PAGE 10
74 YEARS THAT SHOOK
THE
WORLD
BY MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
M. BISHOFS
Nothing ages so quickly as yesterday's vision of the future
-RICHARD CORLISS
You Russians and we Americans! Our countries so distant, so
unlike at first glance — such a difference in social and political
conditions. . . and yet in certain features, and vastest ones, so
resembling each other.
-WALT WHITMAN
Under Communism man oppresses man Under Capitalism,
just the other way around.
-A JOKE
Five years ago, one year short of its platinum anniver
sary, Bolshevik communism disintegrated into ruin and chaos
Once hoped to be the essential revolution of the masses against
the long history of repression, Bolshevism quickly developed
into a monstrously cruel and eventually stagnant system that
simply fell apart from the mendacious inertia of its own history
The final suicide of the reigning Communist Part was an unsuc
cessful putsch in the summer of 1991: by Christmas the regime
was dead. History, Karl Marx paraphrased Hegel, recurs twice:
"Once as tragedy, and again as farce."
The vast empire of Russian "republics" and east Euro
pean satellites collapsed into bitter splinters of ancient hatreds,
as around the world communism was simultaneously rejected
as a successor to colonialism and as the structure and ideology
of newly enfranchised governments. Instead of seizing the future
and proclaiming a "New Man" through world revolution, commu
nism swiftly diminished as a relic of the past, swept, it might be
said, into the dustbin of history, the god that both failed and
died.
Although Marx, the principle architect of 20th century
communism, envisioned a "higher form of society" based on a
high-tech industrial system "in vtfiich the full and free develop
ment of every individual forms the ruling order," the colossally
monstrous Bolshevik attempt to rapidly transform a backward
Russia, vtfiich had ended serfdom only half a century before
(in 1861), into a 20th century industrial giant cost the lives of
millions and the uprooting and virtual enslavement of millions
more. Despite forced industrialization and expansion of Soviet
society through civil and w>rld war. the communist system
ultimately collapsed, in no small measure from its failure to keep
up with the West in the post-industrial age of computerization
and communications technology The stifling conformity of cent
ralized decision making precipitated the deadening stagnation
that led to the breakdown of the communist system.
The system that collapsed in despair was bom in great
hope. It reflected not only antipathy to authoritarian rule but the
excesses of industrial democracy. Socialism was conceived as
an antithesis to the pervasive inequities of 19th century "Robber
Baron" capitalism. The warking classes were virtual slaves of
the bourgeoisie, by which is meant the "class of modem capital
ists vtfio are the owners of social production and employers of
wage labor," according to Friedrich Engels, who was Marx's
comrade and collaborator for more than forty years.
Marx and Engles said in their famous Communist Mani
festo (1848) that wage slaves "are daily and hourly enslaved by
the machine...and above all. by the individual bourgeois manu
facturer himself." Marx believed that the central contradiction of
capitalism was that instead of benefiting from the product of
their labor, workers are made destitute and miserable. 'The
modem laborer. . .instead of rising with the progress of industry
sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his
own class," Marx wrote, asserting that the bourgeoisie is unfit to
rule society because of its incompetence to prevent its working
slave from sinking into "such a state that it has to feed him,
instead of being fed by him."
The conflicts between the beneficiaries of production
and its producers — the 'conspiracy' of impoverishing the pro
ducers by preventing them from enjoying the product of their
labor — made Marx and Engels popular radical scholars of their
era among trade unions and revolutionaries who desired for one
reason or another to abolish prevailing systems of governments
and economies. (Ignored in the furor between European capital
ists and socialists/communists was the fervent desire for free
dom from European colonialism by Asians and Africans, wXiich
later made them ripe for Marxist exploitation.)
Intellectual invention has probably never been as com
pelling or enjoyed such vast rewards as the early stages of the
Industrial Revolution. However, as in previous historical upheav
als, the very many were ultimately forced to heft the burden.
Though initially the breakthrough of industrial technology
appeared to advance the fortunes of all, a thralldom rapidly
developed among the working classes comparable to medieval
serfdom, and working conditions were as dangerous to their
lives as noblesse oblige was to their ancestors. Marx thought
communism could break the stranglehold wealthy entrepreneurs
applied to those who produced the wealth for not only meager
wages but with little chance of acquiring political equity He
thought he could fashion a system of government that would
once and for all time correct the imbalance of a few ruling and
acquiring the wealth and privileges of civilization at the expense
of the multitudes
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Engels summed up the fundamental proposition of the
Communist Manifesto in a preface to the 1888 English edition,
crediting most of it to his friend Marx who died five years earlier:
That proposition is: That in every historical epoch, the
prevailing mode of economic production and exchange, and the
social organization necessarily following from it, form the basis
upon which it is built up, and from which alone can be explained,
the political and intellectual history of that epoch; that conse
quently the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of
primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has
been a history of class struggles, contests between exploiting
and exploited, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of
these class struggles form a series of evolutions in which,
nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and
oppressed class — the proletariat — cannot obtain its emanci
pation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class — the
bourgeoisie — without at the same time, and once for all,
emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression,
class distinctions and class struggles.
The Manifesto itself sums up communist theory in a
single sentence: "Abolition of private property" — and claims
that "political power is merely the organized power of one class
for oppressing another."
Socialism is defined as a theory of ownership and oper
ation of a society's means of production by the community as a
whole, sharing equally the work and rewards of production and
distribution. Communism claims to be the final stage of social
ism in which all functions of society are controlled by a central
ized state which is the aggregate of the community. Capitalism
in contrast is an economic system in which all or most means of
production and distribution within a society are privately owned
and operated for profits, originally under fully competitive condit
ions but its later phases are characterized by concentration of
wealth and growth of large corporations with pervasive influence
on government. There is a tendency to confuse capitalism vwth
democracy; it evolves instead into a plutocracy which is the rule
of society by the wealthy Democracy is somewhat similar to
socialism in that it attempts government be run by its citizens
either directly or through elected representatives. However, a
democratic government is able to tolerate class distinctions
whereas socialism/communism prefers to render its citizenry
into a common classless mush
'To be a capitalist," Marx and Engels wrote, "is to have
not only a purely personal, but a social status in production.
Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of...
all members of society, can it be set in motion. Capital is there
fore not a personal, it is a social power ” Communism, Marx
wrote,"deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products
of society: all it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate
the labor of others by means of such appropriation."
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