The Misdirected Energies of Mr. Lenin’s Democracy

They were freedom fighters, at a time when the whole world was absorbed into the American economic empire. They were romanticized, and championed. Even today, one of their own, the Argentinian Ernesto Guevarra, is still hailed as a popular icon. So how could they fail? Where did they go wrong? With this, I present the second installment of my series, “Searching for Democracy”

Everywhere in the world, the “American model” of democracy has failed, is failing, or has been recovered and is preparing, yet again, to fail. There’s nothing wrong with the ideals, really. The United States–that upstart colony-group turned nation–was itself full of dreams and ideals, and dreamers and idealists. They thought to themselves that wow, they had a working model of democracy. They thought that they really were a nation of the world.

In Washington, however, and the major cities of the North, they knew better. Big party bosses controlled the Capitol and the White House. The vote was not universal. A large majority of the members of Congress were part of the old or new landed aristocracy. Even after generations of political and social reform, the vote for President is still not by direct popular representation. It is the delegates within states who vote for the new leader, though it is the people who vote which delegates get to vote. And, as is the issue now in the Democratic primaries, there is still the “superdelegate privilege” given to a select few who are not bound by the popular vote to cast their choice.

So, like a joke told and retold, embellished and ad-libbed, the Latin Americans, the Southeast Asians, and the Africans all jumped on the “American democracy bandwagon”. They tweaked the model, improvising it to fit their cultures, temperaments and experience. They made laws and constitutions according to what they “remembered” of the American model, not realizing that the American model itself, in practice, was actually an elected monarchy. They all tripped into the “monarchic” line: the Latin Americans fell to caudillos, the Southeast Asians to the barons and “sultans”, and the Africans to their genocidal military despots.

 

The Communists claimed they had the better answer: from Russia, to China to Cuba, they claimed that they were the real democracies. To this day, North Korea proudly bore the title of a democratic republic, as did Congo, and North Vietnam (in its time), as well as a slew of other semi-socialist or socialist states. The Chinese Communists even called China a “People’s Republic.” The Communists championed the cause of liberty and equality. Their fighters were acclaimed as “freedom’s heroes.” Fidel Castro, the quintessential “Communist of the Third World” was cheered by the crowd in Havana, and then applauded by the international community. Everywhere, the Communists swayed the youth, the laborers, and even farmers. Within decades, even the “Western democracies”, though professing to abhor the Marxist doctrine, tried to initiate their own “social engineering.”

And it all collapsed. One way or another, Communism became synonymous with state terrorism, totalitarianism, and brainwashing. Trying to style world utopias, they gripped the imagination of writers and scholars and inspired a telling about the modern dystopias –devoid of individual reasoning, freedom, and humanity. From the Soviet Union, to China, to Cuba it was the same: whole industries abandoned, wholesale starvation, and anarchy. The people that the Communists championed themselves took to protest: in Tiananmen Square, in Eastern Europe. Even the Soviet Union, the Communists’ “genesis project” for the world, shook off the commissars and embraced Western capitalism again.

What went wrong? They knew the West was wrong, wasn’t it? The West promoted inequality, and consequently the rule of the rich. The West promoted the oligopoly of the oil, of the market, and of morals. It sponsored imperialism, and encouraged dictatorships. The Communists were none of these. The capitalist America focused on the few; they took on the whole. How could they have failed? Were they the ones wrong? For, there can’t be to wrongs, can there?

 

America and her adherents used Communist collapse to prove that they, and not the latter, had the right idea. The Communists, smarting from their defeats, point to treachery within the ranks: Stalin corrupted the Socialist cause, Deng Xiaoping simply gave in to the American “love of money”, and Gorbachev practically gave the West the key to Russia. They weren’t loyal enough to the Communist cause. They didn’t adhere to the correct formula. They were weak. Anything but wrong.

It would come as a surprise that Communism has medieval roots. Scholars and Church doctors were animated by a thought based on equality, the disappearance of castes or classes, the end to discrimination, and the common work for the common good. As late as the 16^th century, the Jesuits had established such a Communistic society in Paraguay; the Reducciones. Saint Thomas More then did not inspire the socialist ideals with the work Utopia, but was inspired himself by a philosophy as old as Ancient Greece itself. Yet, we can’t piece together the mistakes of modern Communism by tracing its ancient, even Christian, origins. We would merely underline the causes; but not the flaws of the structure itself.

