Last night I had a strange experience: I was having dinner in Manhattan, near New York University, surrounded by a group of pleasant and smart people, who happened to be Marxists! It was a nice evening, following a panel discussion at NYU on morality without gods. Still, I couldn’t help the feeling of having been thrown back to my high school days (circa 1977), when people were using terms like “means of production” and “oppression of the workers” with genuine conviction and equal obliviousness to the subtleties of actual socio-economic and political situations.What I thought I was going to hear from my Marxist companions was something along the lines that Marx’s analysis of class struggle and of the foundations of capitalism was still largely correct, and in fact even relevant to the recent collapse of the worldwide financial system unleashed by the most unbridled (as in unregulated) form of capitalism the world has seen since the era of the aptly named robber barons. That, I think, is actually a defensible position, as much as I don’t believe for a second that Marx’s solution will ever work in any real human society. (My take is that both extreme socialism and extreme capitalism make the same mistake, albeit for symmetrical reasons: they ignore fundamental aspects of human nature. Capitalism puts too much emphasis on self-interest, dismissing the fact that we are social animals with strong cooperative instincts; Socialism errs on the other side, proposing an ant-like society where individualism is progressively squeezed out of the human experience.)
If one actually reads Marx’s The Communist Manifesto, one can hardly disagree with most of his theses. That a key to human history is the economic struggle among classes is true, though my view of history does not admit of a one-cause-fits-all sort of explanation. That a more just society would be created by a fairer redistribution of wealth and especially of the control of “the means of production” is also true unless your definition of “justice” is that (economic) might makes right. And that people’s understanding of their own condition is largely shaped by a system that wishes to perpetuate itself despite its flagrant injustice is also something I don’t dispute.
But my Marxist dinner companions really stunned me when they claimed that Stalin “wasn’t all that bad,” and that “Mao was even better.” Come again? Let’s start with Stalin. His radical policies and pursuit of power killed millions through famine, and that was just the beginning. His regime was one of the most violently repressive in human history, with again millions of people exiled to labor camps or simply eliminated, and entire ethnic groups “resettled” because they were not to his liking. Oh, and while Stalin gets a lot of credit for resisting the Nazi invasion, thereby helping to turn the tide against Hitler during World War II, let us not forget that he also pushed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, which paved the way for Hitler’s invasion of Poland, and thus the onset of the war. My Marxist friends quibbled on exactly how many millions were killed (to me, one million is one too many), and claimed that Stalin’s was the first experiment in applied communism, and he had to make up stuff as he went. Well, let me declare the first experiment such a total and abject failure that I really don’t think we should attempt a second one.
But of course many other such “experiments” were carried out during the 20th century, one of the most cruel being Mao’s. Far from me to be able to offer an in-depth analysis of Maoism (or Stalinism, for that matter) here. But let us consider some examples of what the great leader of communist China did. Mao admitted to the execution of about 700,000 people just in the 1949-53 period, justified, in his mind, because of the necessity of consolidating power. The real number is more likely to be somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million. Moreover, another 1.5 million Chinese were sent to labor camps to be “reformed.” During the so-called “great leap forward,” Mao’s second five-year plan that began in 1958, his policies resulted in widespread famine that killed tens of millions of people. The exact numbers are in dispute, depending on the method used to calculate the deaths. A widely accepted figure is of 20 million, though other estimates take that to be a conservative number, with a range going all the way to the mind-boggling figure of 72 million. Again, if this is the hallmark of success, I’d hate to see a failure.
Why is it that otherwise intelligent, nice people, clearly concerned with justice in the world, can still whole-heartedly claim that communism is a good idea? I suspect it is for very similar reasons to why Christians (just to pick another random group of reality-challenged people) can read the Old Testament and seriously claim that all those instances of god commanding his people to slaughter, rape and pillage “in his name” are really quotes taken out of context. In what context, pray, does that sort of injunction become morally acceptable? The problem, in other words, is the uniquely human penchant for adopting an ideological position and then sticking to it, reality be damned.
As my favorite Marx, Groucho, aptly said (ironically, while talking about matters of economics in the masterpiece movie Duck Soup): “A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.” That is not that different from what I wanted to scream at several points during last night’s dinner. Luckily, the neo-Marxist is one club I simply cannot join, on the grounds that they really wouldn't allow someone like me to be one of their members.
How do we know that communism wasn't invented by scientists? Because they would have tried it on mice first. As you can imagine, the idea of a communist paradise sounds particularly 'implausible' from the point of view of someone living in Warsaw. Even if I do happen to have broadly leftist views.
ReplyDelete"Socialism errs on the other side, proposing an ant-like society where individualism is progressively squeezed out of the human experience.)"
ReplyDeleteMassimo,
I was hoping you would make these assumptions explicit.
Really, if you take Marx's actual thought as a starting point then you would have to recognize this as a worn out caricature and strawman of what Marxist socialist theory actually proposes. In works beyond the Manifesto, most of Marx's work is a critque of capitalism, not a political program or a blueprint for a future society. He makes the argument that it is capitalism through the process of commodity production for profit that forces workers into a collectivist condition and alienates them from control over the conditions and the products of their labor. As a remedy, Marx proposes "a free association of producers where the condition for the free developement of all is the condition for the free developement of one".
Actual Marxist socialist theory in no way proposes any "ant like society".
You must have found yourself with a group that must have been members of some Maoist sect, because only they would defend Stalin and Mao on those grounds.
You might have found a better conversation with somebody much better educated about actual Marxism and the history of the Soviet Union. That person might note that to consolidate power Stalin had to murder or inprison many Bolshevik party members to his right and left. So to argue against Marxism or socialism by pointing out the crimes of Stalin (or Mao) is really a non-sequitor.
To use these lemmings you had dinner with as somehow representative of Marxism is like finding a eugenicist and claiming that that person is representative of Darwinism.
There are plenty critical thinking Marxists out there who fully acknowledge the problems of the 20th century socialist experiments and wouldn't defend the crimes of Stalin and Mao.
Regardless, we are still left with the question of whether capitalism is a sustainable and just system. Could it be replaced with something better? Something that is more democratic and not authoritarian? Something that places human needs above the profit motive?
Capitalism puts too much emphasis on self-interest, dismissing the fact that we are social animals with strong cooperative instincts
ReplyDeleteThat makes as much sense as saying accepting Evolution promotes selfishness.
the most unbridled (as in unregulated) form of capitalism the world has seen since the era of the aptly named robber barons.
Ron Paul put it best:
To condemn free-market capitalism because of anything going on today makes no sense. There is no evidence that capitalism exists today. We are deeply involved in an interventionist-planned economy that allows major benefits to accrue to the politically connected of both political parties. One may condemn the fraud and the current system, but it must be called by its proper names — Keynesian inflationism, interventionism, and corporatism.
Marxism is just another religion, more intellectualy insidious than the supernatural ones.
Well, I guess you could call your dinner companions "marxists". You could call Lenin a "marxist". Unfortunately, the kind of "socialism" practiced in the Soviet Union under Stalin(or his successors), would probably make Karl Marx turn over in his grave(if he isn't whirling now). And there are "marxist" socialists who are actually democratic in the best sense of the word --- they actually have read what Marx had to say, and understand it. And recognize that Stalin & Co. weren't it. Yes, my friend, there actually are democratic marxists. I actually know some. Sounds like your dinner companions missed the boat here.
