The Warmth of Collectivism
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” So said New York’s new mayor, socialist Zohran Mamdani.
Let’s consider collectivism’s “warmth.”
Socialism, as a moral doctrine, holds that the individual exists to serve society. Historically, it was a response to the upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution—as interpreted through the prism of anti-Enlightenment philosophy inaugurated by Rousseau. Anti-Enlightenment thinkers declared that the French Revolution had revealed the bankruptcy of reason and individualism—and that the Industrial Revolution was revealing the bankruptcy of the Enlightenment’s political achievement, capitalism. The founding fathers of socialism—François-Noël “Gracchus” Babeuf, Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, and Charles Fourier—offered as a solution a new political ideal that would subordinate the individual to the group, liberate human beings from the self-interested pursuit of profit, and create a world of peace, brotherhood, and equality.
Each of these thinkers came at socialism in his own way. Babeuf, appalled by Robespierre’s betrayal of the working poor, launched one of the first explicitly communist movements, advocating total economic equality. Saint-Simon, more attuned to the needs of production and progress, envisioned a technocratic order led by scientists and industrialists, which he called the “New [secular] Christianity.” Fourier, more Romantic, imagined a society organized into self-sufficient communities devoted to cooperative living and the harmonious fulfillment of human passions. These three strands—revolutionary egalitarianism, technocratic modernism, and utopian romanticism—eventually would be combined with German philosophy and synthesized into a new socialist doctrine: Marxism.
Marx’s Nihilistic Theory
Whereas previous thinkers had tried to define and defend a political ideal, Marx does not claim to be an advocate for socialism. Instead, he claims that he is a scientist who has uncovered the laws governing history. To understand how history has evolved—and to divine how it will evolve—we have to understand the driving force of history: economics. As Engels explains:
The materialist conception of history starts from the proposition that the production of the means to support human life and, next to production, the exchange of things produced, is the basis of all social structure; that in every society that has appeared in history, the manner in which wealth is distributed and society divided into classes or orders is dependent upon what is produced, how it is produced, and how the products are exchanged. From this point of view the final causes in all social change and political revolutions are to be sought, not in men’s brains, not in man’s better insight into eternal truth and justice, but in changes in the modes of production and exchange. They are to be sought, not in the philosophy, but in the economics of each particular epoch. (Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 316.)
Mankind, according to Marx, begins in a state of hand-to-mouth existence. As a savage, he can gather and hunt, but he can produce no surplus over and above his immediate survival needs. That changes as he develops new tools and productive methods. The decisive moment, according to Engels, is the development of large-scale agriculture driven by the cattle-drawn plough, which “created a practically unrestricted food supply in comparison with previous conditions.” (Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 56.) This great achievement unleashed a great evil: slavery.
When each individual could only produce enough to support his own family, a slave was of no value. But agricultural abundance enabled a division of labor—the slaves who produced, and the enslavers who lived off their produce. This was the beginning of private property, social inequality, and the class warfare that would characterize all of subsequent history. It was mankind’s original sin.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto. Each historical epoch is defined by an irresolvable conflict between those who own the means of production and those who do not. The owners constitute a ruling class, who exert control through the state and through ideologies that support their interests. This creates a more or less stable situation—for a time.
But, says Marx, “at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production.” New tools and technologies emerge that make the old ways of organizing work and ownership obsolete. The class that uses or controls the emerging technology becomes conscious of itself as a class and organizes, presenting its program as a cause that will advance the interests of society as a whole. The result is a revolution that propels history into its next epoch.
In Marx’s account, the shift from slavery to feudalism occurred as the Roman Empire declined and its slave-based economy could no longer sustain itself. As the empire expanded, it relied increasingly on the conquest of new territories to supply slaves and wealth. But when expansion stalled and external pressures mounted, the system began to break down. Large slave estates became less productive, urban trade declined, and the empire fragmented. In this vacuum, a new system emerged: landowners began granting protection and land use to peasants in exchange for labor and a share of their produce. These peasants were not slaves but serfs—legally bound to the land and to their lord. A new class dominated—a new class was oppressed.
