HUMAN NATURE, PSYCHOLOGY AND THE COMMUNIST ECONOMY

SIMON KEMP

Was Communism Doomed?

Was Communism Doomed?

Simon   Kemp

Was Communism Doomed?

Human Nature, Psychology and the Communist Economy

ISBN 978-3-319-32779-2 ISBN 978-3-319-32780-8 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32780-8

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016951314

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Simon   Kemp Dept of Psychology University of Canterbury Christchurch , New Zealand

v

Th is book originated with a conversation with my friend Friedel Bolle. Friedel worked as an economics professor—he is now emeritus—at the Europa University Viadrina from shortly after the German reunifi cation. Th e university is in Frankfurt an der Oder in the most eastern part of present-day Germany. I had visited him there twice on lengthy visits sponsored by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and had been fascinated by the area and the remains of the old German Democratic Republic. As Friedel knew well, and as I came to realise, the old communist system there had been very largely a failure.

To get back to the conversation, for some reason that I have now forgotten, I asked Friedel whether he thought a communist system could ever be made to work. He thought not and I agreed. I asked him why not, and he gave me two reasons—poor incentives and the coordination problem. I too had two reasons, but they were not the same ones: I thought of the lack of psychological ownership and learned helplessness. What stuck in my mind, and what led me to write this book, was that they were not the same reasons, and, quite simply, four fatal reasons seemed too many. Much of the book discusses these four reasons, and whether they really are fatal.

Apart from describing the origins of the book, I have another reason for writing about our conversation. In my experience of reading books that are based on psychology but also contain a social message, as this book

Pref ace

vi Preface

inevitably does, I have noticed that the science of psychology tends to come out in support of the particular political or social objectives that the author approves of. I make no claim that I have avoided bias in this book, but I can at least alert you to what my bias is, or, more accurately, what it was when I started to research the book. In brief, as you have probably guessed from the preceding paragraph, I thought that communism was a deeply fl awed system, and that attempts to implement it were likely to be psychologically damaging to the unfortunate citizens of whatever state tried it. Of course, despite this bias, I tried to approach the question fairly. If you want to discover whether I have changed my views as a result of the research I did for this book, you will have to read on.

I have mentioned that sponsorship, by way of renewed fellowships, from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation took me originally to Frankfurt an der Oder and gave me the opportunity to learn something of how the old German Democratic Republic had functioned. Th e Foundation also supported a visit to the Institute for Economic and Social Psychology in the University of Cologne in the spring and early summer of 2015, and I wrote a good part of this book then. I am very grateful to the Foundation for all of this support.

I am also grateful to the University of Canterbury for giving me the time and facilities necessary to write this book. In addition, managerial and governance experiences at my university provided many insights into the diffi culty of making any reasonably sized organisation function.

Many people have put up with my talking about aspects of this book, contributed ideas and anecdotes for it, and read drafts of it. For some years, my fourth year class in economic psychology at the University of Canterbury has patiently listened to me talk about bits of it, as well as occasionally contributing essays on what might happen if New Zealand elected a communist government. Th e comments of Lena Haarman and a seminar group at the University of Cologne led me to rethink the chapter on psychological ownership. My colleagues at the University of Canterbury contributed both ideas and tolerance. Friedel Bolle read and commented critically on the middle chapters of the book. Th ree busy people at the University of Cologne—Detlef Fetchenhauer, Jens Klemke, and Olga Stavrova—read through an entire fi rst draft, and I hope I have been able to do their sensible suggestions some justice in the fi nal version.

Preface vii

Th ree anonymous reviewers commissioned by Palgrave Macmillan all gave sympathetic and intelligent criticism on the proposal and some of the chapters.

Paul Stevens, Nicola Jones, and Sharla Plant at Palgrave Macmillan were consistently encouraging about the book: I was amazed to once get an email reply from Sharla that was sent at 3  a.m. UK time. Th is was impressive! I am also grateful to Eleanor Christie, Subramaniyan Bhuvanalakshmi, and the production team. Finally, I should like to thank my wife, Cora Baillie, for her never failing interest and enthusiasm for the many aspects of the project that I have talked about with her.

