On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff offers a special episode to continue the previous discussion on communism. We will discuss how socialism's history evolved into separating socialism from communism and creating multiple, different meanings of what is considered communism today.
Economic Update
Economic Update- Understanding Communism - Part Two
Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work. A non-profit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of books by Richard Wolff, who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School University, has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics, including Greek thinking Marxism, Understanding Capitalism, and Democracy at Work, a cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwolf.com. Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic dimensions of our lives and those of our children. I'm your host, Richard Wolff. Today's program is a kind of part two from last week. Last week, we talked about communism. Many of you have written to me and asked about it, and I gave a kind of general overview definition and looking at the basics. I want to now go back and revisit the same subject, but this time doing it very carefully, historically, and very much focused on the last century, the one we are now ending. And I think that that will give us a way of understanding communism that is better than trying to cram it all into one session. Before I jump back in, I want to remind you of the appreciation we feel for the suggestions and comments you send in to Charlie Fabian, who's working with us to take them and to transform them into programmatic proposals for what we can do in the future. So once again, charlie.info438@gmail.com. Charlie.info438gmail.com. Okay, where did we leave off in our discussion of communism? Well, in a way, we left off what we might call in the prehistory of communism. When communism was a vague idea, not very important in the world, except in a few locations where a few individuals began to think about going beyond capitalism in new and different ways. Most of the 19th century, if you were a critic of capitalism, Marxist or not, you were a socialist. You thought of yourself as a socialist. You called yourself a socialist. You were part of organizations that began to be important that were socialist in terms of what the organization stood for and what they fought for. I'll give you an example. Two of the great themes of socialism toward the end of the 19th century were number one that the system is unbearably unstable, unbearably unjust, and unbearably unequal. In other words, socialists were the people who said, this is a crazy system of this capitalism. It has an economic crash. You can call it a panic. That was a big word they used in those days in the 19th century. You can call it a recession, a downturn, a crash, a crisis. A lot of words, because it keeps happening every few years, throwing billions of people out of work, crashing businesses that are doing important things, decimating families, interrupting educations, really bad stuff. And people said, we don't want this instability, this uncertainty. We don't know from one five-year period to the next, whether we're going to have a job or kind of job we're going to have. And this is an unacceptable way of living. Likewise, the gap between rich and poor seems to get worse under capitalism. We don't want this inequality. We had that with slavery. We had that with feudalism. We don't want it with capitalism, especially because the revolutions that brought capitalism into being the French, the American, and others were all about equality that people said they wanted. And this capitalism isn't producing equality quite the opposite. And then there was the gross injustice. The gap between rich and poor already meant that some people lived in opulent mansions and other people lived in shacks. And I'm not even talking about the fact that the wealth of the world was concentrated in Europe and North America and a little bit in Japan toward the end of the century, excuse me, but that the bulk of Asia, Africa, and Latin America was unspeakably, excuse me, poor, unspeakably poor. Why? Well, that was the way capitalism worked. The rest of the world was where you gather food and raw materials, the way you produce modern commodities. Well, that's in Europe, North America, Japan, and so on. So people were critical of that. The second big theme of socialism was, okay, how are we going to change this? And socialists pretty much agreed that the way you're going to change this, and we talked about this last week, was to seize the government, seize the state. After all, the socialists said, the majority of the people are not capitalists. They're not employers. They're not rich. The census, if you took one in those days, would have shown you that employers were a small minority of the population. Today in the United States, the US census tells us employers are 3% of the population, not a very large group, and yet they have all the power and they can concentrate the wealth. And so the idea was you would use the fact that the vast majority of people are working class folks, not employers, not rich, not powerful, but they have the vote. We have suffrage. And the more we give the vote, the more of the average person, which was a struggle, the 19th century in America, for example, women didn't have the right to vote. Non-whites didn't have the right to vote, and so forth and so on. They were slaves and therefore couldn't vote for first half of the century, and they were excluded in the second half in 100 different ways. Okay, so the idea was to get the state. Here socialists began to split. You know, that often happens when you have a revolutionary or a critical movement. It is unified at first, and then it has disagreements. People have disagreements. And the big one among socialists, in the end of the 19th century, was whether you grab the state by the vote electorally, this was called reform, or you grabbed the state by a revolutionary upsurge. And socialists argued, it was called the debate between reform and revolution. But it was socialists all who argued this way. Probably the greatest formulation was in Germany, not surprising, because socialism in the 19th century was more advanced in Germany than anywhere else. Not coincidentally Karl Marx is a German. But by the end of the 19th century, socialists had the second biggest party, political party, in Germany. They were knocking on the door to power, and they had built it up by voting. So they had a German socialist, Edward Bernstein by name, who articulated the strategy of the socialists must be to capture the vote, control the government, and then use the government to make a transition from capitalism to a better socialist future. But there were those who said you are naive. Other socialists, they said that government is never going to be allowed to be voted in by the socialists. Every time they get close, they're going to be smashed by the capitalists who run the state, who own the state, who will use the police, the army, whatever, to crush any if you can't do it that way. You