Socialism in practice: “Private land was 32.4 times as productive as public land in the Soviet Union”

 An economic historian on socialist Russia after WW II: 

• * Source: Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, A. A. Knopf, 1999, p. 215.

Related: Violent Politics — The Lesson of Marxist Philosophy. From Open College podcast by Stephen R. C. Hicks

Below is an un-edited transcription of this previously released podcast. Audio links: iTunes. Soundcloud. Stitcher. YouTube. Topics and times:

• History [00:00 — 07:26]
  • Death tolls in communist countries [00:59 — 01:46]
  • Quoting Marx, Engels, Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, Trotsky, Hobsbawm [01:46 — 07:26]
• Three options: coincidence, unintended consequences, intended consequences [07:26 — 09:06]
  • My claim [08:14 — 09:06]
• Marx’s ideas in The Communist Manifesto [10:58 — 12:26]
• Why violent revolution and not democratic reform? [12:26 — ]
  • Psychological reason: impatience [13:18 — 15:59]
  • Environmental determinism in Marxism [15:59 — 21:56]
    • Plasticity of human nature in Marxism [17:36 — 21:56]
  • Economic circumstances as fundamental social-environmental forces [23:56 — 27:32]
    • Marxist epistemology of social conditioning [24:49 — 27:32]
• Politics is driven by philosophy [27:32 — 28:39]
• Total: 30:05

Transcription:

Violent Politics — The Lesson of Marxist Philosophy

So much brutality has emerged from Marx-inspired activists. We could think it is just an accidental by-product of well-intentioned theory. Or is it really a necessary and intended consequence of its principles?

To begin, what do I mean by the long history of brutality? On indicator of this is the sad and enormous death toll in the Marxist communist societies of the twentieth century.[1]

Soviet Union: 62 million people killed. China: 77 million people killed. And when we are talking about the killing here, we are talking about democide, defined as the killing of citizens by their own government. That excludes cases of civil war; it excludes all kinds of international wars. There are no war deaths included in these numbers. Soviet Union’s approximate 62 million and Communist China’s 77 million. Smaller countries [like] Cambodia: 2 million people killed (famous for its killing fields), Vietnam 1.7 million people. And a long list of communist regimes.

Now that’s communist practice. But what about the theory? We have to make a connection. It is natural to start with a series of quotations for some of the principal figures. Let’s go right back to the “founding fathers,” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They are famous, of course, for their co-authored 1848 The Communist Manifesto—a political tract. But here is Marx in 1848—not in Communist Manifesto, but in a contemporary publication saying:

“There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.”[2]

(Let me say, as a side note, that the sources for the quotations and sometimes charts and so on that I mention along the way will be at my website with a link to the podcast.)

Next, here is Engels a year later, in 1849, talking about the next world war and kind of longing for it to occur. And here is what he has to say about it:

“The next world war will result in the disappearance from the face of the earth not only of reactionary classes and dynasties, but also of entire reactionary peoples. And that, too, is a step forward.”[3]

Those are the “founding fathers” of Marxism. Seems quite clear that they see violence, terror, and disappearance from the face of the Earth of whole peoples as built into what they are talking about.

Marxism was in the doldrums—both theoretically and as a movement—through much the late 1800s. But it was revived in the early 20th by the success of the Russian Revolution. So we can look at the 20th-century revolutionaries, particularly the successful ones, and their understanding of what bringing Marxist theory into practice requires

Here is Vladimir Lenin in 1917, at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, stating forthrightly:

“The state is an instrument for coercion … We want to organize violence in the name of the interests of the workers.”

Three years later, consolidating power: “A good Communist is at the same time a good Chekist.”[4] Historical reminder: the Cheka were early Soviet Russia’s political police force; they had sweeping powers of arrest and detainment, including the right to torture and execute people on-the-spot when they judged necessary (which, frankly, was rather often).

And here is Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Cheka chief, in 1918 when they were getting some blowback about how violent and brutal their methods had been:

“The public and the press misunderstand the character and tasks of our Commission. We stand for organized terror—this should be frankly stated—being absolutely indispensable in current revolutionary conditions.”[5]

All right, that’s early in the Russian revolution. A generation later, Leon Trotsky, no stranger himself to the revolutionary violence, was speaking ruefully, admiringly about Joseph Stalin. This is in 1940; Stalin had consolidated power after the death of Lenin. Here is Trotsky’s assessment of Stalin: “Under all conditions well-organized violence seems to him the shortest distance between two points.”[6]

So what we have then is a fairly strong connection between what Marxist theoreticians, including the “founding fathers”, said and what their political activists did. All of them are forthrightly claiming the necessary use of violence, terror, and so on.

