Why Tyrants Are Invariably Attracted To Socialism

 

          SOCIALISTS have a very high view of themselves because they have a very low view of capitalism. Capitalism, for them, is an exploitative, aristocratic, and chaotic ideology that promotes might-makes-right morals and feudalistic tyranny. That socialism promotes the fulfillment and humanity of the worker, that capitalism commodifies and alienates people, these ideas are represented in the posters, logos, quotes, and articles of socialism (just browse the Jacobin or WSWS). Socialists are the moral Übermenschen of human civilization/philosophy, while anyone who does not endorse their noble, egalitarian, collectivist ways are evil greedy bourgeois; yes, even if you are a poor proletarian yourself.

          Yet, despite the very confident and endearing self-image they possess, socialists seem to have time and time again contradicted basic morality. Many socialist regimes launched pogroms and purges that killed countless people. As shown in the exhaustive book The Black Book of Communism (see Courtois et al. 1999), the far-left ideology is responsible for tens of millions of deaths and a mountain of concomitant destruction. Scholar Rudolph Rummel, the coiner and leading scholar of democide, has calculated over a quarter-billion civilian deaths attributable to government action (find his website here), meaning socialist/collectivist regimes have been responsible for over 60% of democide since the 20^th century.

            As shown in the previous article of Anti-Communism Month, the failure of socialist regimes occurred before external pressure was ever applied to them. Similarly, the oppression of socialist regimes occurred early; Lenin was purging the Bolshevik Party by September of 1921, Kim Il-Sung was conducting purges in the 40s and 50s, and we might as well mention one of the earliest and most influential socialist regimes, the Paris Commune, lionized by Marx and Engels, which was also full of blood and terror.

          In response to this, as with all attempts to critique practical socialism based off of historical socialism, socialists familiarly cry out, “That wasn’t real socialism!” To frame historical socialist regimes as merely heretical movements then capitalists/anti-socialists cannot say we know what practical socialism is like, meaning we cannot critique its real-life function. As I have said before, the best response to it is to say, “Those countries weren’t capitalist, however!” At the core of the USSR, Khmer Rouge, Polish People’s Republic, DPRK, and other socialist regimes past and present was never capitalism, and you’d have to be an utter fool to claim that. These regimes were collectivist and anti-capitalist, and while not all collectivists and anti-capitalists are socialists (you have syndicalists and fascists), all socialists are collectivists and anti-capitalists.

          So, like in the article “Who Killed Socialism?”, this shows that there is no distinction - except a delusional one - between practical and historical socialism. More importantly, there is no distinction between theoretical and practical socialism. When socialists try to make apologies for practical socialism, what they are invariably trying to do is vindicate theoretical socialism. Socialist theory exists on paper, in texts such as Das Kapital, Understanding Power, and The Condition of the Working Class in England, and things that exist on paper cannot hurt us (unless someone hits us with them hard enough). When put into practice, theory  becomes dynamic and tangible and we can weigh the consequences and validity of the fundamentals of an idea.

          The focus of this present article is to prove that the reason why practical socialism has historically ended in tyranny is because its theoretical basis is tyrannical. Hence, “Why Tyrants Are Invariably Attracted To Socialism”. In regards to economics, the failures of theoretical socialism have already been examined in detail, such as in Ludwig von Mises’ lengthy book Socialism (see Mises 1951) or Friedrich Hayek’s The Fatal Conceit (see Hayek 1988). However, we are focusing - again on - the political consequences of socialism, another, more nuanced, subject. We will learn why, due to its theoretical basis, socialism (or, at its core, collectivism and anti-capitalism) has time and time again ended in bloody terror.

          At the core of socialism, especially since the time of Marx and Engels, is the concept of “dialectical materialism”. Dialectical materialism is the belief, as Antony Sammeroff summarized, that everything that exists is material (materialism) and certain material forces are in contradiction with other material forces and they seek a resolution/synthesis (dialectics). According to Marx, before long the [contradicting] material forces of civilization will come into severe contradiction, leading to a period of social revolution during which the superstructure transforms itself (the ideal socialist workers’ revolution).

