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Hello fellow kids!
Welcome back to What is Politics
Today I want to give a very simple answer to a question that gets asked all the time, and that for some reason almost no one on the left seems to be able to give a coherent answer to – and that is: why is it that every communist country is always a dictatorship?
Even some of the biggest names on the left give really terrible answers to this questions. Most Recently I heard Dr. Richard Wolff who’s a popular Marxist Professor / youtube personality completely flubbing this question on the Lex Fridman podcast – which is what motivated me to make this video!
Fridman – who was born in the soviet union – asked Wolff if there was something inherent to trying to create an egalitarian society out of naturally hierarchical humans, that inevitably leads to dictatorship. And Wolff responded by babbling on and on about how civilization is all about doing all sorts of things that are against our nature, and he talked about Freud’s theory that civilization inevitably means that we are forced to do things that are against our nature, and that this causes all kinds of traumas but that that’s the only other alternative is to be wild animals murdering eachother all day.
And wow, that is just a really terrible answer on so many levels. Nevermind how outdated that theory is, but it’s basically like saying, ‘sure socialism would suck, but it’s better’n’it wud’.. kind of like D-Pants – which you can look up for your entertainment or horror.
And Wolf’s inability to answer this question is really surprising – both because Wolff must have been asked this question hundreds of times in his life and also because the correct answer is just really, really simple.
Now, if you want a good explanation for why it’s not against human nature to organize on egalitarian lines, then check out all of my anthropology episodes and my ongoing dawn of everything critique – but for now, let’s stick to why every communist country is always a dictatorship.
Before I get to the EZ obvious reason for why communist countries are always dictatorships, I should point out that there are coherent explanations for this coming from the right – people like Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, or more recently Peter Boettke. One is that if you try to control the free market – for example by imposing rent control – it creates unintended consequences – like landlords harassing tenants and neglecting their buildings – that require more and more regulations and agencies to police – like anti harassment laws, and special tenant protections, special penalties for violating these rules and special housing courts – so that you eventually end up with total government control of everything. And there are related arguments like the “calculation problem” that tell us that a centralized command economy necessarily leads to economic failure because you can’t price things correctly without the zillions of inputs that a decentralized market gives you, and how these inevitable failures incentivize corruption and dictatorship – and you can look up those authors to get a sense of those arguments – I’ll make a video debating these arguments another time, but for now, I want to point out that these arguments are besides the point.
First of all, central planning without a market, is not an inherent feature of socialism. While some models for socialism involve eliminating markets and central planning, historically many socialists were quite enthusiastic about markets. Until the era of the soviet union and the other communist countries, the defining feature of socialism was that it sought to abolishing dependence relationships. Most crucially the employee employer relationship – but also things like male dominance, ethnic or religious dominance, slavery, and imperialism – which is dominance of some countries by other countries.
Also, given today’s computing technology, there is good reason to believe that you could have a decentralized economy even without a market. You can look up cybernetic planning in chile and bulgaria or OGAS in the USSR or books like the peoples’ republic of walmart or red plenty or the general intellect unit podcast for more about that stuff – but for now, we’re going to leave this fascinating stuff for another episode and instead look at a the very simple and obvious reason why all communist countries are dictatorships which everyone seems to ignore:
Every communist country thus far has been a dictatorship because all of them except for one, started on purpose as dictatorships. You had one communist revolution in russia in 1917 which was supposed to be deeply democratic – but within a few years, that revolution failed at socialism and at democracy, and degenerated into a one party top down dictatorship with a bureaucratic ruling elite class – and it was that model which every other so-called communist country explicitly emulated on purpose.
Now why would all of these countries copy a failed model on purpose?
There are several reason, but three main ones:
First of all, the Soviet Union model was attractive to these countries because while the Soviet Union completely failed at communism and at democracy, it did succeed at rapid industrialization – Russia went from being a very poor country with 85% of the population as peasants, to an advanced industrialized world power in 20 years. This is something that took the first capitalist countries about 200 years to do. And it was actually this rapid industrialization that enabled russia to win WWII.
Another thing that the soviet union succeeded at was at escaping economic and military domination by the powerful capitalist countries – i.e. imperialism. And most socialist revolutions were also nationalist revolutions, seeking national independence.
If you compare communist countries to similarly underdeveloped capitalist countries, but that were not dominated by outside powers – like russia and finland – capitalist finland does a lot better because it had access to world markets. But if you compare communist countries – whose markets were generally blockaded by the rich capitalist countries – to similarly underdeveloped countries that were dominated by powerful countries – like costa rica vs china – the communist countries develop and the capitalist ones don’t.
And finally the Soviet model also succeeded at getting rid of the previous elite class, and in allowing formerly poor and low status people to rise up in the ranks of all the powerful positions in the state. So for the first few decades, you would find large numbers of people from worker and peasants backgrounds, at all levels of Soviet government and industrial management, including the head of state.
Also, he fact that the USSR industrialized so quickly is what enabled them to win WWII.
So people in all of these poor countries all around the world who wanted independence and development for their societies, were looking at all this thinking like wow I’ll have what she’s having!