This, of course, is also reflected in a large number of West intellectuals—even after they became aware of the atrocities in the Russian Revolution and all of the other communist regimes. But they were quite blasé or forthrightly accepting of them.

I’m going to take Professor Eric Hobsbawm as an exemplar here. He was an academic historian at Cambridge University and Birbeck, University of London. He lived a long, very comfortable life in England justifying the theory and practice of communism.

In 1994 he is an older man and is being interviewed for high-brow Times Literary Supplement. He is asked about the huge death toll, the killings of millions of Russian citizens under Stalin. Hobsbawm says: Well, it was “probably excessive.” But he went on to say said that all of that killing would have been worth it if true Communism had resulted.[7] Mass killing is fine as long as we get communism out of it.

And that’s not to go through the long list of the Marx-inspired terrorist groups of the 20th century: the Red Army Faction in Germany, Italy’s Red Brigades, Japanese Red Army, terrorist groups up and down Latin America, and so forth. All of them were very willing to use indiscriminate violence in order to bring about what they hoped would be a revolution.

So there is a pattern. We have three options when we step back and try to explain the violence.

The first option: Well, it is just a coincidence.

The second option is to say communism in theory is humane and has great ideals. But somehow its practitioners misinterpreted Marx and/or when they tried to put things into practice unintentionally everything just got out of control and all the violence occurred.

The third option—and this is the one that I think is true: communism is a theory that calls explicitly for terrorism and the extermination of large numbers of people. This is going to be so not merely as a matter of political expediency; rather, that is built into the philosophy from the beginning, and necessarily so.

A general theme of my podcast series. Philosophy is sometimes considered to be impractical. It has a reputation for being highly abstract—and, of course, it can be head in the clouds, ivory tower, distant from practical concerns. But the claim I’m going to make is that no matter how theoretical those claims and issues are philosophically, how one answered those issues makes a difference practically. Abstract claims in metaphysics, in epistemology, and so forth when they are applied consistently, become literally life and death in practice. And I mean that not just social-media “literally” but literally “literally”. Marxism is a very clear case study of this.

Now if we go to the relatively early Marx—this is Marx of The Communist Manifesto (1848)—but nonetheless he is a mature thinker.[8] Most of us are familiar with the main themes of that work. It is a class analysis: Marxism always takes any society, divides it and analyzes it in terms of its class structure. Feudalism has a variety of classes. Some of them have more power or less power than others. So capitalism fits right into this as well with its two classes: the bourgeoisie who are the property owners—richer and more powerful—and the proletariat who don’t have any property, and therefore are weaker in that system, and after work for the capitalists or if they are dispossessed from any sort of employment at all are even weaker. These two main classes are in conflict with each other. The conflict is zero-sum. That is to say, there is always a winner and a loser. But because of their power the rich property owners, the bourgeoisie, are in the position to exploit and extract wealth from the proletariat. Capitalism, therefore, is an immoral system. But because of its internal conflicts that are going to break out into contradictions eventually, it will become unstable. And some sort of communist version of socialism is not only a future ideal but a necessary result of the analysis.

There is always a question, though, when we think about the Marxist theory: Why the Marxists are rejecting explicitly achieving socialism by democratic and reformist methods? Why are they insisting—in this work and others—upon violent revolution? There is already in the modern world a longish history; we can go back a hundred years, say, to even Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He started publishing in the 1740s. Some of the socialists then were more violent than others, but many of them were reformists or democratic or republican in their advocacy of the methods by which one would bring about socialism. But Marxism is very forthright in rejecting all of that and arguing that terroristic and violent methods are necessary.