Now, dialectical materialism has been critiqued from various angles, from its incoherence with Hegelian metaphysics, to even theological issues, and to other logical concerns. However, our critique comes down to this: historical/dialectical materialism posits that material interests guide the inherent nature of specific groups, i.e., classes. Therefore, the proletariat are inherently proletarian and the bourgeoisie are inherently bourgeois. This, therefore, contributes to the socialist’s infatuation with revolution, because they believe only this can break one’s mental/spiritual bondage to capitalist/material class interests, thereby producing the “new socialist man”. Since, therefore, there are groups of people inherently, diabolically opposed to the interests of the masses (the capitalists), violent revolution is required to disempower them. This being the case, the philosophical basis of socialism necessitates the systematic violent disemboweling of targeted groups of the population (capitalists and counterrevolutionaries).

Now, as practically everyone acknowledges, Karl Marx was influenced by Hegel. Indeed, as a young little radical Marx was a part of the “Young Hegelians”; indeed, many radical leftists were disciples of Hegelian thought, such as Marx’s other half, Friedrich Engels. The significance of the Hegelian aspect of far-left ideology can manifest in multiple manners, but for our present purposes there is one particularly significant detail to focus on: Hegel’s conception of the State.

The best analysis of Hegel’s politics was given by Murray Rothbard in section 11.3 of An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought’s second volume, “Hegel and politics” (Rothbard 2006, pp. 353-357). As Rothbard says of Hegel’s influences, “In particular, Hegel was greatly influenced by the Scottish statist, Sir James Steuart, a Jacobite exile in Germany for a large part of his life, whose Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy (1767) had been greatly influenced by the ultra-statist German 18th-century mercantilists, the cameralists.” Elsewhere, Rothbard explained these “cameralists” thusly:

“[T]o the cameralists the object of all social theory was to show how the welfare of the state might be secured. They saw in the welfare of the state the source of all other welfare. … The whole social theory radiated from the central task of furnishing the state with ready means.”

          So, ultra-statist, just as Rothbard described them. However, this is how the cameralists thought, what about Hegel? Certainly, Hegel could have understood some things differently than the cameralists, just as we do with many of our own influences. Well, Rothbard cites a number of damning passages from Hegel’s own mouth that incriminate Hegel as just as much of an ultra-statist as the cameralists:

“‘The modern State, proving the reality of political community, when comprehended philosophically, could therefore be seen as the highest articulation of Spirit, or God in the contemporary world.’ The state, then, is ‘a supreme manifestation of the activity of God in the world,’ and, ‘the State stands above all; it is Spirit which knows itself as the universal essence and reality’; and, ‘The State is the reality of the kingdom of heaven.’ And finally, ‘The State is God’s Will.’” (Quoted in Rothbard 2006, p. 355)

          “The State is God’s Will,” my my, what an intense statement. Knowing what God is, the ultimate reality and arbiter, and if the State is truly the embodiment of His will, then the State would be the ultimate reality and arbiter, too; the State would be unquestionable. Any questioning of it, therefore, would amount to blasphemy. As Karl Popper, the esteemed philosopher and liberal, said in his work The Open Society and Its Enemies:

“Hegelianism is the renaissance of tribalism… [Hegel] is the ‘missing link’, as it were, between Plato and the modern forms of totalitarianism. Most of the modern totalitarians…know of their indebtedness to Hegel, and all of them have been brought up in the close atmosphere of Hegelianism. They have been taught to worship the state, history, and the nation.” (Popper 1966, pp. 30-31)

          Marx was certainly no stranger to the State and centralized governance. After all, he was the man who believed in a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, who idolized the violence of the French Revolution, and who supported central banking (a necessarily statist apparatus). Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, and the other disciples of the German socialist were statists themselves for a reason. Peter Kropotkin, Mikhail Bakunin, Errico Malatesta, and other Marxian anarchists had to emphasize their anarchist side for a reason. We will discuss far-left anarchists more later.

          Now, while Hegel preferred a monarchy (Rothbard 2006, p. 355), Marx differed on this point. What Marx instead preferred was democracy, a system that has become inseparable with the term “liberty”. As he would himself say in The Communist Manifesto, “We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class, is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy” (Marx and Engels 1910, p. 40). And, in Engels’ words, “Above all, [the revolution] will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” So, Marxism goes hand-in-hand with majoritarianism.

