Posted on 11/29/2012 5:29:21 AM PST by SJackson
I recently read the new biography of Trotsky by Oxford don Robert Service, published in 2009 by Pan Books. It is well-written and surprisingly interesting. The book does a great public service in describing the life of the actual Trotsky, whose previous “biographies” were little more than hagiographies written by his toady worshippers (people like Isaac Deutscher). The last time that I had taken any interest in Trotsky was when I was a teenager and had fleeting delusions of believing in “socialism.” Reading the new book as an adult and as an economist, I found it a useful opportunity to contemplate the rise of one of the most oppressive regimes in human history. I have gathered some thoughts and impressions here and I hope they will be of interest.
Hunger and starvation have so often accompanied “political revolution” that it would be safe to suggest that they are intrinsic parts of it. Communist revolutions have invariably produced famines and terror. The immediate trigger for “revolutionary terror” in early Soviet Russia was the same as in the French Revolution: the inability of the regime to obtain food for urban residents.
The Bolsheviks had never had very much interest in the peasants in the first place. As great believers in Marxist theology, they advocated the imposition by the “proletariat” of urban workers of “its” will upon the country, including upon the agricultural laborers who constituted the bulk of the population. Even if the Bolshevik party could seriously be thought to represent the urban “proletariat,” they would still have constituted a movement representing only a very small portion of Russian society. Thus bolshevism’s most basic operating principles were anti-democratic.
The Bolsheviks represented a movement seeking to impose the interests of this minority “class” over the interests of the bulk of Russian society (and later over non-Russian populations in the Soviet empire). The role assigned by the communists to the peasants was to sit back and turn over food to the “revolution,” either without getting paid for it or without getting paid very much. The Bolshevik state procurement of food operated through a state-run monopoly, preventing peasants from seeking better prices, and increasingly turned violent when peasants refused to cooperate. The communists considered payment of incentives to peasants for delivering food to be anti-revolutionary and capitalist. The most violent stages of the French Revolution had been triggered by similar inability of the “revolutionary state” to procure adequate food for urban “workers.” Armed gangs of Soviet foragers, like Parisian foragers before them in the French revolution, emptied the stores of food in rural areas in a desperate attempt to prevent their own loss of power.
The other problem for the Bolsheviks was of course that they claimed to represent “the working class” of urban workers, but never considered it necessary to allow those same members of the “proletariat” a say in what they themselves considered their “class interests” to be. The communist party leaders claimed to represent the proletariat automatically, supernaturally, by dint of their having studied Marx and Engels. Under their theology they could automatically divine from the dusty 80 year old writings of Marx what served the interests of the Russian “working class,” without having to ask any actual workers, and in most cases without having to engage in actual work. Party leaders, led by Lenin and Trotsky, lived bourgeois lives even in the most difficult days of the Russian Civil War, often living in luxurious royal apartments inside the Kremlin (which had been the royal residence before the Revolution). Soviet leaders were attended by large numbers of servants, and Trotsky himself never went anywhere during the Civil War without both his large flock of servants and a 35-member military band. Bolshevik leaders (Trotsky in particular) generally had never done a day of honest labor in their lives in any factory or farm; their entire “careers” consisting of political activism.
The Bolsheviks believed that they could divine the answers to what the “workers” collectively needed in much the same way that Church clergy could conjure up the agenda of God, by reading the holy scriptures. And like other manifestations of theology, the Bolsheviks tended to bicker and break up into small factions over minor questions of belief. Like in the Church, the factionalism was suppressed by means of the proclamation of official dogma approved by the party’s Pope. It was the beginning of the thought police system, later perfected by Mao.
In the case of communists, these scriptures meant Marx and Engels, and later Lenin. The problem of course was that Marx and Engels never spelled out the nitty gritty details of what “workers” would need, and basically had no understanding whatsoever of economics. They can hardly be excused for this ignorance on grounds of writing before the advent of modern economic understanding, because it was already well on the course of development at that time.