One kind of reason can be more psychological. We can imagine trying to bring about socialism through political processes that are democratic or republican. That that is going to push on our patience buttons pretty hard. So it might just be that we are very impatient. Because we know that if we are going to be successful in those systems—that is to say, in a democratic republic of some sort—the first thing we have to do is get organized. That takes time as we all know; we need time to organize a merely intellectual movement. And suppose we try that and succeed, and we start entering the electoral process. We know we are going to lose elections a lot of elections at first, several rounds of them. And then later maybe we will start to win some elections, but we are still going to be a minority in the lower legislative chamber—the House of Representatives or Parliament or whatever it is. And suppose after several more elections we get a majority in the lower chamber. But then we know there are divisions of power and there is an upper chamber and whatever socialist legislation we pass in the lower one, it is just going to be vetoed by the upper chamber—the Senate or House of Lords or whatever it is called. Maybe eventually, after several more elections and more work, we will get a majority in the upper chamber too, but then our bills will be vetoed by the president, the prime minister or the judiciary or whatever the top-dog institution will be. At the same time, if we are going to be successful in the democratic republic, we are going to get education establishment on our side, we are going to get the journalistic establishments on our side. But we know that in a free democratic-republic many of those are going to be against socialism, or they are very slowly going to become reformist.

Now even if we overcome, as socialists, all of those obstacles, we still have to remember that the rich bourgeoisie will have concentrated huge amounts of resources available in their hands. They will have lots of money available to them. And the capitalists and their lackeys will bribe whomever they need to in order to stay in power. So all of the extra-legal sources of power inside a democratic republic are still going to be available, and we are going to be up against those. Or if bribery is not sufficient, they will just use the police and/or military to suppress any threats coming from socialist quarters. So if you’re a socialist—and especially imagine yourself as a relatively young socialist with a burning desire to see socialism actually happen—well, who has the patience to endure all of that?

The Communist Manifesto is a political tract. But it is important to interpret it in the context of Karl Marx’s broader philosophy. And here it is very important to remember that Marx is not merely a political activist. He has a Ph.D., and his Ph.D. is in philosophy. So he is famous for his political economy, but he developed it explicitly in the context of an entire philosophy. When we start looking at the Marxist philosophy we realize that—in addition to and even more strongly than impatience—there is a strong philosophical reason that Marxism embraces and that leads it to rule out on principle any sort of democratic reformism. That reason is environmental determinism.

Now by determinism, I mean the thesis that human beings do not control their thoughts, actions, destinies. They are subject of divine, biological, or environmental forces beyond their control that shape them and ultimately cause their destiny to be whatever it is. So that is to say human beings do not have volition; they do not have free will, capacity for self-control or self-development. The individual is not the power that be. Instead, we are created and we act on the basis of forces beyond our control, whether they are divine, biological, environmental or some combination of those.

Marxism takes a very strong environmental-determinist stance. Except as a kind of malleable potential, there is no such thing as human nature. Here is a direct quote from early Marx, Marx-as-philosopher-of-the-time: “the human essence has no true reality.” Human beings are consequently to be seen as plastic or plasticine; to be brought into the world as malleable and shapeable by their circumstances.

Here is another formulation direct from Marx at the time: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their lives.” Now I want to pause on that for a moment. That is to say, it is not your consciousness; you do not think, consider, deliberate, weight pros and cons, make a decision, and they [choose] to put that into practice through volitional initiative and on the basis of that determine what your life is going to be. No, Marx is going to argue that is the other way around: “on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.”

The word “social” is important in that quotation because, for Marx, the determining environmental circumstances are fundamentally social. Marx sees individuals as vehicles of social collectives. We are not autonomous individuals who are born into a family, a city, a nation, an ethnicity, etc. None of us is an autonomous individual that can control our thoughts, make decisions, put them into action, and make our own character and life and so forth. Instead, we are vehicles through which the social units we are born into. [They] mold you and create you.

Early Marx-the-philosopher again:

“Activity and mind are social in their content as well as in their origin; they are a social activity and social mind.”[9]

Again: the individual “exists in reality as the representation and the real mind of social existence.” So that is to say, you as an individual are a representation of a society’s existence.

A longer quotation here but an important and pregnant one:

“Though man is a unique individual—and it is just his particularity which makes him an individual, a really individual communal being—he is equally the whole, the ideal whole, the subjective existence of society as thought and experienced. He exists in reality as the represen­tation and the real mind of social existence, and as the sum of human manifestations of life.”

That is a clear statement that your individual being is to be a vehicle through which social forces operate. You are a representation of sociability.

