Agents of Reaction and Stagnation

Agents Of Reaction and Stagnation

By Rick Smith

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

-George Orwell, novelist

The gains won by the working class in their struggle for a more just share of the wealth produced by their labour are under frequent attack from an arsenal of ideological mercenaries, those that sell their oratory and intellectual skills to the highest bidder. It is these agents of right-wing thought that espouse unsubstantiated, half-witted, or otherwise fabricated “truths” to mislead the gullible and exploit the lack of time for genuine thought that most people suffer from. Their claims that socialism doesn’t work economically are most prominently that it slows innovation and efficiency and by extension the standard of living as a whole, that it necessarily invests too much faith in a bureaucratic and authoritarian government, or the favourite “it just doesn’t work”, all of which only stand to amateur scrutiny.

Addressing the matter of innovation and efficiency in a socialist economy must be taken in the context of the difference between socialism and capitalism. That is not to say that all socialists believe in the same economic brand in every sense of the term, nor all capitalists. Nevertheless, the central tenet to any capitalist theory remains that continual economic growth is desirable, let alone attainable, to maximize the wealth of those who participate in the system. Socialism relies on a slightly modified belief that economic growth, while desirable, cannot continually be sustained and that it should only be taken as far as is necessary to ensure a quality standard of living for all members of society. The reason socialists reject eternal economic growth is fundamentally environmental: that is, an economy is only as rich as the natural resources it can withdraw, and non-renewable and renewable resources alike can be exhausted so they must be managed wisely. So, when speaking of economic growth in socialist terms, it is important to understand the limits to the potential for an economy’s size before it collapses from its own over-consumption, which is possible in numerous ways. Innovation, despite the common myth, is not necessarily stumped in a socialist system. This belief comes from one of two sources: either the intrinsically spurious notion that advancements can only be made by individuals or the example set by the Soviet economies of the Eastern Bloc. To address the first, it is clear from many examples that innovation, even in capitalist economies, is done only through teamwork. The Canadian medical science duo of Frederick Banting and Charles Best may represent the public faces of the discovery of insulin’s use for treating diabetes, but there were multiple foundations laid before them that led to this discovery. Paul Langerhans, Oscar Minkowski, Joseph von Mering, and Eugene Opie, while possessing no such fame as Banting and Best, were just a few of the scientists who had done the work since 1869 that provided the studies that Banting and Best needed to make the connections that they did that would eventually lead to insulin’s use as a treatment for diabetes. In countless other innovations and discoveries, it was never just one person plucking an idea out of the air, but an addition to steps already taken. It is important to remember that advances in science and technology are made in teams, especially in this day and age, and not by individuals seeking personal glory. As for the examples of the Soviet Bloc, one must consider the nature of the Soviet economy. Because of the authoritarian government in the Soviet nations, control of the means of production was in fact in the hands of a bureaucratic mess that claimed to be a worker’s state but was in fact detached from those they professed to represent. Stringent quotas had to be met, and when the prospect for a more efficient method of production came about, managers the economy over passed up the opportunities to innovate because they knew that it would be met with only higher quotas. For this reason, the Soviet economy was never able to modernize and could not produce the quality of goods necessary to maintain a high standard of living. Without this, the system fell apart both because of backwardness and because of popular displeasure with these aspects and the authoritarian style of the Communist Party, not because socialism as a system cannot sustain itself.

