Socialism vs Communism: Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters Episode 7

This entry is the seventh instalment of my blog ( and eventual podcast) Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters. While I have not recorded the audio file yet, this entry was written to be aired in podcast format and as such will (at times) read more like the transcript of a podcast than a traditional blog. So without further ado, here’s the seventh episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters.

(Chapter Headings: Introduction)

Hello, my name is Matitya and welcome to Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters

Today’s Topic, are Socialism and Communism basically the same thing? No.

(Chapter Headings: Definitions)

I have elsewhere defined Socialism as government ownership of the means of production and I stand by that definition. That raises the question “What is Communism?” My response to that is that Communism is the political ideology of Karl Mark and Friedrich Engels advocating the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie.

(Chapter Headings: Is Communism evil?)

In Marxist theory, the bourgeoisie essentially means the rich, so Communism is fundamentally an ideology that advocates murdering the rich. It is an evil doctrine.

(Chapter Headings: Mind-bogglingly stupid things that people say in defence of Communism)

There are people who will object to my acknowledging Communism as evil by saying things like “that wasn’t real Communism” or“Communism is great in theory but doesn’t work in practise”. Those claims are false.

(Chapter Headings: The Communists in their own words)

Marx and Engels said in their Communist Manifesto

“In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat.” And this is not something they were merely predicting but something they were advocating otherwise they wouldn’t have ended their manifesto with

“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 Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!”

Marx also responded to the failure of an uprising in Austria by saying “the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.” In the final issue of his newspaper Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx published a piece complaining about the German government somehow being unaware of Marx’s support of violence saying “We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror”. Marx, in the 1870s, defended the Paris Commune for its use of violence to come to power and its execution of an Archbishop and went as far to say “The moderation of the Commune during the two months of undisputed sway is equalled only by the heroism of its defence”.

Engels expressed similar sentiments. So no, you can’t convince me that this “wasn’t real Communism” since this is what the philosophers of Communism said Communism was and you can’t convince me that Communism is “good in theory” because this is what Communism is in theory.

(Chapter Headings: Leninism)

The argument against Communism being fundamentally distinct from Socialism is that whenever Communists came to power, they established government ownership of the means of production. And even though Vladimir Lenin and his ideological heirs claimed that their Socialism was strictly a temporary measure meant to bring about stateless Communism, it never stayed temporary. Thus all Communist countries are Socialist.

(Chapter Headings: Communism as a form of Socialism)

Given that all Communists are Socialists, would it follow that all Socialists are Communists? No. Lenin might have said “the goal of Socialism is Communism” ( I haven’t found a credible source for him having said those words but he did express that sentiment) and that idea was parroted by his ideological heirs but I don’t take Communist propaganda at face value. It’s also worth noting that Communists and Socialists don’t always get along.

(Chapter Headings: Communists murder the moderate Left)

Adolphe Thiers was not a Socialist. He was nonetheless a man of the Left. When he was elected President of France, Socialist radicals violently seized control of Paris declaring it a Commune. Marx endorsed the Paris Commune and Engels later said that it was his model for “the dictatorship of the proletariat”. Now, you might be thinking “that’s not a fair example, Thiers wasn’t a Socialist” and you would have a point. To that I would say, Alexander Kerensky was a Socialist. Kerensky came to power after the Czar was overthrown in the February Revolution of 1917 and Kerensky released the Communists from prison despite not being a Communist himself. Eight months later, Lenin and the Communists violently overthrew Kerensky’s government in the October Revolution and established a Communist dictatorship in its stead. Something Kerensky understandably resented. There’s a reason why the self-proclaimed anti-fascists who threw Molotov cocktails in protest of the pro-Trump Milo Yiannopoulos being invited to speak at Berkeley spray-painted upon the walls “Liberals get the bullet too” followed by a drawing of a hammer and sickle. The violence is not strictly directed at right-wingers, it also targets the moderate Left.

