Analyzing the Communist Experience
I have seen many memorable changes over the course of my life, but none more striking than the collapse of communism and the demise of the Marxist left.
I’m including a photo of the 24th Congress of the CPUSSR. This event took place in 1971, at the height of communism’s power and influence. I’m in that photo–along with the top leadership of the Soviet-aligned section of the world communist movement. I was a 31 year-old committed revolutionary, the National Educational Director of the CPUSA. At that point, it never occurred to me that this movement, which I believed represented humanity’s future, would disappear within thirty years.
24th Congress USSR
After WWII, Eastern Europe, China, North Korea and North Vietnam joined the USSR as part of a powerful block of communist nations. There were large and influential communist and socialist parties in every advanced industrial nation that played important roles in their political life. Increasing numbers of nations that were newly liberated from the bonds of colonialism were calling themselves socialist–Arab socialist, Afro-socialist, etc. By 1971, it was becoming clear that the most powerful capitalist nation in the world–the USA–was being forced to withdraw from Viet Nam. The political balance of power in the world appeared to be shifting in favor of communism.
It’s all gone. A massive, world-historical movement simply disintegrated. Perhaps even more surprising than its demise, has been the failure of those who sympathized with its goals to examine the lessons to be drawn from its experience.
When communism collapsed, it took socialism down with it. The term socialist is still in use, but no one really knows what it means anymore. It is generally thought of as either the managed capitalism of the Scandinavian social democracies or the authoritarian state capitalist regimes of China and Viet Nam. All of these are very different from the original socialist blue-print the communist attempted to follow. This latter was inspired by the theories of Karl Marx, and it was this Marxist model that came tumbling down at the end of the 20th century.
Why did it implode? The reasons for its failure have largely gone unanalyzed. At this point, such an analysis might appear irrelevant–a waste of time. Humanity has moved on. We are at a new stage of development: global warming, pandemics, toxic pollution–the struggle to adapt to nature has replaced the class-based conflicts of the old industrial era. Communism, from this perspective, is ancient history. That, I believe, is a seriously mistaken assumption.
The fundamental goal of the communists was to create a collectively managed economy. They believed socialism would unleash cooperative capacities that would produce a prosperity that would take care of everyone’s needs– that would irradicate poverty and inequality. They were sure it would work and they gave it their best shot.
Communism had its successes. It pulled hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, educated its citizens, and ended many endemic diseases. The communist countries played a key role in dismantling the colonial system, and their socialist economies turned Russia and China into major industrial and scientific powers. Nevertheless, they failed to create an attractive alternative to capitalism.
I travelled to the USSR in 1989 to witness the first free elections held under communism. Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev was intent on transforming the USSR into a socialist democracy. He had opened the doors to free discussion (glasnost), and as a result, I had an opportunity to talk with dozens of Russians. I had expected them to be enthusiastic about this exciting new phase of socialist development, but that’s not what I found.
I had spent time in the USSR during my communist days in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Soviet people knew they were poor, but they believed their system was superior and that it would eventually flower into a prosperous and egalitarian civilization. In 1989 they no longer believed that. They felt they had sacrificed for a future that never came; they just couldn’t make the system work. They hadn’t seen any progress in more than 20 years and they felt they were falling behind the rest of the world. They didn’t want to reform socialism; they wanted out. And no one came forward to defend it.
It took a revolution to establish socialism, but not to dismantle it. Once Gorbachev eliminated the Communist Party’s hold on power, the system just melted away. And the wolves moved in.
The importance of the Communist Experience
The communist experience, both its successes and failures, hold important lessons about the choices facing humanity. It’s true that we are at a different stage, but many of the issues the communists grappled with are even more salient today.
Humanity is going to have to create a sustainable relationship with the natural world. That means we are going to have to scientifically and collectively manage our development. While the capitalist world has learned how to shape its economic processes to some degree (largely through Keynesian methods), it is clear that much more will be required–and that getting there is not going to be easy.
Communism did not fail because it made this or that particular error. The main thesis of this essay is that it was destined to fail. It had the best of intentions–something almost never acknowledged in the West–but not only were the means it used inadequate, but its model of the future was irreparably flawed.
I am not arguing that there was a better socialist alternative available; that had Lenin survived or had the USSR avoided the brutality of Stalinism they may have succeeded. Their problems ran much deeper than that. Communism failed because humanity–human culture– was not at a stage where it could create a workable, collectively managed society. The Marxist framework, which guided the thinking of the communists and which was very advanced for a mid-19th century body of thought, was not up to the task. The communists, indeed humanity, lacked the cultural tools–the political, legal, moral and intellectual resources that will be necessary to secure our species’ future.
While communism may have been fatally flawed, that does not mean there is nothing to be learned from it. Its efforts to create a collectively managed economy left us with a trove of valuable experiences. Digesting its lessons is part of the growth process humanity needs to go through in order to meet the existential challenge bearing down upon us.
I would like to open this discussion with an analysis of its final days—the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to save it.
{OK– go to the center of the first row of the photo–that’s leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of CPUSSR. Go four persons to the right ( the third person is Aleksey Kosygin, Premier of the USSR). Go straight up through five people (one of whom was Gus Hall, General Secretary of CPUSA) and that’s me with the rimmed glasses}