Christchurch , New Zealand Simon   Kemp

ix

1 Introduction 1

2 Th e Aims of Communism 5

3 What Is Success for a Communist Economic System? 29

4 A Short History of Communism 55

5 Possible Psychological Flaws in Communism 93

6 Th e Coordination Problem 105

7 Incentives 135

8 Psychological Ownership 167

9 Learned Helplessness, Locus of Control, Self-Effi cacy 195

Contents

x Contents

10 Does Communism Empower Evil? 215

11 Conclusions 241

Bibliography 257

Index 267

1© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016S. Kemp, Was Communism Doomed?, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32780-8_1

1 Introduction

Th is book investigates whether communism as an economic system was bound to fail, and in particular whether it was bound to fail for psycho-logical reasons.

Th e collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and then in the USSR itself over the period 1989–1991 was sudden, dramatic, and largely unforeseen. When the state of the communist economies before the col-lapse became widely known, many people concluded that the system itself had been doomed and that communism was simply unviable in the long run. Th is conclusion led naturally to another question. Th e com-munist systems of the USSR and Eastern Europe were diff erent to those of the Western world in a large number of ways. Which diff erence or diff erences were responsible for the collapse?

If you search the Internet, it is easy to fi nd many answers to the ques-tion of why communism failed. Here are a few that were generated in September 2013 by putting the simple question “Why did communism fail?” to the web.

Th e most common and simple explanation for why communism failed is that people are greedy. Th is is a gross simplifi cation but does contain some

truth. Communism failed to provide incentives for workers and citizens to work hard and be productive. While there are many benefi ts from equality, if pushed to an extreme it robs people of an incentive to make an eff ort. 1

Th e fundamental error of communism was that it failed to recognise exactly what the human person is; any reorganisation of human society is bound to fail if there are errors in its most basic premise. 2

Th e fi rst and most obvious (though not always discussed) reason was that Communist regimes were dictatorships. Th is meant there was a repres-sive environment, large military expenditure, misallocation of resources, and the heavy burden of a totalitarian regime and the absence of proce-dures to remove incompetent decision makers. 3

[C]ommunism cannot work. Th e premise of communism is that power and resources are shared. An inherent assumption here is that either all of the producers will have equal status, or that those who have superior posi-tions will not abuse their power. … [H]ow can we ensure that those in power will never abuse their privileges? … [T]he second requirement of communism is that resources are shared, that there is no ownership. Forget about owning land, or factories or companies. … Th is goes completely against human nature. We humans have evolved from beasts: we are built to have the desire to own our niche, to control and amass resources be it land or wealth. … A system that is based on principles that go against our nature is bound to fail. 4

A few minutes on the Internet turns up many such arguments, some similar to those quoted above, some not. At this point, we are not con-cerned with whether the statements are true or not, but simply to note that many of the arguments raise issues of psychology, and that people often claim that communism failed because it rested on faulty psychol-ogy. Indeed, it is often claimed that, because of its fl aws, communism was eff ectively doomed from the start. For example, towards the end of his Communism: A brief history , Richard Pipes remarks that “[i]f it

1 Nielsen (2013b ). 2 Yahoo answers ( 2013 ). 3 Nielsen ( 2013a ). 4 Catsambas ( 2011 ).

2 Was Communism Doomed?

[communism] is ever revived, it will be in defi ance of history and with the certainty of yet another costly failure.” 5

Is another costly failure really predictable from our present-day knowl-edge of psychology? I should be clear what I mean by this. Th is book is not primarily concerned with the end of most of the world’s commu-nist governments in 1989–1991. Th ere are already a number of excellent political and historical analyses of these events, and some of them are reviewed in Chap. 4 . Th e book is partly concerned with ways in which communist governments, both deliberately and unintentionally, failed to encourage human development in the twentieth century. Th ese failures are reviewed, and they are enlightening. However, the book’s main pur-pose is to search for necessary failures, failures that came about in the past and would come about in the future because of the nature of commu-nism, rather than failures that came about because the past communist (like other!) governments simply got it wrong for other reasons.

Structure of the Book

Th e rest of the book falls into three unequal parts. Chapters 2 , 3 , and 4 cover preliminary issues to investigating possible psychological fl aws in communism. Chapter 2 is concerned with what communism was sup-posed to be like, what problems it was supposed to solve, and how it was supposed to enable people to develop. Th is chapter focuses on com-munist ideology, but defi nitions of communism are considered, and a defi nition that is used in the rest of the book is put forward. Th e chapter also briefl y considers Marxist and Soviet psychology. Although there was a great deal of overlap between the scientifi c psychology researched and taught in communist countries and that in the West, there were also some diff erences. One important emphasis of Marxist and Soviet psychology was a belief that human nature was heavily dependent on the environ-ment, particularly the social environment, and was at least to some extent changeable. Th is issue is introduced in Chap. 2 and developed in Chap. 3 .

