The Communist Program—and Its Problems
Did you know?
Sixty-four percent of Americans agree with Marx’s statement of the basic principle of communism
Twenty-five percent of Millennials have a favorable view of Lenin
The Communist Manifesto calls for the “abolition of the distinction between town and country”
“Communism wasn’t responsible for any deaths. Crappy leaders were.”
A frustrated James Kirchick of the liberal Daily Beast jotted down those words after hearing them from a friend. Kirchick knows better. He takes liberals to task for this attitude, which pervades the political Left. He asked his readers, “How many times have you heard some formulation of this viewpoint? ‘Communism is an excellent idea in theory, it just hasn’t worked in practice.’ I wish that was the sort of sentiment I only remembered from college dorm room bull sessions.”
Kirchick responded, “OK. How many more millions of people have to die before we get it right?”1
The notion that communist ideology is not responsible for the well over a hundred million deaths perpetrated by communist regimes has long been (as Kirchick says) “de rigeur among a broad segment of the intellectual elite.” What’s worse, it is gaining currency among Millennials and the American population as a whole—the population of the nation that won the Cold War and ought to know better.
In an October 2016 survey, only 37 percent of Millennials said they had a very unfavorable view of communism; 25 percent had a favorable view of Vladimir Lenin. One in five first-time voters (aged sixteen to twenty) said they would vote for a communist. And this delusional attitude isn’t exclusive to dopy Millennials. Among Americans as a whole, 64 percent agreed with the basic principle of communism, as Marx put it in The Communist Manifesto: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”2
These findings are no surprise to those of us who have watched public opinion in recent decades. If I had a dollar for every nice thing some dummy told me about communism, I’d be one filthy-rich capitalist.
Again and again, you hear assertions along these lines:
Communism is a good idea.
The Communist Manifesto is a pretty good book.
Communists favor helping their fellow man. That’s not a bad thing.
The communists’ goals were positive. What’s wrong with taking money from the rich and sharing it with the poor?
I could start a lucrative business of baloney bumper stickers touting the bogus virtues of Marxism-Leninism. I’d be one fat Wall Street one-percenter.
“What do you have against Karl Marx, dude?” an irritated liberal whined to me in college one day in November 1989—just as the Berlin Wall, that ultimate monument to Marx, built not far from the lousy university where he honed his craft, was being torn down. “Marx was just a little old man with a long beard sitting in a library writing books about philosophy.”
Again and again, we’re told that communist philosophy was never the problem. No, it was nasty leaders like Joe Stalin who have given communism a bad name. Stalin, you see, was an aberration. As were, presumably, Lenin, Trotsky, Latsis, Dzerzhinsky, Beria, Bulganin, Khrushchev, Voroshilov, Malenkov, Mikoyan, Brezhnev, Andropov, Chernenko, Chebrikov, Ulbricht, Ceausescu, Tito, Hoxha, Dimitrov, Zhivkov, Mao, Pol Pot, Ho Chi Minh, Mengistu Mariam, Kim Il-Sung, Kim Jong Il, Kim Jong Un, Fidel, Raúl, and Che, not to mention the countess thousands of liquidators and inquisitors in the NKVD, the GRU, the KGB, the Red Guard, the Stasi, the SB, the AVH, the Securitate, the Khmer Rouge, the Sandinistas, the Sendero Luminoso, and on and on and on. That’s a lot of aberrations.
The Devil Is in the Details
The Communist Manifesto begins, “A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. . . .” And why shouldn’t a holy alliance have wanted to drive out this very unholy spirit? What else do you do with a demon but exorcise it?
You would think at least one commie, somewhere along the line, would have gotten it right. Why such ugly results if the theory is so pretty? Can’t these geniuses read?
Kirchick quotes Marion Smith, director of the vital Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation: “It is perhaps one of the biggest lies that exist in our culture today that the deadliest ideology in history is somehow not responsible for the regimes that it brought to life and the deaths that it caused. Ideas have consequences and there has never been a communist regime that did not end up killing its own people as a goal.”
From the outset Karl Marx conceded, in The Communist Manifesto no less, that despotism would be necessary to implement his ideology. To wit: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and a long line of communism’s leading lights, implementers, practitioners, advocates, flag-wavers, cheerleaders, plus gaggles of theorists, teachers, and tenured radicals in American universities—far beyond just a handful of “crappy leaders”—understood and candidly admitted that violence would be necessary to reach the communist utopia.
