Thoughts on Communism
It occurred to me while reading an article on the failure of Marxism that there is something of a contradiction with regards to how capitalist countries think about, and reacted to, communism.
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If you live in a capitalist country you are assured that, as an alternative economic system, communism is an abject failure. You probably associate it with images of impoverished folk queuing to get their hands on basic goods like food, of weird management systems overproducing some goods while underproducing others all in the name of meeting some target imposed from on high, and other dubious activities. If that is the case you would naturally assume that capitalist countries would be pretty relaxed about other countries experimenting with communism. After all, this experiment would inevitably lead to economic collapse (of course this would happen, Communism can only ever fail) and then the capitalists could sweep in and take advantage of the situation by asset-stripping the country and herding the proles into the kind of working environments that would be considered exploitative in more prosperous countries. Yep, communism, that disastrous economic system, should really have been regarded as a great wealth-making opportunity.
So were capitalist countries relaxed about communism, just sitting back and waiting for its inevitable failure and then taking opportunity of the outcome?
Um, no.
Instead we had the Cold War. We had the war in Vietnam. We had the McCarthy witch hunts. We had endless propaganda about the RED MENACE!! The RUSSIAN BEAR!!!! Such things were not the reaction of countries utterly assured of the correctness of their way of life and the dismal failure of communism. No, it was more like how you would react if you feared your way of life was threatened because you thought communism would succeed, and succeed spectacularly.
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According to the BBC documentary Marx and Marxism, “the conventional wisdom has it that this world revolution never materialised and therefore Marx was wrong. But in fact during the years following World War One Marx’s Marx’s predictions came within a hair’s breadth of succeeding. Even Britain, the centre of stability, was closer to revolution than at any time this century...The proletariat looked for a time as though it would become the leading class of the 20th century. Where the Marxist movements went wrong was in misjudging the resilience of capitalism and the strength of the State. It was a costly mistake. And as the tide of revolution in Europe began to ebb, it left the Russian revolution isolated and exposed….it was encircled by Czarist troops backed by the armies of 17 nations. These were the soldiers, workers and peasants who fought to hold back the combined forces of the capitalist countries in their crusade against what Churchill called “The nameless beast of Communism”’.
Would communism have failed anyway without capitalism so ruthlessly attacking it? I dunno, maybe.
References
“Marx and Marxism”- BBC documentary