ReplyDeleteAnne G
It sounds like you found yourself in the company of people who revealed themselves as "real atheists" by acknowledging their crush on Stalin -- according to christian stereotypes about "real atheists."
ReplyDeletePerhaps needless to say, an experience with a few possible Stalin apologists says very little about Marxists and the viability of communism. Sheldon, in a comment above, has said all that remains to be said, so I won't rehash it.
ReplyDelete@TLP:
ReplyDeleteUnbridled capitalism is what has led to the current economic crisis. That the banks are now demanding government bailouts doesn't mean what they were practicing wasn't unbridled capitalism; only that, like selfish capitalists everywhere, they want profits to be private, and losses to be nationalised. I.e., it's perfectly capitalist: it considers only the individual, not the group.
It's exactly what Ron Paul favours; i.e., "I can shoot my neighbour, but the government has no right to interfere". Not much protection of the weak against the strong, there.
But then again, RonPaul is a soi-disant maverick.
So, that's all right, then...
I find comments along the lines of "this is not really communism/capitalism" rather disingenuous. Of course an evening conversation with a few self-professed Marxists does not amount to a condemnation of Marxism. I used that experience simply to get the conversation started on this blog. (After all, a "web log" is a kind of diary of one's experiences...)
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, how many more atrocities or financial disasters do we need to acknowledge that a certain way of thinking and doing things may suffer from fundamental problems?
"We are social animals with strong cooperative instincts." True. When people are free (as in "unbridled" and "unregulated") they cooperate and do good things for themselves and for everyone. Collectivism by force (including democratic force, as in the US and Europe) is no substitute for free cooperation. It is less morally appealing and it just doesn't work so well.
ReplyDeleteMarcelino,
ReplyDelete"When people are free (as in "unbridled" and "unregulated") they cooperate and do good things for themselves and for everyone."
Really? You mean like on Wall Street during the past few years? Or at Enron a few years ago??
Some of you might be interested in my new book on Stalinism
ReplyDeletehttp://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/excerpts.html
I am sorry for the non-profit advertisement. My six recent OpEds (links are at the end of the above) are based on the book content.
Reviews in your local (and not only local) newspapers and journals will be highly appreciated. Same for the reviews to be posted on my website.
Ludwik at
kowalskiL@mail.montclair.edu
ludwik K.
From a Swedish left-wing perspective, I must say that these were some strange and not very representative marxists you happened to encounter in NY. I, for myself, think marxism is an important political philosophy, that helps us to understand and analyze the world around us - albeit not the only one.
ReplyDeleteI also think that the current financial collapse DO say something about capitalisms failures, without defending any of those repressive stalinist or maoist regimes that you mention. I do think that society would be better off with a greater share of the "means of production" under common ownership, without denying that there are difficulties that need to be solved. But the current economic system (capitalism) is not the first social system in human history - and will certainly not be the last.
Marxist philosophy, when it as as best, helps us to analyze the world, and is certainly not a detailed receipe for building a better society (that hard work has to be done by ourself!). All marxists are certainly not dogmatic stalinists or maoists, at least not in Sweden, where these groups are almost non-existent.
My personal interpretation of this experience is that in such a hyper-capitalistic society as the US, the weak left-forces are so marginalized so that they are more or lessed force in to taking "extreme" positions, as this marxist crowd in NY. It is no coincidence, I think, that one of the most dogmatic communist parties in the world is the one in the US! I find it remarkable that american communists, many of them who have done so much good in e. g. the civil rights movement in the 60'ties, are still so extremely dogmatic when it comes to think about the failures of the Soviet Union. But dissidents easily go to extremes, think about Alexander Solzhenitzyn in Russia, who fought against Soviet terror, but himself defended Tsarism and certainly was no democrat. That is a parallell to the marxists in the US, perhaps?
Finally, as an evolutionary biologist myself, I would never deny human nature. However, I think that human nature (whatever it is) is neither any argument against socialism or argument in favor of capitalism (whether regulated or unregulated). Again, we cannot be lazy when forming our society and rely on Marx or human nature. We have to do the hard work and thinking ourselves.
Massimo,
ReplyDeleteNo, I do not mean government intervention favoring some people (Enron, Wall Street) at the expense of others, and messing things up at the expense of everyone. I mean people acting free from government intervention.
But let me restate my point. Liberalism - the free-market philosophy, or extreme capitalism, or whatever you want to call it - does not dismiss the fact that we are social animals with strong cooperative instincts. Rather, it is based on that very fact.
"How many more atrocities or financial disasters do we need to acknowledge that a certain way of thinking and doing things may suffer from fundamental problems?"
I ask the same question.
Marcelino,
ReplyDelete"I do not mean government intervention favoring some people (Enron, Wall Street) at the expense of others, and messing things up at the expense of everyone. I mean people acting free from government intervention."
But the Enron and WS disasters happened precisely *because* people where acting free of government regulation...
Massimo,
ReplyDeleteI keep saying that the fact that humans are naturally social and cooperative is a fundamental tenet of free-market thinking. You first said the opposite of this, but now you stay mute on the matter.
Instead you keep bringing up Enron and Wall Street. I don't understand why.
"But the Enron and WS disasters happened precisely *because* people where acting free of government regulation..."
ReplyDeletebut inside of the matter...
Economic disasters happen especially when a majority in a society value wealth and affluence over families and children, and even potential children. (If having more children means having less $...and so on.) And I don't think that Marxism touches on that aspect of a breakdown at all. Marxism is more of a cheap substitute for a cooperative system with diminishing returns. A VERY poor substitute also for solidarity within a family unit. If one happens to be well to do, or very much economically disadvantaged, if one has the sincere love of one’s family the economic aspect of having or not having is rather insignificant.
"..and seriously claim that all those instances of god commanding his people to slaughter, rape and pillage “in his name” are really quotes taken out of context. In what context, pray, does that sort of injunction become morally acceptable?"
ReplyDeleteGod ever commanded anyone to rape other people? I don't think so. Chapter and verse maybe?
As for the other parts of your comments, how do you imagine that 'the mob' came to be so powerful and massive in Soviet countries and Italy? Possibly no one has had the guts to challenge those corrupt families or groups of people?
What if the countries respective military forces were able to wipe out like 100% of those "crime families". Would the society in Italy, for instance, be better or worse? Would the respective military be immoral for wiping them out?
Is the God of the Bible somehow a worse character then for asking his people to do the same thing?
If those amongst us who have to make decisions about what to do with the corruption around us seem like they are suspect for having to make any decision whatsoever, we need to ask ourselves why we would turn around and refer to them as evil for being a corrective force in the world.
Certainly beats the alternative.
I too was at the NYU meeting. I was most offended by Paul Ecstein's attempt to absolve religion of all of its faults by praising its compassion. But as I see it the compassion of religion comes at a very high price: worshipping (or asskissing, as I like to call it) make believe deities, superstitions and myths posing as "tradition." Very few relgionists offer compassion to those who refuse to submit to their dogmas.
ReplyDeleteI have a very hard time evaluating communism because on the one hand it hurt many people but on the other it probably helped more people than any other movement in history. So what are we to conclude?
ReplyDeleteOn 11/23/08, Eric Stone said: "I have a very hard time evaluating communism because on the one hand it hurt many people but on the other it probably helped more people than any other movement in history."