Karl Marx read little about the Middle Ages, or the writings of the Church scholars. He was more animated with the French Revolution, and its violent character. I doubt he knew the debates among Greek scholars of Man’s natural state. He probably knew of the works of the German “Statist” philosophers, and the Enlightenment thinkers of France. Marx did not make a manual to build, but to destroy. Communism was actually, his “anti-thesis” to what was happening in his time. Therefore, the best path to knowing what Communism is is to discover what it isn’t.

 

In the beginning was the Aristocracy. Marx had nothing but contempt for the upper class, which he wanted exterminated. A persistent grievance among the liberal reformers–as far back as ancient times–the nobility within a nation often monopolized power, influence and wealth. In the times of the Roman Republic, the aristocratic-dominated Senate blocked the bills sponsored by the plebeian tribunes, if it diminished their power. Peasants, laborers and farmers in the Middle Ages were subject to high taxation to fund for their lords’ wars abroad, and for their king. The aristocracy’s power lay first, in blood, in land, and in wealth, though the latter alone did not affirm one’s status. Those who had only that were looked down on, and seen as merely an upstart–nouveau riche.

While drafting the modern Communist manual, however, Marx was keenly aware of a new class of people that had come and won the power that was once held alone by this aristocracy. They earned the large amount of his hatred. The bourgeois were, in fact, the nouveau riche that the aristocracy belittled. Working their way from poverty, and accumulating power and wealth through mercantile trade or the pursuit of professions–a dedicated skill or service–they soon began to challenge the power of the nobles (ironically, some of the most virulent bourgeois writers had nobles as patrons). The Jacobin and Girondist lawyers led the French Revolution. Robespierre, the monster of the Reign of Terror, was a lawyer. The students and the intellectuals who led the explosive revolutions of 1830 and 1848 belonged to the bourgeois. Little by little, as land was confiscated and redistributed, and aristocrats were handed to the mercy of the guillotine, and as institutions began to promote people by their merits rather than blood ties, the old gentry, or aristocracy began to die. The nobility remained proud of their traditions, but most became impoverished themselves. Some who did not joined the new “elite” of the bourgeois–who filled the power vacuum.

Under them, a new economic system flourished. Capitalism. It affirmed the status of the higher middle class (now upper class) in society. The new system encouraged the rise through the ranks via accumulation of wealth. Had the world’s people then been in equal ground of each other, it would have then represented equal opportunity. But in a system of inequality, the plight of the oppressed became more acute. The capitalists invented new instruments for industry: mass production, communication and transportation. To the haves, this meant an improved quality of living. To the have-nots, the laborers, this meant inhumane conditions in the factories, and the mines. They were no better than the farmer, who was in constant fear of his land being confiscated by the State in favor of the rich, or to build roads and industry. This was a new “at the expense of” system. It was, to many who were impoverished, just another form of slave labor.

 

And even as the Christian Church and other groups began to clamor and win social reform, particularly in labor conditions, Capitalism began to take on an imperialistic color. Commerce for new products thrived in Europe–but the resources were found from semi-feudal systems set up by the colonizers in Asia and Africa. Their repressive, often barbaric, industries were so efficient, that when they left, the natives adopted the same system to their people.

However, it was the United States, far from Marx’s sight, who championed the cause of capitalist imperialism. They adopted the European use of African slave laborers, and then later used migrant Chinese and Japanese as well. In pursuit of the “American dream”, their numbers moved westward, eventually waging wars and confiscating the ancestral lands of the natives, the latter being “humanely herded” to smaller, humiliating reservations as “apt compensation.” They styled themselves Americans, and their farmers and plantation owners exploded to the world, engineering the overthrow of natives in Hawaii and the revolt in Texas, monopolizing local industries and businesses in newly “liberated” Spanish colonies, particularly Cuba and the Philippines (the latter was even colonized), and joining the Europeans in carving up a dying Manchu China.

In pursuit of this same “American dream”, the Americans continued to maintain a sort of political-economic imperialism all over the world. In the decades after the Second World War, the CIA conducted missions to overthrow leaders that planned to expel American investors, or nationalize their industries. American leaders made virtual client states, courting rebels and dictators who promised to serve American interests, even at the expense of local ones. Globalization was championed by the United States, though almost all the Third World countries opposed it. How could these nations compete against the world’s top producer and consumer?

The mistake, then, of calling the Communist bluff, is to think that the American alternative is any better. Only Americans benefit from the American system.