5 Pipes, Communism, p. 161.

1 Introduction 3

Chapter 3 asks what initially might appear to be a very simple ques-tion: How would we know if a communist government or state was successful? It turns out that there are a number of ways to answer this question and that none of them, for rather diff erent reasons, are com-pletely satisfactory. Th is chapter also considers a psychological issue: Can human nature be changed?

A brief history of communism in the twentieth century is outlined in Chap. 4 . Th is chapter makes use of work by historians, political scientists, and economists that gives us a picture of how communism worked in practice, particularly in the economic sphere, and why it later fell apart in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Th e primary focus is on the Soviet Union. Th is is because that was the fi rst state to attempt to build a com-munist command economy and the one that persisted longest with it.

Chapters 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , and 10 , which make up the bulk of the book, deal with possible psychological fl aws in communism. Chapter 5 outlines some general considerations in choosing and examining the possible fl aws, and then fi ve diff erent specifi c possibilities are examined in Chaps. 6, 7 , 8 , 9 , and 10 . In each of these chapters two questions are asked: Firstly, to what extent did this fl aw—if it was one—aff ect communism in practice? Secondly, to what extent is the fl aw inevitable in a communist state?

Finally, conclusions are reached in Chap. 11 .

References

Catsambas, A. (2011). Why communism has, and always will, fail. Enginomics: Economics through an engineer’s perspective . Downloaded from http://engi-nomics.blogspot.co.nz/2011/01/why-communism-has-and-always-will-fail.html on 22 September 2013.

Nielsen, R. (2013a). Why did communism fail? #1 Dictatorship. Whistling in the wind . Downloaded from http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/tag/why-did- communism-fail/ on 22 September 2013.

Nielsen, R. (2013b). Why did communism fail? #3 Incentives. Whistling in the wind . Downloaded from http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/tag/why-did- communism-fail/ on 22 September 2013.

Yahoo answers . (2013). Chosen by the asker as the best answer to the question “Why did communism fail?” on yahoo. Downloaded from http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=1006040405045 on 22 September 2013.

4 Was Communism Doomed?

5© Th e Editor(s) (if applicable) and Th e Author(s) 2016S. Kemp, Was Communism Doomed?, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-32780-8_2

2 The Aims of Communism

Th is chapter focuses on the aims or ideology of communism, and principally on the ideology of communism that developed in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, also known as the Soviet Union and the USSR. Th e chapter moves towards a decision to focus on economic rather than political principles of communism. Finally, Marxist and Soviet ideas about psychology are briefl y summarised.

The Essentials of Communist Ideology

It is not easy to defi ne the essence of communist ideology. Indeed, given that philosophers are not always in agreement about whether it is pos-sible to defi ne the essential attributes of anything, it comes as no surprise to fi nd that it can be diffi cult to decide what is essential in any politi-cal ideology. 1 Certainly this is true for communism. Two people or two organisations that labelled themselves as communist might have had very diff erent ideas both about what it meant to be a communist and about

1 Cartwright ( 1968 ).

the changes to society they wished to see. Perhaps the clearest practical demonstration of this is found in the long-standing hostility between the USSR and Communist China. Although this hostility, which lasted from the 1950s to the 1980s, had a number of diff erent causes, one of the main issues at dispute was the diff erent versions of communist ideology followed by the leaders of the USSR and China. 2

However, it was generally agreed that the political and economic system that was called communist in the twentieth century was derived from the writings of Karl Marx (1818–1883), with important intellectual contributions from Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) and Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin (1870–1924). Th is ideology had great infl uence on how the communist system worked in practice, particularly in the USSR.  It is also likely that the growing gulf between what was supposed to happen economically in the USSR of the 1970s and 1980s according to the ideology and what actually was happening produced something of a crisis in the minds of the Soviet leaders.

