I’ll never forget the day the Wall came down. I was watching a 3-inch TV screen, the biggest I could afford. A few months into my first real teaching job, I was finally in my own apartment instead of a college dorm. So I was all alone to celebrate the biggest achievement in foreign policy since World War II.
My younger friends, however, may have no idea why I capitalized the word Wall in that first sentence. You didn’t grow up in the Cold War. You probably didn’t dive under your school desk in nuclear bomb drills. (As if that could help!) You may not have wondered whether it would be better to die in the initial blast or to survive with radiation burns.
The Goal of Socialism!
As we have said, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels used the words socialism and communism interchangeably. In fact, their name for communism was ‘scientific socialism.’ The progression from capitalism to socialism and communism could get messy, though. Marx predicted that workers’ revolts would produce a dictatorship (a powerful government which can force citizens to do anything).
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat. (Critique of the Gotha Program, 1875.)
Marx thought dictatorship was a necessary stage on the way to true communism. The working class would rise up to become the dictators. He pointed to the Paris Commune of 1871 as an example of this transition stage. (The Paris Commune, though short-lived, resulted in the deaths of scores of clergy and civilians.)
In Marx’s view, however, a successful ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would teach everyone to share everything. Then government wouldn’t be necessary. That was the promise of communism, its ultimate goal.
It didn’t work out that way.
Deaths
The problem with all revolutions is that people die. The problem with communist revolutions is that the dying doesn’t stop after the war is over. That’s because of the radical nature of dictatorship. If someone doesn’t agree, they have a choice: obey or die.
I can’t tell you how heartbroken this topic makes me. When I was watching the 1993 movie Schindler’s List, I had to leave the theater twice. I was crying so hard I couldn’t breathe. You could tell me, “Sure, that was about the Holocaust. Killing 6 million Jews was terrible, but Nazis weren’t communists.” Technically, they called themselves ‘socialists,’ but I’ll give you that argument.
The communists, however, broke the Nazis’ record. The death toll of communism is said to be around 100 million. We could argue all day about whether the numbers are right. But anytime you can tack the word “MILLION” to the death toll, you’ve got a horrific tragedy on your hands. For me, the argument ends there, but if you’re not convinced, here are three examples. (By the way, I’m only counting people killed by their own government, not by war or natural disaster.)
USSR
Millions lost their lives under the Soviet leadership of Stalin and Lenin. A great many others wound up in prison. Look up the Red Terror, Purges and Gulags if you can stand it. The Soviet Union broke apart in 1991.
CUBA
Most of the countries which declared themselves communist are in the Eastern Hemisphere, but not all. Cuba is small but admittedly communist. Its death toll is smaller as well, but the loss of thousands on a little island is not a little thing.
CHINA
China beat the Soviets’ record. The People’s Republic of China under Mao Zedong was credited with the deaths of tens of millions. And it didn’t all happen years and years ago. China’s response to a student demonstration at Tiananmen Square (1989) cost at least a thousand lives. I’ll never forget watching on the evening news as a group of unarmed students faced off against an army of tanks and guns. And then the guns fired.
For the record, I don’t think the guns firing made it into the live newsreels of the time. But the mental image, based on bloody photos of the event, is seared in my mind. Fast forwarding to the China of today, the first thing you’ll notice is that the government is still very communist.
China is the world’s largest communist regime still operating, in fact, so its current policies are worth noting. (The other three are Cuba, Laos, and Vietnam.) In 2018, China demolished a Christian megachurch, tore down a Catholic landmark, and banned online Bible sales. These oppressive activities have continued into 2019. Meanwhile, in a secluded province, a million people are undergoing ‘reeducation.’ They committed the crime of belonging to an ethnic minority that practices Islam.
Freedom (or not)
That brings us to what Americans call our First Freedoms: Religion, Speech, Press, Assembly, and Petition. In communist countries, that’s what they call criminal activity.
… of Religion
Marx called religion the “opiate of the masses,” which is why atheism is the state religion of many communist regimes. Many of them also openly persecute religion. (See the above notes about China.)
… of the Press
Che Guevara is a darling of modern socialists. Perhaps you’ve worn a tee-shirt printed with his portrait. He was the lead guerilla warrior of the Cuban Revolution. He once proclaimed, “We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.” He also said, “We must eliminate all newspapers; we cannot make a revolution with free press.” (So much for Twitter, the New York Times and CNN!)
… of Speech and Assembly
China is finalizing its “Social Credit System.” They will give each citizen a score that relates to how well they obey the rules. Already, that score affects whether a citizen can buy an airline ticket. It will create more restrictions as it is rolled out. Anti-government comments on social media could lower one’s score. So could hanging out with known rebels. There go the freedoms of speech and assembly!