ReplyDeleteI suspect that Russians would suffer less without proletarian dictatorship imposed by Bolsheviks. I am thinking about their first post-tsarist government (Kerenski, duma, etc.). They had everything needed to catch up with other European nations, in a decade or two.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Bolshevik-morality-by-Ludwik-Kowalski-081120-865.html
Marcelino,
ReplyDelete"I keep saying that the fact that humans are naturally social and cooperative is a fundamental tenet of free-market thinking. You first said the opposite of this, but now you stay mute on the matter."
I'm not being mute at all, and I did not say the opposite of what you state here. What I said is that human nature is an inextricable mix of selfish and cooperative instincts, and that extreme capitalism overplays the benefit of one while underestimating the limits imposed by the others; communism makes the diametrically opposite mistake. Which is why we need an intermediate system that takes seriously the fact that humans are neither perfectly selfish nor perfectly cooperative.
In other words, you cannot impose too much control (thus underestimating the need for individualism) nor too little (because you overestimate cooperation). Enron and the WS collapse originated out of favoring selfishness and assuming that people would cooperate without regulations.
Ok, we agree that humans are naturally social and neither perfectly selfish nor perfectly cooperative. Under these conditions, what is the social system that better coordinates humans? You believe in a system with strong, but far from complete, government control. I believe in a system with much less government control than we now have. This doesn't mean less control. It just means less control in the hands of government and more control in the hands of private parties.
ReplyDeleteIn the case of Enron and Wall Street, the proposition that they operated free of government regulation and intervention is simply incorrect - think about anti-trust regulations, anti-insider trading regulations, price controls, artificial quotas, subsidies, bailouts, capital and certification requirements, and the money supply monopoly held by the Federal Reserve. Once we recognize this, we are left with two alternatives:
1. Financial scandals and crises would be less severe if markets operated under more strict government regulation and intervention.
2. Financial scandals and crises would be less severe under less government control.
You believe 1. I believe 2.
The original article mentions " . . . It was a nice evening, following a panel discussion at NYU on morality without gods. . . . "
ReplyDelete"Morality Without God" or "God without Morality" are interesting topics. But these two categories have never been sealed from each other.
Ludwik
Marcelino,
ReplyDelete"You believe 1. I believe 2."
Well, you have a right to believe what you want of course. But to say that Enron and the WS collapse happened because we had too much regulation is, I think, pretty ludicrous.
In the case of Enron and Wall Street, the proposition that they operated free of government regulation and intervention is simply incorrect - think about [...]
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that this type of reasoning is based on faith and goes against the evidence. I see it being advanced all the time by the "nearly-anarcho-capitalists", but I believe it holds no water. Maybe I'm just being naive. I'm no expert in these things, I'm just a Biologist. But here is my humble take on it.
See, Marcelino, you are comparing the current US system (some regulation) to your ideal (less regulation, I don't think you're advocating NO regulation at all, right?). As you know and maybe regret, there's never been any society with a truly free market. So based on what do you make the assumption that less (no?) regulation would be beneficial? And what is the criterion for measuring "benefit"?
Now, the opposite view -- that less regulation would be bad, and we need more. Of course we already know that planned economies do not work. But in the spectrum of levels of regulation, we can see some things, I believe.
Where did the current financial crisis (and maybe previous ones?) start? In places with more or less regulation? The current one: in the USA. Not in Europe (although they, and everybody else, ends up being dragged down by it anyway, since everything is connected in today's world). Who's got stronger regulations, the USA or those pesky socialist control freaks (if you listen to some media outlets in the US) in Europe?
Do your own extrapolation from this little simplistic piece of data and tell me which version of the system is poisoning the whole thing.
On the "measuring benefit" part: if one's only value is accumulation of money by the whole country (with no regards to how it is distributed among the population), then, granted, the US has the best system, since it is the richest country by GNP. If one has a different idea about what life and a good society are about, then I guess other countries should be wary of following the American economical philosophy too closely.
But that's just my amateurish opinion on this whole mess.
(hm, the CAPTCHA's text for publishing my post is "commie"! Where is my tinfoil hat!?)
I feel that some important points have not been considered here.
ReplyDeleteThe first point is that religion and ideology are forms of tribalism. Saying that God or Stalin are good is a way to convince yourself that your tribe, and your own identity, are good. So, as soon as your attachment to the tribe, and to your own identity, is strong, you don't really try to understand how things are, instead you are actually struggling all the time to find proofs in favor of the standardbearer of your tribe.
Reality, such as in http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/excerpts.html, can be a cure. For a religious integralist, possibly reading about the horrors of religious fundamentalism can be a cure. At some point doubt can creep in and make you think that all your tentatives of escaping reality are the wrong way to go.
But a fundamental fact remains unsolved: we are not only selfish and cooperative animals, but also tribal animals. No effective political movement has ever existed without a certain degree of tribalism. Can we develop antibodies against the excesses of tribalism, without losing completely the ability to act and decide as a community? At the moment, we are often just oscillating between the extremes.
Many had seen beforehands the intrinsic failures of communism, fascism, religious integralism. However, people strongly moved by a feeling of unredeemable injustice, of self-defence, of offended morality, continued and will continue to fuel that kind of collective phenomena.
Another point is that we should stop thinking of communism only through its self-description as a means of establishing equality on earth. It was also an act of extreme nationalism by elites which felt humiliated by the superiority of neighbouring countries. This applies both to Russia and China. The receipt was to apply a shock therapy of forced industrialization and alphabetization to their countries, treating people as disposable commodities. There were also positive results: countries that were lagging behind everybody else became world powers, people from a state of serfdom were projected into modern societies. But hardly anybody would like to repeat the experiment. On the other hand, we are not in a position today to really feel the sense of humiliation against the world that pushed a part of the Chinese elites to pursue the communist experiment, for instance.
So instead of defining ourselves as tribes with respect to past events (communism was not so bad, fascism was not so bad, the Pope did'nt know about genocide in Croatia and only wanted the good of everybody), we should possibly try to face contemporary challenges understanding that the objective forces that generated any sort of collective fanatism are always there, and we must devise clever means of controlling them appropriately. If at all it can be done, and in which measure.
Wonderful. Couldn't help laughing when you described communism as an "ant-like" society. It sounds so condescending.
ReplyDeleteThere are several kinds of socialism, as summarized in:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.opednews.com/articles/Socialism-Is-Not-Marxism--by-Ludwik-Kowalski-081111-13.html
I've always found it amusing that socialists will, almost in the same breath, fervently demand free speech in their own country while defending restrictions on the same in China and Cuba as "neccesary to the revolution".
ReplyDelete>"But the Enron and WS disasters happened precisely *because* people where acting free of government regulation..."
ReplyDeleteI was going to suggest that Massimo misunderstood the situation and maybe he has but Marcelino has already pointed out that there was not truly a lack of regulation. There are thousands of regulations and tens, if not hundreds, of regulating agencies. So it wasn't really lack of regulation that was the problem. It was the lack of Massimo-approved regulations. And that, in a nutshell, is the story of the fight between liberals and conservatives over the ownership of government power. Both of them want the government to be a 'big stick' and both of them want to control that big stick. I am reminded of an old saying: Whether the elephants make love OR war, the grass gets trampled.
And I'm feeling pretty green lately.
As for the meeting, I am a bit surprised that anyone with free access to information can still support Stalin or Mao. I can imagine that there might be some sort of ideal Marxist society that would work but achieving it through the deaths of millions of people doesn't seem defensible.