As just one example of the problem, should the price of shoes in a “workers’ state” be high in order to benefit shoe workers producing shoes, or low to benefit workers who are consumers? And if the representatives of the proletariat cannot make up their minds about the price of shoes, then how the Devil can they decide what constitutes “worker interest” in thousands of other dilemmas. Asking the workers themselves what they wanted was quickly ruled out by the Bolsheviks as a counter-revolutionary nonstarter.
The solution of the early Soviet regime was essentially to suppress and terrorize urban workers, not just the peasants. Before the end of the Civil War, Lenin and Trotsky were ordering all independent labor unions, meaning those that were not simply servile fronts for the party, to be suppressed. Lenin and Trotsky insisted that unions represented and promoted only the narrow interests of selected groups of “proletarians” and not of the entire “class.” Exactly!
In fact, the “alienation” of the “urban workers” by the party had occurred even earlier. The Bolshevik coup and the storming of the Winter Palace were uprisings of the “working class” only in party mythology. The bulk of those rising up in support of the Bolsheviks were soldiers in the Czarist or Kerenski armies, who supported the party because of the promise by Lenin to surrender to the Central powers and end all fighting and mobilization of troops.
The Bolshevik banner may have featured the hammer of the urban worker with the sickle of the peasant, but at the time of the Revolution it was little more than a party of disgruntled soldiers and sailors, most from rural background, reluctant to be sent back to the World War I front to defend Russia. Their opportunistic support for the Bolsheviks largely vanished in thin air as soon as the party tried to mobilize them and send them out to fight the “whites” during the civil war. Trotsky was forced to recruit ex-czarist officers to serve as commanders in the Red Army.
The main groups of soldiers supporting the party with enthusiasm were non-Russians desiring the end of Russian domination over their native lands, like the brigades of Latvian riflemen who served as Lenin’s praetorian guards. By 1921, the same Kronstadt sailors who had been critical in bringing the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 were shooting them and organizing a massive mutiny, brutally suppressed by the communists. The suppression of the rebellion led Whittaker Chambers to label bolshevism a form of fascism, and persuaded many of those who contributed later to the book, “The God that Failed,” to abandon communism. As in the French Revolution, all opposition was automatically attributed by the “Revolutionaries” to foreign conspiracies. Dissent was a form of treason.
Bolshevik thinking in the early days carried strong features of theology. The Bolsheviks believed that if they were to follow the precepts of Marx to the letter, and pronounce the correct incantations, then magic would take place and socialist revolutions would spring up all over the world like adorable leprechauns. This voodoo Marxism eventually led to the rise of Stalin and totalitarian “socialism in one country.” And an ice pick in the skull of Trotsky.
Most Bolshevik leaders had no skills or experience in government administration, management, business, or anything else. Their only claim to legitimacy was their assertion that they understood the needs of the “proletariat.” Trotsky believed in command control and central “planning” of the economy until his last breath, and he was hardly alone. Within days of seizing power in their coup d’etat, the Bolshevik leaders were seeking to impose their “dictatorship of the proletariat,” by which they meant the dictatorship of those party officials, more often than not from middle class backgrounds, claiming to represent the proletariat. The Russian economy imploded under their rule. Output of Russian factories and mines in 1921 was only a seventh of what it had been under the Czar in 1913.
Their understanding of foreign powers and diplomacy was even more pathetic than their ignorance of economics, and was also dominated by belief in magic. During the first years of the Soviet regime, its leaders quite seriously expected communist revolutions to break out all over Europe. And they were truly surprised when none did, except pathetic attempts – quickly suppressed – to install bolshevism in Germany and Hungary.
