This thought was perhaps less than random (it didn’t just “pop in there”; I already had the topic in mind when I posted a couple “Food for thought” quotes ago. Therefore, I gave it a stand-alone title.)
So, yes, Soviet Russia, and indeed the entire Soviet system, was not communist. I know that’s what they claimed, but people make all kinds of claims that are not true. And this is one of those instances.
After the revolutions in 1917 and the consolidation of the Soviet Union in 1922, the world was presented with, it was claimed, a communist system forged in Karl Marx’s name. Of course, this was all nonsense—especially the inclusion of Marxism as the guiding ideology.
Karl Marx (see my blog post on him on Jan. 22 of this year) did talk of revolution. However, what Vladimir Lenin and company achieved in 1917-22 was not what Marx had in mind. Marx envisioned a proletariat revolution (conducted by the workers) and this would take place in a country where capitalism was in its most advanced stage of development, namely, in Germany or England. Russia was certainly not a candidate, being a mostly feudal country where capitalism was in a stage of infancy.
Furthermore, the Communist Party and its Central Committee constituted a single-party tyranny. The Bolshevik revolution of October 1917 was the product of a bunch of power-hungry intellectuals—hardly what Marx envisioned.
Into the bargain, the idea was not to divide up everything and redistribute it among the peasants and factory workers. What was billed as a workers paradise was intolerant of labor organization. The state assumed control of the infrastructure, the economy, and the resources.
One might call this kind of configuration “state capitalism,” as the state acts as the entrepreneur. So, if we add this up, we have: no worker control of anything (factories, etc.), a cash-based (the ruble) economy, state ownership of everything (factories, resources, etc.), and capitalism (by the state) carrying on all the while. This is hardly a communist arrangement. It’s a totalitarian arrangement with state-capitalist enterprise churning in the background.
Americans have been encouraged ever since that this configuration is the only other major socio-political system on offer. It’s either “capitalism” or “communism.” This is an either/or dichotomy and is logically fallacious. Americans have been programmed to believe that capitalism is wonderful and communism is the work of the devil. Can one imagine a person living in thirteenth-century England bragging that “Feudalism is the best system!” Would we take such a person seriously? Why do we brag about the presumed superiority of a system that we likely do not participate in?
The system that predominates in the United States is corporatism, which is maybe a cousin of capitalism. However, do not think for a minute that Apple, Amazon, and Google want free-market, laissez faire capitalism. They do not want competition. They loathe capitalism and want nothing to do with it. They want monopoly control. Wall Street wants robust government involvement—when it comes time to bail them out. They just adopt an anti-government line when it perturbs its profits. And if you think there’s a wide-open free market, go start your own bank. Or your own drug company. Or start making smart phones. And you will quickly find out just how unfree the market is, or just how non-competitive it is.
So when policy ideas are dismissed as “socialism,” I’m not sure what the person is talking about. Will universal healthcare turn the United States into Moscow 1923? And how is that exactly? No, it will inch us closer to Copenhagen 2023 or Oslo 2023 or Bern 2023—fine by me. A reader of this blog saw a girl with a patch or something on her backpack that said, “Socialism Sucks.” Does this patch mean that Lenin and Trotsky suck? State capitalism sucks? The politburo of the Communist Party under Stalin sucked? What does the patch mean? Is Denmark socialist? Is Switzerland? Is Germany? Is France? These are not socialist/communist countries.
Like “liberal” and “conservative,” socialism is one of those words we use, do not understand, and would do well to stop using.
