On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff offers a special episode discussing the unscary origins of the ideas of communism and socialism before the Cold War demonized them. 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 One
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. As usual, I want to remind you that Charlie Fabian awaits your comments, suggestions, criticisms that can help us make this program better. You can reach him via email best at Charlie.info438@gmail.com. Once again, Charlie C-H-A-R-L-I-E, Charlie.info438@gmail.com. Okay, today's program is all on one topic that you have been writing to me, all of you in my audience here, but you want me to deal with. You have rightly pointed out that if we did a book on understanding Marxism, which we did, and understanding socialism, which we did, and now understanding capitalism, you would like us to do something about communism. So here's the first response to your request, a discussion of communism for the program today. Okay, the idea of communism is related to a word you're all familiar with. Community, it is the same word. It comes from the root commune, which has been used to mean things like community, village, association of people, one kind or another. If you travel through France, many of the villages you enter as you drive have a sign, commune de, the community of, and then whatever the name of the town or the village might be. You know that the 1960s and 70s, young people in remarkable numbers went off into rural parts of the United States where they set up communes. They called their little associations or not so little communes, and there have been movements for thousands of years of people who want to live together, work together one or the other or both, and call the effort to do that a commune de. And the spirit of it, the idea of it, the accumulated experience with it can be and has been called commune, ism. It's the ism, the accumulated thoughts and practical experiments with trying to do that. And it is clearly something important in the human experience because there have been efforts to produce and to live in and to work in communes of one kind or another for as far back as we have human history. One of the interesting questions that have agitated human thought for thousands of years is how to understand the relationship between the individual person on the one hand and the member of a commune living together or working together or both on the other. And you will know that in your life, for example, if you've ever been on a sports team, you will know that there's a kind of tension in that team, almost always, between what the individual members of the team want to do, how they want to play, how they want to act, what initiative they're going to take on the one hand, and what the community as a whole needs on the other. That's why the coach, who's a good one, will sometimes urge a player to develop a skill he or she, or they have that's unique to them and sometimes give an entire lecture on the need to incorporate into yourself the team spirit, the community spirit. That's why in every village and town in the United States, people are individuals, but they're also members of that community and various individuals feel that membership to different degrees for some to say I'm a Chicago person has enormous meaning for other people less so. For some cleaning up the neighborhood you live in, the debris off the street is part of what you feel a community spirit requires. So communism has had lots of different meanings that befit the complicated desire human beings have to live in and to work in groups, not instead of being an individual, but as the other part of their individuality. Important to keep that in mind as we go through because you will see, as I will take you through it, that communism has meant an enormous different array of things to the different people who balance the individuality and the group dynamic, the group spirit in different ways. But before jumping in, I have to preface what I'm saying by telling you that over the last 75 years the word communism came to mean all kinds of horrible things as it got loaded up with the Cold War. And you have to kind of take a step back because that's an abirational period in human history. 75 years, you know, we've been going for thousands. So a 75 year period may look big because it's recent, but it's already fading. What do I mean? Well, in the Cold War, our other side, our enemy was the Soviet Union. And the political party that was dominant in the Soviet Union was the Communist Party. And you can learn about that as I go through today's material because it's part of the definition. But since that was the arch enemy of the United States, the USSR, and since it's party, the party that led it called itself the Communist Party, which it did, the word communism took on every negative attribute, every bad adjective that anybody here in the United States, or in other parts of the world that were like the United States, took on every bad word anybody could think to throw at it, most of which stuck more or less, at least for most of those 75 years, and anything that lasts for 75 years, especially if those are recent, less on. Not in everybody, not to the same degree, but it's still there. So you have to kind of remember that. You have to wade through a lot of that noise to try to understand what this is all about. Okay, the first thing then is to be sure that you understand what it is not. The word communism does not apply to a society of which we have any historical record in any nation state. The Soviet Union was not a communist country. I know that's hard because the New York Times and everybody else you encounter with few exceptions talks as if it were, writes as if it were, the phrase communist Russia, or communist China, or communist East Germany, or whatever you want, those are all erroneous, those are mistakes. Why? That's not what those societies were. Not only is it not what they were that I'm saying so, but they never said that they were communist. They rejected the term communist to be applied to them, which means who called communist Russia communist was the United States, which hated Russia and hated communism. Okay, but you don't normally accept the adjective of people who hate what they're describing. What does the USSR, the official name of the Soviet Union, stand for? The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Not communist republics, socialist republics. What do the Xi Jinping and the leaders of China today? What do they call China? They give you