have to seize power. Workers have to use the power they have as workers by striking. Don't do the work. The railroad stop, the train stops, the telephone doesn't work. And then say, we'll go back to work, but under a new regime, a new system. And they argue that in the 19th century. It didn't make that much difference beyond an argument that split people and were very intense. If any of you are interested, Bernstein is the expositor for a electoral strategy to socialism, and his great critic, his debate alternative, also a socialist, was by far the most famous woman socialist in Europe at the time, Rosa Luxembourg. And she wrote the revolutionary argument against Bernstein who wrote the evolutionary socialism as he called it. The only time it became practical was for that few weeks in 1871, when there was a revolution, when the workers in Paris took over the government, threw out the existing government. You're not mayor anymore. You're not the city council. We, the workers are going to elect our own people for a while. They did it. And there was a little revolutionary moment, which all socialists, both the revolutionary kind and the evolutionary kind looked at, participated in, thought about, and then tried to analyze when it fell apart. It didn't last very long. And so the debate continued. It wasn't really resolved beyond showing that the revolution could take power. Now, the new question was, could it take power and retain the power? Or would it inevitably fall apart when the capitalist society sought to crush it? That question was answered only in the 20th century. And that produced the most important event, birthing communism. That event was the Russian Revolution of 1917. Actually, the whole World War One, which went from 1914 to 1918, was a moment when the socialist movement had to make basic changes, had to make decisions it had never faced before. Above all the decision, do you participate in a war? World War One was clearly a war organized by capitalist countries. Every one of the participants in that war had a capitalist class structure above all else. And therefore, this is a capitalist war. And it led socialists to ask a question they had never asked before in quite the same way in all these different countries at the same time. Is it appropriate for a socialist to participate in a war that's organized by capitalists, fighting over how to divide up the colonial world among them to profit off of it, Germans versus British versus Russians? Well, you know, many socialists said, well, we are loyal members of our society. Of course, we will put on a uniform and fight for Germany or the US or France or whatever. But other socialists said, no, no, no, no, no. It is not appropriate for the working class of any country to pick up arms and kill workers in another country in order to profit one group of capitalists over another. And among the different socialists who said it, the leader of the American Socialist Party, Eugene Victor Debs, said that, and the leader of the Russian Socialist Party. Vladimir Lenin said that. Debs was imprisoned because he said it. Lenin was forced into exile because he said it. Socialist split into those who were in favor of being loyal patriotic to your country and those who were internationalists in their view and solidaristic with workers across the world. And that split is what we're going to pick up with at the next half of this program, because that split is the birth of modern communism. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update. I want to pick up right where we left off talking about the Russian Revolution. It really did change everything in the history of socialism and communism and certainly shaped what those words mean in the 20th century and right into our time now. And I think I can show you that in the time of the second half of this program. So let's begin with why the Russian Revolution was so important a moment. Well, simply, it was the first time that socialists not only grabbed power that they did in the Paris commune, but held on to it. In other words, overthrew an existing capitalist government, a government that celebrated endorsed capitalism as the way to organize the economy, subsidized it, protected it, enforced it, as most capitalist governments today do to their capitalist economies. So the Russian revolutionaries, the socialists, overthrew. They didn't do it by reform, by winning an election. They did it by a revolution toward the end of World War I. So all socialists around the world, and by that time there were many, the whole 19th century, was the expansion of socialism to many, many parts of the world. Socialists everywhere looked to the Soviet Union as the success story, the model that worked, the way to go, the future presented in advance in this country which had accomplished what no other country had. And the three different leaders, I'm going to mention in a moment, took that revolution in three different directions. And I want in a way to stress this. So the three leaders were Lenin, the unquestioned leader, and his two most important assistant leaders, you might call them, although they didn't have that title. One of those assistant leaders, Joseph Stalin, and the other assistant leader, Leon Trotsky. These were the three people who together most symbolized and most led this revolution in Russia, starting in 1917. But they were all associated with the revolutionary wing of socialism. That meant what was the point of view and what was the reaction of socialists around the world, who on the one hand admired what the Russian socialists had achieved, but were very distressed that it was a revolutionary solution. Okay, that might then go for Russia, but they didn't want that kind of solution, that kind of seizing the state to be done in their country. And so the question became immediately after the revolution of 1917, which side are you on? Every socialist in every country faced it. Are you on the side of the socialists who want to continue with the evolutionary, electoral, peaceful means of winning state power, or are you on the revolutionary side? And the way that worked out is most socialist parties split a larger or smaller group who favored following the Russian model, following the revolutionary road, supporting the Soviet Union as the first achieved socialism. They decided, no one forced them, they decided to take another name to underscore what they were, communists, and not to be like what the old socialists were, who now became more and more the electoral type. And you had a split. And that occurred in almost every socialist party in the years 1918, 19, 2021, in the immediate after years after the Russian Revolution, the world split. Socialists everywhere were either going to be electoral. And we now call that socialism, democratic socialism, social democracy. They ended up accepting leave the industry in the hands of private capitalists. But the way you make it better is you use the vote to get a softer, gentler government supported government regulated government subsidized capitalism, as you have in Scandinavia and Western Europe and pieces of it around the world. The other direction were the