          What is the significance of this relationship? Well, simply, democracy is perhaps one of the most tyrannical forms of government out there! This has been well-acknowledged by republicans and anarchists, who have repudiated the “tyranny of the majority”. Many persons have covered the tyranny of democracy, such as Hans-Hermann Hope, H. L. Mencken, Murray Rothbard, Thomas Jefferson, and ancients like Plato and Socrates. Socrates objected to democracy on the grounds that it let the dumb lead the smart, or let the many opress the few (as the Athenians ultimately did to him, “democratically” sentencing him to the death penalty). Or, in Hoppe’s words, “As for the moral status of majority rule, it must be pointed out that it allows for A and B to band together to rip off C, C and A in turn joining to rip off B, and then B and C conspiring against A, and so on” (Hoppe 2001, p. 104). Democracy has, in Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s words, a “road to tyranny”.

          If democratic rule, then, is a facet of orthodox socialism, this makes socialism all the more tyrannical. “Democratic socialism”, a term adored by legions of American socialists, is therefore an authoritarian double-whammy. The only way to protect democracy from itself, then, is to do what the Founding Fathers did, establish a constitution that protected the rights of everyone (with an emphasis on those in the minority). Engels even mentioned a constitution himself. However, as Murray Rothbard showed in the chapter “How the State Transcends Its Limits” of Anatomy of the State, constitutions will only protect a citizenry temporarily from their government.

          We may also look into the concept of central planning, core to socialist economics. Both later socialists and the writings of Marx are all for central planning, and - as mentioned before - Marx was pro-central banking. Central planning, however, is rife with issues. Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, two of the greatest economists of the 20^th century, both showed in detail why central planning was fundamentally flawed due to the famous computation/calculation problem (see Engelhardt 2013). Simply, just in a daily basis there are millions of tractions, millions of commodities, millions of individual supplies and demands, and innumerable factors overall, overlapping, and overwhelming; the decentralized free market, which utilizes the full brain power of every consumer and producer, is far more efficient at handling this quantity of factors that a central planning board, made up of a finite number of people with finite intellectual and mathematical capabilities. Central planning, therefore, rapidly devolves into an inefficient, slow, and impotent agency that severely hampers economic performance. Not even high-tech computers will help disappointed central planners.

          However, rather than being merely an economic travesty, central planning is also a political travesty. Why? Well, in Freidrich Hayek’s words, “There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess” (Hayek X, p. 145). This is the honest to God truth, because the market is fundamentally decentralized, the sum total of millions of daily, intermeshed transactions by millions of producers and consumers. The socialist economy, on the other hand, is centralized in order to guide the dishing out of capital “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Hayek dedicated a whole book, The Road to Serfdom, on proving how political authoritarianism was the most logical outcome of [socialist/collectivist] economic authoritarianism (see Hayek X). Find more critiques of central planning here and here.

          A final cause we might find for socialism’s inherent oppressiveness is its repudiation of individualism in favor of collectivism. While collectivism has had much propaganda produced for it, with nice-sounding slogans such as “the public good” or “civic duty”, it all ultimately falls flat. Collectivism is, inherently, a logically flawed and politically dangerous ideology.

          First, it is beyond obvious that socialism is founded on collectivism. The word itself makes this clear: “socialism”, the social/common ownership of property and the means of production (cf. communism). As Marx himself said, “It is not men’s consciousness which determines their being, but their social being which determines their consciousness.” Second, we have already seen that socialism is based upon a dangerous collectivist ideology, democracy/majoritarianism. That ideology posits that, so long as a majority of society agrees, political action might be taken, and the horrors of the democratic vote have been realized in a number of historical episodes (from the election of the Nazis to the death of Socrates). Things go further, however.