Then came capitalism. Marx actually gives different accounts of the birth of capitalism, none of which is especially important. What is important—what Marx devoted his life to explaining—was the nature of capitalism and why it would eventually and inevitably give way to Communism.
Capitalism, for Marx, represents the conflict between the bourgeoisie and proletariat—between the class that owns the means of production and the workers who use them to produce—between capitalists and “wage slaves.”
Capitalism, Marx grants, has created unprecedented progress and wealth.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour? (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in Robert C. Tucker (ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 477.)
But these achievements, Marx thinks, have come at a steep price. The source of all value, the cause of all these achievements, was the labor of the workers—and yet instead of rewarding them for their achievements, capitalism has left the proletariat alienated and exploited.
Christianity had explained human alienation through the story of the fall: through his original sin, man became cut off from God, “a stranger and afraid in a world I never made.” Marx secularizes the concept of alienation, but in his telling, alienation refers not to our separation from God—but to our separation from our work and the products of our work.
True humanity, for Marx, consists of the ability to exercise our creative powers without regard for our material needs, and to function as a part of a community bonded not by self-interest but by love. Under capitalism, however, the worker works, not in the manner of an artist but in the manner of a slave. He produces, not to express himself, but to secure his mere survival. Under the division of labor, he plays some small role in the creation of commodities that belong, not to him, but to the capitalist. These products are like foreign objects to him, and come to dominate him. “It is the same in religion,” says Marx. “The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the object; but now his life no longer belongs to him but to the object.” Just as the worker becomes alienated from the products of his labor so he becomes alienated from the process of labor. “The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. His labor is therefore not voluntary, but coerced; it is forced labor.” (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 72-74.)
Alienation, for Marx, describes how the worker experiences work under capitalism; exploitation explains why the worker suffers alienation at the hands of the capitalist. Marx rejects the notion that the worker is exploited because he is paid less than his labor is worth. The worker, indeed, is not paid for his labor at all. Instead he is paid for his ability to labor—what Marx calls his labor power.
The value of the worker’s labor power is determined, not by how much the worker can produce, but by how much it costs to produce him, i.e., by the cost necessary to keep him and his family alive. This follows from Marx’s labor theory of value: the theory that the value of a commodity is determined by the labor time required to produce it. But labor power has a unique feature that makes it possible for the capitalist to profit from this transaction: each worker is capable of producing more than is required for his own subsistence. Everything a worker produces beyond what is necessary for his family’s survival represents surplus value—and this surplus value represents profits for the capitalist.
Here’s how this works. A capitalist hires you for a day’s work. Everything you produce belongs to the capitalist. In six hours, you produce enough to keep yourself and your family alive for the day. But your working day isn’t over. Everything you produce in the hours that follow also belongs to the capitalist—and it is this unpaid labor that generates his profit. He has not paid you less than your labor power is worth—and yet you are exploited because he owns and profits from your surplus value.
All of this, it must be said, is false. The economics profession would come to reject the labor theory of value with the so-called marginal revolution of the 1870s, and Marx’s broader economic theory would come under withering critique by the Austrian economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in 1896. Capitalists, economists would argue, don’t profit by exploiting workers, but by entrepreneurial risk-taking and acting as the guiding intelligence directing and coordinating productive pursuits. As part of those pursuits, they hire and pay workers, and competition for labor leads capitalists to pay wages aligned with their best estimate of a worker’s marginal productivity. The more productive workers are, the more money they’ll make. If Marx can be excused for not anticipating these insights, what he cannot be excused for is evading the fact that working class wages at the time he was writing were not stuck at subsistence—they were rising.