And for Cal, in case she checks back here:
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the fighting men had taken totaled 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys, and 32,000 young girls. (Numbers 31:25-35 NLT)
...the city shall be taken, houses plundered, women ravished; half of the city shall go into exile, but the rest of the people shall not be removed from the city. (Zechariah 14:1-2 NAB)
Its very hard to pinpoint what people mean when they say they're "Marxist". Karl Marx himself ridiculed the "ism" by stating he was not a Marxist. The young Marx is somewhat different from the Marx of the Manifesto, from the Marx of "Capital" - an unfinished work, from Marx of Grundrisse. Analogously, Sigmund Freud underwent different stages. Although he is often accused of interpreting everything in terms of the libido, in his older years, in works such as "Beyond the Pleasure Principle", he went beyond a single drive theory.
ReplyDeleteMarx too led a long, prolific, diversified life. He was a lawyer, philosopher, journalist, trade-unionist, historian, economist and was studying biochemistry when he died. His thought evolved. There are however some central ideas, such as historical materialism, largely driven by the struggle between social classes. Despite other modes of dividing a society and the importance of social movements along lines not characterized by social class, in my opinion social classes and the class struggle continues to be valid and very fruitful perspective.
Likewise, if someone uses the term "socialism" or "communism" I need some additional clarification. The term had different meanings when used by Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, or Gorbachev; or by Leon Trotsky, Rosa Luxembourg, Tito, Antonio Gramsci, István Mészáros, Michael Lebowitz, etc. It had a different meaning in the USSR, Romania, Albania, Poland, East Germany, etc. It has a different meaning in China, Vietnam, Laos, Nepal, West Bengal or Cuba. It has a different meaning for the Communist parties of France, Spain, Bohemia-Moravia, Cyprus, Greece or Portugal. In part this has to do with the different histories and traditions, but also with the objective and subjective conditions of the time and place.
Marx himself wrote very little about what he envisioned a socialist society would be. He concentrated on understanding the underlying laws of capitalism, its contradictions, and the need to surpass the exploitation of a working majority by a capitalist minority, i.e., socialism meant the intent to build a society without exploitation. The particulars were not, nor should they be, set in stone.
I was born under a fascist dictatorship that strangled Portugal for 48 years - the longest fascist leadership in history. Fortunately, when I was two years old, the military and the people overthrew fascism and in a largely peaceful revolution (on the 25th of April 1974) installed democracy. The Portuguese Communist Party played a major role in resisting and fighting fascism and its colonial war. Working clandestinely, it helped organize many worker and student struggles, built broad anti-fascist fronts, and under political democracy has continued to fight for an advanced democracy, with economic, social and cultural justice, a democracy that is not restricted to the right to vote and free speech. Because of its history of struggle for democracy and social progress, its ideological independence, its close ties to workers, and its determination to build a better society, I am a proud member of the PCP, and shall be participating in its XVIII Congress this weekend.
As a closer, a quote from a Marxist, namely Groucho: "These are my principles. If you don't like them ... I have others."
DA
ReplyDeleteOne has to go out of his way to read the Zechariah passage that way. Best always to read verse before and after to catch the context. In context, there is no doubt that the passage (s) are prophetic not a commandment to go do thus an such.
Zec 14:1 Behold, the day of the LORD cometh, and thy spoil shall be divided in the midst of thee.
Zec 14:2 For I will gather all nations against Jerusalem to battle; and the city shall be taken, and the houses rifled, and the women ravished; and half of the city shall go forth into captivity, and the residue of the people shall not be cut off from the city.
Zec 14:3 Then shall the LORD go forth, and fight against those nations, as when he fought in the day of battle.
Zec 14:4 And his feet shall stand in that day upon the mount of Olives, which [is] before Jerusalem on the east, and the mount of Olives shall cleave in the midst thereof toward the east and toward the west, [and there shall be] a very great valley; and half of the mountain shall remove toward the north, and half of it toward the south."
And to understand Numbers one even has to look at the chapters previous to the one you mention. Why was Israel at war with the Midianites? And one ought to keep in mind too that the Israelites were one of the few, if not only, civilizations that keep chronologies of almost everything was said, done and transpired between warring countries. The good, the bad AND the ugly. IF other societies wrote about themselves, it was always embellished to make them look good no matter what the outcome of the war or whatever situation happened to be.
Num 31:7 And they warred against the Midianites, as the LORD commanded Moses; and they slew all the males.
Num 31:8 And they slew the kings of Midian, beside the rest of them that were slain; [namely], Evi, and Rekem, and Zur, and Hur, and Reba, five kings of Midian: Balaam also the son of Beor they slew with the sword.
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Num 31:9 And the children of Israel took [all] the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.
Num 31:10 And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.
Num 31:11 And they took all the spoil, and all the prey, [both] of men and of beasts."
http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Num&c=31&v=1&t=KJV#top
Am I arriving late to this debate? I hope not. It's got several interesting angles, and I don't think I'll be able to cover them all (specially considering that maybe no one will read this at this point in time). Oh well, here we go:
ReplyDelete"Socialism errs on the other side, proposing an ant-like society where individualism is progressively squeezed out of the human experience"
This is not really accurate, but it's repeated a lot. Socialism actually wants the opposite: freeing people from the weight of having to produce not to satisfy their needs but to fill in the pockets of the owners of the means of production, it aspires to give us all (not a tiny minority of privileged people in a world surrounded by hunger and wars) the times and the means to develop ourselves freely.
And actually it could even free the enslavers from having to enslave just because that's the logic of the system (to accumulate capital). Have you read "The soul of man under socialism", by Oscar Wilde? It's very interesting, even if you don't agree with it all (I'm not sure I do).
"Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism". "Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them." "With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live."
"I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt."
(There's also an essay from Russell which makes some similar points regarding work, but I can't remember its name now)
Now: I think Marx would have agreed with this. He spent lots of time making a critique of alienated work and what it did to the "soul of men", as Wilde puts it.
The problem is, of course, socialism can't be achieved magically, or as easily as buying something from the shop. Class strugle is here and it gets tougher in revolutionary times, as there are people not willing to give up on their privileges who have lots of armies and boycott mecanisms at their disposal. Furthermore, socialist revolutions tend to occur in the third world (contrary to what Marx thought); that is, the most isolated and backward countries, with probably no industries, with their natural resources being drained regularly to the first world, with an uneducated population, with no democratic experience (and all this doesn't happen by bad luck or ineptitude but because of imperialism and colonialism), etc. This brings a number of serious problems. How can a revolution survive if -as it has always happened- it is attacked by the capitalist countries, which are more powerful, have more resources, etc.? The country has to take some measures to defend itself, it has to concentrate on developing industry quickly, on preparing for war, etc. There won't be time for the individual to fully express itself until socialism (though there should be several advantages for lots of people in the process: healthcare, nutrition, education, etc. has improved in most socialist countries before they were attacked) can be spread enough through the world so as to not be threatened by the surviving capitalist superpowers.