Further, according to Marx’s philosophy, it is not just your social circumstances in general, it is more specifically your economic circumstances that are the fundamental social-environmental forces creating you. Again Marx’s words, for example, these are from a little bit later, from Das Capital:

“As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.”

So putting all of that together: What we have is Marxism is committed to a collective, economic determinism. Anyone’s belief system is a necessary consequence of their economic social being. What one thinks is true, reasonable, and good is determined by the economic circumstances in which one is raised.

What does this imply for understanding the capitalist economic system in particular? We know that Marx holds that capitalism divides people into polarized economic classes: the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The main point here is going to be members of the two classes are born and raised in fundamentally different and opposed economic circumstances.

Again a quotation from Marx: “In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer must grow worse. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.” [10] That is a restatement of the claim that “the rich get richer, the poor get poorer”—the two-polarized-classes thesis and that they’re in zero-sum conflict with each other.

This set of economic circumstances is combined with environmental determinism. What does that combination imply? That means the bourgeoisie are conditioned to one set of truths about what’s reasonable and good. The proletariat are conditioned to an opposite set of truths about what’s reasonable and good. Given their conditioning, there is no way for individuals of different classes to communicate effectively with each other. To understand each other’s position is going to be impossible. To change the other’s mind through reason—that will be impossible. Each side has been molded to embody an opposed set of beliefs.

It follows that for Marxism—if we go back to the issue of democratic-republicanism—the democratic process is a pointless sham.

So pause here and think about what democracy depends on. Classic democracy theory presupposes the effectiveness of reason. We say that individual citizens can think for themselves: they can observe the facts, make judgments for themselves, can learn from their experience, can try one policy or a candidate, realize that it is not working or they don’t like that person. They can change their minds, vote differently, and next time they will be open to argument, and we should have lots of arguments and discussions, etc. Marxism, however, rules all of that out on epistemological principle: “knowledge” is conditioning, it is not a result of autonomous rational judgment.

So, in final consequence, it follows that when differently-conditioned individuals meet—that is to say people from different classes—their conflict can be resolved only by forceful methods. Socialists cannot argue capitalists into socialism. Socialists cannot through reason convince liberals to accept the dictatorship of the proletariat. They cannot objectively present evidence, they cannot appeal to reason—nobody can. Marxist can only take over by violence and remove their social enemies by force.

And that is, accordingly, the biggest part of the explanation for the post-Marx-and-Engels socialist tradition of violence: Lenin and Stalin in Russia, Mao in China, Guzmán in Peru, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Castro and Guevara in Cuba, and the long, long, list of Marxist and neo-Marxist terrorist groups that torture, blow-up, or otherwise kill people promiscuously, indiscriminately to try to precipitate the revolution.

Politics is driven by philosophy.

Marxism is very clear about this. In Marxism, we have a direct line from a metaphysical point about causality, to a human nature point about plasticity, to an epistemological point about knowledge as conditioning, to a social-ethics point about zero-sum conflict of beliefs and values, and then finally to a political point about necessary violent methods.

And that is worth remembering, in our generation, when responding to and trying to understand left-inspired activists and want-to-be-revolutionaries. Whether they are true-believer-Marxists or neo-Marxists or some other evolved variation—all of them have absorbed the basic Marxist philosophy underlying the politics.

And the point more generally is going to be that it is always worth remembering in analyzing any political issue or battle: We always need to look especially to the underlying philosophical issues.

Sources:

[1] Genocides and democides: https://ourworldindata.org/genocides . Wikipedia, “Democide”.

[2] Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 136, November 1848.

[3] Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle,” first published in Neue Rheinische Zeitung No. 194, January 13, 1849.

[4] Vladimir I. Lenin, quoted in George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, Oxford University Press, 1987.

[5] Felix Dzerzhinsky, press interview in early June 1918, quoted in Leggett, The Cheka.

[6] Leon Trotsky, Stalin—An Appraisal of the Man and his Influence, unfinished manuscript published in 1941.

[7] “Eric Hobsbawm is Dead.”

[8] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto. 1848.

[9] Karl Marx, Early Writings. Penguin.

[10] Marx, Das Kapital, Volume 1.

Related: “The Crisis of Socialism” [pdf]. Chapter Five of Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault

The complete series of Open College with Stephen Hicks podcasts.