“When we went to Lille, my honorable traveling companions and I, the law on unsafe habitations had gone through; here is what it left in its wake, here is what we found there.
The first basement where we showed up is located Cour à l’eau, n2. Let me tell you of it. Although the door was wide open to the sun since morning, for it was a beautiful February day, it emanated such a horrible stench, the air was so polluted that of the seven that we were, only three managed to go down. A fourth who ventured in couldn’t reach halfway down the stairs, and just like what happened to the prefect that accompanied Mr. Blanqui in 1848, he stopped as if asphyxiated on the basement’s threshold and had to hurry back outside. We found in this cave at the bottom of the stairs an old lady and a very young child. This cave was so low that we could only stand in the middle of the vault. Strung damp old clothes blocked the flow of air all around. Near the wall, there were two beds, that is to say, two worm-eaten wooden chests filled with straw mats whose cloth, never washed, had taken the color of dirt. No drapes, no blankets. I approached one of these beds and saw through the darkness a living being. A little girl around six-years-old lied there, sick with measles, shivering from the fever, almost naked, barely covered by an old woolen rag ; through holes, the straw came out of the mat. A doctor who accompanied us made me touch this straw. It was rotten. The old woman, who was the grandmother, told us that she resided there with her widowed daughter and two other children that came back for the night ; that she and her daughter were lace makers ; that they paid 18 sous in rent a week, that they received a loaf of bread from the city every five days, and that they earned ten sous a day for the two of them. Next to the bed, near the sick child, there was a great mound of ash that emanated a revolting smell.
It was peat ash that these families gather and sell to live. If needed, these ashes serve as beds. Such was this basement.” [1]
These words are the incipit of Victor Hugo’s famous harangue to the French national assembly in March 1851. Titled Les Caves de Lille, he carefully describes the living conditions of the poor urban population. These echoed through numerous texts at the time and were the ones the workers suffered from the European industrial revolution. If I mention it, it’s because I couldn’t but think about them as a colleague of mine wrote the following, some time ago on Slack during a light-headed discussion:
“In my opinion any system built on Marxism is evil. Lenin further developed the philosophy into practical politics. And no, the system was not distorted by the Stalin, it was rotted from the start.”
Such a blunt statement deserves, I believe, a comprehensive answer. Dismissing it as a stupid claim has no chance to change the other person’s mind, or even to nuance it, and after all, it is not a stupid claim, and its ubiquitousness makes such an answer necessary anyway. The colleague has two main claims, the second being a concrete example of the more general first. The first is that any system built on Marxism is inherently evil. The second is that Stalin was a natural succession to Lenin, who — according to him — was the “practical” incarnation of Marxism.
To discuss these claims, we will first start with a historical perspective on the inevitability of the emergence of communism in the context of the 19th century and the industrial revolution. Then, we will consider communism in the 20th century across the world and its impact, as well as the effects of capitalism during not only the same period but also the early 21st century (after all, capitalism has become de facto the only accepted system worldwide). With that in mind, we will finally be able to explicit the failure of the manicheist “us vs them” dichotomy as it was presented during the cold war and explicit how capitalism failed Humanity as a whole as well as why and how communism can help.
In addition, Appendix B offers a few — in my opinion reasonable — insights on how to address contemporary issues with a social and constructive approach.
Before we continue, I apologize in advance for covering such a broad range of topics preventing me to dive deeply in most of them, but I will always refer to some resources if you are interested in reading more (or want to dispute my points).
The nauseating misery Hugo describes was the most fertile dirt for a revolutionary spirit to grow on. What Marx did then, in writing the Communist Manifesto and the Capital is to list the reasons, causes, and responsible for this state of affair. He gave a target to the main victims of the system that was appearing all over the world. But where Marx was particularly insightful is by realizing that these poor workers of Lille were the victims of the same system that was responsible for the Indian Revolts for the monstrous effect of colonialism (sometimes in very insidious ways like the Congo “Free” State later becoming the Belgian Congo) or the victims of the Manifest Destiny in the United States. It was clear to him that the poor worker from Lille had more in common with the black slave in the United States than to the bourgeois in the very city he lived in. Obviously, pointing the very antagonistic nature of the interests between proletariat and bourgeoisie, as well as singling out the bourgeoisie as responsible for the misery of the proletariat didn’t fare well with the power that be. Thus, the only issue was a conflict.
