As the commentary around the recent deaths of Nelson Mandela, Amiri
Baraka and Pete Seeger made abundantly clear, most of what Americans
think they know about capitalism and communism is arrant nonsense. This
is not surprising, given our country’s
designed
to impress that anti-capitalism is tantamount to treason. In 2014,
though, we are too far removed from the Cold War-era threat of
thermonuclear annihilation to continue without taking stock of the hype
we’ve been made, despite
, to believe. So, here are seven bogus claims people make about communism and capitalism.
Obviously,
no private equity baron worth his weight in leveraged buyouts will ever
part willingly with his fortune, and any attempt to achieve economic
justice (like taxation) will encounter stiff opposition from the
ownership class. But state violence (like taxation) is inherent in every
set of property rights a government can conceivably adopt – including
those that allowed the aforementioned hypothetical baron to amass said
fortune.
In capitalism, competing ownership claims are settled by
the state’s willingness to use violence to exclude all but one claimant.
If I lay claim to one of David Koch’s mansions, libertarian that he is,
he’s going to rely on big government and its guns to set me right. He
owns that mansion because the state says he does and threatens to
imprison anyone who disagrees. Where there isn’t a state, whoever has
the most violent power determines who gets the stuff, be that a warlord,
a knight, the mafia or a gang of cowboys in the Wild West. Either by
vigilantes or the state, property rights rely on violence.
This is
true both of personal possessions and private property, but it is
important not to confuse the two. Property implies not a good, but a
title – deeds, contracts, stocks, bonds, mortgages, &c. When
Marxists talk of collectivizing ownership claims on land or “the means
of production,” we are in the realm of property;
,
we are in the realm of personal possessions. Communism necessarily
distributes property universally, but, at least as far as this communist
is concerned, can still allow you to keep your smartphone. Deal?
2. Capitalist economies are based on free exchange.
The
mirror-image of the “oppressive communism” myth is the “liberatory
capitalism” one. The idea that we’re all going around making free
choices all the time in an abundant market where everyone’s needs get
met is patently belied by the lived experience of hundreds of millions
of people. Most find ourselves constantly stuck between competing
pressures and therefore stressed out, exhausted, lonely, and in search
of meaning. — as though we’re not in control of our lives.
We aren’t; the market is. If you don’t think so, try and exit “the market.”
The origin of capitalism was
depriving British peasants of their access to land (seizure of
property, you might call it), and therefore their means of subsistence,
making them dependent on the market for their survival. Once
propertyless, they were forced to flock to the dreck, drink and disease
of slum-ridden cities to sell the only thing they had – their capacity
to use their brains and muscles to work – or die. Just like them, the
vast majority of people today are deprived of access to the resources we
need to flourish, though they exist in abundant quantities, so as to
force us to work for a boss who is trying to get rich by paying us less
and working us harder.
Even that boss (the apparent victor in the
“free exchange”) isn’t free: the market places imperatives on the
ownership class to relentlessly accumulate wealth and develop the forces
of production or else fail. Capitalists are compelled to support
oppressive regimes and wreck the planet, as a matter of business,
even as they protest good personal intentions.
And
that’s just the principle of the system. The US’s particular brand of
capitalism required exterminating a continent’s worth of indigenous
people and enslaving millions of kidnapped Africans. And all the
capitalist industry was only possible because white women, considered
the property of their fathers and husbands, were performing the
invisible tasks of child-rearing and housework, without remuneration.
Three cheers for free exchange.
3. Communism killed 110 million* people for resisting dispossession.
*The number cited is as consistent as it is rooted in sound research; i.e., not.
Greg Gutfeld, one of the hosts of Fox News’ “The Five” and a historical scholar of zero renown,
recently advanced the position that
“only the threat of death can prop up a left-wing dream, because no one
in their right mind would volunteer for this crap. Hence, 110 million
dead.” In declaring this, Gutfeld and his ilk insult the suffering of
the millions of people who died under Stalin, Mao, and other
20th Century Communist dictators. Making up a big-sounding number of
people and chalking their deaths up to some abstract “communism” is no
way to enact a humanistic commitment to victims of human rights
atrocities.
For one thing, a large number of the people killed
under Soviet communism weren’t the kulaks everyone pretends to care
about but
themselves communists. Stalin, in his paranoid cruelty, not only had
Russian revolutionary leaders
assassinated and
executed,
but indeed exterminated entire communist parties. These people weren’t
resisting having their property collectivized; they were committed to
collectivizing property. It is also worth remembering that the Soviets
had to fight a revolutionary war –
against, among others, the US –
which, as the American Revolution is enough to show, doesn’t mainly
consist of group hugs. They also faced (and heroically defeated) the
Nazis, who were not an ocean away, but right on their doorstep.
So much for the USSR. The most horrifying episode in 20th Century official Communism was the
Great Chinese Famine,
its death toll difficult to identify, but surely in the tens of
millions. Several factors evidently contributed to this atrocity, but
central to it was Mao’s “Great Leap Forward,” a disastrous combination
of applied pseudoscience, stat-juking, and political persecution
designed to transform China into an industrial superpower in the blink
of an eye. The experiment’s results were extremely grim, but to claim
that the victims died because they, in their right minds, would not
volunteer for “a left-wing dream” is ludicrous. Famine is not a uniquely
“left-wing” problem.