… of Petition
Asking a communist government to lighten up isn’t going to get you far. But then, any refugee from communism could tell you that. House churches met in secret in the USSR, and untold thousands of political prisoners went to the gulags for speaking out against the government. By all reports, attempts to “petition the government for a redress of grievances” didn’t go well.
Minorities
Historically speaking, communism isn’t great for minorities, either. From the Holodomor Famine in the Ukraine (1932, USSR) to the Uighur reeducation in Xinjiang (2018, China), the record is filled with the deaths and relocations of millions of ethnic minorities.
Equality
The goal of communist uprisings is to create a society where everyone is equal. They are a reaction against the age-old struggle between classes. Unfortunately, the usual result is the creation of a new wealthy class of the powerful. Climbing up the party power structure brings privileges, from better houses, to stores stocked with goods no one else can get, to luxurious holidays at resorts. (This holds true for socialist nations as well. The lights went out across Caracas, Venezuela in March 2019, but not for the wealthy.)
As for the rest of society, perhaps Che Guevara put it best. In a 1964 speech to the UN, he called Latin America “a family of 200 million brothers who suffer the same miseries.” Instead of making society equally rich, communism makes the common folk equally poor.
Economics
Communism in the USSR had over 70 years to prove itself as a workable economic system. In 1989, shortly before the USSR dissolved, it had a larger population and workforce than the USA. But the amount it produced, per person, was just over $9,200. In the US, the per capita GDP was more than double that, about $21,000.
This summary of daily life is condensed from an article by a former resident of the USSR.
1. A private citizen could not own anything bigger than his toothbrush or TV.
2. Want to start a business? Out of luck. All companies were owned and controlled by the state.
3. No one could buy or rent a house or apartment. It was assigned by the government.
4. There were only two TV channels to choose from. Both were owned by the government. Newspapers abounded, but – you guessed it – they were controlled by the government.
5. If you wanted to buy a car, your name was added to a waiting list. If you had the money, you would be allowed to buy it in a few years.
6. You could go to college for free, but only if the government determined you were smart enough.
7. There was no homeless problem, because everyone was required to work. Your employer was the government, and you did what it told you to.
8. If you were lucky enough to travel abroad, you were spied on by the KGB.
Add to that the utter lack of anything lining store shelves, and you had a pretty miserable existence. At least everybody else was equally miserable (except for top party officials).
Communism’s end result
Supporters of modern communism argue that the USSR wasn’t a true communist state. After all, Karl Marx believed that his plan of ‘Scientific Socialism’ would eventually make the government obsolete. Everyone would share everything in common, much like the commune model of living.
Like I said, it didn’t work out that way. The promise of communism failed. It would be hard to expect anything different, knowing human nature. Russia’s 1990s attempt at free markets devolved into a capitalist free-for-all. China enacted capitalist-leaning reforms in 1978. Cuba just recognized the right to own private property in July 2018. The city of Havana was saved from decay by capitalist ventures aimed at tourism.
Bottom line: History shows that communism reverts to capitalism in the long run. (Or it stays in that cycle of oppression and poverty we talked about.)
The Collapse of Bolshevism
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall that separated East (Soviet) from West came tumbling down. In 1991, a coup attempt led to the end of the Soviet reign in Russia. Boris Yeltsin became the first president of the Russian Federation. But one stunning chapter of that saga received little notice.
In September 1989, Boris Yeltsin visited a Randalls Grocery Store in Texas. His entourage toured the aisles of the store, amazed by what they saw. When they reached a freezer full of pudding pops, Yeltsin seemed dumbfounded. “Even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even Mr. Gorbachev,” he reportedly said.
He later wrote, “When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, for the first time I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people. … That such a potentially super-rich country as ours has been brought to a state of such poverty!” His biographer added the reaction Yeltsin expressed on the plane ride home: “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the Americans.” Yeltsin’s aide later said it was at that moment “the last vestige of Bolshevism collapsed” inside him.
So, for my young friends who idolize Che and Marx, let me ask you: Do you love your expensive smart phone? Do you like watching 800 channels on TV? Do you relish being able to choose your own career or college major? Do you know anyone who loves their religion enough to die for it? Do you cherish a free press and the ability to tweet what you think? Do you enjoy hanging out with whoever you want, wherever you want? Those are all important to consider before you embrace communism.
“But,” you tell me, “No one wants communism anymore. Socialism is where it’s at.” That’s where we need to consider the lessons of the Early Church, the Plymouth Colony, and the California Missions. I don’t think we need more examples. Instead, we some time to reflect. The next post will pick up from there.
Header Image Credit: USSR flag and vintage worker’s poster courtesy pixabay.com.
Links to the entire series can be found online in this index.
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