With this in mind, I believe two things are crucial to understand. First that Marx did not simply point out the class struggle but also offered both an alternative and a rallying banner. The second is that, if like me you do not abide by the “Great Men” view of History, the social climate of the time made it inevitable for someone like Marx to appear. The movements everywhere, locally, were already brewing. Alexis de Tocqueville describing the Revolution of 1848 said.
“One wished to reduce the inequality of richness, the other inequality of knowledge, the third undertook to level the oldest of inequalities, the one between man and woman; we pointed out specifics against poverty and remedies to this problem of work, tormenting humanity for as long as it existed. These theories were very diverse among themselves, often contradicting each other, sometimes enemies; but all, aiming lower than the government and forcing themselves to aim for society itself, feeding it, took the common name of SOCIALISM.” [16]
The 19th century was the century of revolution, and not just in Europe. For example, the Sepoy revolt of 1857 in India is a classic illustration of anti-colonial insurrection [10]. The conditions became so intolerable that fighting for the most basic rights was turning into an apolitical surviving necessity. What Marx understood was the political root of it, enabling him to both clarify it and cement its foundations.
Thus is established the inevitability of communist ideology. However, apart from a few short-lived attempts like the Paris Commune, we will not see any try at a communist state until the 20th century, and witness the complete triumph of capitalism as economic and social system worldwide. Which raises the question of how that could happen.
The answer is twofold. On one hand, the admittedly terrible failure of the Soviet Union and Communist China. On the other hand, the incredible means mobilized against any rising socialist or communist state in the rest of the world, through neo-colonialism and imperialism, as well as the spread of economic interests as many tentacles snatching once and for all the financial market out of both the political and democratic arenas.
One of my colleague’s claim is that there is essentially no difference between Lenin and Stalin since the system was rotten from the start. This is fundamentally wrong as Lenin and Stalin followed not only different but sometimes straight up opposed policies. A consequence illustrating this matter is Lenin’s testament recommending Stalin’s removal from his position as general secretary of the party. Looking deeper, Lenin set up the new economic policy that was soon — in 1928 — discontinued by Stalin despite its success. Lenin believed in using Russia’s position to carry on the worldwide revolution while encouraging self-determination of the people. Both positions were staunchly opposed by Stalin; he conceived the so-called socialism in one country, hence requiring the unity and stability of said country, regardless of any ambition of self determination by the different populations in it (incidentally, this position is also quite anti marxist for a variety of reasons, mainly that the only way for the workers to unite in any constructive way was to admit to their own systemic racism and biases, and recognise the need for independence of different communities, as to remove the domination relationship between them [7]).
And while Lenin did create the Cheka and instaured the unique party policy, let’s not forget that 1) Russia was in a civil war at the time and attacked constantly by foreign powers, the secret police is a traditional tool in any war, the purges, and other horrors started with Stalin 2) the whole political debate was to be situated inside the different soviets themselves, so more than a unique party, he was abolishing the need for parties altogether (in a way that would probably make Simone Weil proud, despite her criticism of Marxism [15]). Surely, that transfer of power wasn’t completely done during Lenin’s lifetime, because he believed that it could only be achieved after the country’s industrialization (and thus, after the final success of the NEP, which we saw was abolished prematurely by Stalin after Lenin’s death). So the failure of communism in Russia comes, mainly, from allowing a context in which the rise of Stalin was possible and failing to prevent it. This is not a small failure, any proper political system should be able to withstand and resist inner turmoils to some extent. What ensued is undeniably one of the most horrific slices of History of the twentieth century which combined to Mao’s China, lead to the often cited statistic of a hundred million death attributed to communism [2].