And it’s not surprising that every country that had a native communist revolution that emulated the soviet system was a poor country. The only wealthier countries that had communist governments were the eastern european countries like East Germany and Czechoslovakia where communism was basically imposed on them by the Soviet Union after World War II with the consent of the US and the UK at the Yalta conference.
And it’s very important to point out that although it was only poor countries that ever had communist revolutions, most socialists, including Karl Marx and his followers – and including the leaders of the russian revolution itself – thought that communism wasn’t even possible in poor countries.
Another important reason that poor countries emulated the soviet model and not other democratic models of socialism, was that the Soviet Union purposefully trained, recruited and funded revolutionaries in poor countries, and it tried to control socialist movements and parties everywhere around the world in order to mold them after their own image, and also so that they would serve the soviet union’s interests.
So if you were a nationalist anti imperialist 3rd world revolutionary, you could go to a school is Moscow and learn how to lead a successful revolution, and get money for your cause and a blueprint for what to do and how to start industrializing your country.
Meanwhile if you were an international socialist or a libertarian socialist, you had no one helping you, and you probably had soviet agents trying to undermine you or even assassinate you on top of the united states trying to overthrow and assassinate you.
Ironically the two countries in the 20th century where there were successful socialist revolutions that were free and democratic and economically functional while they lasted – had their revolutions crushed by the Soviet Union! And those are Spain where the libertarian socialists aka anarchists carried out a successful socialist revolution in much of the country during the spanish civil war from 1936-1939, and the Ukraine where the western part of the country was in anarchist hands from 1918-1921.
Meanwhile in Chile, the one wealthier country that elected a government that was serious about transitioning to a parliamentary form of socialism, had its government overthrown by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by a free market oriented dictatorship.
THE NEW CLASS
So that’s the short Tink Tonk version answer – there was one failed communist revolution in russia, everyone else copied that on purpose because they wanted to industrialize and remain independent – while at the same time, the USSR and the USA made sure to crush any kind of democratic socialism in the bud the few times that it appeared.
Now as simple as this answer is, you’ve probably never heard it before, and a lot of the things that I just said probably seem confusing or like they contradict a lot of what you’ve learned – like that the russian revolution failed, or that communism is supposed to be democratic or some socialists were very enthusiastic about the market – so let’s get into the long version for everyone who’s head is spinning or exploding.
But before I get into the details, I want to point out that I did not make this particular theory up – the idea that all the communist revolutions were primarily a means to industrialize poor countries and achieve national independence was first articulated in a book from 1957 called the New Class by Milovan Djilas. Djilas had been a top Communist Official in Yugoslavia and before that he had been one of the partisan fighters who liberated Belgrade from the Nazis and established communism in Yugoslavia in the first place.
And just before writing the New Class, Djilas had been stripped of his position and expelled from the communist party for criticizing corruption among other top Yugoslav officials and for calling for and end to one party rule, in favour of a socialist multiparty democracy. And soon after that he was thrown jail for criticizing the government of Yugoslavia in the foreign press.
And this is a really interesting book if you’re interested in the history of communism, and it’s almost a forgotten book at this point for some reason.
More recently, Branko Milanovic articualtes more or less the same idea in chapter 3 of his 2019 book Capitalism Alone.
SOCIALISM AND COMMUNISM DEFINITIONS
So – why do I say that Russia failed at communism when the soviet unions is always described in pro and anti-communist sources alike as the most important communist country in the world for 80 years? And what do I mean when I say that the leaders of the Russian revolution didn’t think that communism was possible in a poor country like Russia? Why would they undertake a communist revolution if they didn’t think communism was possible in the first place?
Before we can make sense of any of this, we first need some kind of definition of socialism or communism – and to do that we need to look at the history of socialism.
Like all political terms, the words socialism and communism are words that most people use them without really knowing what they mean. Everyone kind of just “feels” what they mean, having inferred their meanings from journalists and academics and youtube brodudes who also have no idea what these words mean.
And whenever we just “feel” the definitions of words without knowing what they mean, that’s a big red flag – pun intended – that we’re being manipulated. And socialism are communism are terms whose meaning a lot of powerful people have been interested in distorting and manipulating.
Wealthy people and the governments who represent them in capitalist countries have defined these words in ways that manipulate us into hating certain things that we might otherwise love – like the idea of workers directly running the government and their workplaces – which historically were the core tenets of socialism.
Meanwhile the leaders of former and current communist countries have defined the words socialism and communism in ways that manipulate us into loving or excusing things that we might otherwise hate – like a dictatorship over the workers by and for bureaucrats. And we’ll see in a few minutes how this starts with Lenin, the founder and head of what became the Soviet Union.
In mainstream corporate journalism and academia the word socialism tends to mean government control over the most important sectors of the economy, and the word communism is used to describe a one party dictatorship and a centralized command economy.
Since Bernie Sanders’ presidential runs in United States, a lot of people now use the word socialism to refer to a capitalist economy but with an advanced welfare state, like the Scandinavian countries.
Hilariously, in american right wing media and especially right wing alternative and social media you’ll often hear the word “socialism” used to describe a system where rich and powerful zillionaires like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates use government power in order to prevent potential competitors from ever being able to threaten their wealth. And I say hilariously because when socialism started out this was basically the socialists’ definition of the world “capitalism!”