a straightforward answer. China is socialism with Chinese characteristics. Notice the word that's missing, communist. The name of the political party is communist because they wanted with their name to signal what their ultimate objective was, but they were very clear to say in Russia after the 1917 revolution in China after the 1949 revolution and so on that they had not achieved communism far from it. They had achieved something less than communism, namely socialism. And that gets you into murky territory because Denmark today has citizens, many of whom call them a socialist society. In many European countries, indeed in most of them, there is a socialist party and a communist party. They're separate. They have separate budgets, separate memberships, people vote for one or the other. Wow, for them, these things don't all collapse together, whereas here in the United States, socialist, communist, it's a little bit vague and an awful lot of people use them synonymously, but they oughtn't to. The real word that has been active for most of the last century and a half has the word is the word socialist. That's a movement. That's a political party. That's a kind of social organization. Now it means different things, so I've got only one definition, but that's what we've been living with, not communism. Communism has meant most of the time a further stage of human development beyond socialism, different from socialism. Many people years ago when it was still possible in the United States to talk reasonably about this made a simple differentiation, which helped people kind of keep it in their mind. Socialism, it was said, had the idea you take from everybody what they can do, the work they can do, and you give to everybody a portion of the output in proportion to how much work they did to produce it. You get back corresponding to what you put in. Communism was different. Communism took from everybody what they were capable of contributing and gave to everybody what they needed. Notice communism distributes according to people's needs. It no longer limits distribution to what has been produced because there isn't scarcity anymore. There's enough for everybody to take what they need. It's a kind of ideal. It's a kind of utopian dream, and that's all that communism meant most of the time, and it certainly didn't apply to the Soviet Union, and it does not apply to Russia today even less. Okay, we've come to the end of the first half of today's program. In the second half, I'm going to go through the modern history defining exactly what socialism has meant, how socialist and communist political parties are different, so that the idea of this difference, even knowing that it changes, will continue to change, but we'll know what the changes are about. Welcome back, friends, to the second half of today's economic update as we go into the definition, the meaning of the term communism. We looked at more of its ancient history, its basic meanings in the first half. Now I want to take you through what it has come to mean in the modern times. Well, here's the first thing that may surprise you. Ideas of socialism, of doing things together as a community, remember that root word of commune, for communism, that's as old as capitalism, as old as the system of capitalism has been criticisms of it, feelings that there were things about it that people living in it did not like, and they wanted to change them. And the things that they found unhappy won't surprise you because they are the things we continue to find flaws in capitalism. The biggest one probably, inequality. People noticed in capitalism that if you're dream of overcoming feudalism, if you're dream of overcoming the feudalism of the British Empire in North America, or to overthrow the unfair feudalism of Louis in France who built Versailles, or his family did, the super inequality of late feudalism, if you wanted to overthrow that for a egalitarian society, and remember the slogan of the French Revolution, Liberty Equality Fraternity, or the image of Thomas Jefferson that the post-revolutionary America would be a land of small, roughly equal farmers, then you would have quickly understood as capitalism evolved, that it did not get rid of inequality. It reproduced the inequality, and over a few generations, inequality like the feudal gap between the Lord and the surf. Indeed, if you look at Elon Musk today, or people like that, they are like ancient pharaohs in the absurd wealth they have relative to the rest of us. And people didn't like that about capitalism. It made the few rich, and the rest of us not at all. And so they said, "You know, we should change this." And they came up with ideas that took on the name "socialism." We want to focus on making society a certain way, like a community of more or less equals. Sure, you can have a little richer, a little poorer, but within a framework where we're not all that different, not some of us with billions and the rest of us with nothing. This is not so complicated. And so people said, "Let's have rules. Let's have limits, because we'll be at each other. Those who have nothing will be bitter and angry and envious, and those who have a lot will be protective and nasty and bitter, and they will hire some of the poor to protect against the rest of the poor, taking the bit from them that they need. We don't want that kind of society. And they had the name "socialist." It's one of many names they had. Levelers was another name. Populists was another name. There's a whole variety of names in different countries at different times. But the ideas were simple. Instead of letting each individual become as rich at the expense of others as they could get away with, you had rules that would govern everybody, rich and poor alike, so that it wouldn't be the gaps between them. That idea has agitated capitalism from day one to right now. Why? Because capitalism keeps producing inequality against which people push, and so we have that tension in our societies. Then there were people who went further who said, "You know, we ought to make property collective." Land shouldn't belong to an individual. Individual didn't put it there. An individual didn't make the land. If you were religious, you felt God made the land. If you weren't, it was there before we were. So why people get pieces of land? Private property began to strike people as the root of the problem. We're just human beings here for a while. The property stays here. The land and the trees and the urban ethos or the ground and the fish in the sea were stewards of public property, of collective