This obliges the revolutionary countries in a transition to socialism to take some measures to increase workloads for the time being, centralize some decisions, make sure work is done efficiently (Lenin thought it was vital to apply Taylorists methods to do this, and he was quite right), etc. This meausures, in countries such as Russia and Cuba, were taken by the people itself so as to defend their revolutions. They were voted by the people's representatives. People weren't "being squeezed out of their human experience", they were willing to do some sacrifice in order to defend what they had achieved in their previous years by breaking their chains. Of course, there were people not willing to do any of this, and there was resistance, and there was internal struggle, and -yes- the force of the state had to be used sometimes with no hesitation to stop all this nonsense when the country was fighting 17 foreign armies invading its territory, shortage of supplies, famine-menace, etc. But try to organize a strike in the middle of a foreign full scale invasion in a capitalist country and the same will happen. War is, of course, undesirable and a crap experience, but you can't just ignore it when it exists and you have to take extreme measures in order to defend yourselves.
But there's a point in which it can go wrong, of course. As I said: people in third world countries haven't got a lot of democratic experience, have had a poor education before the revolution, and so this countries become prone to abuses by their leaders (as it happened in the USSR after the first few years, when leaders stopped being elected as Lenin had been, and decisions started to be taken by a small number of privileged party members, who by the way had already or were starting to kill all the old revolutionaries that opposed them) and to the return of capitalism or worst regimes, where the bureaucracy itself, which had been living in a priviledged way by taking advantage of the workers, ended up restoring capitalism because they were privileged enough to do well on it.
I'm not an expert on this (and, as english is not my mother tongue, I also need some extra work to try and express myself clearly in complicated subjetcs), and there are certainly people more capable than me of explaining it, but in my opinion Stalinism and all its atrocities is the consequence of the failure to establish a socialist society, not of its success. For success to be achieved, the revolution has to survive international and internal threat, and expand itself so as to be threatened no more. It wasn't possible in the USSR, the revolutionary energies (and lots of people) died, and we know how history went after this.
Still, there are positives to be taken from the socialists experiences so far. Cuba is, today, the only latin american country with no child malnutrition, the one with the highest life expectancy, with free health care and education for everyone, no analphabetism, a LOT less police and military repression than in the capitalist countries of the rest of the first world (I've been told by people who have been there, and in zones not specially made for tourists, that police can't use their weapons on civilians, that opposition demonstrations are legal, and that only 6 people were sentenced to death in the last (I think) 20 years -compare this with the United States-). There are some restrictions from freedom (though greatly exaggerated by US press, and certainly much smaller than in several similar latin american capitalist countries, which are never mentioned by that same press), there are some privileged bureaucrats and military personnel, there's a leader that has given power to his brother, there are women prostituting themselves to get tourists' valuable dollars, there are some kinds of goods that are very hard to find (because it's almost impossible to import due to the embargo/blockade imposed by the US), but this has a lot to do with what I was saying: foreign pressure applied to a small, isolated, socialist country, subdued much more strongly than any of its capitalists neighbours, which still manages to do quite well despite all these. Living in a country which has child malnutrition, lots of grown ups that can't do reading comprehension, a police that kills a person every 40 hours according to statistics, etc., I value things like this a lot. And I think they are proof that socialism can work: how would it work under much better conditions, not being boycotted, in countries less likely to succumb to internal or external pressure? How much better would our world (which today has 1000 million hungry people, and counting) be?
I could go on doing a comparison between Russia pre and post revolution, from being one of the worst places to live on earth to being the second most powerful country. People certainly didn't live as well as in several first world countries, and there was repression, censorship, and lots of crap, certainly, but the worse thing that happened was a return to some of the Tsar's awful ways, albeit with more powerful means to carry them out. Still: Russia had maybe the best matematicians of the century, developed science from a very obscurantist, rural, isolated, supersticious country, developed industry, took a lot of people out of poverty, etc (and yes, I know, killed a lot of innocent people too, I don't support Stalin's crimes and don't like him at all, for the reasons I've already explained and will expand a bit on). What could have happened if all this development was done without those oppresive conditions that led to them not being used fully for the people's weel-being? We can't write a conjectural history, I know, but better cases such as Cuba (and what happens in first world countries which, eventhough they exploit third world countries workforce and natural resources, take some elements from socialism for their own population -Sweden, Canada, etc.-) make me think that we can certainly live in a better world than the one capitalism (in full flight, and controling 99% of the world if we consider that China is almost capitalist again, too) is offering us today.
Stalin's supporters are very wrong in my opinion, Stalin was co-responsible for drowning the revolution; but I don't think socialism's supporters are. Lots of socialists denounced Stalin at the time, because they knew what he was doing was bad for socialism and humanity. And socialism's name has been used by several tyrants, yes, but lot's of good things have been distorted too. Look what some despicable people did with the great Charles Darwin by using his name to justify exploitation of men with the lie of "social darwinism". Well, Stalinist "socialism" was a lie too. Full of theoretical gaps and inconsistencies which sound socialists, though not perfect, don't have. It has done a lot to damage the name of socialism, but just as you defend science here, I think it has to be defended too, because the world is not turning into a nicer place since the fall of the last socialist hopes.
Oh, and one last thing. When was the time when people in the world, capitalist or not, had the best standard of living, best distribution of income, etc.? It was when socialism was a menace to capitalist leaders. In Latin America, in Europe, in the USA, the welfare state existed as a way of containing people's demands, so as to not lose everything. "We'll give them 30, so they won't take the 100%", said an Argentine leader once. It was fully true. Now that the working class lost, unemployment rose back, welfare state was dismantled, etc., because the capital can do whatit wants, as it has no menace. This tendency will continue, in my opinion, unless the working class recovers the initiative and becomes a menace to capitalists again, forcing them to give them something, at least not to lose all their privileges, as it happened decades ago. Another reason to cheer for socialism, even if we live in a first world country, the ones with the best part in this play. Because if the current tendency continues, one day our part will stop being a nice one, and we'll join the big number of people suffering seriously. But I don't want to be gloomy, it can be reverted, we just need to start studying historical reality clearly, and acting in consequence.
Sorry for the length of the post. Cheers.
Superb analysis, Nacho.
ReplyDeleteI just want to point something out.
When was the time when people in the world, capitalist or not, had the best standard of living, best distribution of income, etc.? It was when socialism was a menace to capitalist leaders.
Think of the military coups that "coincidentally" took place in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay during the cold war years. Think of today's world distribution of income: it's becoming medieval. Don't you think that this has something to do with the fact that socialism is no longer a menace?
but lot's of good things...
ReplyDeleteOh dear. I blame this to writing at 4 AM. :P
What follows is Nacho’s article with my inserted comments. Comments are recognizable by sets of asterisks, at the beginning and at the end). They are numbered, to facilitate possible discussion.
ReplyDelete= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Am I arriving late to this debate? I hope not. It's got several interesting angles, and I don't think I'll be able to cover them all (specially considering that maybe no one will read this at this point in time). Oh well, here we go:
"Socialism errs on the other side, proposing an ant-like society where individualism is progressively squeezed out of the human experience"
This is not really accurate, but it's repeated a lot. Socialism actually wants the opposite: freeing people from the weight of having to produce not to satisfy their needs but to fill in the pockets of the owners of the means of production, it aspires to give us all (not a tiny minority of privileged people in a world surrounded by hunger and wars) the times and the means to develop ourselves freely.
***1*** ) Socialists are not the only people who want life to be enjoyable. Manual labor in USSR or China was not more enjoyable than in other industrialized countries. They also had assembly lines. They also had labor camps in Siberia. Was working in collective farms in Cuba mere enjoyable than working of migrant workers in Florida or California? I do not know. Probably not. (******)
And actually it could even free the enslavers from having to enslave just because that's the logic of the system (to accumulate capital). Have you read "The soul of man under socialism", by Oscar Wilde? It's very interesting, even if you don't agree with it all (I'm not sure I do).