4. Capitalist governments don’t commit human rights atrocities.
Whatever
one’s assessment of the crimes committed by Communist leaders, it is
unwise for capitalism’s cheerleaders to play the body-count game,
because if people like me have to account for the gulag and the Great
Sparrow campaign, they’ll have to account for the slave trade,
indigenous extermination, “
Late Victorian Holocausts” and every
war,
genocide and
massacre carried
out by the US and its proxies in the effort to defeat communism. Since
the pro-capitalist set cares so deeply for the suffering of the Russian
and Chinese masses, perhaps they’ll even want to account for the
millions of deaths resulting from those countries’ transitions to capitalism.
It
should be intuitive that capitalism, which glorifies rapid growth
amidst ruthless competition, would produce great acts of violence and
deprivation, but somehow its defenders are convinced that it is always
and everywhere a force for righteousness and liberation. Let them try to
convince the tens of millions of people who die of
malnutrition every year because the free market is incapable of engineering a situation in which less than half of the world’s food is
thrown away.
The
100 million deaths that are perhaps most important to focus on right
now are the ones that international human rights organization DARA
projected will
die climate-borne deaths between 2012 and 2030. 100 million more will
follow those, and they will not take 18 years to die. Famine like the
human species has never known is
in the offing because
the free market does not price carbon and oil-extracting capitalist
firms have, since the collapse of the USSR, become
sovereigns of their own.
The most virulent anti-communists have a very handy, if morally
disgraceful, way of treating this mass extinction event: they deny that
it’s happening.
5. 21st Century American communism would resemble 20th century Soviet and Chinese horrors.
Before
their revolutions, Russia and China were pre-industrial, agricultural,
largely illiterate societies whose masses were peasants spread out over
truly vast expanses of land. In the United States today, robots make
robots, and less than 2% of population works in agriculture. These two
states of affairs are incalculably dissimilar. The simple invocation of
the former therefore has no value as an argument about the future of the
American economy.
For me, communism is an aspiration, not an
immediately achievable state. It, like democracy and libertarianism, is
utopian in that it constantly strives toward an ideal, in its case the
non-ownership of everything and the treatment of everything – including
culture, people’s time, the very act of caring, and so forth – as
dignified and inherently valuable rather than as commodities that can be
priced for exchange. Steps towards that state of affairs needn’t
include anything as scary as the wholesale and immediate abolition of
markets (after all, markets predate capitalism by several millennia and
communists love a good farmer’s market). Rather,
I contend they can even include reforms with
support among broadly
ideologically divergent parties.
Given
the technological, material, and social advances of the last century,
we could expect an approach to communism beginning here and now to be
far more open, humane, democratic, participatory and egalitarian than
the Russian and Chinese attempts managed. I’d even argue it would be
easier now than it was then to construct a set of social relations based
on fellowship and mutual aid (as distinct from capitalism’s, which are
characterized by competition and exclusion) such as would be necessary
to allow for the eventual “
withering away of the state” that libertarians fetishize, without replaying the Middle Ages (only this time with drones and metadata).
6. Communism fosters uniformity.
Apparently,
lots of people are unable to distinguish equality from homogeneity.
Perhaps this derives from the tendency of people in capitalist societies
to view themselves primarily as consumers: the dystopic fantasy is a
supermarket wherein one state-owned brand of food is available for all
items, and it’s all in red packaging with yellow letters.
But people do a lot more than consume. One thing we do a huge amount of is work (or,
for millions of unemployed Americans, try to and are not allowed). Communism envisions a time beyond work, when people are free,
as Marx wrote,
“to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning,
fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner… without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” In
that way, communism is based on the total opposite of uniformity:
tremendous diversity, not just among people, but even with in a single
person’s “occupation.”
That
so many great artists and writers have been Marxists suggest
that the production of culture in such a society would breed tremendous
individuality and offer superior avenues for expression. Those artists
and writers might have thought of communism as “
an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all,” but you might want to consider it an actual instantiation of universal access to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
You won’t even notice the red packaging with yellow letters!
7. Capitalism fosters individuality.
Instead
of allowing all people to follow their entrepreneurial spirit into the
endeavors that fulfill them, capitalism applauds the small number of
entrepreneurs who capture large portions of mass markets. This requires
producing things on a mass scale, which imposes a double-uniformity on
society: tons and tons of people all purchase the same products, and
tons and tons of people all perform the same labor. Such individuality
as flourishes amid this system is often extremely superficial.
Have
you seen the suburban residential developments that the housing boom
shat out all over this country? Have you seen the grey-paneled cubicles,
bathed in fluorescent light, clustered in “office parks” so indistinct
as to be disorienting? Have you seen the strip malls and service areas
and sitcoms? Our ability to purchase products from competing capitalist
firms has not produced an optimally various and interesting society.
As
a matter of fact, most of the greatest art under capitalism has always
come from people who are oppressed and alienated (see: the blues, jazz,
rock & roll, and hip-hop). Then, thanks to capitalism, it is
homogenized, marketed, and milked for all its value by the
“entrepreneurs” sitting at the top of the heap, stroking their satiated
flanks in admiration of themselves for getting everyone beneath them to
believe that we are free.
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