There are two parts to any proper answer to this ‘statistic’. The first, quantitative, is to compare the number of deaths that we can attribute to the capitalist system during the same period (or even in our days). While this war of numbers shakes the imagination (See Appendix A), it does very little in terms of ideological comparison. The second, more qualitative, is to see the effect of communism outside of these two blocks (Soviet Russia and China), as well as the impact of the rest of the world on these communist pockets (albeit, it would be easy to argue that if the Maoist regime had received outside help and support, rather than hostility, to industrialize China, countless death could have been averted, which is, I believe, a strong hint towards the need of a worldwide revolution built on the solidarity of the people rather than isolated pockets struggling both with the internal changes and the external tremendous duress).
We will consider two very different examples. The first one will be France, the second Cuba.
While France has never been a communist country, communists and socialists were able occasionally to greatly influence it (and I mean socialists in the political meaning of the term, not to name the political party which has very little socialism left in it). And there is no greater example than France in 1946. Before the war, the capitalist regime in place had a very little incentive to resist and pay for another expensive conflict against Germany (accentuated by social issues at the time), and as such composed and fared well under the Nazi regime, which guaranteed order and cheap “labor”, two crucial components of a high performing economy. A good part of the French resistance was composed by communists and socialists. At the end of the war appeared a peculiar situation during which capitalist France was outrageously guilty and had to accept with almost no negotiation the demands of the communist and socialist France. These demands were, among others, a complete social security system, including retirement for old people. One of the most notorious goals (and possible successes) of the new liberal France is to slowly get rid of these measures for the sake of competitivity, austerity and so on, which is nothing but the culmination of decades of fight from what was then the bourgeoisie and we now call the elites or dominating class (which are different names for essentially the same thing).
As a side note, remember that most great capitalists had been collaborating with Hilter until the war, e.g. Ford, IBM, and so on in the United States, as well as the overwhelming support of German CEOs as soon as the NSDAP came into power, once more showcasing the taste for order and oppression of a proper capitalistic mindset.
Cuba, on the other hand, got its Cuban Revolution and became a communist country and a major thorn in the foot of the United States. A poor island with not much to offer for international trade (for example, its main trade export by far is sugar [9]) and under constant extreme international pressure. Yet, this same country managed, soon after the revolution, to reach a complete alphabetization and a healthcare system that is so efficient and competent that it led to doctors becoming their main export commodity. To quote Wikipedia:
Since the early 1960s, 28,422 Cuban health workers have worked in 37 Latin American countries, 31,181 in 33 African countries, and 7,986 in 24 Asian countries. Throughout a period of four decades, Cuba sent 67,000 health workers to structural cooperation programs, usually for at least two years, in 94 countries … an average of 3,350 health workers working abroad every year between 1960 and 2000. [3]
The fact is that this struggling communist island managed to send doctors everywhere in the world, in places lacking medical facilities and healthcare systems as part of a purely humanitarian and anti-colonial policy (the proof that a good ideology can have great consequences, and that the solidarity on which Marxism depends is not a vain word). Maybe, soon Cuba will have to send its doctors to the United States to tend their poor (actually, they already offered [5]). All in all, getting rid of the capitalistic and classist overhead allowed, and only then, to create a major system (nationwide healthcare) working in an efficient and essentially Humanist way.
Many will scream about the ‘notorious’ human rights abuses in Cuba, citing for example abuses towards the LGBT community. To this, I will answer by quoting Dr Denise Baden: “The time of which the revolution was considered to be a little bit homophobic was in the 60’s, I’m not sure many countries could hold their heads up high and say they were as open as they should be” [17]. Since 2008, sex change operations for transgenders are free, and before already, the law had anti discrimination measures and so on.
These two examples of communist success illustrate the absolute idiocy of the “us versus them” posture of the cold war (or even before), best exemplified by the following: one of the greatest effort by the market intelligentsia since the fall of the eastern block was to convince the world, in particular, the occidental world, that the class struggle is at best gone, at worst straight-up nonsensical. Truth is, thanks to globalization, the class struggle became greater and more apparent than ever. Rather than “us versus them”, it ought to be “the controlling oligarchy versus the awakening of the productive masses”. Bernard Arnault, the CEO and owner of LVMH made almost eight billion euros in 2017, I would very much like to know what did he produce to earn that much.
