COLLECTIVISM AND COMMUNISM

Most of this essay was written in 2001 and 2002.

Nearly everyone is a collectivist, but few realize they are.

What is collectivism?

Collectivism is the belief that everyone must be organized into collectives. Collectives are, usually, compulsory groups of people.

Most of us are collectivists, to some extent or other. But most of us don't think of ourselves as collectivists.

Why is that?

There is a major and a minor reason.

The major reason is that collectivism has a terrible reputation.

Soviet Collectivization

When Vladimir Ilych Lenin (1870-1924) and the Bolshevik party seized control of Russia in 1917, they gradually introduced collectivization. That is, property was seized from its owners without compensation, and consolidated into collectives supposedly owned by the state and controlled by the people. Workers in each factory or company were organized into (compulsory) collectives, supposedly with some power and input into how the factory or company would operate. In fact, they were usually organized into sham unions, and the factory or company became a totally-controlled part of the command economy of the Bolshevik-controlled state. Real criticism of the management of the enterprise was usually not allowed. Criticism was dangerous.

This system worked so badly in practice that in 1921 Lenin retreated from it. War Communism, as the policy was called, had been introduced partly to fight White opposition to the Revolution but mostly for ideological reasons. (The German philosopher and economist Karl Marx (1818-1883) had believed that capitalist production was exploitive.) War Communism reduced industrial production to one-seventh of what it had been before the Revolution and caused a famine that took five million lives. Like Castro five decades later, Lenin thus announced a New Economic Policy (1921-1928) that allowed a certain amount of small-scale capitalism.

The New Economic Policy worked a bit better. It produced some goods, but was rather corrupt. By the late 1920s Lenin's successor Joseph Stalin (1879-1953) felt it wasn't working. He was unhappy with having reintroduced some capitalistic features. !n 1928 Stalin again abolished capitalism.

Collectivization returned to high gear in the early 1930s when Stalin collectivized Soviet agriculture. This ruthless, merciless policy caused the death of perhaps 16,000,000 people, many by execution but most by famine. Seven to nine million were Ukrainians in what appears to be (I am not an expert in this word) genocide.

The Soviets tried to hide the results of the collectivization: famine, starvation, and death. But, despite corrupt, lazy, incompetent reporting, word eventually leaked to the West.

Since then collectivization has had a terrible reputation. The failures of Soviet collectivist agriculture and the similar, but somewhat less costly failures of Soviet industrial collectivization have destroyed collectivism in the minds of most people.

But this did not occur all at once. For decades the Soviets introduced forced collectivization into the Eastern European countries that fell into their orbit. The Chinese under Mao Zedong introduced collectivization into China as soon as they had taken power in 1947. They executed hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of landlords and capitalists, and proceeded to create communes. These succeeded about as well as the Soviet ones, i.e., not at all. (If there is one thing the 20th century learned, it is -- Don't collectivize agriculture!)

Forced collectivization of farms and industrial enterprises worked so badly that by 1960 the Soviets were giving bonuses to workers and factories who produced beyond the quota established in the Five-Year Plan. In some collectivized enterprises throughout the Soviet bloc, management sometimes tried to get around central organization and to introduce a certain amount of freedom in production. Most of the Soviet Union's food came from private plots tended by caring farmers, though this land was actually only a minor fraction of the acreage devoted to agriculture in the collectives. Agricultural collectives were vastly unproductive.

But few Communist officials in the Soviet Union, China or the Eastern bloc countries would admit the horrendous failure of collective ownership in agriculture. Too much of the prestige and accomplishment which these regimes were claiming, depended on the success of collectivism. So for decades Communist officials attempted, somehow, to improve collective agriculture and industrialism, without much success.

Thus in the 1980s and 1990s Hungary quietly began decollectivizing numerous enterprises. Even communist Cuba under Fidel Castro (19 -  ) began to allow small businesses.

# # #

Above, I mentioned a minor reason why I believe most of us are collectivists, but don't know it.

This minor reason is that most of us have a strong desire to be part of a group, and to make a contribution toward the success of that group, and of mankind. We might call this urge the desire for community.

The desire for community is not the strongest desire in most human beings. Stronger in most of us is the sexual urge, and the desire to have children. Stronger also in most of us is the desire to accomplish something, the desire to fit into the right occupation (the Buddhists call this value, right livelihood).

Nevertheless, the desire for community is strong. After young people escape from their parents, get jobs and hearths of their own, find sexual partners, and settle down, their desire to fit into a community becomes strong. Young people often merge the desire for community into their desire to have productive work. They adopt helping professions, caring professions that give them the opportunity both to be productive and to build a better community. Thus young people go into the armed forces, and risk their lives for their country (read: community).

# # #

Despite the failures of collectivism in the 20th century, I said most of us are collectivists. Can this be?

Yes.

Most of us are collectivists. We believe in our nation, and think of it, in some sense, as the collective expression of some of our ideals. We believe in state action to control justice and establish law. We believe in a state police power. We believe in constitutions to shape our collective, we believe in forcing each other to obey at least a few simple laws.

We even believe in certain governmental regulations to control how we drive and how we live.

I think this is collectivism (though not forced collectivism), and that nearly everyone believes in it. Even most anarchists believe in a degree of collectivism.

Of course, very few people today any longer believe in collective control of agriculture. Very few of us believe that the state has much if any proper role in industrial production. While only a few decades ago there were many who believed, even in the West, that perhaps a good deal of industry should be nationalized, hardly anyone today in the West believes it. Socialist parties like the British Labour party and the Canadian New Democratic Party have quietly softened their socialist talk and shelved many of their socialist doctrines. We may believe in a certain amount of regulation for the public good or to avoid monopolies, but that is all. For the most part, except for issues of public health and safety, we have come to believe that industry should be left alone by the state.

A debate continues whether medical care should be of governmental concern. Should there be government health care, or should some or all health care be private? Most Western countries have chosen to set up national health schemes: even the United States has two (partial) national health plans, Medicare and Medicaid. But it seems desirable for private health care plans to supplement national schemes.

Most of us are collectivists. But our conscience is uneasy at the elements of compulsion in our systems.

# # #

The Irish socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) loved to twit the English upper classes. In The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) he wittily defended public ownership of public transit systems and electrical utilities. He then called this "communism".

This is not what most of us mean by "communism". We mean -- most of us -- Marxist communism. But perhaps we should more carefully consider what Shaw said.

Shaw pointed out that state-owned public transit systems and electrical utilities worked fairly well.

[To Be Continued and Revised]

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Last modified: 8:31 AM 25/07/2004