(Chapter Headings: Socialists are sometimes very critical of Communism: Part 1 Orwell)

It’s worth mentioning that some outspoken Socialists have been scathingly critical of Communism. The most famous example of this would be George Orwell. That said, Orwell is a complicated case. In a 1944 critique of G.K. Chesterton’s analysis of Hard Times by Charles Dickens, Orwell wrote

“ In fact, there are new ideas. The idea that an advanced civilization need not rest on slavery is a relatively new idea, for instance; it is a good deal younger than the Christian religion. But even if Chesterton’s dictum were true, it would only be true in the sense that a statue is contained in every block of stone. Ideas may not change, but emphasis shifts constantly. It could be claimed, for example, that the most important part of Marx’s theory is contained in the saying: ‘Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.’ But before Marx developed it, what force had that saying had? Who had paid any attention to it? Who had inferred from it — what it certainly implies — that laws, religions and moral codes are all a superstructure built over existing property relations? It was Christ, according to the Gospel, who uttered the text, but it was Marx who brought it to life. And ever since he did so the motives of politicians, priests, judges, moralists and millionaires have been under the deepest suspicion — which, of course, is why they hate him so much.”

That sounds like Orwell thought Marx had a good point, at least at the level of analysis. And it’s worth noting that when Orwell went to Spain to fight the Fascist Francisco Franco, Orwell served as part of a Communist contingent but was disillusioned with Communism after the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin denounced Orwell’s unit for being Trotskyist. Even when Orwell wrote the anti-Communist novel Animal Farm as an allegory for the October Revolution, he based the character of Old Major on both Marx and Lenin and portrayed him positively. Also, in Animal Farm, Orwell based Snowball on Lenin’s right-hand man Leon Trotsky and portrayed him generally positively. And in his anti-Communist dystopian novel 1984, Orwell based the character of Emmanuel Goldstein, with very little subtlety, on Trotsky and portrayed him positively. Indeed, part of 1984, is the protagonist Winston Smith reading Orwell’s arguments straight out of Goldstein’s manifesto.

Would this suggest that Orwell was not an anti-Communist but simply a Trotskyist who opposed Stalin because Stalin drove Trotsky out of the Soviet Union and seized power for himself? It would if this were all Orwell had ever written about Trotsky. That said, in his 1945 essay Notes on Nationalism, Orwell wrote:

“The fact that Trotskyists are everywhere a persecuted minority, and that the accusation usually made against them, i.e. of collaborating with the Fascists, is absolutely false, creates an impression that Trotskyism is intellectually and morally superior to Communism; but it is doubtful whether there is much difference. The most typical Trotskyists, in any case, are ex-Communists, and no one arrives at Trotskyism except via one of the left-wing movements. No Communist, unless tethered to his party by years of habit, is secure against a sudden lapse into Trotskyism. The opposite process does not seem to happen equally often, though there is no clear reason why it should not.”

That said, Orwell said in the same essay that the word Trotskyist “is used so loosely as to include Anarchists, democratic Socialists and even Liberals. I use it here to mean a doctrinaire Marxist whose main motive is hostility to the Stalin regime. Trotskyism can be better studied in obscure pamphlets or in papers like the Socialist Appeal than in the works of Trotsky himself, who was by no means a man of one idea” such that Orwell’s denunciation of “Trotskyism” is not necessarily directed at the person of Trotsky. Even so, Orwell wrote ““Trotsky, in exile, denounces the Russian dictatorship, but he is probably as much responsible for it as any man now living, and there is no certainty that as a dictator he would be preferable to Stalin, though undoubtedly he has a much more interesting mind.”

Comments like these lead to me regarding Orwell as an anti-Communist rather than an anti-Stalinist Communist.

(Chapter Headings: Was Orwell a Leninist?)

You might object that Orwell was only talking about Stalin and Trotsky but he might still support Leninism. You might be wrong. Orwell ,in his review of James Burnham’s anti-Communist essay Lenin’s Heir, commented about Burnham’s thesis that Stalin had not betrayed but fulfilled the promises of Lenin’s revolution that

“ In itself, this is an easier opinion to swallow than the usual Trotskyist claim that Stalin is a mere crook who has perverted the Revolution to his own ends, and that things would somehow have been different if Lenin had lived or Trotsky had remained in power. Actually there is no strong reason for thinking that the main lines of development would have been very different. Well before 1923 the seeds of a totalitarian society were quite plainly there. Lenin, indeed, is one of those politicians who win an undeserved reputation by dying prematurely. Had he lived, it is probable that he would either have been thrown out, like Trotsky, or would have kept himself in power by methods as barbarous, or nearly as barbarous, as those of Stalin.”

So whatever his intellectual sympathies were towards Marx, Orwell was opposed to “Communism in practice” though that remains a distinction that I despise given it gives too much credit to Marx.

(Chapter Headings: Was Orwell a Socialist?)