Meanwhile among people who admire the so called communist countries, the word socialism is used to describe a transition period between capitalism and communism where the government takes control of major industries, and the population becomes employees of the state, while the word communism means a stateless society where workers directly control the economy and the government.
Note how contradictory these all of these definitions are!
So let’s iron out what was historically meant by socialism and communism, so that we can understand where the leaders of the russian revolution are coming from and what they were trying to do when they hit the scene in the early 20th century and how they became the model for 3rd world national liberation movements.
WHAT IS SOCIALISM
The word Socialism was the name given to a broad range of ideas which emerged in the first decades of the 1800s. What these ideas had in common is that they rejected the economic and political system that was emerging at the time, which the socialists called “capitalism”. And the word “capitalism” was actually a slur word invented by those early socialists in order to describe a system where the owners of capital – meaning productive property – used their control of the state and their market power to enrich themselves and entrench their power over the rest of the population, and their employees in particular.
And in capitalism, the more capital you have the more power that you have.
And that power is economic power, but it’s also political power
It’s political power in because capital and money give you the power to tell people what to do. Remember that the word politics refers to decision making in groups.
In capitalism the owner of capital has the power to boss around the people who depend on his capital. That’s why the owner of a company tells his employees what to do and not the other way around, even though the owner might be just one person and the employees might be 1000 people – in the private sphere, capitalism is not a democracy, it’s a dictatorship of the owner. The person who owns the property gets to tell those people who depend on his property what to do.
And the only power that iyou have is whatever your bargaining power accords you – ultimately that means you just have the power to refuse to serve the employer or rent the landlord’s apartment. And realistically you only have that power to the extent that you have better options.
And the more capital you have the more people there will be who are dependent on your property – whether it’s as tenants, as employees or as consumers of your products.
So if you own the all the water sources or the food sources for your town, you will rule that town – which is how many ancient kingdoms got all of their power. Capitalism is only different from previous systems in terms of the forms that this dependency takes, based on property rights, and contracts and employer employee relationships rather than things like divine right or tribal affiliation or other traditions.
The other form of political power that you get from being an owner of a lot of capital is what we normally think of when we hear the word politics, and that’s power over the state. In modern representative democracies, all citizens are supposed to have equal political power through one person one vote. But in reality, the more capital you have, the more you dominate the political system beyond your tiny vote. And this happens in a whole variety of ways.
The most obvious one is through campaign donations, where you get to choose which politicians can afford to be seen and heard by voters and which don’t. And then there’s ownership of the media and internet companies – where you get to choose which politicians get to be seen and heard and which don’t and which ideas get to be seen and heard and which don’t. And then there are donations to universities where you get to influence what research scientists do, and what elites and professionals think and what theories are popular in economics, politics, medicine and every other discipline.
Even if you live in a country that has strict campaign finance laws and publicly funded universities – the big corporations and multibillionaires still have enormous power over the political system, both through ownership of the media, and the leverage they have over jobs and investment – but also because they have the money to hire lobbyists who work 24-7 exposing politicians to the capital owner’s point of view:
Oh you can’t raise the minimum wage, that reduces employment! and you can’t raise taxes on rich people because that takes away their incentive to innovate! and you can’t have rent control, that just reduces housing supply. So legislators are being fed these ideas day in and day out And in the US, corporate think tanks commonly go so far as to write the laws that their wind up monkey doll politicians then go off and rubber stamp in congress and the senate.
Meanwhile there are very few people or organization exposing politicians to ordinary peoples’ points of view, or writing draft legislation in favour of tenants or employees. And the overwhelming majority of people don’t belong to these underfunded understaffed and often idiotically inefficient organizations.
Most people only know how to vote and maybe write an email once in a while or give an angry incoherent speech at a town hall meeting where you don’t even know what you’re talking about. [mcrib video]
And the power of the wealthy over the state was much more blatant in the early 19th century, where in most countries that had elected parliaments, you needed to have a certain amount of property just to have the right to vote.
So a socialist was someone who wanted to replace this system where the more capital you have, the more power you have – with something where everyone has relatively equal power, and where the economy and the political system exist in order to benefit the entire society not just people who own a lot of capital.
Early on, there were some authoritarian visions of socialism, like Saint-Simoneanism, where a wise elite would run things for the benefit of the rest – a bit like in Plato’s republic – but as the 19th century went on, and the workers movement became an important driver of socialist ideas, those kinds of authoritarian visions of socialism largely faded out in favour popular hyperdemocratic visions of socialism.
And these ideas were either directly democratic where workers should directly control the government and their workplaces, like in Anarchism, or Marxism or via their unions, like in syndicalism – or at via elected state representatives like what was called at the time Lassalism, and which I call “parliamentary socialism” to avoid jargon.
One of the main aims of the socialist movement at this point, was to abolish the employer-employee relationship and the landlord tenant relationship. These relationships were seen as the next step up on the ladder of oppressive relationships after the master-slave relationship, and the lord-serf relationship. Wage labour was better than slavery or serfdom – sometimes – because slaves and serfs were often treated better than the lowest wage earners, and although wage earners technically had more freedom, they often had to work such long hours in such atrocious conditions just to survive that they couldn’t exercise any of their freedoms – but they were similar in the sense that there was a relationship of servitude based on one person controlling property that the other depended on.