And how could it not be? The Communist Manifesto said that, “Communism abolishes eternal truths, it abolishes all religion, and all morality.”3 Marx and Engels envisioned a new morality without God, one based on “the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.”4 The things that communism promises are entirely unnatural, completely contrary to what human beings had believed before, and even to their very humanity itself. It was intended to transform human nature so completely, and so committed to undermining everything from natural law to Biblical law to common sense and decency, that the ideology could never have been implemented without killing people. Lots and lots of people.
A Material Guy
“[Marx] thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism: man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions, and it is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.”—Pope Benedict XVI8
An Ideal, a Program, and a Regime
Richard Pipes, Harvard professor emeritus of Soviet history, writes insightfully and authoritatively in his indispensable Communism: A History that the word “communism” in essence refers to three related but distinct phenomena: an ideal, a program, and a regime set up to realize the ideal.5
The “ideal” of communism is equality in its most extreme form. The program is based on what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote in their 1848 Communist Manifesto. The regime is the global horror-show unleashed upon millions of innocents who simply wanted to live in peace, beginning with the regime of the ghastly Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, angry architect of “Marxism-Leninism,” the totalitarian ideology that became the dominant strand of communism across the world in the twentieth century.
To get the gist of the communist program, as Marx himself laid it out, does not require years of scouring dusty old volumes in stacks at university libraries. The Communist Manifesto, Marx’s most famous single expression of his philosophy, is very brief and very inexpensive—free, in fact, at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/.
But for a more thorough grasp of the world’s deadliest philosophy, you have to understand Marx’s ideas on the so-called “dialectic” of history—explained at great length in Das Kapital (Capital), his magnum opus. As a student at the University of Berlin, Marx had learned from the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel that history is a series of struggles between opposing forces, with each successive struggle unfolding on a progressively higher plane than the one that preceded it. Ultimately, according to Hegel, the truth is only revealed as the result of a dialectical unfolding in history. As one Hegel scholar wrote, this “dialectical unfolding ends in the revelation of God.”6
Hegel’s was an “ideational dialectic.” But Marx, unlike Hegel, was not any kind of Christian.7 He was an atheist and a materialist, and the “dialectic” he had in mind in was not on Hegel’s “ideational plane.” It was based on economics and classes—the material things that were the framework of what Marx believed in. For Marxist philosophy, the be-all and end-all was economic and material. It was a dialectical materialism.
Marx was highly critical of the industrialization of the nineteenth century, which indisputably had its abuses, excesses, and cruelties. And Marx was a skilled complainer. He could describe wretchedness as movingly as anyone. Describing misery, however, is much different from diagnosing a proper response to it. And Karl Marx was the last person for coming up with good solutions. Marx envisioned an apocalyptic revolution leading to the overthrow of capitalism by the impoverished working class, the common people, the masses—the so-called “proletariat.” The stage in the revolutionary process immediately following this overthrow would be “the dictatorship of the proletariat.” But that dictatorship would be only a way station on the road to the ultimate utopia: a “classless society.” The state would simply die out; it would wither away.
Soviet-Era Humor
“A Brit, a Frenchman, and a Russian are viewing a painting of Adam and Eve frolicking in the Garden of Eden. ‘Look at their reserve, their calm,’ muses the Brit. ‘They must be British.’
“‘Nonsense,’ the Frenchman disagrees. ‘They’re naked, and so beautiful. Clearly they are French.’
“‘No clothes, no shelter,’ the Russian points out, ‘they have only an apple to eat, and they’re being told this is paradise. They are Russian.’”11
In a classless society there would be no more economic inequality, no more class antagonisms, no more conflict. All would be peace and harmony. Of course, in order for this utopia to come into being, socialism would need to sweep the planet. It had to be worldwide. It would need to spread across the globe. The whole thing was the ultimate utopian pipedream.
What were the specifics for getting there? Were there any? Where were the detailed directions? The road map? The blueprint?
Marx grandiosely exclaimed that “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”9 Few ideologies, or ideologues, have been so self-boastful.