Th e publication of Marx and Engels’s Manifesto of the Communist Party in 1848 was the beginning not only of a massive amount of political activity promoting communism and socialism in nearly every country of the world but also of a massive amount of writing on issues such as: What is socialism? What is communism? What did Marx really mean by …? Th e issue was made more complex by the fact that Marx’s most impor-tant work, Capital , is mostly concerned with a detailed analysis of how capital and capitalism work in general and particularly in 1860s Britain. 3 To some extent this work needed updating well before the arrival of the fi rst communist government. So, for example, Lenin’s account of monop-oly capitalism, where productive capacity in an industry may rest in a very small number of hands, and perhaps be organised as a cartel, rests mostly on events that occurred towards the end of the nineteenth cen-tury, and then initially in the USA and Germany rather than in Britain. Marx could not have written about these developments because he had no opportunity to observe them. 4

2 For example, Brown, Rise and fall of communism , pp. 318–324. 3 Karl Marx, Capital , Vol. 1. 4 Lenin. Imperialism .

6 Was Communism Doomed?

Many, many books and papers have been written about Marx, the nature of socialism, and the nature of communism. I make no attempt to summarise the many disagreements that have arisen. Instead, I lean heav-ily on one version of the ideology. Th is version is summarised in a single book, which is a manual on the Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism pub-lished in English in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Publishing House, probably in 1959. 5 Th e account below also refers directly to works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Indeed, Fundamentals itself contains a large number of quotations from them.

Th is choice refl ects two considerations. First and foremost, Fundamentals appears to summarise the offi cial ideology of the most important and longest lasting communist government of the twentieth century. Th us, this version of the ideology was practically infl uential. Secondly, Fundamentals appeared at a time when it was possible for lead-ing fi gures in a communist government to not only believe in the ideol-ogy, but also believe that it might come to dominate the world in the foreseeable future. By contrast, many people within Gorbachev’s govern-ment were likely to have had serious reservations about the fi rst of these two beliefs and to have rejected the second outright. 6

Communist Ideology

Th e fi rst part of Fundamentals is not concerned with politics, economics, or revolution, but with philosophy, and in particular with the superi-ority of a realist or materialist philosophy over idealism. 7 Th e material conditions of the world are thought more important than ideas about it. From there the emphasis shifts to considering how materialistic con-straints have aff ected human history. Th e central idea here is that produc-tive forces, which are technology in the broad sense of the word, aff ect productive relations, which are the ways in which humans organise them-selves to use the productive forces. Productive relations in turn aff ect

5 Fundamentals . I do not strictly follow the ordering of topics in the book. 6 Ellman and Kontorovich, An insider’s history . 7 Fundamentals , pp. 22–140.

2 The Aims of Communism 7

other institutions and arrangements in a society. Th us, the organisation of society is determined by the relationship between people and the natu-ral world rather than vice versa. As new technologies were developed, society changed in consequence. So, for example, primitive societies are supposed to have changed to societies with slavery following the develop-ment of technologies such as metal smelting. 8

In the long run, changes to productive forces, that is, changes in tech-nology, management theory, and economics, produce changes to soci-ety which are inevitable. However, in the short term the social changes are often slow and subject to reversals. “Even when the ruling class has become reactionary [i.e. resists the change], its ideology remains domi-nant for a very long time.” 9 Th is view of progress, in which there is a pressure to move in a particular direction but this pressure is resisted and at least temporarily reversible by counterforces, is sometimes known as dialectical, and was infl uentially advanced by the philosopher Georg Hegel (1770–1831).

Although the changes originate in productive forces and spread to political and social institutions, they are not restricted to institutions and organisations. Indeed, the psychology of individual people is changed:

Th e transformation of human consciousness in the course of the socialist revolution in the USSR …, the appearance of new spiritual traits (collectiv-ism, for example, as opposed to bourgeois individualism) convincingly refute the bourgeois sociologists’ assertion that human nature cannot be changed. 10

Th e historical process of change can be viewed as a class struggle, and the classes are based on who owns the means of production. 11 Th e most important classes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were the proletarians, or labouring class, and the bourgeoisie, who own the capital, but there are also other classes. For example, there are landlords, whose class is descended from the feudal aristocracy; peasants, who, with

8 Ibid, pp. 155–156. 9 Ibid, p. 169. 10 Ibid, p. 175. 11 Ibid, p. 187.

8 Was Communism Doomed?

the exception of the richer kulaks , are another exploited class like the industrial workers; and the petty bourgeoisie, who are an intermediate class. Th e state is an instrument which the ruling class uses to dominate the others, and the type of state depends on who the ruling class is. 12 If changes to the productive forces favour domination by a new class, the inevitable emergence of this class as dominant will be delayed because an older dominant class will retain state power for some time.