And remember that the word “employee”, means human tool. I employ a shovel to help me dig a ditch. I employ a worker and let him use my shovel so that he dig a ditch so that I don’t have to. I own a slave, but I rent a worker. Better, but still servitude.
Different socialists had different ideas about how politics and property should be managed – like should people be able to own their own plots of land and trade their products on the market, or should everything be owned collectively and exchanged according to need or to some plan – but all of the main strains of socialism agreed that wage labour should be abolished, and that any property that many people depended on, needed to be controlled by the people who depended on it – workers and consumers – whether as a cooperative or a commune, or through state representatives. It should under no circumstances be controlled by an outside force like a private owner or a non-democratic government.
In the words of Eugene Debs, the most prominent socialist in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th Century:
“What is it that socialism proposes? Simply that the tools workingmen made and use and upon which their very lives depend shall be owned by themselves that they may fully produce the things that are required to keep themselves and their families in comfort and health.”
All this to say that the main tenets of socialism were democracy and individual freedom.
Freedom from servitude to a king, a master, a government, a business owner or a husband. Freedom to make the decisions that affect you, via direct democracy in the workplace, direct democratic control over collective property, and direct or representative democratic over the broader decision making institutions, whether that be a state government or else a confederation of communes and cooperatives.
In the words of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’ partner in organizing and theorizing, the communist revolution will “establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” and the proletarian means wage workers who don’t own significant property.
Marx saw real democracy and communism as basically one and the same thing, and to quote a paraphrase of Marx’ early terrible writing
to Marx ‘What makes democracy ‘true’ is not the equal opportunity of every citizen to devote himself to public lifeas something special, but the “immediate participation of all in deliberating and deciding” on political matters. There should be no professional bureaucrats, no professional politicians, no professional police, etc.
…‘political’ deliberation and administration would be the work of everyone, on apart-time or short-term basis; it would not be sufficient to have only a chance to serve. The chance of every Catholic to become a priest, Marx remarked, does not produce the priesthood of all
Vladimir Lenin, who started the Communist revolution in Russia and who was head of state of russia from 1917 until he died in 1924 tells us that “Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.”
Leon Trotsky, another leading figure in the russian revolution, tells us that “Communism needs democracy like the human body needs oxygen.” [CANT FIND SOURCE]
COMMUNISM
OK so socialism and communism are supposed to be democratic. But what’s the difference between communism and socialism?
The short answer is nothing – these are terms that were often used interchangeably by predecessors of Marx on until 1917.
The long answer is that although the terms were used interchangeably, the word communism was sometimes used by Marx and Engels and the parties influenced by them, to distinguish themselves from other kinds of socialists, the main distinction being that the communists were generally against private property and market relations and believed in Marx’ so-called “scientific socialism” which is a fancy way of saying that they think about ideas and political systems in their material context, which we’ll talk about in a bit, as opposed to ideas and political systems just forming randomly out of peoples’ minds.
Nevertheless you can read Marx and Engels using the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and synonymously for their entire lives, as well as other more descriptive terms like “the free association of the producers”
Other socialists like Pierre Joseph-Proudhon, who’s one of the early leading anarchist thinkers, and whose philosophy inspired the Paris communards – were big fans of the free market and they were ok with people owning property so long as you couldn’t own the property that others depended on, and so long as labour couldn’t be rented. In other words, they were pro market but against a market for labour and against the employee employer relationship, which again was one of the main objectives of socialism in general once you get to the mid 19th century.
SOCIALISM AND STATE
Most people have it in their heads that socialism or communism means the state controls everything and manages a planned economy in the name of the workers – which is what you saw in all of the so-called communist countries until vietnam and china took a turn towards capitalism. And in Vietnam and China that state still carefully keeps the private sector under its thumb so that it doesn’t turn into a political competitor.
But was the actual socialist and communist attitude towards the state in Marx’ time and until the early years of the russian revolution into the 1920s.
Whereas one popular branch of 19th century socialism called Lassalism – envisioned a democratic state controlling the economy – the two most popular forms of socialism – marxism, and anarchism – were expressly against the state even existing, nevermind controlling anything. Both the anarchists, and Karl Marx and his followers believed that that state is by definition an instrument that was used by one class of people to oppress and exploit the rest of the population.
In slave societies the state reinforces the master’s rights, in feudalism the state enforces the rights of the nobility to extract surplus from the serfs, and in capitalism the state enforces a version of property rights that ensures that people who have lots of capital get to command people who don’t have capital, who have to rent themselves out as employees to those people who do have it, and protect people with lots of property from losing it in all sorts of ways.
Therefore, in a communist, classless society, there could be no state, because no one would be controlling anyone else and there would just be no purpose for it. Once the revolution happened, and the workers took power in their own hands “the administration of people would become the administration of things” and the state would wither away since there would no longer be any need to dominate anyone.
Keep in mind that in this era there was no welfare state as we know it – the state was largely just institutions of coercion – courts, armies, police, prisons and sometimes poorhouses and asylums, which were a lot like prisons, keeping undesirables out of the eyes of rich people.
Marx and Engels tell us that state is “the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their common interests” and the Modern state “is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt … for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests.”