 

Marx merely drafted the modern Communist manual, with the thought of snuffing out the bourgeois, the aristocracy, and capitalism. It was Lenin who perfected this democratic model, directing his energies at abolishing all forms of inequality, particularly those of America. Modern Communism was a reaction to the flawed systems of that time. And its opposition to them defined it. That was its tragic flaw. When a movement, or a force defines itself in opposition to another, there is little space left for independent identity. When the object of hatred disappears, this same force begins to float unsteadily, maybe even fracture. This is what happened to Sun Yat-Sen’s revolution, whose primary aim was to oust the Manchus. When the latter was expelled, the country splintered into different warring factions.

The tragedy began to unfold: Lenin began to apply the Marxist model in Russia. He gave it some “personal touches”, but stayed true to the doctrines. The new Soviet state seized private property; it banned Western music, books and thought; it banned independent thought. He utilized the secret police, the Cheka, to spy on dissident activities, or even the slightest protest against the government. They nationalized the industries, and expelled the foreigners. The State regulated everything, from distribution of food, to all forms of culture, always exhorting the glory of the Party. Lenin left the control of the Party to the intelligentsia—they will not be members by popular representation, but for collective welfare. Putting it more aptly, he said, “if you give power to the people, what are they going to do with it?”

The West erroneously infers that because power was centered on the State, generally, it was just another oligarchy, with the Party leaders enriching themselves from the wealth of the people. However, this was not the case, especially during idealistic times (particularly in Cuba). The people, as a whole worked to produce for the nation as a whole, and their products are surrendered to the State, which, acting in turn, would “compensate them” through equal distribution of welfare, education, and most importantly, food. The State, ideally, served as a conduit for the people.

 

The Communists accomplished what they set out to do: eliminate all forms of inequality, and transform the nation to a community working to serve its collective needs. Marx’s blueprint didn’t go beyond that. By that time, the Communist system would have worked, and the world would be won over at the sight of such success. It didn’t work. Production had lessened. Now what? Lenin and then Stalin tried to concentrate the individual farms into larger communes, making them virtual agrarian factories. The harsh realities of economics, however, began to bear down on them. Not every land was a fertile field of crop, and not every time was harvest time. Distribution had become a logistical nightmare. And, faced with the same scarce portions provided by the State, for food and basic necessities, farmers began to desert, or work less. Less food was produced. People began to starve.

They also scared away the world’s admiration through their repression of independent, Western thought. It seemed as if the State was regulating free will, and rendering it inexistent. Everything had been torn down, accused of being a “bourgeois concept”. They were running the nation as if it was a giant factory, with its workers acting as if automatons. Communism had begun to become akin with slave-labor despotism, except fed with ideological propaganda. Human dignity had become a “bourgeois concept”.

The West focused on Marx’s denunciation of enrichment. And yes, there is nothing wrong with private enrichment. Pope Leo XIII, in his encyclical Rerum Novarum, exhorted the workers, and explained that the accumulation of private property was as natural to Man as an animal’s search for a habitat. It is integral to his nature, and a natural product of his interaction with his community. However, there are limits to how much one is to seek for enrichment. Wealth must not be the end, but only the means to a better quality of life. Christian teachings warn of the sin of Greed, the excessive desire to acquire material pleasures.

 

The most enduring, and celebrated Communism is the one in Cuba. Fidel Castro did not lead his people to Stalinist purges, or Maoist Cultural Nightmares, though, like all Communist states (and even their counterparts in Americanist democracies) he killed hundreds of dissidents and imprisoned political enemies, earning the condemnation of Amnesty International. The Cubans participated in “liberation wars” in Africa, and Latin America. Castro earned a seat in the Non-Aligned Movement, and the respect of major Third World countries. He made good with his promise, and gave the Cubans health care and free education. But economically, Cuba was in shambles. For all his efforts, and for all his monitoring, the production of crops, from sugar to coffee, was down. It was so bad, that the Soviet Union himself warned to no longer dabble in his “agrarian experiments” to get the production high. More people rebelled, and more people were killed. They needed to import food, but in exchange for what? They had no money. They could barely feed the people.

Communism, the Marxian Democracy, failed. The Soviet Union collapsed, and with it, its Eastern satellites. Cuba, China and other Communist states were forced to open their doors to American capitalism, in the form of tourism, foreign markets, etc. Castro, however, is right that the American dream is one where the corporations control his country. He, and the other Communists, would rather suffer starvation than enslavement.

 

There is the final tragedy: there are two wrongs. The American monarchist-capitalist democracy failed in design, and the Marxist-Leninist socialist-democracy failed in methodology. And the world has suffered, and is continuing to suffer, for entire generations under these ideologies. However, the pursuit of real democracy has not ended here; there is a third form of democracy–akin to Communism but adopting none of its more radical principles. It also encourages a form of enrichment, but not the American capitalist one. To this, we shall now turn.