On the topic of the myth of the necessity of dictatorship with socialism, there are multiple examples as well as basic logic to prove this incorrect. There is the common myth that socialism cannot equal anything but Stalinism, but also the belief of the likes of Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman that the economic system is repressive. In terms of socialism and how it relates to Stalinism, nothing could be further than the truth than to suggest that the two cannot be mutually exclusive. Stalinism’s roots are that of an opportunistic strong man who manipulated the bureaucracy of an already too centralized government to consolidate his power without a thought in his mind for the common worker other than how they could produce wealth for his iron-fisted tyranny. This is in contrast to the basic principles of socialism, which advocates vesting the ownership of the means of production in the community as a whole, a principle fundamental to the Renaissance. Whereas a Stalinist would put all factories in the hands of the central government, Renaissance socialism would place it in the various Community Associations where they are located. While railways and airports would be put in the control of the federal government, the means of production should always be as localized as possible to ensure both community health and motivation for keeping up with each other’s technological advancement. Clearly, these are two conflicting ideas and could not co-exist in the same system. Furthermore, from the perspective of individual choice, socialists run the gamut from the dictatorships of a Stalinist to the anti-government sentiment of an anarcho-syndicalist, just as capitalism could either be implemented in Fracisco Franco’s fascist Chile or a libertarian paradise of Friedrich Hayek. Pertaining to the claims of Rand and Friedman that socialism’s emphasis on the working class eliminates personal freedom is centered on the principle that the right to become rich is an inalienable and natural right. When a squirrel gathers a nut, the squirrel gets a nut. When a wolf pack takes down a deer for kill, all the wolves eat. A squirrel does not gather nuts to nor does a wolf pack hunt to potentially be able to eat in the future. Similarly, humans must cast off the idea that we should work for tomorrow and instead being to collect the fruits of our labour today. It is natural that what work is put into a task should be received by a comparable output. The economy always maintains that sort of action-reaction effect: in the same way, while one person accumulates riches by moving ahead, others must sacrifice their own capital. As long as we continue to pursue this dream of riches in the future while sacrificing comfort today, we run the risk of never attaining either, and today that risk is never more acute or widespread than ever before. So, while a capitalist system promises the right to pursue riches and mongers fear of a communist dictatorship hiding behind every non-capitalist ideology, socialism indeed promises more than “everybody earning the same”.

The safety net of capitalist opposition to socialism is that it “simply doesn’t work”, the one that virtually everybody has heard and is brought out after the first two assaults fail. This is said so in the context of the failure of the Soviet Union and its allies to establish themselves permanently. To counter this argument therefore is to seek to understand the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet government beyond passing it up as being an impossible dream, which runs the risk of disgracing real debate. At the beginning of the history of communism is Karl Marx’s plan for the system. He said that it must occur in a rich capitalist Western European country first and spread from there, because these countries already had industry set up and would therefore not be reliant on a new authority to do so. Because subsequent revolutions in Germany, Italy and Hungary either failed or were very short-lived, Russia stood a lone, a country that was largely agricultural with only 10% of its workforce employed in industry. This made them dependant on the Communist Party which, following Lord Acton’s proclamation that “power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely”, became what the followers of Lev Trotsky called “state capitalists”. Thus, by the time Stalin challenged Hitler to a war, the Soviet Union was already corrupted beyond what either Marx or Engels would have ever wanted their ideas to be represented by. Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms only served to empower the nomenklatura, or the elite within the Communist Party and economic sectors. With the government so centralized, agriculture failed because of the detachment from those running the sector (the government) from the land and workers themselves who would otherwise have the knowledge to have made it work. Industry was told to produce with little thought for either environmental or supply and demand factors. Eventually, the Soviet Union had to import wheat from the United States and Canada because of the severe mismanagement of agriculture, and with little to offer them from industry, eventually faced economic hard times. When Mikhail Gorbachev came about with his campaign for perestroika, he was seeking to reform the most inefficient aspects of the economy. While these stayed generally true to the roots of the Communist Party, they were in no way similar to the original socialist doctrine, now that power was either in private investors or the government, neither of whom represented the common people. With glasnost, an alienated and disenfranchised people demanded an end to Communist Party rule. This collapse has been attributed to Ronald Reagan’s “heroic” pressuring of the Soviet Union and his knowledge that their system was not working. After the collapse of their system, despite bearing no similarities to socialist ideas of any side of the scale, the failure was attributed to a fundamental problem with socialism that simply could not be fixed. Rather than encourage legitimate public debate about how this came to happen, the upper class powers that be initiated a propaganda campaign to introduce a two-sided spectrum of ideologies to the 90s: neoliberalism and neoconservatism. By adding “neo” to the beginning of these former foes, liberalism became capitalist and conservatism became authoritarian. Understood in this context, with a preconceived understanding of what Renaissance socialism advocates, it should be clear that the events that preceded the downfall of the Soviet Union and therefore solely form the foundation of the maxim that “socialism/communism simply doesn’t work” are assumed and specious.

This is not all to suggest that when the Canadian Renaissance comes to fruition, socialism will be the automatic result. Nevertheless, socialism is compatible with the empowering of communities and workers, and not the state bureaucracies or gluttonous upper class that Stalinism and capitalism do respectively. The Renaissance’s economics are a form of socialism that believe in placing economic power in the hands of those who produce the wealth and to safely keep them within the hands of the local communities. This does not resemble Stalinism or post-Stalinist USSR and should not be treated as such.