communists led by the Soviet Union. They were in favor of revolution everywhere, as was Stalin, as was Trotsky, as the followers of Lenin. Remember, Lenin only lives a few years after the 1917 Revolution. Then there's a fight between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin wins that Trotsky loses it. Exile leaves Russia and is not part of what happens in that part of the world after that in a major way. But there were always further splits. The Russians discovered that, yeah, you made a revolution. And yeah, you're holding on to power. But to transition to a socialism, that's going to take a long time. And Stalin made the decision, he and his supporters, to call what the Soviet Union was socialism. They knew it wasn't what they had hoped for yet, but they thought they could get there. The Trotskyites, that became a movement, a kind of socialism, didn't agree with leaving the private capitalists the way they did in Scandinavia. The Trotskyists were critical of all of that, but they were also critical that Stalin didn't continue the revolution. He solidified. He cemented what they had achieved, which Lenin, by the way, had called state capitalism. The government is the owner operator of enterprises, not private capitalists. That became the big difference. In many, many countries, there were socialist parties and communist parties with one of the other, the bigger, and that varied. And sometimes there were third parties that were the Trotskyite parties. They were not socialist in the sense they weren't going to let the capitalists stay in control of private industry, but they weren't going to consolidate and have the government do it, because in their view, this wasn't carrying the revolution through. And so they developed Trotskyist political parties, calling them one name or another, and it's confused with people for a long time. But for most of the 20th century, and certainly, for most people in the world, over the last 70 years, socialism has meant private enterprise by and large, but with a big amount of government regulation, government initiative, some government-owned operation, but basically a private capitalism with a government softening it, whereas socialism has meant Russia, Soviet Union. And the big difference, the government there, owned and operated all the enterprises. Well, then, where are we now? Well, to answer that question, I have to explain to you that there has been a kind of interesting further development in the struggle between the socialists and the communists. And that further development is not so surprisingly a combination, a hybrid, a kind of society involving both the socialist element and the communist element together. And the name of that one is called the People's Republic of China, because that's the innovation that they represent. On the one hand, half of the economy in China is like it is in Scandinavia or the west. Private capitalists own and operate their own businesses in the way they see fit. The other half of the Chinese economy is government owned and operated. So, it's not like the United States of Britain where the majority is private. And it's not like the Soviet Union where the majority of the industry were publicly owned and operated. It's a hybrid. It's a mixture 50/50, roughly. And the difference is, communists sit on top of this hybrid, running it, shaping it, regulating it, and telling us, we will see, that they are moving it towards what socialists and communists always said they wanted, some future society that will be radically more egalitarian and democratic than anything seen in capitalism. That's the project of what the Chinese call socialism with Chinese characteristics controlled and regulated by a communist political party. The name communist, referring to where they want to take the society, not referring to what they have. What they have is a socialism, where they're going is a communism. That's their difference. But it's a real difference because it's a hybrid. It really isn't like the United States, and it really isn't like the Soviet Union. Only folks who don't know anything about the history of socialism and communism lump together socialism, communism, use them as synonyms for one another. That's ignorant. That just shows that you don't know what it is you're talking about. And normally, Americans who are as smart as anybody else wouldn't make that kind of mistake. But we're not normal on that subject. We have been fighting socialism and communism, at least for the last century, as a kind of national obsession. So don't blame yourself if you didn't know how could you, who's going to teach you. This stuff isn't taught in the schools very rarely, and then mostly by people who are hostile and denunciatory. And that doesn't lead to people understanding it. But it's a real issue for everyone in the world right now. And I want to end by telling you why. For most of the people in the world who live in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the number one objective or certainly one of their two or three most important objectives is to overcoming the poverty that so tragically shapes their lives and illnesses and deaths. So for them, a crucial question about every system, capitalists, communists, socialists, whatever, is how fast can you make this economy grow? How quickly can you get us and our children out of poverty? We want a decent diet and decent clothing and a proper medical care and a decent education for our children, all the things that people everywhere want. How soon can we get it? Well, the capitalist west offers them one way. The Soviet Union, which isn't here anymore, it disappeared in 1989. Offered them another. And what is left is China as the alternative to the United States, as you see all around you nowadays. But the Chinese have been growing much faster than the Western capitalists, and they've been doing that for an entire generation. So they are likely going to go in the direction which over the last several years is obvious to everyone willing to pay attention. That's the challenge of communism today. What the Chinese have achieved? And then that lingering question, which we can't answer yet, is there a promise to go to a communism that really does make people equal, that overcomes the instability, the inequality and the injustice of capitalism? Or not? That time will tell, but the issue of communism will be there on our agenda as humans in this planet for the foreseeable future, and it therefore deserves a lot more attention than our society gives it. And that's why I devoted this program to it. Thank you for your attention. And as always, I look forward to speaking with you again next week. Support from the production of Economic Update comes in part from Democracy at Work, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and publisher of Books by Richard Wolff. Who is a professor of economics emeritus at UMass Amherst and a visiting professor at the New School University has authored numerous books on the subject of social economics, including rethinking Marxism, understanding capitalism, and democracy at work, a cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwolf.com. [Music]