Liberalism and Communism

Welcome friends!

A few weeks back I did a post on what I see as the relationship between modern conservatism and fascism (November 11, 2011), so this week I thought I’d do the right thing and write up a little companion piece on what I see as the much weaker relationship between modern liberalism and communism.

Now for me communism has always seemed like a sort of flip side to fascism.  Just as fascism arises when conservatives feel they can no longer control democratic political systems and use them to their own advantage, communism arises when liberals give up on democratic political systems because they see them as too beholden to economic elites to express the interests and needs of anyone else.  I think this is pretty much what happened in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.  Basically, you had a bunch of poor, hungry, desperate people living under a rather brutal authoritarian regime who just sort of gave up on democratic government as a means of bettering their lives and hence gave up on the liberal ethos.  Of course, I’m not sure they actually had a lot of experience with it, so I’m not sure they really knew what they were talking about, but I guess they gave up on even the idea of it.  Although I obviously disagree with the path they chose I feel I’m not really in a very good position to judge these people because I never experienced what life was like as a down and out peasant in Tsarist Russia.  I’m guessing it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips.

Anyway, as was the case with fascism, I feel this rejection of democracy was really communism’s fatal flaw.  Once you stop going through the hard work of making arguments and trying to convince people of things and instead start talking about a special vanguard of know-it-alls, or a leader with a capital L, or whatever it is, then my friend you’re in deep, deep trouble.  Because history has shown all manner of incredible things are liable to happen once one eliminates the checks and balances of a democratic political system and the liberal intellectual framework associated with democracy (i.e., an interest in individual liberty, freedom of conscience, freedom of thought, freedom of the press, etc.)  Instead of the worst case result under democratic systems of a pack of confused and ignorant people talking endlessly and entirely beside the point and then stumbling willy-nilly into misguided policies that regress to the mean level of ignorance and incompetence, non-democratic systems move relatively efficiently and quickly to whatever idiotic and usually self-destructive destination some self-proclaimed political elite happens to have dreamed up.  In the case of the USSR, of course, we famously ended up with all manner of purges, pogroms, famines, gulags, secret police, foreign adventures, and what not.  I’m sorry, but it wasn’t a pretty picture.

Then another huge flaw with communism for me was simply its radicalism, in particular, the idea that to solve social problems one had to entirely remake society, change the nature of man, rewrite economics, and take on all manner of other implausible and Herculean tasks.  I mean, come on.  Let’s keep one foot in reality, shall we?  If you have a problem, for the sake of argument let’s say a few million starving peasants and a brutal and corrupt government that doesn’t really give a damn, let’s just work on it one step at a time.  If your democracy isn’t really functioning the way it should then take that up.  If you’re concerned about distributional issues then take those up.  If you see natural monopolies and oligopolies at work then take those up.  I understand it’s a little callous to the people who aren’t going to make it while we slowly inch and claw our way toward a better society the democratic way but sometimes that’s the best we can realistically manage.  Take a shortcut in the dark and you’re liable to walk right off the edge of a cliff.  Of course, if you’re one of the people who aren’t going to make it then I guess you wouldn’t really have anything to lose, but I’m talking from the perspective of society at large now.

And then I suppose the last big flaw with communism to my mind is that over time the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the whole enterprise led it finally to express the values I associate with social and economic conservatism so in a sense it gradually transformed into its opposite.  This certainly seems to have been the case with respect to social conservatism at least.  Once one loses the liberal appreciation of the importance of diversity and freedom of thought and action one ends up with this incredible pressure for everyone to get on the same page (which is social conservatism all over), even if that page happens to involve doing things that are historically unusual like doing away with organized religion or whatever.  And I’m actually not even sure communism managed to prevent a weird sort of economic conservatism from developing as well.  From what I’ve read the USSR seems to have ended up with their own economic bigwigs who ostensibly deserved special consideration in terms of the distribution of goods and who ended up being quite cozy with the government, etc.  I don’t know, maybe overall they still had a greater concern for generating a just and humane distribution of goods than one sees in places like the US, where many people don’t even like to talk about it, let alone think about it, but I suspect they had at least some of the same type of elite status quo economic conservatism going on albeit in an unusual non-market formulation and with different people doing all the talking.

I think all of these elements of communism put it firmly at odds with liberal and humanist values.  So to state the obvious, unlike conservatives, I don’t feel at all that communism represented some type of ultimate expression of the liberal humanist ethos.  Not even close.

However, let me consider if there was anything at all I liked or at least didn’t particularly mind about communism in terms of either theory or practice just as a little case study for the conservative idea that liberals tend to be soft on communism.

Well, in terms of social philosophy, I suppose I don’t really mind the egalitarian and socialist ethos that was expressed in official communist ideology.  In fact, I tend to agree with that bit.  I think one does have to keep one eye on distributional concerns and I don’t think simply having a market system ensures everyone will be just fine.  Now I never really understood or thought very much of Marxian economics as a scientific theory but I have to say I did find it somewhat interesting simply because it looked at economic relationships with different value premises than one typically finds in discussions of neoclassical economics, which was rather refreshing and thought provoking.  Of course, I think one can discuss different value premises in the context of neoclassical economics, as well.  But let’s face it, we usually don’t.  Well, liberals do, but try discussing some of the usually unexpressed value judgements implicit in common presentations of neoclassical economic theory with a conservative some time and see what happens.  Then I suppose I also agree with communists’ assessment of religion, not in the sense of using non-democratic means to stifle it obviously but in terms of their overall intellectual attitude toward religion.  I mean, let’s face it, religion does function in many ways as the opiate of the masses.  And not just of the masses.  So I think they were right on that one.