"Socialism itself will be of value simply because it will lead to Individualism". "Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road and encumbering them." "With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live."
***2*** ) Private property of means of production was abolished in the USSR. Did it produce individualism that was more healthy that in the US? (******)
"I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being written and talked nowadays about the dignity of manual labour. There is nothing necessary dignified about manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many forms of labour are quite pleasureless activities, and should be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral, or physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for something better than disturbing dirt."
(There's also an essay from Russell which makes some similar points regarding work, but I can't remember its name now)
Now: I think Marx would have agreed with this. He spent lots of time making a critique of alienated work and what it did to the "soul of men", as Wilde puts it.
The problem is, of course, socialism can't be achieved magically, or as easily as buying something from the shop. Class struggle is here and it gets tougher in revolutionary times, as there are people not willing to give up on their privileges who have lots of armies and boycott mechanisms at their disposal. Furthermore, socialist revolutions tend to occur in the third world (contrary to what Marx thought); that is, the most isolated and backward countries, with probably no industries, with their natural resources being drained regularly to the first world, with an uneducated population, with no democratic experience (and all this doesn't happen by bad luck or ineptitude but because of imperialism and colonialism), etc. This brings a number of serious problems. How can a revolution survive if -as it has always happened- it is attacked by the capitalist countries, which are more powerful, have more resources, etc.? The country has to take some measures to defend itself, it has to concentrate on developing industry quickly, on preparing for war, etc. There won't be time for the individual to fully express itself until socialism (though there should be several advantages for lots of people in the process: healthcare, nutrition, education, etc. has improved in most socialist countries before they were attacked) can be spread enough through the world so as to not be threatened by the surviving capitalist superpowers.
***3*** ) Marx did know about social revolutions in pre-capitalist world (slave revolts etc.) One of the fundamental mistakes made by Lenin was to start October Revolution, after February Revolution in 1917. Kerenski government (replacing tsarism) was on the right path. Russia had everything needed to catch up with more advanced countries, such as France and Germany. Civil war and foreign intervention were direct consequences of the Bolshevik revolution. Improving modern society without a revolution is possible and desirable. (******)
This obliges the revolutionary countries in a transition to socialism to take some measures to increase workloads for the time being, centralize some decisions, make sure work is done efficiently (Lenin thought it was vital to apply Taylorists methods to do this, and he was quite right), etc. This measures, in countries such as Russia and Cuba, were taken by the people itself so as to defend their revolutions. They were voted by the people's representatives. People weren't "being squeezed out of their human experience", they were willing to do some sacrifice in order to defend what they had achieved in their previous years by breaking their chains. Of course, there were people not willing to do any of this, and there was resistance, and there was internal struggle, and -yes- the force of the state had to be used sometimes with no hesitation to stop all this nonsense when the country was fighting 17 foreign armies invading its territory, shortage of supplies, famine-menace, etc. But try to organize a strike in the middle of a foreign full scale invasion in a capitalist country and the same will happen. War is, of course, undesirable and a crap experience, but you can't just ignore it when it exists and you have to take extreme measures in order to defend yourselves.
***4*** ) The force of the state was used not only “sometimes.” It was used constantly, and not only to suppress the internal struggle? It was used to kill my father, and millions like him, who wanted to build a better word. Forced collectivization of agriculture was one of the fundamental mistakes of Stalinism. Here is good argument for this. According to 1979 data, “about 28% of the Soviet agricultural production was from small plots of private citizens. These plots represented less than 1% of the cultivated land.” I wish I had data agricultue productivity of in China, now versus what it was under Mao. (******)
But there's a point in which it can go wrong, of course. As I said: people in third world countries haven't got a lot of democratic experience, have had a poor education before the revolution, and so this countries become prone to abuses by their leaders (as it happened in the USSR after the first few years, when leaders stopped being elected as Lenin had been, and decisions started to be taken by a small number of privileged party members, who by the way had already or were starting to kill all the old revolutionaries that opposed them) and to the return of capitalism or worst regimes, where the bureaucracy itself, which had been living in a privileged way by taking advantage of the workers, ended up restoring capitalism because they were privileged enough to do well on it.
***5*** ) What about killing of Mecheviks, Social Revolutionaries, Kadets etc.? These people also fought against tsarism. This was done when Lenin was alive. What about killing of millions of productive peasants (kulaks). (******)
I'm not an expert on this (and, as english is not my mother tongue, I also need some extra work to try and express myself clearly in complicated subjects), and there are certainly people more capable than me of explaining it, but in my opinion Stalinism and all its atrocities is the consequence of the failure to establish a socialist society, not of its success. For success to be achieved, the revolution has to survive international and internal threat, and expand itself so as to be threatened no more. It wasn't possible in the USSR, the revolutionary energies (and lots of people) died, and we know how history went after this.
***6*** ) Was bureaucracy a new class in the Soviet Union? Was it a new class in China and Cuba? Detailed analysis of all “negative experience” is needed. Who should be doing this? Those who fight for another revolution. Unfortunately, many of them prefer to minimize negative things, they prefer people to be ignorant about dark pages of the Soviet history. As the result, most of the analysis is done by those who oppose communism. (******)
Still, there are positives to be taken from the socialists experiences so far. Cuba is, today, the only latin american country with no child malnutrition, the one with the highest life expectancy, with free health care and education for everyone, no analphabetism, a LOT less police and military repression than in the capitalist countries of the rest of the first world (I've been told by people who have been there, and in zones not specially made for tourists, that police can't use their weapons on civilians, that opposition demonstrations are legal, and that only 6 people were sentenced to death in the last (I think) 20 years -compare this with the United States-). There are some restrictions from freedom (though greatly exaggerated by US press, and certainly much smaller than in several similar latin american capitalist countries, which are never mentioned by that same press), there are some privileged bureaucrats and military personnel, there's a leader that has given power to his brother, there are women prostituting themselves to get tourists' valuable dollars, there are some kinds of goods that are very hard to find (because it's almost impossible to import due to the embargo/blockade imposed by the US), but this has a lot to do with what I was saying: foreign pressure applied to a small, isolated, socialist country, subdued much more strongly than any of its capitalists neighbors, which still manages to do quite well despite all these. Living in a country which has child malnutrition, lots of grown ups that can't do reading comprehension, a police that kills a person every 40 hours according to statistics, etc., I value things like this a lot. And I think they are proof that socialism can work: how would it work under much better conditions, not being boycotted, in countries less likely to succumb to internal or external pressure? How much better would our world (which today has 1000 million hungry people, and counting) be?
***7*** ) Both positive and negative things must be analyzed by those who want to learn from what really happened in post-revolutionary countries. Ignoring experimental data is an open invitation to future mistakes. (******)
I could go on doing a comparison between Russia pre and post revolution, from being one of the worst places to live on earth to being the second most powerful country. People certainly didn't live as well as in several first world countries, and there was repression, censorship, and lots of crap, certainly, but the worse thing that happened was a return to some of the Tsar's awful ways, albeit with more powerful means to carry them out. Still: Russia had maybe the best mathematicians of the century, developed science from a very obscurantist, rural, isolated, superstitious country, developed industry, took a lot of people out of poverty, etc. (and yes, I know, killed a lot of innocent people too, I don't support Stalin's crimes and don't like him at all, for the reasons I've already explained and will expand a bit on). What could have happened if all this development was done without those oppressive conditions that led to them not being used fully for the people's well-being? We can't write a conjectural history, I know, but better cases such as Cuba (and what happens in first world countries which, even though they exploit third world countries workforce and natural resources, take some elements from socialism for their own population -Sweden, Canada, etc.-) make me think that we can certainly live in a better world than the one capitalism (in full flight, and controlling 99% of the world if we consider that China is almost capitalist again, too) is offering us today.