          Since, per the collectivist’s wisdom, the corporate whole of mankind is the “greater good”, and “society is an entity living its own life, independent of and separate from the lives of the various individuals, acting on its own behalf and aiming at its own ends which are different from the ends sought by the individuals” (Mises 1998, p. 145). The collective/society/State is a living, dynamic entity, then, superseding the individual. The issue, however, is that it can easily be proven that a collective is a fallacy, and I defer to Frank Chodorov to make this point:

“Society is a collective concept and nothing else; it is a convenience for designating a number of people. So, too, is family or crowd or gang, or any other name we give to an agglomeration of persons. Society…is not an extra ‘person’; if the census totals a hundred million, that’s all there are, not one more, for there cannot be any accretion to Society except by procreation. The concept of Society as a metaphysical person falls flat when we observe that Society disappears when the component parts disperse; as in the case of a ‘ghost town’ or of a civilization we learn about by the artifacts they left behind. When the individuals disappear so does the whole.” (Chodorov 1959, pp. 29-30)

          Clearly, collectives do not exist without the existence of individuals, and neither do collectives act without the action of individuals. This is where we may begin to analyze the danger of collectivism, other than duping people into a logical fallacy of metaphysical significance. Say, in the classic example, 500 Athenian men assemble to condemn Socrates to death, and 280 jurors vote against Socrates (or, diverging from the historical example, all 500). The condemnation of Socrates only exists in the minds of the individuals, and it is clear that Socrates will not die until someone takes a cup of hemlock and forces him to drink. “Society” will not suddenly manifest itself with hemlock in hand, and it is only when an individual acts that Socrates will die (even if he administers the hemlock to himself, this is still an individual acting). Thus, in any collective the action of the collective is predicated upon individual action, and to ensure this individual action is consistent with the “public good”, there must also exist a caste of enforcers to make the living collective’s ends met, because certainly no other individual - especially those not acting in line  - will do the policing. Hence, this is why we see time and time again organs of collective societies dedicated to the enforcement of conformity, such as the NKVD, the Ministry of State Security, OVRA, Stasi, the FBI, etc.

          Therefore, beyond mere logical stupidity, collectivism poses a political issue in its capacity to devolve into thought policing. The individual is the true unit of human society, as society will not rise nor collapse without their action. Collectivism betrays the primacy of the individual by desiring the conformity of all individual units with the nebulous “greater good” of the whole; a wrench thrown in the most well-oiled machine will nonetheless break it. The best critiques of collectivist thought are Frank Chodorov’s One is a Crowd (see Chodorov 1952) and ex-communist sympathizer William Chamberlin’s Collectivism: A False Utopia (see Chamberlin 1937).

          So, we now have assembled ample evidence based upon the foundations of socialist thought - historical materialism, Hegelianism, collectivism, etc. - that expose theoretical socialism as fundamentally tyrannical, backed by the repeated descents of practical socialist regimes into tyranny. The tens of millions of deaths from war, starvation, and oppression, the propaganda and secret police bureaucracies, the endless streams of lies, and other dark deeds of socialist regimes now seem all the more understandable. Anarchist socialism is no solution, either, because - being collectivist - logical issues and political troubles inherently follow; Murray Rothbard wrote an essay on anarcho-communism that succinctly points out why it is doomed like regular radical leftism. These are just part of the natural rhythm of the socialist heartbeat. Marx was partially right when he said, “Let the ruling classes tremble at a communist revolution”; all should tremble. 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

• Chamberlin, William H., Collectivism: A False Utopia (New York, NY: Macmillan Company, 1937).
• Chodorov, Frank, The Rise and Fall of Society: An Essay on the Economic Forces that Underlie Economic Institutions (New York, NY: Devin-Adair Publishing Company 1959).
• — One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist (New York, NY: Devin-Adair Publishing Company, 1952)
• Courtois, Stéphane, et al. (eds.), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, trs. Jonathan Murphy and Mark Kramer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999).
• Engelhardt, Lucas M., “Central Planning’s Computation Problem.” The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics 16, no. 2 (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2013): 227-246.
• Hayek, Friedrich A., The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, ed. William W. Bartley III (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988).
• — The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents – The Definitive Edition, ed. Bruce J. Caldwell (X, X).
• Hoppe, Hans-Hermann, Democracy: The God That Failed (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2001).
• Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, ed. Friedrich Engels, trans. Samuel Moore (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Company, 1910).
• Popper, Karl R., The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 2 (5th ed.; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966).
• Rothbard, Murray N., An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 2: Classical Economics (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2006).
• von Mises, Ludwig, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, tr. Jacques Kahane (new ed.; New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1951).
• — Human Action: A Treatise on Economics - The Scholar’s Edition (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998).