COMMUNISM

Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten, jedem nach seinen Brdürfnissen: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs – Karl Marx

In our own times, in many countries people own homes and land, stocks and bonds, and a lot of material wealth is in the hands of private citizens. The two principal sources of wealth are: (a) fruits of one’s own labor and marketable skills; (b) inherited wealth. In most industrialized countries, the wealth of many people is derived not so much by their own work, nor from inheritance, but from the toil and labor that others perform for them in factories and  manufacturing centers. In the nineteenth century this was so blatantly inhuman that it was only a notch better than slavery.

Since ancient times sensitive and thoughtful people have been appalled by social injustices in systems in which an upper class or caste  benefitted from the exertion and sweat of the lower strata of society. Some ethical systems suggested that we should share our foods with others, others that we must give away our possessions, that all our belongings must be given to a central authority so it all is part of a common pool. Some preachers have seen in the writings of the ancients inklings of a philosophy of common ownership. In Kamba Ramayanam we read that in the kingdom of Ayodhya there were neither rich nor poor, since everyone had enough. Thomas More’s Utopia envisioned a world where people did not fight for owning private property. But even Rousseau’s romantic view of life in nature was an ideal society, and not a set  goal to right the wrongs of economic disparity. Until the age of primitive industrialization sharing of one’s possessions was regarded as a noble virtue worthy of cultivation because it is intrinsically good, rather than as a social imperative.

In the nineteenth century all this took on a drastically different tone and turn. Already during the Enlightenment period in France in the eighteenth century the idea of sharing economic and material products among the members of a community had been proposed by Victor d’Hupay in 1777. He introduced the word communism. It was a philosophy based on common ownership. The French word for common is commun. That is why it is called communism and not commonism; which is what it would have been if an English speaker had coined the word.

It is a interesting historical coincidence that this important idea of communism emerged a year after the birth of the United States of America. Nobody imagined that a couple of centuries later the  idea would become  veritable terror there.

In 1848, after several drafts by various people, the famous Communist Manifesto was published in German, because its authors were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The document was soon translated into several European languages. Its goal was to abolish private property altogether: a slap on the face of John Locke and Co. It wanted to promote the proletariat (as the working class came to be called) to the ruling class. It famously proclaimed that “the workers have nothing to lose but their chains, and a whole world to gain.” It ended with a clarion call to “the workers of the world to unite.”

The Communist Manifesto was not a plea to the plutocrats to part with their plunder and share it with the less fortunate. Rather it was a spirited exhortation to the exploited to take up arms against the cabal of capitalists.

It included a new thesis on the philosophy of history when it stated unequivocally that “The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles.” Class struggles is a key concept in the communist doctrine.

Though drastic in its formulation, and not necessarily verified all through history and in many places, there is more than a kernel of truth in the view that all societies have been cursed with the opposing duality of the privileged and the marginalized classes, the wealthier and the poorer. But more often than not, and quite surprisingly, all over the world they have lived in unstable peace with each other for centuries.

A careful and penetrating study of all this was made by Karl Marx who dissected the economic framework in the Industrial Revolution as a biologist would dissect a frog. In a highly technical treatise entitled Das Kapital, composed with Germanic scholarly verbosity, Marx defined and analyzed terms and concepts like buying power, selling power, surplus value (profit), constant capital, variable capital, appropriation of labor power by machinery, law of value, rate of profit, and more. The work was the economics equivalent of Newton’s Principia. Marx’s thesis in essence is this: Capitalists spend money to buy raw materials. Then they use the labor of the workers to convert raw materials into manufactured goods by using machinery. The result is to increase significantly the monetary value of the raw materials. A small fraction of the augmented value is given to workers; a large faction is pocketed by capitalists. This, as Marx explained in many pages, is how the capitalist system works.

It is only when the under-privileged are pushed to an extreme that a struggle begins, and it is not always that the proletariat takes over. Indeed, whenever and wherever that happened, contrary to Marx’s prediction, the masses were not exactly liberated. More often than not they came under a different kind of subjugation, losing their right to pray or protest, or express freely their thoughts and fears. More verifiably than the doubtful promise of religions that if one behaved well one would reach heaven, the dream of communist revolutions have generally turned to nightmares.

The Communist Manifesto, like the scriptures of religions, had dramatic impact on human history. It ignited the Bolshevik Revolution in Tsarist Russia which led eventually to a Cold War that lasted many decades, causing tremendous economic waste and emotional energy while making the capitalist nations wealthy under the sway of the military-industrial complex. More seriously, it created panic and paranoia, not unlike some current reactions to Islamic extremism. Communism rocked the politics in China, with efforts to erase the rich cultural memories of the people in a great leap forward, and managed to replace them with servile worship of Mao and Marx, even while elevating the plight of the masses.

It can’t be denied that the revolutions instigated by Marxist ideology, though stifling to human freedom and dignity, causing the Gulag and Tiananmen Square, did transform a ruthless backward Tsardom into a modern nuclear world power, and a medieval modest rural Chinese society into an economic giant on the modern world, competing with the most powerful nation in the world. As Vladimir Lenin proudly put it, “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.”

Indeed, in countries with vast natural resources with despotic regimes (Russia), or where there had been centuries of economic backwardness (China), or where capitalist exploitation was pandemic (Cuba), communism generally resulted in  better conditions the masses: i.e. for the vast majority of the people. Invar-ably, it was far better than life under the previous fascist dictators that it replaced.

Some scholars have noted parallels between religions and Communism, saying that it is in fact another religion. After all, Communism has its own prophets (Marx and Lenin), its own infallible scripture (the Manifesto and Das Kapital), its own mode of worship of heroes, its severe punishment for dissenters, its disdain of other religious paths, and its own prescription for attaining Heaven: not in the celestial world, but right here where Communism reigns. It points, religion-like, to a Devil (the Capitalist class) as the source of all evil. Most of all, like all religions, it sounds great as an idea or an ideal, but from what we have seen of some of its practitioners in power, and if we hear what people living under communism say, it is more horrific than honorable, more terrible than terrific.

Bertrand Russell was one of the first to point this out in his The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism. That book altered the idealized view of communism in many people’s minds. However, though critics invariably point to the negative sides of Communism in their comparisons with religions, in fairness it should be said that Communism sprang from genuine empathy for the poor and the disadvantaged, and it speaks out on their behalf, not unlike Buddha and Christ who too were moved by human suffering. Some have even quoted Acts 4:32 from the Bible to show that communism already existed then: “And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had things in common.”