Engels, in Th e origin of the family, private property, and the state , expanded the historical account and linked it to the anthropological the-ories of the American, Lewis Morgan (1818–1881). Following Morgan, Engels saw human society as passing through the successive stages of sav-agery, barbarism, and civilisation. Th ese stages are characterised by great changes in the power of women and the nature of the family. Savage societies have tribal structures in which women are often “the dominat-ing power” and households are “communistic.” 13 Couples are often only loosely monogamous and inheritance, in so far as there is anything to inherit, proceeds down the female line.

Monogamy is founded “on economic conditions, viz. Th e victory of private property [via inheritance through the paternal line] over primi-tive and natural collectivism.” 14 A consequence is the lowered status of women. In a family, indeed, the man “is the bourgeois, the woman repre-sents the proletariat.” 15 Th ere is a paradox here, of which Engels was quite aware, in that the lower status of women accompanies a decrease rather than an increase in their workload. Another paradox is that marrying for love rather than for property or dynastic reasons is essentially a bourgeois invention but one that tends to be commoner among the lower classes than among the bourgeoisie itself. 16 Th e eventual institution of commu-nism in modern society will change the nature of the family. As for the status of women, “the emancipation of women and their equality with

12 Ibid., 190–194. 13 Engels, Origin of the family . 14 Ibid., p. 79. 15 Ibid., p. 89. 16 Ibid., pp. 97–98.

2 The Aims of Communism 9

men are impossible and remain so, as long as women are excluded from social production and restricted to domestic labour.” 17

According to Engels, early societies were not states, but organised into diff erent gens, phatries, and tribes. Decisions were often made by assem-blies of these organisations. As organisations became bigger, as divisions of labour increased, and as distinct social classes emerged, states appeared. Th e diff erent classes were often recognised legally in states. For example, the diff erent classes in Athens had diff erent legal rights and obligations, including how men of the diff erent classes, as defi ned by their annual incomes, should equip themselves to defend the state. 18 At the time that Engels wrote, it was quite common for diff erent European classes to have diff erent voting rights, and the franchise was often restricted to people having a certain amount of property. In Engels’s analysis, the modern state is essentially rooted in class diff erences and if these are removed, the state—or at least the kind of state witnessed by Engels—has no function and will wither away. 19

It is important to realise that in communist ideology the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consequent destruction of the old feudal system is a social, political, and economic advance. Th e Manifesto of the Communist Party claims that “[t]he bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more passive and productive forces than have all pre-ceding generations together.” 20 It is the rise of capitalism that has made further advances in productive forces possible.

Marx in Capital points out that the simple fact of workers cooperating with each other produces increases in productivity. 21 At a somewhat later stage, a further increase in productivity is made possible by the division of labour famously noted by Adam Smith in his analysis of pin making. Smith noted in the fi rst chapter of the Wealth of Nations that a worker on his own would struggle to make a pin a day, but a ten-man pin- making business “is divided into a number of branches, of which the

17 Ibid., p. 196. 18 Ibid., pp. 138–141. 19 Ibid., pp. 211–213. 20 Marx and Engels, Communist manifesto , p. 134. 21 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 311–326. Fundamentals , p. 273.

10 Was Communism Doomed?

greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire; another straightens it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it. … Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins [the busi-ness’s daily output], might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.” 22 Yet division of labour has a cost too. As Marx points out, Adam Smith wrote in a later passage in the same book that a working life dedicated to one simple action, for example, drawing out the wire for pins, will tend to produce stupidity and “corrupts the courage of his mind.” 23

Th e introduction of machinery in which the power source is not human made possible a still further increase of productivity, and ren-dered both the old cooperative system and simple division of labour obsolete. According to Marx, in theory, the new factory and power-based industrial system also makes a much more human working environment possible:

‘Modern industry, indeed, compels society … to replace the detail-worker of today, crippled by life-long repetition of one and the same trivial opera-tion … by the fully developed individual, fi t for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the diff erent social func-tions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers.’ 24 However, Marx claimed, the capitalist sys-tem in practice tended to resist this opportunity for personal development, thus producing an ‘absolute contradiction.’ 25

Lenin, in Imperialism, the fi nal stage of capitalism , written about 1916, pointed to the development of monopoly capitalism in the form of cartels and very large enterprises, for example, General Electric in the USA. In this development, which as noted earlier, mostly happened after Marx wrote Capital , competition between diff erent fi rms is reduced. Th e for-mation of larger enterprises often makes for greater effi ciencies of scale. Th at is, if an organisation becomes larger it may become more effi cient,

22 Smith, Wealth of nations , Book 1, Chap. 1. 23 Smith, Wealth of nations , Book 5, Chap. 1, Part III, Article 2. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, p. 356. 24 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 494. 25 Ibid., 493.