Marx fantasized, “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me 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, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”10
It would be, according to Marx, a “leap from slavery into freedom; from darkness into light.”12
This was no small project, and thus it would require no small changes. As a matter of fact, it would require the transformation of human nature itself. In The German Ideology, Marx called for not merely “the production on a mass scale of this communist consciousness” but “the alteration of men on a mass scale.” This project is totalitarian in its scope. It envisions a complete overthrow of human nature as we know it. Marx explained that the communist “revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrowing it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew.”
Engels also preached a gospel of fundamental transformation (to paraphrase Barack Obama). In his Dialectics of Nature Engels called for “the alteration of nature by men” (his emphasis) as “the most essential and immediate basis of human thought.”13
The success of communism naturally depends on altering human nature because few things are more inherent in human nature than the ownership of property. This basic human right is as ancient as the Ten Commandments, where God ordained that “Thou shall not steal.” The commandment implicitly acknowledges that persons have possessions and that they have an inherent right to that property—so it is thus not permissible for others to take it away from them.
But Marx and Engels weren’t about to admit the right to private property that we find even in the Bible.
So what exactly was this “proletariat” that would be so refined by the communist revolution that it would be suited to “found society anew”? Engels defined communism as “the doctrine of the conditions of the liberation of the proletariat” and the proletariat as “that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor.”14
Marx viewed the proletariat as pitiable but also as the source of salvation—a redeemer class. As Martin Malia explains it, this victim-redeemer class was charged with a higher mission precisely because it was the most exploited and hence most dehumanized class in society. Marx thus defined the proletariat not as the body of factory workers but as the class destined to liberate the species from social inequality. Marx’s revolution would commence once this victimized proletariat achieved sufficient “consciousness” of its dehumanized plight and emancipatory mission.16 And of course, the intellectuals—Marx and his university pals—were the anointed ones tasked with raising the consciousness of the unenlightened. It was by the stripes of these chastised people that humanity would be healed.
Property Is Theft
“Under private property. . . . Each tries to establish over the other an alien power, so as thereby to find satisfaction of his own selfish need. The increase in the quantity of objects is therefore accompanied by an extension of the realm of the alien powers to which man is subjected, and every new product represents a new potentiality of mutual swindling and mutual plundering.” —Karl Marx, Human Requirements and Division of Labour (1844)15
This is a crucial insight not only about Marxists-Leninists and cultural Marxists but also into the far Left generally. To this day, the radical Left never stops looking for a new class of victims, whether it be disgruntled workers, purportedly excluded ethnicities, or supposedly oppressed “sexual minorities” whose plight needs to be identified and their consciousness raised by a more enlightened intelligentsia. Go to the website of any modern communist publication at any time and you will find the comrades pushing and prodding and hoisting the latest group of downtrodden victims in (allegedly) desperate need of the assistance of the far Left. It is through these pitiful sufferers that redemption must be delivered.
All Proletarians Are Equal, but Some Proletarians Are Less Equal Than Others
The proletariat will redeem the world and usher in the communist utopia. But not necessarily all the proletariat. What Marx called the lumpenproletariat is identified in one of his myriad of memorable diatribes. This was an unseemly layer of working-class rabble, incapable of ever achieving proper class consciousness and thus essentially useless to the noble goals of the revolutionary struggle.
The word “lumpen” derives from the German for “rag” or “miscreant.” Marx described this smarmy caste in his The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. “Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin,” sniffed Marx, “alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème.” Here we see Marx’s tendency—shared by Vladimir Lenin as well—to debase and dehumanize entire types and groups of people. (Lenin called some groups of people “harmful insects.”) Marx rounded them up with his typewriter; Lenin and Stalin and boys would round them up with bayonets.
Abolishing the Present State of Things
Another hallmark of communism and the far Left in general, in addition to its serial adoption of new victim groups, is its hostility to reality as it actually exists. No institution, no tradition, no facet of nature—no matter how worthy, decent, or even absolutely necessary to human flourishing—is safe from the revolution. From the avowed communists in the German universities of the early twentieth century to the cultural Marxists at American universities in the twentieth century, the goal has been the abolition of the realities that underpin society as it actually exists.
Property Is Slavery
“The slave frees himself when, of all the relations of private property, he abolishes only the relation of slavery and thereby becomes a proletarian; the proletarian can free himself only by abolishing private property in general [emphasis original].” —Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism (1847)17
“Abolition” is a word that appears frequently in the writings of Marx and Lenin. As Marx wrote in the German Ideology, “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”18
Abolishes the present state of things. Those are significant words. This is why communism is a totalitarian ideology at its very root. Communists hate the very idea of permanent things. “To my mind,” wrote Engels, “the so-called ‘socialist society’ is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change.”19 You can see why communists like to refer to themselves as “progressives.”
