Despite their supposed internationalism, most socialist leaders are nationalists
International free trade is incompatible with socialism
Socialism provokes nationalist conflicts by creating shortages of natural resources
In a 2000 essay in the International Socialist Review, writer Tom Lewis argues that real socialism is lexically internationalist. “Socialists are internationalists,” he writes. “Whereas nationalists believe that the world is divided primarily into different nationalities, socialists consider social class to be the primary divide. For socialists, class struggle—not national identity—is the motor of history. And capitalism creates an international working class that must fight back against an international capitalist class.”1
Lewis knows whereof he speaks—unfortunately, he seems to know only that. It is true that socialists in the United States tend to be highly internationalist. This is largely a function of the fact that they have been safely contained in intellectual ghettos for decades upon decades, venturing out from time to time to teach a graduate seminar in the thought of Julia Kristeva or to do a little phone-banking for the Dennis Kucinich campaign.
American socialists tend to be internationalists because they tend to be anti-American; in fact, it seems to be more often the case that their anti-Americanism leads them to socialism rather than socialism leading them to anti-Americanism. Until quite recently, American socialists were kept safely away from power—and their internationalism is in no small part a function of that fact. In the rest of the world, when socialists approach power they almost always do so as nationalists.
That was especially true of the most self-consciously “internationalist” of the socialist regimes, that of the USSR. While Marx’s international socialism quickly transformed into the patriotic campaign for “socialism in one country” under Stalin, the Russian socialists consistently talked out of both sides of their mouths about nationalism. Operationally, they were internationalists when it came to the satellite states Russia absorbed into the USSR and to their various factota and puppets around the world, but they were robustly nationalistic when it came to Russia herself. Naturally, this sub rosa nationalism was accompanied by the suppression of ethnic minorities, such as Chechens and ethnic Germans. According to the Russian History Encyclopedia,
In the official Soviet ideology there appeared the term “unreliable” nationalities. Accused nationalities were the subject of deportation and collective punishment, based on allegations of collaboration with the Nazis. As the result of this policy, the Volga Germans, Chechens, Crimean Tartars and dozens of smaller nationalities were deported from their homelands to Central Asia and Kazakhstan. Under Stalin, fifty-six nationalities, involving about 3.5 million people, were deported to Siberia and Central Asia.
First Secretary of the Communist Party Nikita Khrushchev rehabilitated the repressed nationalities and allowed most of them to return to their original homes. The main exceptions were the Crimean Tartars and Volga Germans, because their lands had been taken over by Russians and Ukrainians.
. . . Soviet leaders had a double standard toward Russian nationalism versus the nationalism of the other nations of the Soviet Union. Thus the expression of Russian superiority over other nations was permitted. Movies, paintings, and novels were created about the heroic Russian past. The official Soviet ideology called the Russian nation the “older brother” of all nationalities of the Soviet Union.
Meanwhile expressions of national feelings by the non-Russian nations were suppressed. Even demonstrations of respect for some distinguished national figures from the past were forbidden. Thus Soviet authorities forbade gatherings near the monument of the distinguished nineteenth-century Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko . . . . Ukrainian nationalism was considered by the Soviet rulers as one of the most serious threats to national unity and was severely suppressed.2
Soviet socialism was nationalist socialism. This may sound odd to the American ear, which is used to thinking of Soviet socialism as the archenemy of national socialism—Nazism, as it was known in Germany—but what mostly transpired between Russia and Germany during World War II was a conflict in nationalisms among two governments that largely agreed on the socialism.
One can oversell that shared socialism, of course; Soviet socialism was in many ways a very different economic system from German national socialism. But the two systems were much more similar to one another than either was to Anglo-European liberalism. My National Review colleague Jonah Goldberg has been the target of a lot of left-wingers’ hooting for the provocative thesis of his excellent book, Liberal Fascism, but it is a fact that the international socialist Benito Mussolini did not have to radically alter his economic agenda when he became the fascist duce Benito Mussolini. The anti-capitalism was already in place, the statism, the central planning—Mussolini’s fascism in Italy was very much of a piece with Stalin’s “socialism in one country.” Hitler’s fanciful projects for the Germany economy were, if anything, in the long run more grandiosely socialist than were Lenin’s aspirations.