Now I guess that for most economic conservatives in the US I’ve just declared myself a big old commie because I think the main problem most economic conservatives in this country had with communism was not its anti-democratic nature but the fact that it expressed a socialist ethos.  Indeed, it’s become rather obvious recently that many conservatives are pretty suspicious of democratic government themselves albeit for different reasons of course.  No, I think conservatives’ main beef with the communists was that the communists did not agree with them that the primary role of a political system is making a small economic elite of Special Worthies happy and keeping working people in line but were instead interested in raising the economic welfare of the entire society in a more or less equitable fashion.  (Well, I think many of the early communists were interested in that, anyway.  As I said before, I’m not so sure about the later ones.)  In other words, the big crime of the communists in the eyes of most economic conservatives was not that they were anti-democratic but that they did not accept the market definition of economic and social justice, and that’s the type of thing that I think gives economic conservatives nightmares.

In contrast, social conservatives in this country are all about religion so I suppose I don’t need to say much more about how social conservatives felt about communism and why.  Again, I think the big crime of communists for social conservatives was not their anti-democractic nature but the fact that they were atheists.  Of course, I’m sure they secretly applauded certain other elements of communism, such as the persecution of sexual minorities and things like that, but the main issue for social conservatives in this country is usually their ability to force other people to follow their religious precepts and I’m not sure they thought they would be able to do much of that under the old communist regimes.

Then in terms of history rather than social philosophy I suppose it may indeed be the case that I have a bit of a soft spot for the old USSR.  Not that I’m a big fan by any means.  As I hope I’ve already made clear, I understand they were fundamentally foes of the liberal humanist ethos so, you know, good riddance.  However, at the same time, I feel I understand how they got there.  That is, I suppose I understand why they might have felt the need for a revolution, and I suppose fighting a violent revolution against an entrenched social and economic elite and then fending off all the inevitable hostility from conservative forces in other countries didn’t exactly make for a sunny and optimistic disposition.

And, of course, I would like to add that I also appreciate the USSR’s role in taking down old Adolf and his posse of conservative bully boys.  It was obviously a horrible, horrible time in human history, I’m really glad I managed to miss it all, but there is something rather satisfying to me about how it all played out.  Here we had these great uber-conservative proponents of brute force, violence, cruelty, and intimidation knocking heads together and kicking down doors all across Europe until they got to the end of the block and finally kicked in the wrong door: the door to a society that not only didn’t see eye to eye with their social philosophy but that was even more brutal, violent, and determined to succeed at any cost than they were.  And we all know what happened after that.  Yes, they basically had their own assess (excuse me) kicked right the way back across Europe and their psychotic King Rat had the door to his own underground hiding hole kicked in.  You know, a Hollywood scriptwriter couldn’t have come up with this stuff.  Of course, I’m not sure the USSR was up to the task because of Joe Stalin and his thuggish henchmen or in spite of them, but they were running the show at the time and usually those running the show get at least some credit for any good things that happen on their watch so why should this case be any different?  Anyway, one thing’s for sure: you have to admire the sacrifice and determination of the common man and woman who managed to pull it off.  I know we played a role in ending the war as well, but I think rather a smaller role than we often like to take credit for.  And, yes, of course I realize the people of Eastern Europe weren’t exactly overjoyed at the ensuing decades of foreign communist domination but come on, it had to have been better than what they would have seen under the fascists with their open adulation of aggressive warfare, their racism, and their murder factories.  My thinking is were it not for the USSR the world could very easily have become a much, much uglier place than it is now, so no matter what else you might think about them you have to at least give them credit for that.

Finally, let me conclude by saying I personally find what happened after the fall of the USSR to be a little tragic.  You know, like many liberals, I guess I wish the place could have had some type of liberal democratic political and intellectual transformation while holding true to its historical socialist ethos.  I think it would have been interesting at the least and potentially instructive.  Instead, some of the countries involved seem to me to have gone into a sort of intellectual and cultural free fall.  Russia, in particular, seems to have devolved into a sort of third rate conservative market state with an ex-KGB strongman presiding behind the scenes over a motley parade of billionaires, oligarchs, organized crime syndicates, the Orthodox Church, all manner of xenophobic, homophobic, and racist social conservative skinheads (and mayors), a horde of unemployed poor people, and everything else one naturally expects to find in such a place.  I think at this point Russia should probably just apologize to the old revolutionaries who gave up the ghost trying to make their society a better place.  You know, sorry guys, we gave it a shot, but in the end we gave it all up for a quick ruble. Something like that.  I don’t know, sometimes I think they should just bring back the Tsar and get it over with.

Yes, it’s a funny world.  As a liberal and humanist, I feel I have precious little in common with the old time communists and indeed I seem to see rather more parallels between communism and modern conservatism than between communism and modern liberalism.  Yet I see how, for conservatives, I probably seem to have a great deal in common with communists.  So which is it, really?  Well, I don’t know.  I suppose it depends what you’re looking at.  Let’s just say whatever you like and leave it at that.