The essential elements of human life and society that the communists want to eradicate are countless, but they start with the ownership of property, marriage and the family, religion and traditional morality. According to Marx: “the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”20 Needless to say, the unequivocal rejection of such a fundamental aspect of human experience violates the most basic rights of all peoples, acknowledged from the cave to the courthouse, from primitive tribes to the most sophisticated philosophers of our Judeo-Christian civilization. As Marx himself acknowledged, his views on property stood undeniably contrary to the “social and political order of things.”21 The Manifesto offered a ten-point program of specific policy recommendations.22 Here they are, in direct quotation:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of all property of emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. . . .
9. . . . gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. . . .23
Marx and Engels conceded that this program would require despotism. They prefaced their ten points by insisting: “Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads.”24
No kidding. Human beings were not going to give up their fundamental liberties—their natural rights—without some resistance. To take away everyone’s property, rightly and fairly earned, would require a terrible fight. The communists—from Lenin to Pol Pot to Hugo Chávez—would need all their guns and their Gulags.
And the communists’ work isn’t done once they have seized everyone’s property. Then they have to manage it. Communist economies are “command economies” or “centrally planned economies.” The hallmark of communist economies—in contrast to free-market capitalist economies—is command and control via a central planning bureau, agency, or council. This group is tasked with the goal of managing and directing the whole of a nation’s vast resources and means of production. The “Invisible Hand” of the free market is replaced by the omnipotent hand of the planning bureau. All major decisions regarding the resources used and the composition and distribution of the goods produced are dictated by the planning bureau.
This task, of course, would be hopelessly challenging for a small village. It is patently absurd to imagine that any bureaucracy could pull it off for a nation the size of the Soviet Union (which covered twelve time zones) or China (housing over one billion people) or for a “bloc” of countries comprising an entire region like Eastern Europe. Nonetheless, communist after communist—that is to say, one jaw-dropping economic ignoramus after another—has been undeterred, attacking this mission with glee.
Yuri Maltsev, who worked for the section of the Soviet planning bureau that set prices, recalls that his group had 328 staffers who were responsible for setting approximately twenty-three million prices in the USSR—for everything from potatoes and sausages to screws and cogs. They published a massive catalogue that contained this vast assemblage of information.25
Of course, as anyone with common sense knows, let alone a rationally thinking economist, no such catalogue could ever conceivably work. Just keeping it updated would be a pipedream. But the essential problem is that no group of individuals, unless they were literally omniscient, could begin to know the “right” price for each and every item. It was this problem that led Friedrich Hayek, the great Austrian School economist, to argue in his brilliant book The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, published in 1988, that central planning is inherently unworkable. Hayek observed that centrally planned economies can neither be efficient nor even continue to exist in the long term because they lack the massive volume of intricate, minute, and dispersed knowledge that the free market makes available by means of prices negotiated by millions of producers and consumers acting on their own independent knowledge.
A similar argument had been made earlier by Hayek’s Austrian School colleague, Ludwig von Mises, in his 1922 classic Socialism, which predicted the inevitable failure of communism. Free market capitalism, von Mises argued, constituted the only true economic democracy. The free market makes consumers sovereign. “Their buying and their abstention from buying decides who should own and run the plants and the farms,” he wrote. “They make poor people rich and rich people poor. They determine precisely what should be produced, in what quality, and in what quantities.” And these consumers are “merciless bosses, full of whims and fancies, changeable and unpredictable. For them nothing counts other than their own satisfaction. They do not care a whit for past merit and vested interests. . . . The consumers patronize those shops in which they can buy what they want at the cheapest price.”
Indeed they do. Consumers, which comprise the proletariat and everyone else, are sovereign in the free marketplace. They are the bosses. They are the dictators. Under communism just the opposite is true. There, the consumers—the vaunted “masses”—are not sovereign but captive to the planning bureau and the unelected apparatchiks and dictators. They have little power.