It’s also worth mentioning that Orwell’s Socialism is a bit more complicated than people say. Don’t get me wrong. Orwell was a Socialist. Even so, Orwell was willing to acknowledge problems with Socialism (and argued that doing so was necessary to defending Socialism.) Orwell wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier “As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents” of whom he wrote “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. “

Orwell also acknowledged that the libertarian economist Friedrich August Hayek had a point in saying that a planned economy gave too much power to the government and easily enabled tyranny. Orwell sums up Hayek’s book The Road to Serfdom as saying “By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it” and describes Hayek as proposing an unplanned competitive economy as the solution. Orwell comments “In the negative part of Professor Hayek’s thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often — at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough — that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of” and that Hayek had a point about Socialist intellectuals being “more totalitarian-minded than common people.” Don’t get me wrong, I am not suggesting that Orwell was a closet libertarian. I am saying that Orwell had a more nuanced view of Socialism than the average dyed in the wool Socialist.

Even so, I am wiling to call Orwell an anti-Communist Socialist.

(Chapter Headings: Anti-Communist Socialists Part Two Russell)

Orwell is not the only example of an avowed Socialist who was an anti-Communist. The British mathematician, Nobel Prize in Literature winning writer, philosopher and peace activist Bertrand Russell was an avowed Socialist. Russell was also vehemently opposed to Communism. Russell visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin in the wake of the First World War and returned to England with a negative impression. Russell wrote of Lenin “He has as little love of liberty as the Christians who suffered under Diocletian and retaliated when they acquired power” and “I went to Russia believing myself a communist; but contact with those who have no doubts has intensified a thousandfold my own doubts, not only of communism, but of every creed so firmly held that for its sake men are willing to inflict widespread misery.” Russell didn’t hold Trotsky in higher regard. Russell’s piece, written for The Nation, doesn’t focus on Marx though he does reference Marx in it saying “the whole tendency of Marxism is against psychological imagination, since it attributes everything in politics to purely material causes.” Russell said after the Second World War “The Russians, and the Poles with Russian encouragement, have, I regret to say, adopted a policy of vengeance, and have so far as I am able to discover, committed atrocities very much on the same scale and of the same magnitude as those of which the Nazis were guilty.”

In the late 1940s, Russell argued in favour of nuking the Soviets before they could get an atomic bomb. In 1956, Russell wrote an essay titled Why I am not a Communist in which he said “My objections to Marx are of two sorts: one, that he was muddle-headed; and the other, that his thinking was almost entirely inspired by hatred.” And Russell said “His theoretical errors, however, would not have mattered so much but for the fact that, like Tertullian and Carlyle, his chief desire was to see his enemies punished, and he cared little what happened to his friends in the process.” Russell declared in the same piece “Marx’s doctrine was bad enough, but the developments which it underwent under Lenin and Stalin made it much worse.” Russell had particular vitriol for Stalin, of whom he wrote “As the sole class-conscious proletarian, Stalin condemned millions of peasants to death by starvation and millions of others to forced labour in concentration camps. He even went so far as to decree that the laws of heredity are henceforth to be different from what they used to be, and that the germ-plasm is to obey Soviet decrees but [not] that that reactionary priest Mendel. I am completely at a loss to understand how it came about that some people who are both humane and intelligent could find something to admire in the vast slave camp produced by Stalin.”

That said, Russell made the case that the possibility of nuclear annihilation made war an unacceptable mechanism to defeat the Soviets and as such suggested eliminating poverty to keep it from driving people into the hands of the Communists.

Should you still doubt Russell’s Socialist credentials, in 1935, he wrote an essay titled the Case for Socialism where he states

“For my part, while I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race. If it cannot now be [realised] without a violent upheaval, this [is] to be attributed largely to the violence of its advocates. But I still have some hope that a saner advocacy may soften the opposition, and make a less catastrophic transition possible.”

Russell never recanted this view. Before you object that he defines Socialism differently from how I do, he says in the same essay “Let us begin by a definition of Socialism. The definition must consist of two parts, economic and political. The economic part consists in State ownership of ultimate economic power, which involves, as a minimum, land and minerals, capital, banking, credit and foreign trade. The political part requires that the ultimate political power should be democratic.” For him, ‘democratic Socialism’ is government ownership of the means of production plus democracy. So my definition of Socialism would be included in his definition.