Marx published the first edition of Capital in 1867. In the two decades preceding the publication, average wages in England had risen by 30 percent, and would continue to climb. (John Cassidy, Capitalism and Its Critics, p. 133.) Damningly, Marx tried to conceal evidence of the increasing prosperity workers were enjoying. As Leszek Kolakowski notes in his book Main Currents of Marxism, “Bertram Wolfe has pointed out that in the first edition of Capital various statistics are brought down to 1865 or 1866, but those for the movement of wages stop at 1850; in the second edition (1873) the statistics are brought up to date, again with the exception of those on wages, which had failed to bear out the impoverishment theory.” (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 238.)
Ultimately, the evidence was so overwhelming that capitalism improved the material well-being of workers that Marx was forced to amend his claim that capitalism would keep them at the level of bare subsistence. Instead, he damned capitalism for its relative impoverishment of workers and the spiritual degradation it supposedly inflicted: workers were growing more prosperous under capitalism, but not as quickly as the capitalists—and that prosperity did nothing to quell their alienation.
In any case, said Marx, capitalism faced other challenges that rendered it unsustainable. Economist Thomas Sowell summarizes Marx’s view:
The historic role of capitalism is that it creates the economic preconditions of socialism and communism. . . . But although this productive potential was created by capitalism, it could not be utilized for egalitarian and humanitarian purposes under a system which Marx and Engels saw as funneling its benefits to a few capitalists, while keeping the workers overworked despite labour-saving machinery. This made it desirable, from their perspective, to change to a collectivized economy and society. What made it necessary was that capitalism was inherently incapable of continuing as it was indefinitely. Its own inner stresses—“internal contradictions” in Hegelian language—would metamorphose it into a new social system. (Thomas Sowell, Marxism, pp. 71-72.)
What were the “internal contradictions” that would cause capitalism to self-destruct? Just as capitalism allegedly immiserated workers, it also thrust more and more bourgeoisie into the working class as larger capitalists outcompeted smaller ones. “One capitalist,” says Marx, “always kills many.” Meanwhile, the capitalists operating under capitalism’s “anarchy of production” would struggle to produce products in the right proportions, unleashing recurrent economic crises that “put on its trial, each time more threateningly, the existence of the entire bourgeois society.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 437, 478; Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 327.)
For a long time, Marx and Engels believed that it was just such a crisis that would unleash a Communist revolution. Alas, the revolution did not come and Marx would later lose confidence that crises would unleash a Communist revolution. But he did not lose faith that capitalism would ultimately self-destruct and the proletariat would revolt, seize political power, and abolish private ownership of the means of production. “For us the issue cannot be the alteration of private property but only its annihilation,” he told the Communist League. “[N]ot the smoothing over of class antagonisms but the abolition of classes, not the improvement of existing society but the foundation of a new one.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 505.) It would, Marx insisted, be a violent revolution. It had to be because the bourgeoisie would not go down without a fight.
Above all things, the workers must counteract, as much as is at all possible, during the conflict and immediately after the struggle, the bourgeois endeavours to allay the storm, and must compel the democrats to carry out their present terrorist phrases. Their actions must be so aimed as to prevent the direct revolutionary excitement from being suppressed again immediately after the victory. On the contrary, they must keep it alive as long as possible. Far from opposing so-called excesses, instances of popular revenge against hated individuals or public buildings that are associated only with hateful recollections, such instances must not only be tolerated but the leadership of them taken in hand. (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 507.)
This bloody revolution would unfold in two phases. First would come the socialist phase of the revolution, where a dictatorship of the proletariat would take over the means of production and deploy physical force to tear down the former ruling classes. In this initial phase, workers will be rewarded according to their productive ability. Ultimately, however, rewarding people according to their ability was a “defect” resulting from the fact that the newly emerging Communist society had emerged from capitalism and was “in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges.” Only in the “higher” phase, after the abolition not only of private property but of the entire division of labor, can “the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banner: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need!” (The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 529-531.)
For all the thousands of pages Marx wrote about the evils of capitalism, he had virtually nothing to say about how a Communist society would function. In urging the proletariat to wage a bloody war to “expropriate the expropriators” he offered no positive guidance on what kind of society they ought to create. Production would be centrally planned by the state (now labeled an “administration of things”), but how would that planning work and how would it be enforced? On these crucial questions Marx was utterly silent. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim, and Pol Pot would have to answer them on their own.