***8*** ) A “better world” is certainly worth building. By I think that evolutionary progress (by small testable and reversible steps) is better than revolutions. But I am pessimistic about the growth of world population; it more that triple during my life-spane (I am 77 now). Also about pollution etc. Yes, the Soviet Union was no less polluted than than other industrial country. Why was it so?
Stalin's supporters are very wrong in my opinion, Stalin was co-responsible for drowning the revolution; but I don't think socialism's supporters are. Lots of socialists denounced Stalin at the time, because they knew what he was doing was bad for socialism and humanity. And socialism's name has been used by several tyrants, yes, but lot's of good things have been distorted too. Look what some despicable people did with the great Charles Darwin by using his name to justify exploitation of men with the lie of "social darwinism". Well, Stalinist "socialism" was a lie too. Full of theoretical gaps and inconsistencies which sound socialists, though not perfect, don't have. It has done a lot to damage the name of socialism, but just as you defend science here, I think it has to be defended too, because the world is not turning into a nicer place since the fall of the last socialist hopes.
***9*** ) Yes, it was very “bad for socialism and humanity.” Stalinism should not be defended; it should be analyzed objectively, especially by those of us who want to see a better world. (******)
Oh, and one last thing. When was the time when people in the world, capitalist or not, had the best standard of living, best distribution of income, etc.? It was when socialism was a menace to capitalist leaders. In Latin America, in Europe, in the USA, the welfare state existed as a way of containing people's demands, so as to not lose everything. "We'll give them 30, so they won't take the 100%", said an Argentine leader once. It was fully true. Now that the working class lost, unemployment rose back, welfare state was dismantled, etc., because the capital can do what it wants, as it has no menace. This tendency will continue, in my opinion, unless the working class recovers the initiative and becomes a menace to capitalists again, forcing them to give them something, at least not to lose all their privileges, as it happened decades ago. Another reason to cheer for socialism, even if we live in a first world country, the ones with the best part in this play. Because if the current tendency continues, one day our part will stop being a nice one, and we'll join the big number of people suffering seriously. But I don't want to be gloomy, it can be reverted, we just need to start studying historical reality clearly, and acting in consequence.
***10** ) The “our part will stop being a nice one” scares me.
a) Would I be able to write what I know and think about Stalinism?
b) Would the www.amazon.com be allowed to sell my 2008 book on Stalinism?
http://csam.montclair.edu/~kowalski/excerpts.html
c) Would I be allowed to live?
Some people probably hate me for writing a book dedicated to victims of Stalinism. That seems to be a part of objective reality. But I am also part of it, trying to share what I think. Will my book have any effect on what will happen in the future? I hope so; I had no other motives in writing it. Royalties have already been committed to a scholarship fund at Montclair State University. (******)
More 4 AM mistakes:
ReplyDelete(Cuba has) a LOT less police and military repression than in the capitalist countries of the rest of the first world
I meant THIRD world, sorry.
Back soon to answer Ludwik's comment.
***1*** ) Socialists are not the only people who want life to be enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteTrue, but this doesn't contradict anything I said.
Manual labor in USSR or China was not more enjoyable than in other industrialized countries. They also had assembly lines. They also had labor camps in Siberia. Was working in collective farms in Cuba mere enjoyable than working of migrant workers in Florida or California? I do not know. Probably not. (******)
There's a non-sequitur here. Socialism was NEVER achieved in the world (only in some parts of it for very short periods of time and in the middle of huge crisis); far from it, there were only some quickly drowned revolutions, some democratically elected socialist leaders in capitalists countries who were quicly boycotted and overthrown by military coups and mass repression backed up by capitalist leaders, and some revolutions that managed to survive but severely damaged, up to the point of self-destruction, as it happened in Russia. There were also some militarly imposed socialisms in some eastern countries by stalinist regimes, but this socialisms are born severely damaged, as they are just proxies of the dying Russian socialism. They never had a revolution, their masses are not active, and they are prone to all kinds of internal abuse, external abuse by the bureaucrat leader of the dying socialist regime that imposed "socialism" there and, on top of all this, abuse from the capitalist countries, so their situation is very complicated.
For socialism to work on a long term basis, it has to be spread through a sufficiently big part of the world so as to be able to develop without being in a state constant emergency due to external pressure from the capitalist world. Trotsky and Lenin said from the begining the revolution would be worldy or would fail, Stalin said he could (and he also said he did) "establish socialism in one country". Stalin was wrong (or, actually, lying so as to keep his privileges and power), but his point of view is used to say that "socialism was achieved and proved to be a failure". I don't think it was achieved. There were only some partial victories in some places, but the territory won was lost back.
So, of course, as the revolution was drowned, what Wilde or Marx or Russell talk about was never achieved.
Nevertheless, I can assure you that life in Cuba -maybe the place in which, despite all the valid (and the non-valid) criticisms you can make of it, and considering that its surviving absolutely isolated and in a world context (of which you can never forget for any social analysis) of massive defeat from the working classes and triumph of capitalism and imperialism- is much better than in comparable countries that didn't have a socialist revolution. Even if it's dying: compare it to life in it's closest neighbour, HaitÃ, or to any of the other thrid world countries there. With similar resources but more foreign agression, they are doing much better. Even if socialism there is probably already fatally wounded. But that's because it was defeated politically, not because the system doesn't work. The same happened to many slave revolts: they lost, and there were massacres there, big bloodsheds, etc. That didn't mean that a society free from slavery couldn't work, or that it would be better not to try to achieve it again, it just meant that achieving it wasn't easy. The same happens with socialism.
***2*** ) Private property of means of production was abolished in the USSR. Did it produce individualism that was more healthy that in the US? (******)
Re-read answer to point number 1, it applies here too. I could also add that comparing the standard of living in a third world country that has a turbulent revolution, civil wars, foreign agression, etc., with the most powerful country on earth is not a fair way of comparing two systems.
Still: sometimes even the unimaginable can happen. Did you know life expectancy is almost as high in tiny and poor Cuba as in the superpower that is the US? This is an inmense achievement, and it IS thanks to socialism, because diseases started to be treated according to how much and how hard they affected people, not according to the profit one could make by treating them. Infant mortality is even lower in Cuba than in the US! That, to my eyes, is impressive.
3) One of the fundamental mistakes made by Lenin was to start October Revolution, after February Revolution in 1917. Kerenski government (replacing tsarism) was on the right path. Russia had everything needed to catch up with more advanced countries, such as France and Germany. Civil war and foreign intervention were direct consequences of the Bolshevik revolution. Improving modern society without a revolution is possible and desirable.