2 The Aims of Communism 11

because it is possible to have more specialisation, as in Adam Smith’s example, and because it is possible to reduce the duplication of eff ort that occurs in having many small enterprises. Th e later Fundamentals claims that this “concentration of production … is a gigantic step forward in the socialization of production.” 26

Th e communist ideology based on Marx and Lenin was thus double- edged in its attitude to capitalism. On the one hand, capitalism made possible an enormous increase in productive forces. Th is is good for people, and potentially enormously good. In consequence, commu-nist ideology—or at least that version of it which was embraced by the USSR—consistently rejected calls to return to small-scale production or handicrafts, and instead moved to form large units of production. For example, communist agricultural policy often stressed that small-scale peasant farming was unproductive, as well as intellectually limiting. 27 Another, perhaps unexpected, example of this thinking is that Soviet planners, offi cials, and economists often admired Western corporations for their scientifi c organisation. 28 On the other hand, under capitalism the benefi ts of this increase in productive forces did nothing to raise the standard of living of most working people. An opportunity for human development was squandered.

Th e fi rst volume of Capital contains many extracts taken from British parliamentary and other reports which describe a labour force that is poor and badly educated. Workers were over-worked when work was avail-able, and near starvation when it was not. According to Marx, as Britain had become richer through the accumulation of capital, the plight of the labourer had worsened. Th ere was “an accumulation of misery, cor-responding with accumulation of capital.” 29 In the words of Destutt de Tracy which Marx quotes: “In poor nations the people are comfortable, in rich nations they are generally poor.” 30 More technically, Marx provides

26 Fundamentals , p. 298. 27 For example Lenin, Imperialism , p.  241; Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p.  429, 463; Fundamentals , pp. 280–281, 309–310, Chap. 15, 697–698. 28 Ellman, Socialist planning , p. 164. 29 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 661. 30 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 664.

12 Was Communism Doomed?

evidence that international diff erences in productivity were not refl ected in international diff erences in real wages. 31

Marx went to a good deal of trouble to analyse how the impoverish-ment of the working classes had come about. One important element of his theorising is the division of labour time into the hours that the worker needs to put in for his own maintenance and the surplus labour time which then becomes the surplus of the capitalist. So, for example, a worker might work for 12 hours a day, of which 6 are necessary for his own maintenance and the other 6 produce a surplus. If the capitalist can fi nd a way to provide for the maintenance of the worker from only 3 hours of his work—for example, by introducing new machinery—then he can enjoy a larger surplus. 32 Incidentally, although this way of think-ing about working time and its division might seem odd to the modern reader, it seems to have been quite common among nineteenth century British business owners. It also has a very long history. Medieval feudal society often divided time in exactly this way: A medieval villein or peas-ant typically worked some days of the week on his own land and some on the land of his feudal lord. 33

According to Marx, a consequence of the Industrial Revolution and the accumulation of capital was the creation of a large pool of surplus labour. Indeed, Marx points out that this occurred even in Ireland where the population shrank during the middle part of the nineteenth century. 34 If the economy boomed then the labour could be profi tably employed by the capitalist. If the economy went into recession—and boom and bust cycles were common in the nineteenth century British economy—then the workers were made redundant, and inevitably faced poverty. Th is aspect of Marx’s thinking had a lasting impact on communist thinking,

31 Ibid., pp. 570–575. 32 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 145–284. I have over-simplifi ed Marx’s argument by leaving out con-siderations of input materials and other costs of production, which he deals with in detail. On the other hand, although Marx concedes that benefi ts of increased productivity might accrue to work-ers through cheaper products (e.g. pp. 532–534, 584–585), there is little analysis of this, even though the market for mass-produced factory-made products must be among the proletariat rather than the bourgeoisie. 33 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 220–224. 34 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 642–727. According to Marx, Irish unemployment arose mainly from the switch from arable to pastoral farming (pp. 726–727).