property, of God's gift to the human race, whatever. And so these were ideas that developed and used the word sometimes communism. The early part of the 19th century, the critique of capitalism reached a whole new level when someone put the ideas together in a mammoth work of criticism. That was Karl Marx. That work has never been superseded. People have developed it, extended it. But that's the basic idea. And Marx called what he was in favor of socialism. That's all he ever talked about. His commentary on communism, very few never wrote a book about communism. Yes, he's famous if you don't know the work of his maturity when he wrote his great analysis of capitalism in three volumes called capital. If you don't know about that, maybe what you know about is something called the communist manifesto. There's that word again. And why did Marx use it? Because he wanted to show that he was not in the socialist group so much as he was in the communist group. But in those days, in the only part of the 19th century, it didn't matter all that much. The words overlapped into one another was Marx sympathetic to collective property. Of course he was. One of his teachers was a French thinker named Prudon, very famous for the phrase private property equals theft. Didn't like it much, did he? But Marx went further and wanted to talk about production and how we relate to one another when we produce goods and services. That, he thought, was the key part of capitalism that caused all of its negative outcomes like inequality. So he joined a little group, tiny group of people in the Germany of his time and in the Europe of his time who called themselves communists in those days. And so he wrote a manifesto for them during the upheaval of 1848 in all across Europe. So he called it the communist manifesto. Notice it was the manifesto of the communist group was not a description of a society. Read it, you'll see it. At the end of it are a set of demands which are things that the Democratic Party or many other political parties would espouse today. They are not revolutionary, they are improvements for the working class within capitalism. Okay, socialists in the 19th century were critics of capitalism like Marx. Something different happened at the end. In 1871 a group of socialists took over the government of Paris. The French government had collapsed, it had lost the war with Germany at that time and it couldn't govern and the working class of Paris rose up, took over the government through the French government out of their own capital city and ran it for a few months. And they called their experiment the Paris commune. Interesting. 40 years later, 50 years later, the Russian revolutionary Lenin studying the French commune as an example of workers taking power led the socialist party, the socialist party of Russia to grab power when the Russian government couldn't govern the country because it had just lost World War I. And in the aftermath of the Russians doing this, they became the only country in the world where socialism had graduated from being a critique of capitalism to trying to construct an alternative society to capitalism. And Lenin was very clear in the five years that he lived from the revolution until he died. In those five years, the most important speech he made said the following. We have seized power here in Russia. We have momentous historical achievement for the working class. A pro-working class anti-capitalist political party is now the government. And we won a civil war with those who don't want us. And we repulsed foreign armies that came to tear us down. The American, the British, the French and the Japanese had sent armies into Russia to crush the revolution. That all failed. We're in charge. And then came the key remark. But all we've done is take over the state, changing the society from capitalist to socialist. We haven't done that yet. We may be able to do it. We better do it. Or else our government will not survive. We cannot keep a socialist government on a capitalist foundation. 70 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. And why? Pretty much because of what Lenin had warned them about. What did he mean? He meant a new idea, which he got from Marx, but too many Marxists didn't. That the issue isn't who runs the government. The issue is how do you organize the factories, the offices, and the stores. If you allow a tiny group of people to sit at the top of them, make all the decisions, tell you what to do when you come to work. Decide who gets the fruits of this enterprise. Mostly, of course, themselves. Then you'll have inequality. You'll have rich and poor. You'll have the whole collection of capitalist problems. Having a worker's government is not a sufficient solution to that problem. You've got to change the organization. You've got to bring community into the workplace. It's got to be one as a democratic community, or else the larger society around the enterprises cannot function as a democratic society. What Lenin tried to introduce, which is now in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union coming more and more into focus for people, is that the revolution never made the step Lenin saw it needed way back in the early 1920s. It needs to transform the workplace. That's what communism has come to mean. That's what has not happened, not in Soviet Union, not in Russia since, and not in Cuba, and not in China, and not yet. Whatever achievements those societies have made, and they made many, as did the Soviet Union, that were progressive, many of them. They didn't make the change. They can now be clarified. Socialism leaves the business of society in the private hands of capitalists more or less. Communism says, no, no, no, no. You've got to go further than that. Not to give the enterprises to the government. That's what the Soviet Union did. That's not the answer. The answer is to change the way the enterprise works. You haven't done that if you've replaced private board of directors with government officials. What you've got to do is make the enterprise, the collective democratic project of the workers there. Then you will have realized what this idea of communism having gone through all these different permutations and combinations, what it now in our time, and for us what it means. I hope you found this the beginning of an answer to your question about communism. We will continue and come back to this topic and project in the near future. 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, or cure for capitalism. Further information is available at democracy@work.info and rdwoof.com.