“The only doctrine of which I had practical experience was that of socialism, from until the winter of 1914—nearly a decade. My experience was that both of a follower and a leader, but it was not doctrinal experience. My doctrine during that period had been the doctrine of action. A uniform, universally accepted doctrine of socialism had not existed since 1905, when the revisionist movement, headed by Bernstein, arose in Germany, countered by the formation, in the see-saw of tendencies, of a left revolutionary movement which in Italy never quitted the field of phrases, whereas, in the case of Russian socialism, it became the prelude to Bolshevism.
“Reformism, revolutionism, centrism, the very echo of that terminology is dead, while in the great river of Fascism one can trace currents which had their source in Sorel, Peguy, Lagardelle of the Movement Socialists, and in the cohort of Italian syndicalists who from 1904 to 1914 brought a new note into the Italian socialist environment.”
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Benito Mussolini, Doctrine of Fascism, 1923
But Soviet central planning failed, much as German central planning had failed before it. And, inevitably, the central planners began to seek an enemy on which to blame their failures. Those Tartars and ethnic Germans were handy as “unreliable” nationalities, but of course the Soviet socialists eventually followed their German counterparts and began to target the Jews. From the Russian History Encyclopedia:
After World War II the Jewish intelligentsia was persecuted during the political campaign of struggle against “cosmopolitanism.” Almost all those who were accused of cosmopolitanism and pro-Western orientation were Jewish. This accusation was followed by loss of employment and by imprisonment. In 1952 the elite of the Jewish intelligentsia, including prominent scientists and Yiddish writers and poets, were secretly tried, convicted, and executed. The anti-Jewish campaign reached its height in the Soviet Union in 1952 with the investigation of the “Jewish doctors’ plot.” Jewish doctors were accused of intentionally providing incorrect treatments and poisoning the leaders of the Communist Party. These political campaigns provoked mass hysteria and the rise of anti-Semitism among the local population. The growing anti-Semitism was supposed to be a prelude to the planned deportation all Soviet Jews to Birobidzhan in the Far East. Only the death of Stalin on March 5, 1953, saved the Jewish population from deportation.3
That is to say, the world’s most developed socialist system was actively plotting the dispossession of its entire Jewish population only a few years after the Nazi Holocaust. It is something to keep in mind when one considers the role that the Stalinist organization International ANSWER—an alliance of hardcore socialists and Mideastern anti-Semites—played in the 2001–08 antiwar movement, which helped to put into office Barack Obama, the most robustly socialistic president the United States has endured since Woodrow Wilson. More on that later.
Jews are a favorite target of authoritarian regimes, wherever there are Jews. (And in some places where there are no Jews.) But it is a big, complex world, and the hunt for enemies is a longstanding socialist obsession; it is an important part of what binds socialism to nationalism in the real world, as opposed to the intellectuals’ imaginary world of international socialism.
There is probably no better example of that today than the case of China. One longtime China watcher, having returned from a sojourn in the Middle Kingdom, told me, “I returned from China convinced that there was nothing to worry about from their ideology. I don’t think any of them really believe in communism any more. But I was terrified of their nationalism.” My National Review colleague John Derbyshire, who himself resided in China for some time, identifies a blend of frank racism and national romanticism in the Chinese outlook. Many Sinologists argue that very little other than nationalism holds China together as its top-down socialism necessitates ever-greater expansions of Beijing’s police state.
Fortunately for the Chinese Politburo—but unfortunately for the Chinese people—history has supplied the Chinese socialists with a ready enemy in the form of Japan, the once-masterful imperial power that raped and repressed China mercilessly throughout long stretches of its history. Japan, of course, has become a modern, capitalist nation; such nationalism as there is in Japan is largely the stuff of political eccentricity, and there is far too little of it to present much of a threat to anybody. Not so Chinese nationalism, which gives Japan very good reason to worry about its national sovereignty and its national defense in the coming decades. The tenor of anti-Japanese rhetoric in nationalist China can be shocking. Peter Gries, an expert on the subject, describes one raging anti-Japanese protest:
“The Chinese people are very angry; there will be serious consequences!” read a long banner held aloft by a dozen marching demonstrators. It was Saturday, Apr. 16, 2005, and thousands of mostly college students were protesting through downtown Shanghai. Another banner revealed the object of their anger: “Oppose Japanese imperialism!” Other signs displayed a variety of specific grievances: “Oppose Japan entering the Security Council!” “Boycott Japanese goods, revitalize China!” “Oppose Japan’s history textbooks!” “Protect our Diaoyu Islands!” Other students expressed their protests individually, holding high a wide variety of handmade placards and posters.
