Chapter 5. The Crisis of Socialism

Recall the two basic claims of classical Marxism, one economic and one moral: 1. Capitalism operates on exploitation of labor and must eventually collapse. Socialism, operating on communal labor and property, is the just system. 2. Morally, capitalism is based on self-interest, which necessitates competition over cooperation, leading to alienation and conflict. Socialism, operating on self-sacrifice, altruism, and thus cooperation, leads only to justice and peace.

While capitalism survives for a time, Marxists thought it would necessarily be unsustainable due to rising class conflict. Diminishing resources and class disparity would render enough pressure to initiate a revolution to socialism.

Marxists waited a long time. Not only were predictions failing, but capitalist countries seemed to be doing quite well. Net immigration to capitalist countries was also a problem; the “land of opportunity” slogan seemed so appealing. Marxist theory suggested that not only would zerosum economics squeeze out the middle-class, plunging most of them back into the working class, it should also slowly eliminate the competitive wealthy until only a handful control the whole of society. Instead, the opposite happened. Middle classes across the world increased in proportion, shrinking the working classes. Wealth for all classes, including the working class, increased. A trend of upward class mobility—“impossible” said the Marxists—was a real thing. It was plain that the proletariat was not going to

revolt under these conditions. Some thought that since a revolution was not going to happen, perhaps they just needed to promote socialism by slow evolution—at the ballot box. This was adopted by the Fabians in England.

There was less patience on the European mainland; democratic socialism in the early 20th century was not working. This ideal of grassroots, bottom-up rallying of the people to bring on socialism did not work for Germany in the 1920s, as Georg Lukács and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt school were reluctant to conclude. Marxism seemed in need of modification; the social revolution required leadership and could not be left to workers to self-organize. Ironically, many of the radical Left came to agree with what the collectivist Right had been advocating all along: the need of an aristocracy, a protected, intellectual class that would engage in the work needed to bring on socialism. In other words, 20th century socialism, while remaining for the people, no longer had the patience to be by the people. The Great Depression gave national socialists an excellent bargaining chip with the already industrialized workforces of Italy and Germany. “Elect us, we will put you back to work, and we will jail the capitalists who caused the Depression…” or so the narrative was to be.

Something quite different happened in Russia as it lacked industrialization at this time. Its revolution in 1917 ultimately created the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, initially led by Vladimir Lenin. Prior to the revolution, Russia was an agrarian, feudal society. Capitalism had not come to industrialize the workforce. Classical Marxism suggested that a period of capitalism was necessary before evolving to socialism, but Russian revolutionaries did not want to wait. Instead, since the nation lacked an

organized workforce, they created an elite to organize and ultimately force the nation from feudalism directly to socialism. During the Russian Revolution of 1917, the czarist monarchy was abolished, and the tsar and his family were executed. Lenin would call the new socialist government a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” At the same time and in a similar situation, onlooker Mao Zedong in the 1920s approved of the transition of Russia and sought to model it in his own country. However, with China even more politically disorganized and impoverished, Mao resisted industrialization and sought to build a socialist state while remaining largely agrarian. Mao, like Lenin, would also label his government as “The People’s Republic”; socialists insist they are always working in the people’s interest.

World War II became an important turning point: rather than united, the collectivists, by a historic miscalculation, fought each other to exhaustion and allowed the liberal capitalists another victory. Now with the collectivist Right defeated, the collectivist Left would have their chance to go toe-to-toe with the liberal capitalists. And so became the intellectual and political division that led to what we now call the liberal West—the United States, Japan, England and its satellite nations, and the western half of Europe—versus the collectivist East—the USSR including eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, and parts of Africa.

Unfortunately, over the experiments of the mid-20th century, it seemed Marxism was wrong about which economic system was unsustainable. It was not capitalism that ruptured, but socialism. Despite being guided by a philosophy that emphasized workers, productivity, and sacrifice to meet the needs of society, the Soviet Union’s agrarian and

industrial sectors struggled to grow over a half century. Considerable amounts of land, labor, and wealth were centrally managed, wasted, and redirected to serve the military and not the people. A prime example was Holodomor, the famine in the Soviet Ukraine in the early 1930s; historians still quibble over whether it was poor economic planning or also an intentional genocide. Scarcity also tends to promote survival habits, where people hoard and are less productive overall. Emigration (which basically amounted to flight) from the USSR also stifled its prospects and raised its infamy as the brutalities of Joseph Stalin, at this time only rumors, gave the nation a disgraceful repute around the world.

In 1956, two blows were dealt to the USSR. A revolt in Hungary was crushed with tanks and soldiers, killing Hungarian workers and students in the streets, followed by public executions of others who were suspected to have been involved. As news and horrific images were broadcast around the world, the USSR was cast as a brutal nation not living up to its socialistic ideals of peace and prosperity. The second blow provided the same effect. That same year, a speech by now-chairman Khrushchev, leader of the Communist Party, was leaked.

The speech revealed the rumors about Stalin to be true: during his reign, he had millions of USSR “comrades” killed, tortured, or sent to slave labor camps in Siberia. Much of the world recoiled as the gulags of communism came to light and the flagship of socialism was found guilty of crimes against humanity. Many socialist sympathizers were in shock. How could socialism have descended to this? Some thought perhaps Khrushchev was a traitor, a stooge of the West sabotaging the great project of socialism. Over

the decades, however, more of the tragedies under Stalin were revealed and could not be ignored. Firsthand accounts of eight years in the gulags were published in Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, first translated to English in 1973.

While socialist intellectuals were now dealing with schisms within their political ideology, the revelations did not end there. China’s “Great Leap Forward,” orchestrated by Mao, was revealed in the 1960s to have been the cause of thirty million deaths. Socialist intellectuals shifted in response. Stalin and Mao had the wrong approach. Instead, Cuban dictator Castro was the ideal. Then it shifted again to Vietnam, then Cambodia, then Albania in the 1970s, then Nicaragua in the 1980s. However, the track record of socialism never recovered; human rights abuses seem to follow socialism wherever it goes. Previously, while socialism had been working on its failures to achieve prosperity, it was now buried in a moral crisis. It could not possibly justify the mass slaughter of human beings as “necessaryto the state.” Table 5: Deaths from Democide1 Compared to Deaths from International War, 1900–1987

Killed by Own Government Killed by International War

Democratic Authoritarian Totalitarian

2 million 29 million 138 million2

4.4 million 15.3 million 14.4 million

1 “Democide” is defined as “killing of one’s own people.” 2 Communist governments account for 110 million of these deaths. Source: Rummel, R. J. Death by Government. Transaction, 1994.