Before going deeper into that subject though, let’s make a quick detour by the French Revolution and the French commune.
As heads started rolling during the terror, first and foremost royal heads, the old monarchies in Europe felt — admittedly legitimately — threatened by the revolutionary movement. They decided to invade to restore the monarchy and put a new king on the throne. Of course, it wasn’t out of charity for the French royal family, but because they felt threatened by the contagiousness of the Revolution. If the people of France could topple a regime, in particular, such a powerful and absolute regime (despite its weakened state after the seven years war and the American Revolution), what would prevent the people in their own countries to topple them? Arguments can be made that the various coalition wars against Napoleon helped very much in spreading the seeds of revolution and had a significant role in many of the European revolutions of the 19th century. The ferocity with which the old nobility defended its power against the Bourgeoisie (because let’s not forget that these were bourgeois revolutions for the most part!) can be found in the same ferocity the current dominating class is displaying in keeping power.
As for the French commune, I will do no more than citing Josef Rezler’s From the Life of the Social Democracy Founders:
We lived in so-called “Popelky”, the last of human junkyards. Only people that couldn’t find a housing anywhere else, people with large amount of children and paltry or no income, people not making a difference between mine and yours, prostitutes, thieves, pick-pockets, vagrants, a rabble that Prague spew out and that was getting drunk, fought, sworn and lived in the “lair of love” as Hugo said. In such environment, I grew up and such I was rough, rude, malicious since our life didn’t differ much from the others. Father, a notorious drunk, didn’t give mother anything but punches that she endured with the dull, special patience of such wives that the younger ones would admire. She had to take care of everything herself and how did she do it? She worked in the field, in a factory, was a laundress or if she couldn’t get a job, she would collect potatoes to feed us while the man was scattered around taverns.
In such circumstances ran our life desolated, empty, without satisfaction or rest, without bright moments from which to take strength to further miserable existence. But still! I could read, I was buying the newspaper now and engaged by reading, I forgot about the hunger and cold, pain in the back after hard work, wounds inflicted by father, dirt, and misery that I was surrounded by.
France was just experiencing tragic days, sinking already exhausted and depressed by Prussia, there was hunger in besieged Paris and from it the commune was born as a rouge, precious flower grown on the hotbed of misery. But the capitalist word got afraid of that and was immediately reaching their hand towards France, left alone until then, to help liberate it. All the press of Europe, including the free-minded Národní listy was defaming the communards. Forgetting the blood spilled by two nations, they only saw the criminality of the people that sinned only by canceling inequalities and wanting freedom, peace, and prosperity for everyone.
There, Rezler describes a process that the modern dominating class has a better mastery thereof than the former rulers. While the old nobility and early bourgeoisie had no qualm whatsoever about sending the army to fire on the protesters and revolutionaries, the current dominating class uses much more insidious and subtle weapons which, at their most extreme, are akin to social genocide. When the European powers decolonized Africa and the Indian subcontinent, they did in a way that was not only completely disconnected from anything the local could want (with rare exceptions) but also ensured instability, easy control and their ability to preserve their economic interests (which can be seen nowadays in their interventionists policies all over the world). While a slightly different affair, the India/Pakistan border was drawn and acted in forty days [6]. Is it surprising that both countries have tense (to say the least) relations?
I wish I could stop here because if the social struggles were the only issues it would mean our world is in much better shape than it is now. Unfortunately, the social struggle cannot be dissociated from both economic issues, obviously, and these economic issues cannot be dissociated from the energy and environmental crisis.
