The Death of Communism
(As part of observances for its 30th anniversary, Stabroek News will be reproducing snippets from its earlier years on page four of each day’s newspaper.) VIEWPOINT BY IAN McDONALD
WE live in an extraordinary time. Compared for instance, with the slowmotion collapse which the Roman Empire, the Spanish Empire, and the British Empire experienced, the Russian Empire is disintegrating in a twinkling of history’s eye. The most that can be salvaged now by that great revolutionary, Mikhail Gorbachev, is a loose Commonwealth club-like association of independent states. All empire-haters should be overjoyed. “What bliss is it in that dawn to be alive!”
However, what is happening represents an even more crucial and fundamental displacement of forces than the end of empire. We are witnessing something far more important — the death throes of a creed. This creed, Communism, for a long time promised the world that it was the creed of man’s future and for many it seemed indeed that nothing could withstand it. Now, with a startling and historic suddenness, it is viewed with revulsion on all sides not merely as a God that failed but even as a Satan which; but for the grace of God, nearly succeeded.
I do not want to be misunderstood. The influence of Karl Marx as a great economist, political thinker, and philosopher will never be displaced. He stands with Plato, Aristotle, Locke, Hobbes, Adam Smith, the French Encyclopaedists, John Stuart Mill, Keynes, and all the others in the pantheon of great Western thinkers about the predicament of man in society. What is dying is Marx’s creed as interpreted, put into practice, and imposed for power’s sake alone by other men, including Lenin but pre-eminently Stalin and his satraps.
DOMINANCE I myself do not think that history will deal kindly with Lenin. But it is Stalin’s practice of Communism which made it dominant in half the world and it is that creed which is now being rejected with abhorrence as clean contrary to the freedom and dignity of man. In this sense Gorbachev is the ultimate founding father of anti-communism. I have always thought that Gorbachev’s comment early on that the Russian Revolution, like the French Revolution, must now be consigned to the history books was a coded signal that he rejected Communism as it had developed since 1917 and that he would therefore be doing all in his power to expunge it from the record.
Thick, learned volumes will be written to explain why Communism has failed so abjectly but I can think immediately of four reasons why the creed of Communism did not, in practice measure up to the fundamental needs of man.
ONE, it could not deliver the material goods. Central planning backed by a system which pervasively commands and administers everything and everybody can achieve success in relatively primitive economies. But as economies grow more mature, complex, sophisticated, that way of doing things simply does not work any longer.
TWO, it ignored the ineradicable appeal of private property. This is not serious when people own virtually nothing but, as they earn more than they spend and begin to accumulate, they will more and more insistently seek to exercise the rights of transfer and exchange which go with unencumbered ownership of property.
STATE POWER THREE, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat in practice turned out to be a crude means of gaining total state power and holding on to it through intimidation and terror. This brutal delusion — that an elite, self-perpetuating and privileged priesthood can arrogate to itself power to decide what the proletariat should dictate - is now in the process of being most rudely shattered.
FOUR, most basic of all, it did not recognise, indeed it strove to suppress, the deep need of men and women to be free. In practice Communism tried to ignore the axiom that freedom is a fundamental demand of human nature and therefore condemned as “bourgeois’’ or “individualistic’’ such principles as freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom to live and work as you please and not as you are commanded.
Pursued by ruthless men, for a while this attempt to ignore what is basic in the nature of man succeeded. But it only succeeded at huge material, and even greater psychological, cost, As Vaclav Havel, the once imprisoned dissident and now President of Czechoslovakia, said recently:
“The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment ...because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”
Gorbachev saw with utmost clarity that the self-delusion, the technological and the material backwardness, and the moral contamination which the system he inherited had imposed could not be allowed to continue. He gave it just a shake at first and has found it rotten to the core, with the result that now everywhere the days of Communism as we know it are numbered. All but the most dyed-in-the-wool Stalinists will be glad of that.
And yet the death of this little-mourned perversion of how men should seek to govern men leaves unanswered a deeper and more subtle question: in this era of liberal capitalism triumphant, has Socialism a future? To that very different question I will try to devote another Viewpoint soon.