Marx’s silence on these issues is no accident. It follows from his driving motive. His aim was not to build, but to tear down. Not to create a Communist utopia, but to smash the immoral system the Enlightenment had created. Marxism is an essentially nihilistic doctrine. “[T]he theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 484.) Marx saw capitalism, the system of private property, as irredeemably immoral and the goal of everything he wrote was to burn it to the ground.
Marx’s Nihilistic Motive
Marx himself denied that he was offering a moral critique of capitalism. Moral concepts like “justice,” he says, are part of the ideological superstructure of society. Nevertheless, he makes it abundantly clear that what he objects to in capitalism is that it is the system of self-interest, and that Communism’s virtue is precisely that it replaces self-interest with the collectivist ideal of self-sacrifice.
This is spelled out in one of his earliest and most controversial works, On the Jewish Question. On the Jewish Question was written in response to debates among German intellectuals during the 1840s over civil rights and the role of religion in the modern state, particularly concerning whether Jews should be granted full political emancipation. It was prompted specifically by an argument from Marx’s early mentor, Bruno Bauer, that Jews must abandon their religion to achieve emancipation. Marx, despite his Jewish origins, was not all that interested in the fate of the Jews. The real goal of his piece was to offer a broader critique of Enlightenment freedom and capitalism.
The Jew, said Marx, represented selfishness and greed. “What is the profane basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly cult of the Jews? Huckstering. What is his worldly god? Money.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 48.) But—and this was Marx’s real point—those are precisely the characteristics that define capitalism.
“Let us consider,” he says, “the so-called rights of man.” The right to liberty? It is, Marx says, founded, not “upon the relations between man and man, but rather upon the separation of man from man.” Enlightenment liberty meant you could deal with others voluntarily or go your own way. “It is,” and Marx means this damningly, “the right of such separation.” The right to property? That, says Marx, is “the right to enjoy one’s fortune and to dispose of it as one will: without regard for other men and independently of society. It is the right of self-interest.” The right to political equality? It is the right “that every man is equally regarded as a self-sufficient monad.” And so: “None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, as an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, pp. 40-43.)
In establishing egoistic rights as the foundation of the social system, capitalism unleashed selfishness: its most conspicuous manifestation was the profit motive. “The god of practical need and self-interest is money.”
Money is the jealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may exist. Money abases all the gods of mankind and changes them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-sufficient value of all things. It has, therefore, deprived the whole world, both the human world and nature, of their own proper value. Money is the alienated essence of man’s work and existence; this essence dominates him and he worships it.
He concludes: “The god of the Jews has been secularized and has become the god of this world.” (The Marx-Engels Reader, p. 50.) The question, then, is not whether to grant political emancipation to the Jew, but whether to achieve true human emancipation by obliterating the evil the Jew represents: capitalism.
If the evil of capitalism, for Marx, is that it protects the right of individuals to pursue their own happiness, including their own material abundance, then the great virtue of collectivism is that it eliminates self-interest and dispenses with rewards on the basis, not of achievement, but need.
To say that Marx is a collectivist is not to say that he openly called for extinguishing individuality and turning human beings into anonymous cogs in the machine. In his nirvana, he insisted that the individual could exercise his creativity to its full capacity. Under capitalism I am forced to specialize in order to earn my living. But under communism I will no longer have to work in order to live, and can instead develop all of my personal aptitudes according to my whim: a Communist society “makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.” (Karl Marx with Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, p. 53.)