The most persistent messages focused on a proposed May 2005 boycott: “Boycott Japanese goods for a month and Japan will suffer for a whole year.” “Boycotting Japanese goods will castrate Japan!” The two most striking visual images were of weapons and Japan’s Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi. Pictures of butcher knives, swords and arrows were painted to pierce the rising sun of Japan’s national flag. Yet it was the image of Koizumi that received the most attention from the young demonstrators. One protestor gave him a mustache to make him look like Adolph Hitler, and others went further, dehumanizing Koizumi. One placard placed his head on a pig’s body and declared him to be a “little pig.” Another painted a pig’s snout and ears onto his face and declared in large characters, “Death to Koizumi the pig!”
But the most ominous images evoked a dead Koizumi, with tombstones bearing his name, and a photo of a funeral with Koizumi’s picture at the center. In addition to peacefully waving the flag of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), singing the Internationale, and chanting anti-Japanese slogans, the demonstrators also engaged in a number of activities of a less benign nature. On their way to the Japanese consulate, they smashed the windows of Japanese stores and restaurants, overturned Japanese cars, and burned Japanese flags and photos as well as placards of Koizumi. When they arrived at the consulate, they hurled eggs and pelted it with paint bombs.4
Notice the largely economic character of that rhetoric. “Boycott Japanese goods, revitalize China!”—as though Japan’s prosperity were the reason for China’s often uneven economic ascent. The image of a boycott as an act of castration is particularly chilling—and particularly emblematic of the crude economic thinking that underlies nationalist socialism in practically all its manifestations.
Spanish economist Faustino Ballvé (1887–1959) understood that socialism was entirely incompatible with a sophisticated understanding of economics—particularly international economics—years ago, writing,
The slogan, “Buy what the fatherland produces; produce what the fatherland needs,” has not been and cannot be of any avail at all, because whoever is in want of a commodity buys it however and wherever he finds it. This, indeed, is the very essence of man’s innate faculty of economic judgment and choice. On the other hand, for a country to produce what it needs, natural conditions have to be favorable, and there must be a sufficient demand to make production profitable, for no one will undertake to produce a commodity, no matter how much the country may need it, that economic calculation shows to be unprofitable and incapable of competing on the world market.5
The extreme form of this line of thinking is autarky, the condition in which a nation attempts to live exclusively on its own produce, as North Korea has endeavored to do from time to time.
Ballve’s analysis, like that of Hayek and Mises, suggests that national economic planning is not so much unwieldy as impossible:
No less illusory is the myth of the economic solidarity of the citizens of one country as opposed to the inhabitants of other countries. From what we have already observed of the economic interdependence of all people everywhere, it becomes manifest that it is absurd and impossible for a country to attempt to live in autarky exclusively on its own resources. No country, however extensive and diversified it may be, not even Russia or the United States, has at its disposal all the natural resources needed for its production and consumption. All countries have to import, and not on a small scale, food and raw materials as well as manufactured goods, if they are not prepared to content themselves with a miserable subsistence dearly paid for, because there are branches of industry that can produce at low cost only on a large scale or under especially favorable conditions. (As we know from the law of comparative cost and the law of returns, few countries are in a position to produce economically heavy machinery, automobiles, etc.) They need to export in order to pay for their imports.
For this reason, the only really integral economic whole is the international, or rather, the worldwide, market, because, in fact, trade takes place, not between nations, but among men and across national frontiers. This universal economic community can be realized only when every entrepreneur buys and sells in the markets of the whole world.6
The international nature of free-market capitalism has lethal ramifications for the would-be central planner. What the central planner cannot do within a single country (or even within a single industry), the markets do across industries, nations, continents—even across time. That is to say, markets coordinate the incomprehensibly complex means of production, ranging from physical capital to financial capital to credit, labor, intellectual property, organizational capital, and the other subtle inputs that make modern material life possible—and national central planning impossible. Hugo Chávez can try to set the price of rice in Venezuela, but so long as rice can cross borders, his regime does not have the last say on the question.
“We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today’s capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money.”
