selling dear, hence profit) is always incipient in any society that goes in for trade. And this occurred in both slave and in feudal societies, which are frequently one and the same. Any familiarity with Roman Law shows how much attention was paid to the Law of Contract and provisions governing trade, usury and even industries such as mining. Indeed discussion of usury, an essential feature of capitalism, is to be found in the Old Testament. It is also interesting that all three monotheistic religions have at various times (and reiterated most recently among Moslem theologians) been opposed to usury, making lending at interest a serious sin. According to this profoundly anti-capitalist, anti-developmental doctrine, there should be no interest charged on loans. However, any study of economics tells us that there can a) be no progress without lending and borrowing because this is what promotes investment; b) that few would lend without the prospect of interest. Where interest was banned by law as in pre-modern China, lending at interest inevitably became a black market activity with excessively high interest charged, thus braking investment and fostering economic stagnation. This was the main cause of the decay of that great civilization which should have had everything going for it including technological progress. (The banning of usury may also be one cause of stagnation in Islamic societies.) d) Weakness of Marxist Philosophy, known as Dialectical and Historical Materialism. I have already looked summarily at the faulty historical element and the extreme materialism of the Marxist view of human nature. As for dialectics (said to be derived from Hegel), the Marxist version of logic, hardly anybody talks about this nowadays except among the totally philosophically ignorant. Philosophical logic has taken enormous strides in the last 150 years and this is not the place to go into this abstruse subject. Perhaps a definitive rebuttal of Marxism in the philosophical area is to be found in an accessible form in Popper's Poverty of Historicism whose title is a gloss on Marx's Poverty of Philosophy. But best of all is the massive work of the Polish philosopher, Leszek Kolakowski, formerly a marxist. A sub-product, very influential in recent times, of Marxist philosophical ideas in the field of Ethics is that of Equality. With its origin in some eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideas, enshrined both in the American and French Revolutions, this meritorious-sounding principle was initially intended to apply to the secular idea of equality before the Law or the Christian idea of equality before God. But the notion of equality has been distorted in recent times to that of the absolute equality of one individual with another, which is of course tied to the Blank Slate idea (cf: the famous nature/nurture dispute). However, as experience, common sense and contemporary genetic science all tell us: individuals are not equal, either in talent, personality or moral propensities, and all a decent State can do about this is to secure equality of citizens before the Law (the Rule of Law) and equality of opportunity. Here is probably the basic Achilles Heel of communist theory. Central planning, intrinsic to a nationalized economy, necessarily involves bureaucratization and restrictions on individual freedom. But bureaucrats are people, unequal people with differing propensities and moral outlooks. Not only is bureaucracy inefficient but it is also a breeding ground for corruption, the arbitrariness of the powerful and a spawning ground for totalitarian tendencies. But the overwhelming defect of central planning is the fact that nobody and no institution can claim complete and adequate knowledge of all the factors involved in any situation and so all decision-making is necessarily flawed and replete with unintended consequences. Bureaucracy was much discussed in the halcyon days of the New Left and the answer was thought to be 'Workers Self-Management', a version of anarchism. No more central planning. No more arbitrariness from above. The workers themselves, as in the original Soviets, would be the decision-makers. It was thought that this idea was being put into practice first in Yugoslavia, then in Algeria. Tomes were written on the subject. One last final squeak of this theorizing emerged among certain observers of the Portuguese post- l974 land reform. Everywhere these experiments collapsed, leaving behind sequels of discontent, cynicism and poverty. Related to the ideal of workers' self-management is the attraction of collective experiments, all of which have wrecked themselves on the rocks of human nature and its fallibility, as any examination of the history of these endeavours clearly demonstrates, from before Robert Owen to the Israeli kibbutz and hippy collectives. But Utopianism continues to lure the unwary. V
Freedom of thought, expression, and association; equality before the Law; freedom to own property as the basis of both economic prosperity and of freedom; impartial and speedy Justice; well-designed and well- manned institutions in a State whose only reason for existence is the protection of its citizens; democracy, defined as that system which enables citizens to get rid, without violence, of an unsatisfactory government. None of the foregoing essentials for a decent society can be guaranteed without an educated citizenry which understands, on the one hand, the benefits these bring and, on the other, the components of the ever- present totalitarian temptation. One of the most important elements in that education is a knowledge of the mistakes of History. Without this we are likely to see them repeated. ~~~~««»»~~~~ |
and FRIEDRICH ENGELS left) were the joint authors of THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO (1848) |
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