Communism, Marx protested, won’t obliterate the individual but will instead lead the individual to equate his own interests with those of society. Here Marx was not regurgitating Adam Smith’s conception of enlightened self-interest, where the social system will channel my selfishness into the public interest. For Marx, the individual will serve the group because he fully identifies his interests with the group. He will not have to sacrifice himself for society because there will be no division in his mind between what he wants from life and what’s good for society. “Contrary to views of the liberal Enlightenment,” writes Kolakowski,
social harmony is to be sought not by a legislative reform that will reconcile the egoism of each individual with the collective interest, but by removing the causes of antagonism. The individual will absorb society into himself: thanks to de-alienation, he will recognize humanity as his own internalized nature. Voluntary solidarity, not compulsion or the legal regulation of interests, will ensure the smooth harmony of human relations. (Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism, p. 147)
The reality, however, was that Marx’s vision could only be achieved by compulsion. Insofar as an individual does not want to serve society, does not want to sacrifice his property, does not want to be rewarded for his need but his achievement, he is left without the protection of individual rights. And when he objects to the commissar nationalizing his business or throwing him in a gulag, he will be told: your true interests are the interests of society—you say you are being forced, but you are being forced to be free!
What would this collectivist “freedom” lead to in practice?
Marxism’s Nihilistic Practice
Marx’s first success was also his first failure: the first Communist state would arise, not out of the ashes of capitalism, but in the backwards, semi-feudal autocracy of Russia. Nor did it emerge from a proletariat uprising, but from a daring putsch by a vanguard of middle class intellectuals. Its leader was a bourgeois revolutionary from Simbirsk, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to history as Lenin.
Lenin was a devout Marxist. Though he would adapt Marx’s doctrines to fit the conditions of Russia and the needs of his revolution, he saw himself and his movement as the only truly orthodox school of Marxism. The question is not whether he was right, any more than the question is whether Luther or the Catholic Church represented “true” Christianity. All religions—including secularized religions—are open to interpretation, and Lenin could find the justification for his doctrines and acts in Marx just as easily as could his Menshevik opponents. The question is what he sought to justify—and this was every essential of the Marxist program: a revolution to tear down the bourgeoisie, eliminate private property, and establish Communism.
Lenin recognized that a Communist revolution would require violence. “Revolutions,” he said, “are festivals of the oppressed and exploited. . . . We shall be traitors to and betrayers of the revolution if we do not use this festive energy of the masses and their revolutionary ardour to wage a ruthless and self-sacrificing struggle for the direct and decisive path.” That path consisted of establishing a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” led by Lenin, of course, where the proletariat would enjoy “unlimited power, based on force, and not on law.” Socialism, he insisted, “can be implemented only through the dictatorship of the proletariat, which combines violence against the bourgeoisie.” (James Ryan, Lenin’s Terror, p. 58.)
From the start, the Bolsheviks practiced what Lenin preached. One of Lenin’s first actions upon seizing power was to found the Cheka, secret police unrestrained by law who could do his bidding, which consisted of smashing any threat to Bolshevik power, whether it be state employees refusing to work for the new government, “class enemies” guilty of the crime of prosperity, or any worker or peasant unwilling to serve the state. In this, the Bolsheviks were inspired by the French Revolution’s Jacobin Terror. “Not only prison awaits our enemies,” said leading Bolshevik Leon Trotsky near the end of 1917, “but the guillotine, that remarkable invention of the French Revolution which has the capacity to make a man a whole head shorter.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 59.)
The Terror would come, and it would kill upwards of 200,000. But the Russian Revolution was not to be a replay of the French Revolution. The French Revolutionaries had been divided about what they would build once they tore down the Old Regime. The Bolsheviks had no doubt: they were building Communism. The first glimpse of what that meant in practice came with the so-called War Communism of 1918 to 1921.
With War Communism, Lenin anticipated the economic system Stalin was to build in the 1930s. The Bolsheviks nationalized virtually every private business, sought to ban private trade and collectivize agriculture, and even flirted with abolishing money and replacing it with a system of rationing. They envisioned an economy run like a military, with workers conscripted into regiments of laborers. This, they insisted, would allow Communism to outperform capitalism, since conscripted labor directed from above would replace the chaos of the market with the discipline of the state. But wouldn’t free workers seeking their own prosperity and happiness outperform slave labor? “If this is so,” Trotsky said, “then you can put a cross over Socialism.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, pp. 722-723.)