Thus, before carrying on we need to make a short side note about this association. Recently Natixis published a report titled The Dynamics of Capitalism are the ones predicted by Karl Marx [12] (text in French, but I invite you to read it if you can it is short). Besides the satisfaction of reading a bank saying that Marx was right, the first point of their synthesis is very important: we are becoming, all things well considered, less efficient. The reason is simple and mechanical: to keep growing, we need an energy increase [13]. This energy has to come either from oil, coal, uranium, or from renewable energies like solar energy which require rare and non rare metals. As a side note, please realize that we were already using renewable energies for a rather small period of time: from the start of Human History to the industrial revolution. Anyway, to get all of these, we continuously need to dig deeper or in less dense deposits, which means using more energy to get all these components. Now, these curves [14] start making a lot of sense: we are not getting rid of coal or oil because as long as we keep growing, so will our energy needs. And to be able to produce this extra energy, we will need to consume even more energy just producing the tools or extracting the fuel required for it. Renewable sources are not a miracle solution, they are not even able to answer the demand created by the increase of our need itself, let alone our total needs. Factor in the problematics of recycling, e.g. did you know that 95% of titanium used is for paint and pigments, which is a dispersive use that absolutely cannot be recycled? it is an extreme example, but you get the idea. Ressources are finite.
Capitalism can face three limiting factors: resources, capital, manpower. As soon as capital isn’t the limiting factor anymore, as shown by [12], speculation starts and financial bubbles appear. Manpower isn’t a limiting factor anymore either, just look at the constantly increasing unemployment rates in the OECD (sometimes hidden by the creation of precarious jobs, like in Germany). Thus, it is clear that we hit the third possible limiting factor: resources. Unfortunately, not only our economic system rests on the assumption of these resources being effectively endless, but the efficiency of our mines will do nothing but decrease (of course, we started by exploiting the deposits with highest yields) and thus require ever more increasing amounts of energy if we want to keep growing.
Capitalism will suffer nothing but growth.
So capitalism will not save the planet, it is as simple as this. No amount of money thrown to environmental startups will do it any good. No amount of well-meaning VC and entrepreneurs whose main goal remains profit will help preserve the environment. The change must come from the base, by the construction of a new revolutionary class, and the only way for this change to happen is by returning the power to the base. But as I said earlier, the dominating class possesses many insidious means of control who must learn — and are learning — to fight back.
Through their control of the liberal medias via advertisers (in France, according to the Monde Diplomatique, on average, forty percent to fifty percent of a newspaper revenues come from ads [8], think of the chains this put on any journalist willing to do any proper investigative job, or an analysis of the market!), through economic sanctions, through the fear of rating agencies and the transit of capital, they managed three major feats: 1) completely isolate any remaining socialist community 2) Put the market out of reach of the democratic process 3) convince the world that there exists no alternative to the current system (any “reasonable” system, including most versions of the universal income, is nothing but a slight variation of the same neoliberal world). Effectively, they suffocated the masses to prevent us from even imagining any other system. They are also managing to convince us that our socio-economic condition is nothing but our own responsibility and that if we are not succeeding it is because of our own bad choices or lack of work (through all this self-entrepreneur bullshit, which is nothing but the good old independent worker in the mine with no right, before unions and the social progress, although now with admittedly better conditions precisely because of said unions and social progress). There is a reason unions are not popular in the relatively young IT world and that they are, in general, being targeted by medias. Furthermore, there is a strong inverse correlation between salaries inequalities and unions’ memberships [11].
As Pope Francis said, “Human beings are themselves considered consumer goods to be used and then discarded.” [4] The current dominating class is hard at work to take back our established social rights. It is guilting us by telling us that we are nothing but costs, and charges, that the government taxes are a hindrance to their growth, that they generate the richness and production and that we should be grateful to have a job, any job. It is telling us that the world is better thanks to them and their generous philanthropy, which is but a check for a clean consciousness, modern indulgences where God is the people, that we should thank them, as they steer us straight into the abyss, socially, environmentally, and intellectually. They hoard capital while we do the real, concrete work. They are evaluating our production not by how much it brings to our society, but by the profits they generate from it.
They tell us that a mother having a kid is a cost because she takes days off and receives welfare as she produces and raises our future citizen, the very manpower they will relentlessly use later on!
We betrayed the ones left behind for the sake of comfort. Women, minorities, the dispossessed in our own and far away countries, we forgot their struggle and their emancipating fight as soon as the dominating class made concessions and our lives improved. In this way, we became class traitors. Now that the dominants are taking back what our forebearers fought for, they are teaching us to fight between ourselves, creating the artificial walls of xenophobia, Islamophobia, sexism, etc… because they truly are terrified of what would happen to them if we came to realize that the richness of the world is us, not them.