What von Mises wrote is easily confirmed by everyday observation on the part of anyone with common sense and eyes to see and ears to hear. Communist central planning is a blanket violation of common sense and the natural order of things. Sadly, there are people who seem not to be able to see the problems inherent in communism—including a lot of people who enjoy life in the dynamic free world graced by Amazon and Walmart, Target and Starbucks, Home Depot and Trader Joe’s. But to adapt Ronald Reagan quoting from Alexander Hamilton, those people are preparing themselves for a master—and they deserve one.26
The inevitable and utter failure of central planning is the cause of the abject poverty into which communists always drive their people. On top of the “fatal conceit” that bureaucrats will be able to manage the millions of pieces of information about every need and resource in an economy better than free individuals in a free market, there is also the problem of incentives. In the communist system, factories and farms are not owned by individual entrepreneurs but by government through collectives and state enterprises. And the whole point of the system is equality. So all workers—whether skilled or unskilled, industrious or lazy—are paid the same. Even the managers (there are no owners) of these collectives are paid the same, with no personal financial incentives or rewards for superior performance.
Everything to Lose
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
—the stirring call to arms at the end of The Communist Manifesto is more than a little ironic considering the millions of people who have been reduced to desperate poverty by communism (not to mention stripped of their human rights, and frequently murdered)
This no-incentive system, which you can see in a communist paradise such as Cuba to this very day, guarantees abysmal performance, whether at the level of the individual, the enterprise, or the national economy. Thus any communist economy is unable to respond to people’s needs and desires. So in Havana you’re one of the lucky ones if you’re driving a 1950s-model car. In communist countries there are always shortages and long lines for the necessities of life, from transportation to plumbing fixtures to toilet paper.
But communism is not just an abject economic failure everywhere it is tried. It is also a human rights disaster. Communists always end up violating human rights; their track record of persecution, imprisonment, torture, and murder is unrivaled in world history. It’s not just that they inevitably find themselves using the brutal force of the state in their vain attempt to break human nature on the wheel of their utopian dreams. It’s that they don’t believe in objective right and wrong in the first place. Communists reject the very idea of moral absolutes; they frankly declare themselves unbound by them.
The Devil Is in the Details
“All the biblical descriptions of hell and the pains of Dante’s Inferno are nothing in comparison with the tortures in Communist prisons,” stated Richard Wurmbrand in his international bestseller, Tortured for Christ. He recalled, “I have seen communists whose faces while torturing believers shone with rapturous joy. They cried out while torturing the Christians, ‘We are the devil!’” He remembered one torturer saying, “I thank God in whom I don’t believe, that I have lived to this hour when I can express all the evil in my heart.”
As Marx explained, “Law, morality, and religion are to him [the proletarian] so many bourgeois prejudices, behind which lurk in ambush so many bourgeois interests.”27 Under communism, all morality is subordinate to class interests. The collective stands superior to the individual. And the promised utopia justifies any violation of the rights of individuals and any breach of the moral law.
The inalienable rights claimed in the Declaration of Independence are alien to communism; they are antithetical to Marxist-Leninist thought. Bear in mind that in the Declaration Jefferson was borrowing from a Lockean tradition that also recognized property as a human right. The American founders believed that our rights to property, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were “self-evident”—and self-evidently bestowed upon us by our Creator. Thus the Declaration of Independence gives governments merely the duty to help “secure” rights that are already there—not the authority to create them in the first place, much less the right to take them away.
But communists don’t believe in a Creator. As Lenin said, “In what sense do we repudiate ethics and morality?. . . In the sense in which it was preached by the bourgeoisie, who derived ethics from God’s commandments. We, of course, say that we do not believe in God.”28
Forgetting Freedom
“[Marx’s] error lay deeper. He forgot that man always remains man. He forgot man and he forgot man’s freedom.” —Pope Benedict XVI29
Tragically, the American Founders’ understanding of liberty and human rights based on “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” which had spread around the world from the eighteenth century to the end of World War I, as many authoritarian governments gave way to freedom and democracy, was jettisoned by the Bolsheviks and their imitators. The real progress humanity had made beginning in 1776 came to a grinding halt in Russia in 1917. Beginning with the Russian Revolution, communist governments rejected every single one of these fundamental liberties: religion, conscience, speech, press, assembly, property, and, oftentimes, life itself.
To be sure, the level of suppression has varied from communist government to communist government, with some much worse than others. Not every Marxist—not even every Marxist dictator—was a Pol Pot. But the abrogation of civil liberties, the death of freedom, and the violation of human rights are hallmarks of every communist regime.