Marx tells us that
“the working class cannot simply lay hold on the ready made State machinery and wield it for their own purpose. The political instrument of their enslavement cannot serve as the political instrument of their emancipation.”
Engels tells us that
“The society which organizes production anew on the basis of free and equal association of the producers will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong—into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax.”
and that after the revolution
“the interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then ceases of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction … of production. The state is not “abolished”, it atrophies.”
Marx writes,
“The ‘police’, the ‘judiciary’, and the ‘administration’ are not the representatives of a civil society which administers its own universal interests … through them; they are the representatives of the state and their task is to administer the state against civil society.”5
Where Marxists differed from anarchist communists was that anarchists thought that you needed to destroy the state right away as part of the socialist revolution, whereas the marxists thought that the workers needed to temporarily seize the state as part of the revolution in order to prevent owners from taking back power. And the workers would hold on to the state until the former owners became assimilated into the working class. And Marx and Engels called this temporary seizure of power, the “dictatorship of the proletariat”.
Marx and Engels’ ideas about the form and duration of the dictatorship of the proletariat changed at different points in Marx’ life but the important thing to know about that term is that dictatorship in the mid 19th century was not so much the concept of one man rule or lack of democracy the way that it is understood today – it described a temporary state of emergency. It had connotations of the ancient Roman instution of the dictatura, where in times of war and other emergencies, the Roman Constitution allowed for the senate to elect a leader with limited powers who could rule without the senate or having to deliberate or approve of his actions. And this period ended with the end of the crisis.
Marx basically used the term “dictatorship” to mean “dominance” – so a representative democratic parliament is the “dictatorship of the bourgeoisie” meaning the dominance of the business class, even though workers and peasants might be able to vote in some countries. And that’s why he uses phrases like “the dictatorship of the democracy” or “democratic dictatorship” which sound like self-contradictory nonsense to 21st century or even 20th century ears.
In the 1850s Marx and Engels spoke as if the dictatorship of the proletariat was about seizing control of the state as it exists with its various institutions, and this is the version that’s more well known because it’s from the Communist Manifesto which is easy to read and which became well known in the 20th century 100 years after it was published as an obscure pamphlet.
Now even in this version, which is the more statist version, the dictatorship of the proletariat was still supposed to be totally democratic – for workers. It’s only the owning class that would be subject to state rule without elected representation, until they assimilated into the working class, a which point the state no longer has any reason to exist because it’s not suppressing anyone.
The anarchists thought that this was wishful thinking at best, and opportunist deception at worst. In the famous words of Mikahail Bakunin who was the leading thinker of the anarchist movement, and Marx’ biggest rival for the leadership of the international workingmen’s association, the first big international socialist organization:
If there is a State, there must be domination of one class by another and, as a result, slavery; the State without slavery is unthinkable.
What does it mean that the proletariat will be elevated to a ruling class? Is it possible for the whole proletariat to stand at the head of the government? …
The Marxist theory solves this dilemma very simply. By the people’s rule, they mean the rule of a small number of representatives elected by the people… This is a lie, behind which lurks the despotism of the ruling minority, a lie all the more dangerous in that it appears to express the so-called will of the people.
The Marxists say that this minority will consist of workers. Yes, possibly of former workers, who, as soon as they become the rulers of the representatives of the people, will cease to be workers and will look down at the plain working masses from the governing heights of the State; they will no longer represent the people, but only themselves and their claims to rulership over the people. Those who doubt this know very little about human nature.
The fundamental difference between a monarchy and even the most democratic republic is that in the monarchy the bureaucrats oppress and rob the people for the benefit of the privileged in the name of the King, and to fill their own coffers; while in the republic the people are robbed and oppressed … in the name of “the will of the people” (and to fill the coffers of the democratic bureaucrats)… But the people will feel no better if the stick with which they are being beaten is labeled “the people’s stick.”
and you can read this whole section and see just how prescient it is when it comes to the Russian revolution and the other communist countries that copied it’s model.
But, also note that here Bakunin is criticizing Marx and Engels’ early vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
In 1870, 20 years or so after the communist manifesto, there was a workers’ revolution led by anarchists and other non-marxist socialists in Paris which established the Paris Commune. This was a communist society which lasted about 2 months until is was crushed by the military.
After the Commune happened, Marx and Engels declared that the Paris Commune was in fact what the dictatorship of the proletariat would look like, which is to say a very democratic network of assemblies, with the no professional army or state police or professional bureaucracy, just armed citizens directly governing themselves and defending the revolution. And Marx and Engels noted that the revolutionaries did the right thing in basically dismantling the state from the getgo.
And at this point Engels tells us
“the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.
And although Engels talks about the Paris Commune as if it’s a form of state, the Paris commune was built in part by anarchists, and most anarchists considered the Paris Commune as an example of an anarchist-communist society and as a model of organization for an anarchist commune – so although the two camps continued to critique each other and accentuate their differences, they’re actually very close at this point anyhow.
And a few years later in 1874 Marx wrote a mostly forgotten point by point response to Bakunin’s state and anarchy book.
So where Bakunin says
What does it mean that the proletariat will be elevated to a ruling class? … Will all 40 million [German workers] be members of the government?”28
Marx responds
“Certainly! For the system starts with the self-government of the communities.”29
And i’ll put a link to that and everything else I’m discussing in the bibliography for this episode.