Part of their problem was that Marx and Engels were themselves wrong with regard to just about everything. They were wrong, first and foremost, with regard to the claim that there exists some sort of monolithic “working class” with some sort of uniform set of “class interests.” Urban workers share no common interest, as the above example involving shoe prices illustrates. Urban workers indeed were a “class” with a common interest only in the most tautological sense, only in the sense that all those assigned to any “class” would favor increases in the incomes and wealth for all members of that “class.” By the same token, people with curly hair constitute a “class,” because any proposal to raise incomes for all those with curls would be supported by them. But regarding any other issue that would arise, the curly headed would have no common interest. Ditto for urban workers. And in the exact same sense, there is no capitalist class. An assembly of the “capitalist class” would similarly be incapable of agreeing over whether shoe prices should be high or low.
And just why were urban “workers” even considered to be politically superior to everyone else in society? Marx, Engels and the Soviet leadership had great difficulty conceiving of anyone doing productive work unless they were making “things.“ And heavy “things” were more valuable, important, and productive than light “things.” Certainly producing services was not understood by them as productive labor, explaining why the quality of services of all sorts in the Soviet block remained abysmal all the way down to the fall of communism.
But just what was a “worker”? Do not bankers and teachers and dentists and engineers and pharmacists work? In many cases, they work longer hours than factory workers. Marx and Engels had insisted that urban factory workers must seize political control of society, and they must do so by means of a dictatorship by the party claiming to speak in their name. In any case, Marx and Engels were pretty sure that peasants did not really provide important “work.” After all, they just produce food. So they need not really be part of any revolutionary regime.
Peasant reluctance to deliver food products to the urban “masses” without getting paid was “counter-revolutionary” and could be resolved by starving them to death, terrorizing them, and locking them up in non-productive collective farms. There food production would prove too low even to feed the peasants themselves, let alone export food to the cities. The Bolsheviks were truly surprised when it turned out that their policies had driven the bulk of the peasants to support the “whites” and other opposition forces in the Civil War. While agrarian collectivism was relaxed briefly under the “New Economic Policy” of Lenin’s last days, it then became an instrument of genocide under Stalin.
The other problem of the Bolsheviks was that, at least in the early stages of the “Revolution,” they were truly captivated by utopian delusions. The problem of all utopians is that they advocate systems and ideas that can only work with imaginary idyllic humans, but never with real human beings. When they discover that real human beings refuse to knuckle under and behave according to utopian expectations, the utopianists respond with violent rage. The greatest strength of capitalism is that it actually works with real human beings, people who are lazy, base, narcissistic, self-indulgent, foul-smelling, mean-spirited, and unsophisticated. Capitalism does not require idyllic fictional humans in order for it to work.
The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.
Such a lifestyle was a "luxury" for a caveman who had been isolated or expelled from his community. That aside, it still doesn't undermine my original contention and you are still wrong.
Participation in a group/team hunt (or other endeavour) still falls under my basic three means of satisfying needs. If one participates in the group freely, then it is merely a contract (albeit an unwritten one) in which one contributes their efforts to the group goal in exchange for a share of the profits...or mammoth steaks as the case may be. If one's participation in the group is coerced without any promised or real benefits, that slave will still have to resort to theft, trade or his own use of force to satisfy his needs.
An interesting comment.
So let me add to that (I have some background in high production agriculture)
As far as I know the Egyptians owned their own land. The King and the temples also owned a good deal of land which they used to support themselves, but I think that most of the land was owned outright by the peasants.
The irrigation channels and the very crude techniques used to get water out of the Nile and into the ditches didn’t look like government sponsored operations. Basically buckets on a wheel.
They also had surveyors, apparently a job description nearly as old as prostition.
Egypt did not have as many people as it does today. Chronic illness as well as extremely low ag yield by today’s standards (1/16th of today’s yield? Maybe lower..) kept the population tamped down. Since Egypt was in the water borne disease zone I suspect that dysentery and malaria were common and took a lot of Egyptians early in life.
(The death rate in Massachusetts from water borne diseases was 1/20th of the rate of the Cheasapeake Bay area in Colonial America. Massachusetts was above the latitude in which water borne disease was common. That was one of the reasons the Pilgrims landed that far North. The latitude at which water borne disease was an issue was well known to our ancestors. I had always thought that it was a bit odd that the pilgrims went to a cold snowy area on the continent, but now it makes a lot sense to me.)