The main takeaway here is that Russell was both a Socialist and opposed to Communism.

(Chapter Headings: Anti-Communist Socialists Part Three: Zamyatin)

As another example, I bring you the Russian dystopian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin who became an atheist, read Marx, supported the October Revolution, and was betrayed by the very Soviet Union he supported and driven out of it for daring to acknowledge its problems. As a result, Zamyatin turned against Communism. Zamyatin wrote in his Soviet Heretic Essays

“Christ on Golgotha, between two thieves, bleeding to death

drop by drop, is the victor — because he has been crucified, because, in practical terms, he has been vanquished. But Christ victorious in practical terms is the grand inquisitor. And worse,

Christ victorious in practical terms is a paunchy priest in a silk-

lined purple robe, who dispenses benedictions with his right hand

and collects donations with the left. The Fair Lady, in legal

marriage, is simply Mrs. So-and-So, with hair curlers at night

and a migraine in the morning. And Marx, come down to earth,

is simply a Krylenko … from Hertzen, from Marx, they have learned by rote

nothing more than “assembly and pardon,” mouthing the words

in the accents of Nizhny Novgorod. And this is why there is so

much vaudevillian grotesquery in their deeds and in the written

monuments they are leaving as a heritage to curious posterity.

Such is the irony and such is the wisdom of fate. Wisdom,

because this ironic law holds the pledge of eternal movement

forward. The [realisation], [materialisation], practical victory of an

idea immediately gives it a philistine hue. And the true Scythian

will smell from a mile away the odor of dwellings, the odor of

cabbage soup, the odor of the priest in his purple cassock, the

odor of Krylenko — and will hasten away from the dwellings, into

the steppe, to freedom. “

Zamyatin also wrote “

“The victorious October Revolution,” as it is referred to in

official sources, in Pravda and Znamya truda, has not escaped

the general law on becoming victorious: it has turned philistine.”

His meaning is that utopian ideals have merit strictly in theory but when established are inevitably corrupted by those with political power. He seems to use this to absolve Communism in theory of association with Communism in practice. Zamyatin’s argument doesn’t work for me because killing Jews, Saracens and heathens for refusing to believe in Christianity is not the logical continuation of believing in the idea that “Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5 KJV) and “Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy.” (Matthew 5:7) But murdering the rich is the logical continuation of believing that it’s necessary for the proletariat to kill the bourgeoisie to free themselves from their chains. That’s the difference.

Even so, Zamyatin seems to have regretted his support for the October Revolution given he said “I regret that I did not see the February Revolution and know only the October Revolution. I returned to Petersburg, past German submarines, in a ship with lights out, wearing a life belt all the time, just in time for October. This is the same as never having been in love and waking up one morning already married for ten years or so. ”

Zamyatin also wrote short stories which criticised the Soviet Union and the dystopian novel We which was a major influence on 1984. Anecdotally, I once read a back cover of We which praised Zamyatin’s book as prophetic for having somehow anticipated the horrors of Stalinism despite being written in the 1920s before Stalin came to power. I still roll my eyes at that description because the person who wrote that back cover missed something obvious. Lenin was in power from the October Revolution to his death in 1924 and throughout that time Lenin was a cruel, vicious and bloodthirsty despot. Zamyatin didn’t anticipate the Soviet Union becoming a tyranny, it was always one. Zamyatin could see that for the same reasons as Russell did. Arguably even more easily given Zamyatin lived in the Soviet Union (though also somewhat less easily given he was ideologically possessed by Marxism whereas Russell wasn’t.)

Despite Zamyatin’s opposition to Communism, he remained a Socialist.

(Chapter Headings: Socialism in theory)
It’s worth noting that, as squeamish as certain Socialists are about denouncing the evils of Communism (I’m looking at you, Bernie Sanders), there is no obvious leap from supporting “government ownership of the means of production” to supporting ‘the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie’. As a result, there is no hypocrisy in Socialists condemning Communism.

(Chapter Headings: Conclusion)

At the beginning of this Matitya’s Musing, I asked if the difference between Socialism and Communism were a relevant distinction to make. The answer is yes. While all Communists are Socialists, not all Socialists are Communists. Communists overthrow Socialists and there are Socialists who are critical of Communism. Most importantly, Communism is always murderous but Socialism can be implemented without any murder.

My name is Matitya and this has been an episode of Matitya’s Many Musings on a Myriad of Matters