Thanks to E. and P. for their translations to English of Hugo and Rezler, and many others for their help.
References
[2] http://www.thecommentator.com/article/6686/a_century_of_evil_communism_s_100_million_dead
[3] De Vos et al (2007), “Cuba’s International Cooperation in Health: an Overview”, International Journal of Health Services, Volume 37, Number 4, Pages 761–776
[4] http://www.vatican.va/evangelii-gaudium/en/files/assets/basic-html/index.html#46
[5] http://havana-live.com/news/cuba-offers-puerto-rico-aid-devastating-hurricane-maria/
[6] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Right_of_Nations_to_Self-Determination
[8] https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/2002/03/A/8481
[9] https://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/cub/
[10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_Indian_Rebellion_of_1857
[13] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.GDP.PUSE.KO.PP.KD
[14] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=12251
[15] https://books.google.fr/books?id=-CXdJmswenYC&pg=PA0&redir_esc=y
[16] A. de Tocqueville, Souvenirs, texte établi par Luc Monnier, Folio Gallimard, 1964, pp.128–129
[17] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WApT5wYHSCg
Appendix A
For the sake of numbers, let’s consider capitalism’s death toll. Given the utter hegemony of the capitalistic ideology, from 1990 to our days, quite a few categories of death can be fully attributed to it.
- 8 000 000 preventable deaths per year due to starvation https://www.statisticbrain.com/world-hunger-statistics/
- 1 000 000 preventable deaths per year due to lack of water https://water.org/our-impact/water-crisis/
- 7 000 000 preventable deaths from tobacco http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs339/en/ (if you have any doubt about its relation to capitalism, do not forget that “nearly 80% of the world’s more than 1 billion smokers live in low- and middle-income countries.”)
- 1.5 million children are dying prematurely from preventable diseases each year https://www.voanews.com/a/unvaccinated-children-dying-from-preventabel-diseases/2730115.html
With these incomplete numbers alone, we can attribute at least 490 million death since 1990 directly to capitalism.
We could add the 10 million death in the Free Congo State by Belgian responsibility, we could add the millions of death worldwide due to French and English colonial ambition, we could add the deaths of World War I and World War II and so on and so on.
Appendix B
What can we do to improve people’s conditions?
- Listen to the people who are the most unhappy, give them breathing space, let them talk and again, listen.
- Have you ever been told that you should be happy to have a job making you miserable because having a job is a luxury in this economy? It is normal, the dominating class is building increasingly worse working environment and conditions. After all, what are you going to do? Fight back? Demand better conditions? No, you need a job. And if you are part of the many unlucky ones in debt, they got you. This is why we need unions, it is only united that we are strong and can resist.
- Support media that are trying not to rely on ads and public funding to preserve their editorial independence.
- There is a significant difference between Universal Basic Income and Lifelong Salary, you can learn about it in this video (with English subtitles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhg0SUYOXjw
- We are stuck in a society that is focused obscenely on growth, to the point that we are exhausting our planet, but there are options, like degrowth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
- To insist on that last point, you most likely heard at least once that you should join a fast growing industry or company, but let me ask you something, who is happier, the cook working in a small good village restaurant with freedom to create his dish and a nice environment, or a cook in a fast growing fast food joint?
- Realize that you do have the right to healthcare, work, and food and water. This is not unreasonable. It is only unreasonable to the ones who live on the profit generated from your labor because it would mean reducing their margin. You aren’t being a “naive idealist” or anything like that. Don’t let people convince you otherwise. The world can support us all, even allow us to pursue grandiose projects together (we saw it worked with social security and universal healthcare), but only if we stop allowing an elite to hijack most of its resources.
- Refuse to carry the blame for the consequences of a neo-colonial and neo-liberal profit-driven economy. Unless you are one of the responsible, then use your capital to help build a breathing space for the workers, instead of using it to generate more profit.
- A few possibly good reads for American readers (or people who are interested in the situation in the US): http://blog.justonepixel.com/geek/2018/01/30/some-recent-reading