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Gregor Strasser, Nazi ideologue
“The State shall make it its primary duty to provide a livelihood for its citizens . . . the abolition of all incomes unearned by work . . . the ruthless confiscation of all war profits . . . the nationalization of all businesses that have been formed into corporations . . . profit-sharing in large enterprises . . . extensive development of insurance for old-age . . . land reform suitable to our national requirements.”
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Nazi Party platform, 1920
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are determined to destroy this system under all conditions.”
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Adolf Hitler, 1927
The American socialist writer Dan Jakopovich (whose work we will closely consider later in this book) is not alone among the so-called international socialists in praising this strategy of “resource nationalism.” It has a long history but remains as fresh as the morning headlines: as Russian collective agriculture failed and productivity plunged, the Soviet economic planners responded by banning the export of what Lenin called “the currency of currencies”—grain. Although the collapse of communism allowed Russian agriculture to recover enough for the country to resume grain exports, in 2010 the outwardly nationalist Vladimir Putin once again banned grain exports, citing poor harvests.
Food is of course a particularly sensitive area—failing electricity grids are bad, but hunger is much worse. Because socialist countries tend to engage in relatively little trade, or in highly restricted trade, they have been historically vulnerable to food shortages. While many of the softer socialist regimes have learned to accommodate themselves to the realities of trade (you just can’t get good home-grown oranges in December in Sweden), the most robustly socialist regimes have not, and they remain extraordinarily at risk of disruptions in their food supplies.
Indeed, most governments engage in a fair amount of attempted central planning when it comes to food, and, inevitably, they do so ham handedly. The world markets have seen some very disruptive developments in food trade in recent years, something that has caught the attention of executives at Cargill, the world’s largest food business. Cargill senior vice president Paul Conway offers a Hayekian analysis of the problem: politics distorts or blocks price signals. As the Sunday Times of London reports,
These intermittent crises provoke what Cargill believes are bad policy decisions—stockpiling, hoarding and export curbs. Whether it was EU butter mountains or the international agencies set up in the early 1980s to manage markets in commodities, such as cocoa and sugar, all came into disrepute, Mr Conway says.
The reason they failed is that governments forgot the role of farmers. “When governments have held a lot of stock, such as in the Soviet Union, [price] signals did not get through to farmers. Last year, the Argentinian Government increased export tariffs, which meant there was no point in planting. You had grain rotting in some countries last year because governments banned exports.”
Instead of trying to manage food output, governments need to invest, he suggests, in infrastructure, irrigation, ports and, counterintuitively, he says that developing countries should sponsor futures markets.
“To blame futures markets for causing problems is nonsense. What they do is give clear price signals. We are a great believer in giving price signals to farmers. A futures market is a tool, a bit like biotechnology. If there is a crisis, blaming the tool is not . . . wise.”
It’s a message that many don’t want to hear—that futures markets are the answer, not the problem.7
Of course, socialist regimes are likely to take precisely the opposite role. Rather than engage with the markets and thereby provide useful information to farmers, packagers, and other producers, socialist governments have attempted to use such clumsy tools as import-export controls to impose THE PLAN, even when the economics say otherwise. In many cases, those moves are accompanied by politically motivated seizures and nationalizations.
Socialist governments have a particularly bleak history concerning the redistribution of land. The collectivization of farming in Soviet Russia and Maoist China were unmitigated disasters, but one need not look that far back into history for an example. The socialist president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, managed in the course of a few short years to transform the nation once known as “the breadbasket of Africa” from a major food exporter into a starving shell of itself—from breadbasket to basketcase. He accomplished that by enacting a “spread the wealth around” program for the country’s farmland, which had for generations been owned mostly by white Zimbabweans resented by black Zimbabweans. After just a few years of attempting to politically manage Zimbabwe’s agricultural economy, Mugabe left 45 percent of his countrymen malnourished and agricultural production lower than it has been in generations. Production of some crops has fallen by nearly 80 percent. Production of maize, Zimbabwe’s staple food, fell some 75 percent. When prices soared in response to falling production, Mugabe enacted price controls. The result was that farmers switched from price-controlled crops such as maize to uncontrolled crops such as tobacco and paprika, driving production down even further and driving real prices—which is to say, black-market prices—even higher.
Zimbabwe’s plight is no mystery. Socialism needs nationalism, and such “resource nationalism” as exhibited by the Mugabe regime is to be expected. The real mystery is: why would the United States want to recreate Zimbabwe’s failures in its oil industry?