Or else. (That’s an empty threat, in case you shivered in fear when reading it.)
Because I went to an excellent high school, a large public high school with terrific (union) teachers, my classmates and I were assigned an interesting pamphlet for some history or social studies course. Most of us had heard of it — Marx and Engels 1848 Communist Manifesto.
And, yes, those two guys captured my heart and mind. What they proposed as an ideal society in which there would be no poor workers enslaved by wealthy capitalists, well, it sounded quite utopian, and who at the angsty age of 16 doesn’t yearn for a utopia?
But since my family and my friends’ families belonged to what Marx described as the exploitative bourgeoisie, i.e., the middle class, I wasn’t entirely ready to take up arms on behalf of the class struggle. I liked being middle class. Still do. But some of the ideas did roll around in my brain for a couple of days.
After which I gave up being a communist, primarily because I thought it failed to take into account the full complexity of human nature.
The pamphlet was full of grand ideas which resounded like mighty thunderclaps over a drought-ridden land, but were followed by no rain. Moreover, by the time I read it, it had been more than a century since The Communist Manifesto had been published but there still was no evidence the “workers” had produced anything like Marxist communism anywhere.
Russia, of course, actually proved how Marxist idealism would be strangled by human nature, i.e., dictatorship not of the proletariat (whatever that meant) but of a series of individual men each of whom believed he deserved power because he was the only smart guy in the room. If his best friends disagreed, well, they disappeared, one way or the other.
The spread of Russian “communism” to Eastern Europe wasn’t a natural workers’ ascension, either; it was a Russian occupation that replaced Nazi occupation by slapping the word “communism” on the whole business and retaining the Gestapo in the form of secret police agencies like the Stasi.
Ō
A complacent wallflower/nerd for most of my teens, I didn’t achieve my first real boyfriend until my senior year. He was a Marxist, but a darling guy with a sense of humor who did not work terribly hard to indoctrinate me.
Once, though, when he was extolling the workers’ paradise of Eastern Europe, I was struck by a sharp thought. “But there’s that wall separating East and West Berlin. If East Germany is such a paradise, why are the people who are trying to escape always going from east to west?” To his credit, he responded, “That’s a good point. I’ll have to study the situation.”
ø
OK, that was back then, when I was a teenager. Now, though, I’ve learned much more about how sociopathic, bloodthirsty and hypocritical were these champions of the Workers.
Lenin and Trotsky considered themselves to be brilliant journalists and revolutionary theorists. (Indeed, Trotsky’s cv cited his profession as “revolutionary.”) I’ll give them this: unlike Stalin, murdering comrades was not their prime activity. Liquidation was sort of an unpleasant last resort.
But what I found most ridiculous about these guys was their background. These “workers of the world” both came from upper middle class, i.e., bourgeois, families. That wouldn’t have been so tasteless if they’d gone out into the fields and broke their backs harvesting crops with the peasants but, no: since they didn’t make much money as journalists, until the colossal scam called the Revolution they lived off their well-to-do families. In effect, they were slackers who sat in their parents’ basements playing video games, while their mommies brought them their meals and did their laundry. Metaphorically.
Actually, no. What they did was perpetually leave their beloved Mother Russia for self-imposed exile, settling for long periods in deprived places like Paris, Switzerland, Norway, et al., where they wrote dense political tracts, along with letters to well-off family and friends, asking for money.
Read these excerpts from a historical biography by Victor Sebestyen, which gave me facts to support my belief that the foundation of communism was irreparably rotten balsa wood nailed together by egotists who fancied themselves as radical and brilliant intellectuals.
‘Yes we steal…But we steal what has already been stolen.’ — Lenin, London, May 1907
Lenin: ‘In order to take power every means must be used.’ Angelica Balabanova: ‘What…even dishonest ones?’ Lenin: ‘Everything that is done in the interests of the proletarian cause is honest.’ — Conversation in London, May 1907
…
The Party couldn’t rely entirely on donations from millionaire magnates — Russian oligarchs of a bygone age — to finance the Revolution. Money had to be found in other ways and Lenin built what was in effect a criminal gang to steal on the Party’s behalf…He didn’t directly order any of the raids himself and he called them, in an echo of Marx, ‘expropriations’, but whatever the euphemism he chose, this was banditry. Lenin appointed Leonid Krasin head of the ‘technical committee’. Krasin chose as his chief ‘fixer’ and right-hand man Stalin, who planned and took part in a number of ‘expros’, all within the Russian empire. The various gangs they employed robbed banks, stole a large sum in cash and gold from the safe aboard the steamship Nicholas I moored in Baku harbour and attacked post offices and state railway tickets offices.
The USSR did not fall so much as it morphed into what we now call Russia. The name of the country may have changed but the character of the Russian leader hasn’t.