By the time we get to the 20th century, as marxist political parties gain success in many european countries – both in terms of pushing non socialist governments to adopt socialists’ demands, but also in terms of actually winning elections – marxists start becoming much friendlier to the state. So in 1902 Karl Kautsky in theorizes that the modern state is the right mechanism with which to organize the communes and cooperatives of the future. And a whole branch of marxism led by Eduard Bernstein, abandons violent revolution entirely and adopts a parliamentary socialist type of ideology kind of like Lassalism where you just keep passing better and better laws in the existing state system until you eventally get to socialism, except keeping in mind Marx’ theoretical outlook on understanding capitalism and the supposed laws of history.
But nonetheless, at the time of the russian revolution, the full spectrum of socialists from Anarchists, to revolutionary Marxists, to parliamentary Marxists you still had a very democratic vision of what socialism and communism were supposed to look like.
NO COMMUNISM FOR POOR COUNTRIES
OK so that’s a little intro to socialism and communism – movements that were supposed to bring about direct democracy and the abolition of relations of dominance, such as the employer employee relationship and the state, but also things like patriarchy – but why did Marx, and his followers right up until the Russian revolution, including the leaders of that revolution, think that socialism was only possible in rich countries?
One of the big things about Marx that set him apart from other socialists at the time – though marxists exaggerate this somewhat – is that Marx looked at politics and history with a special emphasis on the context of the practical conditions which shape and constrain the range of human choices, and which influence their ideas. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.“ That’s his famous quote from his 18th Brumaire.
Marxists talk about this in terms of “material conditions” but I like to talk about it more in term of context, and “practical conditions”, because i think the term “material conditions” gives some misleading connotations about the physical environment determining peoples’ ideas, and it also has associations with weird marxist robot gibberish that I want to avoid and that we wont get into right here. To give you some modern examples of how materialism is applied today, check out my anthropology and dawn of everything episodes.
Basically, Marx’ point was that whereas other socialists spoke as though establishing socialism was just a matter of convincing enough people to agree with you and then just making it happen, Marx pointed out that that free will only becomes an important factor when practical conditions are such that it’s actually materially possible to achieve your goals.
He and Engels dismissed other socialists as “utopians” and dubbed their own ideas as “scientific socialism” which made it weird and contributed to the cultlike mentality which afflicted many of his followers – but at it’s core it’s just common sense.
Like if you really want to build a big flying machine so you can fly in the air like a bird, it doesn’t matter how bad you want to fly, if your society hasn’t developed light metals and fossil fuels and glass and industrial production, it’s not going to happen until those conditions are met.
So in Marx view, socialism wasn’t just going to happen because socialists were going to convince enough people to make it happen via their amazing arguments. It was going to happen because it was being made possible and maybe even inevitable by some practical realities generated by capitalism itself. “Capitalism makes its own gravediggers” was one of Marx’ many famous phrases.
And more and more people were going to be convinced by socialist arguments not because of the increasing quality of socialist orators or Marx theories, but because capitalism was going to push more and more people into a class position that inherently made socialist ideas more compelling to them – the same way that rent control is much more popular in a city full of renters than in a city full of landlords and homeowners.
So on the one hand, capitalism’s internal dynamics were going to generate its own economic destruction – including periodic economic crises and massive crashes and depressions, which were quite frequent and severe in Marx time, and also by the tendency of profits decrease over the long terms as competition increased – so that eventually it would be almost impossible to generate profits by normal market mechanisms. (TOM)
And on the other hand he saw that capitalism was also generating the conditions for its own political overthrow. There were larger and larger numbers of formerly independent peasants being pushed off of their lands by a combination of state imposed laws and market forces.
And these people were concentrating in larger and larger numbers in wretched urban slums working and living in deplorable conditions for barely subsistence wages, when they were lucky enough to be employed. And they were being abused and exploited by bosses at work and then being ripped off by landlords at home, all leading to ferocious resentment and discontent, such that even many middle and upper class people, liberals and conservatives alike were appalled at all the chaos and squalor and wanted social change of some sort.
Meanwhile the fact that urban workers were concentrated into huge numbers both in crowded slums, but also at work in large factories, meant that workers were socializing and getting to know eachother and to beginning to understand their common struggles and interests, as well as their numerical strength. And in the 19th century workers were beginning to organize and fight back, forming illegal labour unions and going on strikes and taking other peaceful and violent actions to defend their interests and achieve their goals.
Marx called these urban workers the proletariat – named after the class of ancient roman citizens who were too poor to buy weapons to serve in the army and who only had their offspring to provide to the military> Proletarius means producer of offspring. Someone who owns nothing but their own children – in the Roman case, you gave your children to the military, in the capitalist case, you gave your children to the factory owner.
So Marx saw that as capitalism would keep on doing its thing, the proletariat would grow and grow, and that naturally this proletariat would eventually come to understand that they’d be better off just getting rid of the capitalists entirely, and putting the factories under the control of the people who worked in them, so that they could run them for their own benefit and that of their communities.