In fact, the results were disastrous. Productivity collapsed, hordes fled the cities, and workers went on strike in droves. The Bolsheviks responded by arresting and shooting the strikers, but that could not erase the fact that their policies had brought factories to a standstill and left millions hungry. By the end of 1920, writes historian Orlando Figes, “even those on the first-class ration were receiving only just enough to slow down the rate of their starvation. Thirty million people were being fed, or rather underfed, by the state system. Most of the urban population depended largely on work-place canteens, where the daily fare was gruel and gristle. Yet such were the trials of finding a canteen that was open, and then of standing in line for its meagre offerings, that more energy was probably wasted doing all this than was gained from the actual meal.” But, Figes notes, the Bolsheviks did have one success they could trumpet. “If Soviet power could do little to relieve the misery of the poor, it could at least make the lives of the rich still more miserable than their own—and this was a cause of considerable psychological satisfaction.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 727, 522.)
Facing unrest in the cities and outright rebellion in the country, the Bolsheviks risked losing their grip on power. Lenin responded by calling on the only force capable of restoring some measure of prosperity to Russia: capitalism. In March 1921, he announced his “New Economic Policy.” The NEP was hardly full capitalism, but by reintroducing money, denationalizing smaller enterprises, taxing grain instead of confiscating it, liberating peasants to sell their surplus grain on the market, and legalizing private exchange more broadly, a country on the verge of collapse was saved from utter ruin. The activist writer Emma Goldberg observed that, “The NEP turned Moscow into a vast market place. Shops and stores sprang up overnight, mysteriously stacked with delicacies Russia had not seen for years. Large quantities of butter, cheese and meat were displayed for sale; pastry, rare fruit, and sweets of every variety were to be purchased.” (Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy, p. 771)
The NEP, however, came too late to stave off a brutal famine that hit in 1921 and lasted through the following year. (The Soviet regime was only saved thanks to support from American humanitarians and American taxpayers.) But by 1924 the Soviet state was stable and by 1926 production levels reached peaks not seen since before the first World War. But the NEP was untenable as a permanent solution. The Bolsheviks had seized power in order to establish Communism, not some bastardized mixture of capitalism and socialism, and it was only the Communist ideal that justified their iron rule. Ultimately, they would have to change course. With the death of Lenin in 1924, that task would fall to his successor, Joseph Stalin.
Stalin’s economic program had two pillars: rapid industrialization and forced collectivization. Rapid industrialization would lead to the wealth needed to establish Communism’s economic and military superiority—forced collectivization of agriculture would provide the state with the cheap food and exports necessary to fuel industrialization. Both reflected a deeper commitment to replacing the free market, such as it was in Soviet Russia, with central planning.
As of 1928, efforts at voluntary collectivization were an embarrassment: collective farming enterprises worked only 1 percent of the Soviet Union’s arable land. (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 10.) Driving the peasants onto state-controlled communal farms would require an iron fist and piles of corpses—justified in the name of a great cause: class warfare.
The targeted class, in this case, was the so-called kulaks—allegedly any well-to-do farmer, but in reality any peasant who was not utterly destitute or who offered resistance to collectivization. Stalin called for “the eradication of all kulak tendencies and the elimination of the kulaks as a class” and sent 25,000 party activists into the country to liquidate the kulaks and drive the peasantry onto collective farms. In practice, this meant literally stealing the clothes off the backs of “kulaks,” along with anything else of value, from water pitchers to babies’ pillows. Reports compiled by the secret police spoke of plunder, rape, and power lust by the so-called 25,000ers. As one 25,000er put it: “If I command it, you must do it, whether to jump into water or fire, otherwise it’s a bullet in the forehead.” (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 37; The Black Book of Communism, p. 148.) Years later, a Soviet defector, Victor Kravchenko, would recall:
What I saw . . . was inexpressibly horrible. On a battlefield men die quickly, they fight back, they are sustained by fellowship and a sense of duty. Here I saw people dying in solitude by slow degrees, dying hideously without the excuse of sacrifice for a cause. They had been . . . left to starve, each in his home, by a political decision made in a far-off capital . . .