I am also not sure that the irrigation operations were quite as extenisve as the yearly flooding provide a huge amount of ground water in soil that was capable of holding on to it. I used to walk our fields that were located on the Mississippi and the black dirt was amazing. A bit like walking on a mattress as the dirt compresses one half to a full inch as you walk on it.
The flooding would also decrease the the amount of free nitrogen in the soil by large amounts and would really knock back the possible yield.
I am going to look at this as it simply is question I am sure has been asked but I have never asked it myself. Thanks for the comment.
Sesostris also, they declared, made a division of the soil of Egypt among the inhabitants, assigning square plots of ground of equal size to all, and obtaining his chief revenue from the rent which the holders were required to pay him year by year. If the river carried away any portion of a man's lot, he appeared before the king, and related what had happened; upon which the king sent persons to examine, and determine by measurement the exact extent of the loss; and thenceforth only such a rent was demanded of him as was proportionate to the reduced size of his land.
Organized by regional authorities, every Egyptian had to move about thirty cubic metres of soil in about ten days every year
The building of dams and canals was done at local or regional levels, and while in the past many held irrigation to be the prime cause for the emergence of a central government, most think nowadays that the involvement of the national government in the irrigation was probably minimal: the opening and closing of the canal sluices to Lake Moeris in the Fayum in order to regulate the flow of the river must have been a task for the central authorities.
The rights to water were as important as the land it was intended to irrigate. During the Late Period at least these rights could be sold like any commodity.
So their economic life required much government adminstration. As for the performance: "From the New Kingdom there are records of yields of between 5 and 10 sacks (200 kg to 400 kg) of corn per aroura (ca. 2800 m²) - about ¾ to 1½ tons per hectare - according to the quality and location of the field."
Simply, Socialism only works through coercion.
Capitalism is the free and un-coerced exchange of goods and services. It is really the only moral economic system.
Probably averaged about 1.1 tons per hectsre. Our average production per hectare is 10.5l tons so... Yields were quite low by our standards.
Thanks for the info on Egyptian agriculture. Quite interesting. It bears further research.
The principle difficulty with Bolshevism in general was that it overlaid a theoretically proletarian revolution with a decidedly non-proletarian cadre Lenin termed a "vanguard party" with its own class interests distinct from the economic ones that ostensibly drove the revolution. In short, an existing aristocracy of birth was replaced by a new one of party. It wasn't an improvement.
“The most violent terrorists and oppressors of others have always been the utopians. The French Revolution turned violent and the guillotine was introduced to attempt to terrorize actual humans into behaving according to the expectations of the utopianists. The leaders of the Soviet Revolution were no slower or more squeamish in following the same route.”
Not necessarily. If anything, the Utopians are only the second-most violent terrorists and oppressors of others. The ones who actually ARE the most violent, and arguably the worst of them, are the dystopians. And I can name a few during the French Revolution. In particular, the Marquis de Sade (yes, he was indeed very much involved with the French Revolution and Reign of Terror. Heck, you could argue that he fired the first shot at Bastille). And if you read what he had to say, it’s pretty obvious he had absolutely no desire for utopia, and if anything just wanted to make things worse just for a sheer kick. This was the guy who acted as the namesake for “sadism” after all. In fact, after being recruited by the Jacobins, he became one of its most radical members, and was specifically assigned to the Section des Piques, before ultimately being locked up again when even Robespierre couldn’t tolerate him any longer. Did I mention that for them to be “true republicans” in his view, he thought they should enact a law that allowed people free access to another person’s bodies? Essentially legalizing rape, in other words?