Basically, capitalism was building the economic wealth and the natural infrastructure and the political base for a socialist economy. And unlike farming or small artisinal production, capitalist factories were already communal – they involved large numbers of people working together – the only problem was that all the power was in the owner while the workers were just tools to be used and exploited. All that needed to happen was for that power to be distributed evenly.
In Marx’ words:
[capitalism] begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; … it has itself created the elements of a new economic order… capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property.
And it’s only a matter of time before conditions are such that workers realize that they should and that they have the power to make this happen.
So it’s practical conditions that will generate socialist consciousness. In the words of Trotsky:
Socialism does not aim at creating a socialist psychology as a pre-requisite to socialism but at creating socialist conditions of life as a pre-requisite to socialist psychology.
And once capitalism had developed to the point that most of the economy was in the hands of proletarian employees – they would be in a position to do just that – all they had to do was be organized so they could strike all at once, and the whole economy would grind to a halt, and then workers could take control of the economy that’s already in their hands in the first place. And this presumably large majority of the population would be allied with dissatisfied downwardly mobile artisans whose livelihoods were being destroyed by mass production, and peasants and the occasional dissident middle class or bourgeois intellectual, which would comprise an overwhelmingly large majority of the population. And that’s when you’d start to see communist revolutions happening in the most highly industrialized societies with the biggest proletariats.
Meanwhile, when it came to peasants, Marx didn’t see them as reliable supporters of socialism. While on the one hand they strongly desired to be rid of exploitation by landlords and lenders, what they most wanted was their own plot of land to work on and improve. And therefore they would be less attracted to his vision of socialism, which was a highly technological society that required the abolition of markets and trading and the establishment of large scale industry including large scale agricultural cooperatives and communes. More-over due to being more spread out and more isolated geographically from eachother, or organized into patriarchal villages, peasants were less likely to interact and become aware of their common interests as a class, than crowded urban proletarians.
And here’s Marx explaining about why the peasants ended up supporting dictator Napoleon III over democracy in 1848 in France.
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse… Each individual peasant family is almost self-sufficient, directly producing most of its consumer needs, and thus acquires its means of life more through an exchange with nature than in intercourse with society. A small holding, the peasant and his family; beside it another small holding, another peasant and another family. A few score of these constitute a village, and a few score villages constitute a department. Thus the great mass of the French nation is formed by the simple addition of homologous magnitudes, much as potatoes in a sack form a sack of potatoes.
…the identity of their interests forms no community, no national bond, and no political organization among them, they do not constitute a class. They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.
To Marx, peasants were like tiny poor capitalists. He called them Petit Bourgeois – little business owners. Not only were they unlikely to connect with eachother and revolt but they were often liable to ally themselves with dictators or even larger landlowners. And his disdain for peasants was amplified by his followers as we’ll see later.
Later, after the Paris commune, Marx’ thought more favourably about the potential for peasants to ally with workers, but hostility and suspicion towards peasants and people without education remained a strong tendency among Marx’ followers.
So when marxists talk about the working class – they’re not usually talking about “people who work” – they’re usually referring to the proletariat – about people who are employees, and who also don’t own anything significant. And sometimes they’re not so much interested in them for moral reasons, like because they’re especially oppressed and it’s so unfair how their being exploited etc – which is just as true of many peasants – but because they’re the group of people that are supposed to make socialism actually happen.
The role of the communist intellectual or activist in achieving socialism was supposed to be teach people about the idea of socialism, and help them organize themselves, so that when the inevitable collapse came, that the workers could make socialism happen versus it just resulting in chaos and destruction, or some awful new order imposed by the wealthy – like fascism, which hadn’t yet been invented, but which fits the bill.
In the words of Karl Kautsky in 1892, who was the leading marxist after Marx and Engels died:
“As things stand today capitalist civilization cannot continue; we must either move forward into socialism or fall back into barbarism.”
Another job of the socialist organizer was to form political parties to push for workers interests and their rights, and maybe under special conditions in very richest and most, advanced countries like the united states, england, or netherlands – to take power via elections rather than via a violent revolution. And keep in mind that when these parties started, most of them weren’t running in elections, because there were no elections for most people!
So these parties at first were more associations for organizing, and were often illegal until workers started winning the right to universal suffrage for men the last decades of the 19th century in some countries, while in others, like in Russia, they remained mostly illegal until WWI was over or in the case of Russia, until the revolution broke out.
WHY COMMUNISM IS FOR RICH COUNTRIES ACCORDING TO MARX
And that’s why the famous leaders of the Russian Revolution like Lenin and Trotsky, did not think it would be possible for communist revolution to succeed in poor countries like Russia.
It was in the rich countries where the process of the peasants being pushed off of their land and and out churned out into a concentrated proletariat was the most advanced. And it was in the rich countries that the crises of capitalist chaotic market crashes and declining profits were the most pronounced and most destructive.
In poor countries at this time, the overwhelming number of people were still peasants – petit bourgeois sacks of potatoes with no education and no awareness outside of their own tiny plot of land or village. These countries, might have revolutions, but they wouldn’t be socialist revolutions, they would be “bourgeois” revolutions, meaning revolutions that would be like the french revolution, which would eliminate monarchy traditional feudal relations, and start either a capitalist democratic republic, or a capitalist non-democratic dictatorship.