The most terrifying sights were little children with skeleton limbs . . . Starvation had wiped every trace of youth from their faces . . . Everywhere we found men and women lying prone, their facies and bellies bloated, their eyes utterly expressionless. (Paul Hollander, Political Will and Personal Belief, p. 50.)
Anyone labeled a kulak, usually for resisting this barbarism, was deported to a Soviet gulag—at least two million people, with hundreds of thousands dying while being shipped to the far reaches of the regime. But the true horror would reveal itself in the Great Famine produced by Stalin’s collectivization campaign.
As Stalin drove peasants onto collectivized farms, he became increasingly frustrated by the failure of these farms to meet their production targets. In reality, the main problem was that the state was demanding an increasing share of what the peasants produced—from the 15 to 20 percent the peasants had willingly sold during the days of the NEP to 30 percent, 40 percent, or even more in some areas. Stalin, however, concluded that the peasants were concealing food, and demanded the state take its quota without concern for whether they would have enough to feed their animals, feed themselves, and replenish their stock seed for the next harvest. (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, p. 199; The Black Book of Communism, pp. 160-161.)
The suffering triggered by the Great Famine of 1932-1933 is truly beyond comprehension. As many as 70 million Soviets would face the prospect of starvation. Roads were littered with human corpses, and desperate parents would abandon their children in cities before returning to the countryside to starve. In Kharkiv, the Italian consul reported that people on the verge of death “are moved out in goods trains and abandoned about forty miles out of town so that they can die out of sight.” (The Black Book of Communism, pp. 164-165; Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 122.)
Cannibalism became common. Sometimes the recently deceased would be robbed of their organs. In other cases, the cannibals didn’t wait for their victims to die. According to historian Stephen Kotkin, “Reports on cannibalism in Ukraine were averaging ten per day. Parents were killing one child and feeding it to the others; some prepared soup stock and salted the remaining flesh in barrels to preserve it. The secret police reported on cannibal bands that targeted orphans: ‘This group cut up and consumed as food three children, including an eleven-year-old son and an orphan whose parents perished from starvation.’” (Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Waiting for Hitler, p. 122.)
All told, roughly six million people perished in the famine, and millions more came close to starvation. But from the perspective of the Communist leaders, forced collectivization and the famine it produced were a success. By 1936, 90 percent of peasant households were collectivized. By the standards of Communism—by the standards of abolishing self-interest, the profit-motive, private property, capitalism—this was indeed a success.
Even here, however, Communism revealed its bankruptcy: the Soviet regime reluctantly agreed to allow peasants to farm small individual plots for themselves, and this small touch of capitalism turned out to be dramatically more productive than the collectivized farms. In 1937, these plots amounted to about 5 percent of cultivated land and yet produced around 25 percent of the Soviet regime’s food. (Martin Malia, The Soviet Tragedy, p. 200.)
As for industrialization, the Soviet Union did manage to industrialize: the 1930s saw the creation of steel mills and coal mines and oil wells and electrical plants and heavy equipment factories. Even these achievements, such as they were, were not the achievements of socialism, but copies of Western achievements. The Soviets produced inferior copies of Western products using inferior copies of Western factories, with none of it translating into a higher standard of living for Soviet citizens.
How could it be otherwise? There was no incentive for workers to produce, let alone invent. As Hannah Arendt observed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “Total domination does not allow for free initiative in any field of life, for any activity that is not entirely predictable. Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 339.)
