Introduction: A Beautiful Idea, Really?
I've often had people claim to
me that communism would be a great idea, if only human nature let it work. But
I don't think that Marxist communism in particular would work on even a
theoretical level- the idea of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' ever seeding
power is beyond comprehension. Were then communist systems always doomed to
fail, or might they have survived if not for a few historical quirks?
Marx claimed in Das
Kapital that “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of
a law of Nature, its own negation”. His argument was that because capitalist
societies relied on social production to create wealth but private
appropriation to obtain wealth, they were fated to collapse. However, communist
systems also suffered systemic crises, from the failure of the New Economic
Policy to the USSR’s fall. Indeed, communist systems suffered from the same
internal contradiction as capitalist systems, notably an exclusive extractive
class which took profits away from socially productive workers. Communist
systems in fact fared worse than capitalist economies from this because they entrenched party
apparatchiks at the head of their economies and lacked the 'creative
destruction' of capitalism. As a consequence, they suffered
systemic crises, to which unlike capitalist democracies, they could not adapt.
I want to make two points in this post: first, that the autocratic nature of
communist parties lead to the creation of a new extractive class, that of
autocratic party bureaucrats and second, that this internal contradiction lead
to crises in communist nations, leading to their eventual collapse. Thus, it
will be proven that not only did communist systems contain internal contradictions;
they suffered worse from them than capitalist systems.
Party Bureaucrats: The World's Best Rent-Seekers
Communist systems lead to the
substitution of Marx and Engel’s bourgeois class who aimed for the
“accumulation of wealth in private hands” for a group of party bureaucrats who
were equally extractive, thus leading to an inherent contradiction. Official Soviet
propaganda espoused that the regime was leading the USSR to a “brilliant
future… one of liberty, equality, fraternity, guaranteed employment”. However,
because of the inherent vagueness in Marx’s idea of the “dictatorship of the
proletariat” which he claimed would lead to the “abolition of all classes”
after a transition phase of socialist rule, all communist systems in reality
did not transition out of bureaucratic socialism. As Olson notes, under Stalin
this meant that the party expropriated all natural resources and capital to add
to its yield to its tax collections and also directly controlled consumption
and investment for its own benefit.
Party members were rewarded
from this expropriation with special stores, health care facilities and
vacation spas in return for loyalty to the party. CPSU members were paid 127
per cent of the average wage of a government worker and their pay was one third
of the government administration budget. Further, there was systemic soliciting
of in-kind payments and direct stealing. They also engaged in what Verdery
terms “political capitalism”, that is bureaucrats used the shortages inherent
to the system to make a profit from selling scarce goods. Party “apparatchiks”
thus became the class of rent-seekers that Marx railed against because the
command economy allowed them to do so. They constituted a class both in terms
of political power, economic capital and the ability to consume both more goods
and those of a higher quality. Communist systems became a form of what Clark
and Wildavsky call “vulgar capitalism” or “profit-making without competition…
based on corrupt personal relations”. Simultaneously, bureaucrats were
rhetorically devoted to “large-scale heroic means of production”, production
based around work done cooperatively. Therefore, so-called communist systems
suffered from the same internal contradiction as capitalist systems: while
production was (at least initially- black markets eventually flourished) social
and cooperative, the accumulation of wealth was private and worked by class
expropriation.
Tear Down That Wall!
Further, this inherent
contradiction led to inevitable crises in communist systems, to which they
could not adjust unlike capitalist systems, which led to their collapse.
Marx believed that the inherent contradiction in the expropriation of
workers by the bourgeoisie would eventually lead to a decline in the “rate of
exploitation” because “vampire-like, the capitalist only lives by sucking
labor”. His argument was that eventually this would lead to recessions and the
awakening of class-consciousness. This problem was also present in the Soviet
Union, where the extraction of wealth by members of the CPSU helped to slow
economic growth to the point where in 1967 the GNP of West Germany was larger than
the entire Soviet Bloc. In particular as Maier outlines the extractive process
of the communist system hampered the social production of the workers on which
it depended.
Somewhat fittingly, this led
to the class conflict that Marx had predicted capitalism falling prey to,
especially the rise of the Polish trade union Solidarity that was integral in
the USSR’s collapse. This was worsened by the chronic shortages of basic goods
which led to worse recessions than those experienced in capitalist systems.
Capitalist systems did not suffer as badly because, as Marx was unable to
foresee, the welfare state was developed, which redistributed profits to the
working class because it was in the bourgeois political class’ interest to
avoid class conflict. In contrast, the extractive behaviours of communist party
members were only possible through continued coercion of those they were
apparently serving. As soon as communist regimes faced crises they could not
adapt except by further coercion and entrenchment of expropriation behaviours.
Thus, as soon as communist regimes were opened to partial openness such as
under Gorbachev’s glasnost in order to create more profits to expropriate, they
began to collapse under the weight of their own internal contradictions. This
has occurred not just in the Soviet Union, but also in the fall of Yugoslavia,
the transformation of the People’s Republic of China and recent partial reforms
in the collapsing Cuban economy. Thus, the inherent contradiction in communist
systems and their inability to adapt to the crises resulting from it led to
their eventual total collapse.
Conclusion and Consequences
In conclusion, contrary to
Marx’s predictions, this essay has shown that the autocratic nature of
communist “dictatorships of the proletariat” created the same inherent
contradiction between the social production and private extraction and
accumulation of wealth inherent in capitalism. Further, it has shown that this
led to crisis and eventual collapse of communist systems because the extractive
class in the communist system could not allow for it to be adapted unlike the
capitalist bourgeois class. Thus, Marx’s proposed solution to capitalism became
self-defeating in practice for precisely the reasons Marx felt that capitalism
would fail.
--
Dan Gibbons is a third year
Bachelor of Commerce (Economics) student at the University of Melbourne. He has
a forthcoming publication in Intergraph: A Journal of Dialogic Anthropology
(about memory and nationalism) and is currently submitting papers on the rise
of modern consumerism, the role of criminology theory in literary criticism and
the institutional theory of nationalism. Dan is a keen debater and public
speaker.