Also, the Marxist vision of socialism was about large scale industry, and mass production, generating enough wealth for everyone to be able to enjoy. They couldn’t imagine a version of socialism based on small scale agricultural or urban production. So for large scale industry to happen, you needed capitalism first, in order to turn peasants into urban workers.
And actually Milovan Djilas, the Yugoslav dissident who I mentioned earlier, noted that given how the communist dictatorships ended up performing the same tasks as capitalism had in terms or urbanizing and industrializing, that they were in fact setting the stage for true democratic communism, which would first require the overthrow of the communist dictatorships.
Anyhow, in Marx’ view, it was the most developed capitalist countries – england, netherlands, italy, germany – is where you would have the big socialist revolutions. Only then could you have socialism come to poor countries, because once countries stopped competing with eachother and exploiting eachother, the rich countries would share their knowledge and technology with the poor countries, and at that point peasants would be interested in moving to urban centres on purpose because it would mean greater standard of living for them.
So poor countries could only have socialism after the revolution had already come to the rich countries.
Late in his life, Marx had some thoughts that maybe you could have some kind of peasant socialism in countries like russia where you had a tradition of peasant communes and village democracy – but … the traditional marxist view was that communist revolution in a poor country would inevitably fail. And this was of course true for Russia, where 85% of its population were peasants at the time of the russian revolution and where there was no capitalist industry besides peasant trading outside of two cities, Moscow and Saint Petersburg.
That’s why Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the communist revolution in russia said in 1906 that
“without the direct State support of the European proletariat the working class of Russia cannot convert its temporary domination into a lasting socialist dictatorship. Of this there cannot for one moment be any doubt … Left to its own resources the working class of Russia will inevitably be crushed by the counter-revolution the moment the peasantry turns its back on it.”[36]
And here Trotsky is using the term “socialist dictatorship” he means “dictatorship of the proletariat” that state of emergency, where there’s democracy for workers, but not owners – he doesn’t mean a country run by a socialist strongman dictator.
Meanwhile many marxists, believed that if revolutionaries in a poor country would manage to seize power and then somehow managed to maintain it in the absence of a european revolution, that it would just end up turning into a horrible dictatorship in the strongman dictator sense.
In 1885 communist Gyorgy Plekhanov was one of the first people to articulate this. He said that in the event that a revolution in russia happened before capitalism had done its work of industrializing the country, that
“there will not be any self-government by the people, and the revolution … may lead to a political monster similar to the ancient Chinese or Peruvian empires, i.e., to a renewal of tsarist despotism with a communist lining.
and he quotes Engels to say that
“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents,
Plekhanov’s believed that after a revolution, independant peasant villages might start out equally – but over time, the natural workings of the peasant market economy would generate inequality, so that you’d kind of end up with classes of owners, and indebted dependants and landless farm labourers, and capitalist relations and hierarchies would emerge all over again.
And the only way to stop this would be for the government to turn into a big tyrannical state to preventing trade and confiscate any excess wealth from the peasants, and supress them from fighting back.
Another argument was that without capitalism pushing peasants into debt and bankruptcy and forcing them to sell their products to the cities for low prices, and to immigrate to the cities in search of work, that this slow down industrialization to a halt. And it would also keep prices for farm products high, which would impoverish the cities and even cause food shortages. And this would undermine the quality of life of the proletarians who are the base of the socialist party. The only way to reverse that would be to do industrialization by force – confiscate more surplus from the peasants by high taxes, or just plain seizures, which would meet resistance and need violent enforcement, which means the peasants wouldn’t support the government, which means you either give up power in an election, or else end up with a dictatorship over a huge part of your population.
And we’ll see that this is exactly what eventually happened after the russian revolution.
Because of this, as far back as the 1870s, non-marxist socialists in russia were making fun of marxists like Plekhanov for actually being in favour of capitalism, and for being in favour of throwing peasants into urban poverty. A playwright even made a satirical character based on this idea in 1879. Isn’t the whole point of socialism to stop capitalism and urban poverty? What kind of socialist wants to make capitalism happen? A marxist socialist, with his “scientific socialism” that’s who!
And this is still what every marxist socialist including the leaders of the russian revolution, believed right up until the early 1920s – already a few years into the russian bolshevik revolution.
MENSHEVIKS VS BOLSHEVIKS
So why did Lenin and Trotsky and Bukharin and the rest carry out the russian revolution when they understood that it was doomed to fail? And what’s the point of a having a marxist socialist party in this first place if you’re in a country that can’t do socialism? And what changed their minds? And why did it take several years into the actual revolution to change their minds?
ALL THIS AND MORE, ON THE NEXT EPISODE OF WHAT IS POLITICS!
Next time, we’ll answer all these questions and we’ll also look at why the russian revolution failed and turned into a dictatorship. Was it doomed in advance, because Russia wasn’t industrialized enough as per the orthodox marxist theories we talked about today? Or was it because socialism is just incompatible with human beings like Lex Fridman was suggesting? Or was it because the leaders of the russian revolution just made bad choices?
And we’ll also see how Lenin cleverly redefined the word socialism in order to justify a regime that would become decidedly not socialist in the traditional sense of a society governed by its workers.
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what even is politics though, like? 
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