2 The Aims of Communism 13

as booms and busts have persisted up to the present day. Marx’s criticism of the cycles displayed by market economies and their eff ects on ordinary people was repeated again and again by communists in the twentieth century. 35

Marx’s analysis of the plight of the working class in Capital focuses mostly on economic causes, but he sees the propertyless condition of the English working class as essentially the consequence of state intervention, and he devotes some time to an historical analysis of how he believes this to have come about. 36 Lenin found the state of crucial importance: Th e “state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms.” 37 It is an organ of rule of a defi nite class and its chief instruments are a standing army and the police. 38 In keeping with this thinking, the importance of the state in suppressing the working classes is also stressed in Fundamentals . 39 A consequence of this way of thinking is that the liberal idea of separating the state from the workings of the economy has generally been regarded as naïve in Marxist thinking. 40

According to the ideology, the conditions and contradictions of bour-geois society make revolution inevitable, although the timing and nature of the revolution are uncertain and may vary from country to country. Th e revolution is supposed to originate with industrial workers, because they are better educated and more politically conscious, as well as more concentrated in factories and thus better able to organise. Th e revolution is fuelled by their poor quality of life in contrast with the bourgeoisie and by their perception of the general failure of the capitalist economic system. 41

35 Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 642–643. Fundamentals , pp. 287–289. Kantorovich, Best use of eco-nomic resources , pp. 150–151. 36 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 736–800. 37 Lenin, State and revolution , p. 387. 38 Ibid, pp. 388–389. Th e diff erence in perspective between Marx and Lenin here may refl ect the much greater role of the state in 1917 Russia than in mid-nineteenth century Britain, a point noted by Lenin (p. 415). 39 For example Fundamentals , pp. 192–196, 325–332, 343. 40 For example Hayek, Road to serfdom . 41 For example Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto ; Lenin, Imperialism , 300–304; Lenin, S tate and revolution ; Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, p. 789; Fundamentals , pp. 317–361.

14 Was Communism Doomed?

Th e outcome of the successful revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat; that is, the new controlling class in society is the working class, and particularly the industrial working class (rather than the peas-antry or rural labourers). Th e new government should create its own state rather than simply taking over the institutions of the old bourgeois sys-tem. Th is is because the old state was designed by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes. So, for example, the old army is to be abolished and replaced with the armed working class. Important industrial assets are to be seized without compensation as soon as possible. Th e major produc-tive forces are then owned by the new proletarian state. Th e main task of the new government is the economic construction of socialism. 42

Th e new government itself should be democratic, but the democracy should be diff erent to that of the old bourgeois state. According to Lenin, “[w]e cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, with-out representative institutions, but we can and must imagine it without parliamentarianism.” 43 Similarly, bureaucracy will still be needed but it is necessary to build a new bureaucracy, and one that is paid at similar rates to workers. 44 Th e new democracy should not allow everyone a say because it is necessary to remove all possibility of power from the old bourgeoisie. 45 However, the new dictatorship of the proletariat should aim to persuade the other classes, and particularly the peasantry, to support socialism out of conviction rather than to compel them. Th e old bourgeois ways of thinking will be very long lasting and acceptance of socialism will come quite slowly. Th e success of the dictatorship of the proletariat will require patience. According to Lenin, the Marxist party “should be able to judge the mood, the real aspirations, needs and thoughts of the masses; it should be able without a shadow of false idealisation to defi ne the degree of their class-consciousness and the extent to which they are infl uenced by various prejudices and survivals of the past.” 46

42 Fundamentals , pp. 625–647. 43 Lenin, State and revolution , p. 424. Fundamentals , Part 5. 44 Lenin, State and revolution , pp. 425–427. 45 Fundamentalism , p. 639. 46 Fundamentals , p. 647.

2 The Aims of Communism 15

Th e new government is to be controlled by a single Marxist party, which should practice democratic centralism. In democratic centralism the key decisions are made at the highest level, although in theory (and sometimes in practice) this follows suggestions and discussion at lower levels. To some extent democratic centralism follows from the idea that the essential means of production are to be owned and controlled by all the people, rather than, for example, by small collectives. As we have seen, Marxist theory wanted the benefi ts of large-scale production tech-niques developed under capitalism, and this meant rejecting local control of small enterprises and many of the ideas of anarchism. 47 At the political level, the implication is that important decisions are to be taken centrally. “Before a decision is adopted, various views may be expressed and oppo-site views may clash in the Party, but once a decision has been adopted all Communists act as one person.” 48