Ultimately, Stalin found that the only way to extract some productivity out of the workforce was to end the Marxist policy of egalitarian wages and threaten laggards with the gulag. But this was hardly enough to unleash the forces of self-interest. Instead, Stalin preached the necessity of sacrifice: the worker must sacrifice for a future where the Soviet Union would surpass the United States. But American progress had not been paid for in sacrifices—at each step, capitalism lifted workers to greater and greater heights while building a better and better future. The Communists, by contrast, had to revert to the old Christian formula. The Christians vowed that sacrifice today would lead to happiness beyond the grave—Stalin vowed that sacrifice today would lead to earthly prosperity someday.
But as with Christianity, while the sacrifices were real, the rewards were not. Crash industrialization was not followed by prosperity—it was followed by the Great Terror, a mass murder campaign that took more than 600,000 lives and left the Gulags overflowing.
The Poverty of Communism
Understandably, atrocities like the Great Famine and the Great Terror overshadow the much more widespread and much more enduring consequences of Marxism on the Soviet population. But those consequences cannot be glossed over. Stalin’s frenzied murder spree came to an end—the suffering of Soviet citizens did not. Trapped in a hell where they were not free to think and produce, hundreds of millions of people lived and died in an inhuman system.
It would be comical if it weren’t so tragic. Capitalist business leaders make decisions based on profit—a market signal that tells them whether their actions are genuinely valuable to other people in the economy. Communist central planners had no way of judging whether projects were valuable. Their five year plans were inevitably based, not on profit, but on output, leading to such perversities as oil workers digging shallow holes that allowed them to meet their quota for “meters drilled” while inevitably producing no oil, and a shoe factory that produced boys’ shoes rather than men’s in order to meet its shoe quota in the face of a limited supply of leather. One Soviet cartoon depicted a factory meeting its nail quota—measured in weight—by producing a single giant nail. (Paul Craig Roberts and Karen LaFollette, Meltdown, p. 10, 15.)
Such absurdities were laughable. The results for everyday Russians were not. They lived in cramped apartments with uneven floors and collapsing roofs. They often weathered the bitter cold without heat and counted themselves fortunate if they had access to electricity some of the time. They spent their lives waiting in line for half spoiled vegetables and (if they were lucky) decaying meat; they would get into fights with other customers over soap and shampoo; goods were so dear that people would jump into a line before bothering to ask what the line was for. Eventually, TVs became widespread, but Russian TVs were so shoddy that it was not uncommon for them to burst into flames. In 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev admitted that, vodka and oil aside, the Soviet economy had been stagnant for twenty years. Decades after an earlier Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, told the West, “We will bury you,” an American welfare mother enjoyed more income in a month than the typical Soviet worker earned in a year. (David Horowitz, The Politics of Bad Faith, p. 99.)
As the Bolshevik’s sorry record of brutality and privation became well known and undeniable, the champions of Marxism declared, “That’s not real Communism. Real Communism has never been tried.” It was not tried in Communist China, where 65 million were left dead. It was not tried in Vietnam, where one million were left dead. It was not tried in Cambodia, where two million were left dead. It was not tried in North Korea, Eastern Europe, or Latin America, or Africa, or Afghanistan, where millions more were starved and murdered by “not real Communism.” (The Black Book of Communism, p. 4.)
And yet Communism was tried in each and every one of these cases because there is only one way to implement collectivism: whether Communists come into power through revolution or through the ballot box, the only way to create a society based on the moral principle that the individual must serve the group is to force recalcitrant individuals to serve and sacrifice for the group. The only way to get people to surrender their property is to expropriate their property. The only way to enforce a five-year plan is with a five-year prison sentence (or a death sentence). Marx had said that the Communist program could be summed up in the sentence “Abolition of private property.” That program was put to the test and, for anyone whose moral goal is human flourishing, it failed that test again and again and again. Marx had named his moral goal as, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” What could such a formula possibly mean in practice except the destruction of ability and the proliferation of need?
Mamdani wants to talk about the “warmth of collectivism”? Let him reckon with the reality.
An excellent elucidation of Marxism and it's consequences as collectivism. I understand much more from this the concepts of Marxism.
A fantastic piece and really highlights the true horror of such a statement. Whoever said Ayn Rand villains are not realistic should now eat their hat.