You seem to think that liberal, capitalist democracies such as the ones we have in Europe or the US can be achieved in the whole world. I find it hard to imagine, to say the least. The industrialised world exports its crisis to he third, using its cheap workforce, using them as markets for their manufactures while they use their natural resources, and making it impossible for them to develop their own industries, because they can't compete with the first world's. This gives us the impression that liberal democracy can be a peaceful thing, which makes everyone more or less happy, but you can only arrive to this conclusion if you don't look at the whole picture (or movie, actually, 'cause reality is dynamic). Stable capitalist democracies can exist only in the developed and expansionist countries. On the rest of the world, people will revolt against them because life is crap for most of them, or they will accept it, maybe, but life will continue to be crap (and at a faster pace, because of the lack of resistance). This is what's happening today, after all, with almost all the world being capitalist.
October revolution was not a bad idea, and the best standard of living the world has ever enjoyed owes an important part to it. Income distribution improved in the non-socialist world because of fear of the ruling classes to lose it all if socialism kept advancing. Do you remember the welfare state? It rose after the 1929 crisis, as we know. Now we have a similar crisis, in some aspects. Will it lead to a new welfare state? No it won't, not for free at least; not unless the workers become a menace for capitalists again, like they were around the world after October 1917.
The problem with the socialist revolution was that it wasn't fully achieved. The old guard Bolsheviks had in mind, from the begining, that to sustain the revolution in Russia, they would need the revolution in, for example, the much more advanced Germany (or any of the important western countries), to be victorious. But the German working class lost (big time), and so a backwards country like Russia was left alone to try and build socialism in extremely harsh conditions. It couldn't be done, internal democracy was lost, workers lost control of the state after a few years, the bureaucratic cast lead by Stalin got hold of it, and the workers state tragically degenerated into capitalism again. The disasters of the 20s, the 30s and so on (until today), happened because of this succesful anti-October reaction.
The force of the state to constantly repress its own people (which you mention on point 4) was used because this workers state degenerated into the hands of the bureaucracy, because the workers lost hold of it: they wouldn't have repressed themselves (and the peasants) if it was a true workers democracy! It would have gone against their own interests. It happened because socialism, true democracy, collective decision making, collective control of the means of production, collective decision making over how to defend from external attacks, etc., was being lost, not won.
So yes, brutal state force was being used to kill people who wanted a better world in the USSR and elsewhere: but that's because socialism was losing, not winning the battle.
The other part of point 4 is regarding agriculture. You cite some sources from agricultural figures from 1979. Please consider that revolution had already received its deadly blows by that point. The leaders of the USSR had embarked the country in a pointless armed race against the US, forgetting about the well-being of their population. But there were several big blows before this one too. The USSR had been degenerating for already half a century.
Trotsky makes quite an interesting analysis of the USSR in the late 30s in "revolution betrayed", explaining the misterious and ultimately fatal zig zags of Stalin's policies towards the kulaks, and saying that the problem was the lack of belief in the socialist organization, which led to a number of very strange decisions from the bureaucracy.
Forced collectivization was wrong when you consider its context, because it was a measure taken... after years of exactly the opposite policy, of telling the landowners to "get rich". All of a sudden Stalin realized this was going nowhere and made a dramatic U-turn. This kind of behaviour makes one think that they didn't know what they were doing. They were even against the creation of a government organism of statistical analysis of production. And all of a sudden they said: no, wait, let's do exactly the opposite. This is a sign of lack of planification, not of an excess of it. (The same happens with pollution: it's lack of future planning that leads to it, not an excess of it; it's the defeat of socialism which led to Chernobyl, not its success)
Anyway, Trotsky also explains in that book that you can't expect people to work the land out of generosity only, to receive nothing in exchange: that is exactly the point of socialism, to make people able to enjoy the result of its own work, contrary to what happens with capitalism. So he points out that, at least for quite a long time, until victory (not a partial victory like the october revolution, but a complete, sustainable one, as I explained) is achieved and after this too, some mecahisms of individual incenctive have to be mantained. So it's not that they don't care about productivity, quite the contrary actually, they care a lot about the development of the productive forces; and it's not that they ignore the reality of individidual motivation. Which leads me to another point you make:
You state in point six (and seven) that there are many socialists that don't like studying the full evidence, and this is true, sure. It has a lot to do with the blind defence of stalinism that many felt was necessary to do to defend socialism, with the blind following policy of the USSR controlled communist parties in the world, etc. But there are many who don't ignore evidence (I named Trotsky before: he was critical of the USSR since the 20s -and he makes a detalied class analysis of the USSR and other countries, if you are looking for something like that-, but this never led him to abandon his defence of the original principles of bolshevism; and he's not the only example), and, equally important: there is a vast majority on the anti-communist side that does ignore a lot of evidence, that constantly ignores historic, global analysis of reality, and just likes to say "oh, socialism is so horrific, I hope it never shows it's ugly face again", when today the world is leading straight into disaster, and clearly not because of socialism, which has a marginal influence. This is ignored, or acknowledged but without proposing any kind of real solution.
"A “better world” is certainly worth building. By I think that evolutionary progress (by small testable and reversible steps) is better than revolutions."
Well, of course that would be nice, but how can you make "small, testable and reversible steps" when the ruling class is against anything that touches their pockets? You can't control pollution because it affects their pockets, you can't try alternative sources of energy because it goes against some of the most powerful interests of the world, you can't strive for effective equal rights for everyone because to do that you have to change a system in which you only have actual rights if you have money to buy them (I can talk about thousands of example that prove this), you can't even stop famine because land for growing food has owners too, and not small and individual ones exactly. Profit rules the world. It's very hard to see a solution without some kind of serious, radical struggle against the people that sustain this system in the process. Do you see one? Which is it? I don't, and I'm afraid we are taking the risk of running out of time.
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What else am I forgetting to answer? Let's see:
-Supression of the opposition during Lenin's period: true, this existed, but let's remember the country was in a civil war, no country can live normally as if nothing was happening. I don't agree with everyhing that was done during Lenin's period, sure, but I know which side I prefer. Is it the White side, whose invation caused 4 million dead russians, or the red side, whose internal police probably killed some thousands of people in that same period (though, as I said, I don't agree with everything they did and of course think you have to do everything you can to reduce the margin of error as close to zero as possible, but I wasn't in their position and it's easier to just condemn both sides equally from the comfort of our living room, which allows as to pontificate without having to suffer the consequences if we don't do anything in a period of war)? And it's not only about number of deaths, it's about whose interests were being defended. The russian workers were fighting to free themselves from slavery, the whites and a minority of russians were fighting and conspiring to restore privilege.
-It's ridiculous to blame the civil war on the bolsheviks. Russia got out of WWI and stopped the massacre of russian soldiers and workers that it was causing. As a result, it was invaded by the countries which -led by their ruling classes, as all capitalist countries- wanted them to keep defending this imperialist, colonial war (and who also didn't like this experiments in which the ruling classes of a country are thrown out of goverment, as they think this could happen to them in the future). And you say it's the fault of those who got out of the war and wanted to stop the savage conquest of the world that they got invaded by their conquerors! This is like blaming a bull for defending himself from a bullfighter.
Well, I think I answered almost all of your points. Sorry for the delay, I had a busy weekend. Hope you can still read my answer despite this.
Thank you for an interesting reply, Nacho. I will think about what you wrote, and possibly reply later. For the time being let me mention only one thing. You wrote "It's ridiculous to blame the civil war on the bolsheviks."
ReplyDeleteI wrote that there would probably be no Civil War without October Revolution. Destroying Kerensky government (before it had a chance to develop capitalism in Russia) was Lenin's big mistke. Why do you disagree with this?