At some point in the future, the socialist system that has been intro-duced and controlled by the dictatorship of the proletariat will give rise to a full-fl edged communist society, which is envisaged as a large commune, a very large commune because communism was always an international movement. At this point the state—that is, the new state controlled by the proletariat—will itself wither away. Th is is because the state is a tool used by a particular class to suppress the other classes. If there are no longer any classes or class antagonisms for the state to deal with, the state is unnecessary. Th e infl uence of the old bourgeoisie will have passed into history. Th e socialist economy will have proved capable of greatly increas-ing the productive forces of the economy, to the point where it becomes easily capable of satisfying any genuine need. 49

In the socialist system, each worker receives from society as much as he puts into it, minus a certain deduction for reinvesting in the means of production. But, in Marx’s words,“[i]n a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labour, and there-with also the antithesis between mental and physical labour, has vanished; after labour has become not only a means of life

47 Lenin, State and revolution , pp. 425–429. 48 Fundamentals , p. 416. See also, Kornai, Socialist system , Chap. 4. 49 For example Lenin, Imperialism , pp. 426–491; Fundamentals , Chaps. 26–27.

16 Was Communism Doomed?

but also life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased, with the all-round development of the individual, and all the springs of cooperative wealth fl ow more abundantly–only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” 50

Quite how this higher phase was supposed to come about was never clear, especially as in practice no communist government came close even to attempting it, let alone achieving it. Lenin conceded: “By what stages, by means of what practical measures, humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know.” He did have some ideas. As the knowledge of general accounting methods becomes more widespread, the allocation processes necessary for effi cient production should become more accessible for the ordinary person. Th e general rules of society can be developed as habits after a period of socialisation. Ordinary people can perform general policing “as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilised people, even in modern society, interferes to stop a scuffl e or to prevent a woman being assaulted.” 51

Th e main task for the dictatorship of the proletariat on the road to communism is economic construction. Th ere are two aspects to this. Firstly, and perhaps most obviously, there will be a redistribution of wealth away from the bourgeoisie and towards the working class, which in itself should produce a better quality of life for the working class and perhaps a better average quality of life overall. Secondly, the Marxist claim is that socialism will do a better job of increasing productive forces than the system of bourgeois capitalism that it replaces. Given that Marx and his successors had a good deal of respect for the bourgeoisie’s eff orts in this respect, this is a strong claim and a number of reasons were put forward for it.

One of the regular criticisms made of the capitalist economy is that it was wasteful of human capabilities. In Capital , Marx gives documented example after example of workers who are poorly educated with low life

50 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme , p. 268. Th e Gotha Programme was put forward by the German Socialist Worker’s Party in 1875, and the slogan did not originate with Marx. 51 Lenin, State and revolution , p. 464.

2 The Aims of Communism 17

expectancies performing menial tasks, often not very eff ectively. He points out that regulation of worker’s hours and conditions in England did not result in the loss of productivity feared by the employers. In addition, during the bust phase of the economic cycle, the reserve army of unem-ployed workers is unproductive as well as miserable. 52 In Fundamentals it is claimed that “[o]ne of the greatest advantages of socialism is that it puts an end to the senseless waste of the greatest wealth that society pos-sesses—human talent.” 53 In line with this emphasis, a constant theme of early communist thinking is the necessity of very widespread education.

Th e periodic economic crises of the nineteenth century were seen by both Marx and his successors as wasteful. While the waste here was partly of human potential, it also extended to the means of production and unsold and unused commodities. Th e Marxist claim is that such eco-nomic crises are getting progressively worse, signalling the end of the capitalist system, and that they can be avoided by better centralised plan-ning. Note here that the general wastefulness of the economic cycles was also remarked on by many non-Marxist economists, most notably per-haps the liberal John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946). Keynes was equally concerned to prevent the waste of such crises, although his suggested gov-ernment interventions fell well short of a completely planned economy. 54

Another and perhaps more unexpected criticism of the bourgeois eco-nomic system is that it does not improve the productive forces thoroughly. Marx in Capital repeatedly produces examples of the productive factory system existing side by side with older and less effi cient systems of pro-duction. So, for example, nineteenth-century British industry contained not only the highly industrialised new textile factories with their recently developed machinery but also large numbers of people employed in man-ual rag sorting and straw plaiting. In general, Marx claims, machinery is only introduced into an industry when all the potential for exploitation of the labourers has been exhausted. When this industrial transformation fi nally happens, usually both workers’ conditions and productivity are

52 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 408–419, 465–485, 664–735. 53 Fundamentals , p. 221. 54 Marx, Capital , Vol. 1, pp. 451–461, 664–735. Fundamentals, pp. 287–289, 317–320. Keynes, General theory .

18 Was Communism Doomed?