And on that note, we might as well include those directly inspired by Sade during that time, such as Jean-Baptiste Carrier, whose infamous “Republican Marriages” at the Loire he specifically described, borrowing a term coined by Sade himself, as being “Le flambeau de la philosophie”. Or how about the guillotines at Arras that were orchestrated by Joseph LeBon and his wife? That was also taken directly from one of Sade’s books, literally in this case since they actually stripped the freshly decapitated victims and put them in poses mirroring the illustrations for 120 Nights of Sodom. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn even indicated that Sade was pretty much tied with Rousseau as being the most influential person in the French Revolution (and Rousseau is probably closer to a utopianist)
And while we’re at it, Marx and to a certain extent his followers would be closer to an adherer to dystopia than to utopia, considering that he specifically advocated for not only reenacting Robespierre’s Reign of Terror, but also making it even gorier than ever before. I’ll even quote it for you: “Once we are at the helm, we shall be obliged to reenact the year 1793…When our time comes, we shall not conceal terrorism with hypocritical phrases. . . The vengeance of the people will break forth with such ferocity that not even the year 1793 enables us to envisage it.” Source: Marx-Engels Gesamt-Ausgabe, vol. vi pp 503-505, final issue of Neue Rheinische Zeitung, May 18, 1849. Quoted in Thomas G. West, Marx and Lenin, The Claremont Institute
And, oh, I’m not finished yet. Remember Sade and his ideology? Well, he got a follower centuries later by the name of Michel Foucault, and even he thought Sade didn’t go far enough. He also advocated that people give into their basest instincts and be, as Joker in The Dark Knight put it, little more than a common criminal. Going a bit further than Marx, he actually advocated repeating the September Massacres, and refused to promote courts, even Socialist ones. And during a debate with Chomsky, he actually advocated that everyone basically commit all the murder they want and upon gaining any power turn right around and oppress others. You can read up on that guy in the following links:
*http://www.conservapedia.com/Michel_Foucault
*http://www4.uwm.edu/c21/conferences/2008since1968/foucault_maoists.pdf
*https://usefulstooges.com/2016/10/14/totally-amoral-michel-foucault/
*https://chomsky.info/1971xxxx/
*https://stream.org/foucault-intellectuals-venerate-sado-masochistic-suicidal-drug-addict/
So, yeah.
“According to Marxist/Leninist theory, there are four phases to the revolution:
1. Revolution of the proletariat
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat
3. The withering away of the state
4. Ultimate freedom of the collective
Problem is: Phase 3 never seems to happen. “
The answer’s simple, really: Marx when he advocated for the “withering away of the state” was truly advocating for it to “wither away” the same way the French state did under the French Revolutionaries under Robespierre. Create a Wild West-style anarchistic area where people are free to commit all the murder and horrific acts their basest desires ever wanted, as you can see in the quote I posted.
But I do ultimately agree. The Bolsheviks were NOT good people, not even at the start, and Trotsky would have been as bad as if not worse than Stalin if he took over (probably going all “killing fields” on Russia as one person put it). And based on the fact that he wanted “permanent revolution”, a desire that was ironically echoed by Ernst Rohm of Germany, it’s pretty clear he’s closer to the dystopian view than the utopian view.
They didn't have the right people in charge. They needed to have the best, brightest, well educated, caring and compassionate people running everything. It will work next time. Honest it will.
Yes, thanks for pinging an old thread. Next time, it will be better. Another century, another few hundred million corpses. We'll get there.
Lord Acton, Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely
Lord Acton, not that well known, other quotes out there, but he got it right. Before the internet. The concentration today is far greater. Neither Mao nor Goebbels could have imagined it. Nor could they have imagined the opposition, should the opposition have access to the "media". Formal or other.
Yeah, I know, a few hundred years ago it was called the public square. Important.
Minor point, it's always bothered me that our Revolution and the French Revolution share the same last name. Quite different.
My one disagreement.
2. The dictatorship of the proletariat.....on to three and four.
Dictatorship requires leadership. At which point the concentration of power is established. Actually in point 1, revolution does't emerge from within. It also requires leadership.
It gave Robespierre supreme power.
There are all kinds of madmen in the world, but those who are purely destructive don't usually attain great power.
Thanks for those links.
L
Ping to post 47.
L
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