Don't know much about history

I believe I've mentioned now and again that I've been reading a lot of history lately. It's just something I've gotten into now that I'm taking a semi-sabbatical. I wouldn't say I've encountered major surprises -- I was conversant with the broad outlines of American and European history. I have certainly learned a lot of specifics and gotten a deeper understanding of the larger stories and patterns over the past few months.

Sadly, most Americans know very little history. Even asserting some basic, indisputable facts can provoke howls of outrage -- for instance, the United States was founded as a white supremacist oligarchy. It's true! It's not just an opinion or an interpretation and certainly not a slur or a misrepresentation. It's in the Constitution. All you have to do is read it. Yes, it has since been amended so that this is no longer true, and that is a very important story, but that's how it started off.

It is very common for people of right wing persuasion to accuse liberal or progressive activists, thinkers and politicians of being Communists, or Marxists, or socialists. But they obviously do not know what these words mean, and seem to be unaware that they are not synonyms.  Calling someone a Communist or a socialist is pretty much like calling them a poopyhead. It's just a meaningless term of opprobrium. When I was in grad school, I taught sociology at a community college, and one of my students told me his father said that the Boston Globe is a Communist newspaper.  That is fucking hilarious.

 

There are actually a few people in the U.S. today who call themselves communists (small c), but they're kind of like the Elks Club. They get together for social purposes, but they don't actually do a whole lot. Nobody who has any influence, or who holds political office, is in fact a Communist. (Well, I can't rule out that there's a Zoning Board of Appeals member somewhere whose neighbors tolerate his eccentricities.) .

 

Anyway, I thought I'd say just a few words about these words. Their meaning is notably highly disputed. For some people, historically though rarely today, they represented a kind of religious faith, and doctrinal disputes about the correct interpretation of Marxism-Leninism are a whole lot like the theological disputes that caused medieval Europeans to murder each other by the tens of thousands.

 

Anyway, just as a primer, Karl Marx was a political economist who was a whole lot better at criticizing 19th Century Capitalism than he was at envisioning what a better world would be like. He thought that like Hari Seldon in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, he had a scientific method for predicting the political future. He thought that industrial capitalism would collapse due to internal contradictions, through a revolt by the working class, which would establish a more egalitarian society in which "the people" would own the means of production. But he was awfully vague about exactly how this was supposed to work. Regardless, it was going to happen in the economically developed capitalist societies of Western Europe and North America -- industrial capitalism was a pre-requisite for the revolution.

 

Well, that didn't happen as you have probably noticed. However, people who considered themselves disciples of Marx ended up taking power in Russia and China, which were economically backward agrarian states with little industry and small to non-existent capitalist sectors. This presented an obvious problem. Lenin, the founding leader of the Russian Communist regime, had to come up with a new set of ideas that could somehow wrestle Marx into relevance in the largely peasant Russian empire. Essentially, there needed to be a strategy to first industrialize Russia, so that the conditions for the proletarian revolution could exist. 

 

Lenin died a few years after Bolsheviks seized power. His successor Stalin imposed a ruthless, murderous dictatorship that dispossessed, starved and murdered the peasantry in order to turn what was left of them into a proletariat. He also murdered everybody in political or military office who he thought might disagree with him about anything, and a whole lot who didn't, just for good measure. None of this had anything to do with Karl Marx or anything he ever believed. Mao Tse Tung in China did pretty much the same thing, although mass starvation of the Chinese peasantry was probably not really intentional.

Meanwhile, in western Europe, political parties emerged that called themselves democratic socialists or social democrats.The kind of society they advocated actually exists today, in Scandinavia, and western Europe generally is closer to it than the U.S. There is considerable confusion because the Soviet Communists and their admirers in other lands also called their system socialism, even though it didn't resemble the democratic socialist regimes of western Europe in the slightest. 

 

Anyway, today, Russia has a capitalist economy but it is ruled by a depraved tyrant. It's probably fair to say that it's more like Nazi Germany than the U.S.S.R. China is ruled by a party that calls itself Communist, but it has a capitalist economy. The same is true of Vietnam, by the way. Cuba is kind of in between. Only North Korea remains as what can truly be called a Stalinist state, but I wouldn't worry too much about North Korean infiltration into U.S. politics. 

The only Americans who purport to admire Stalin and Mao today, and to want their version of Communism to happen here or anywhere, are a tiny fringe group of nutcases. Believe me. Don't worry about it. There is the college professor here and there who professes to be a Marxist, but that's about Marx's critique of capitalism, updated for the modern age, not about creating a Stalinist regime. Adding to the confusion, some people call themselves communist with a small c, but again they're talking about something totally unlike Stalinism. I personally think it's better to stay away from insisting on being any kind of an "ist," and just think for yourself, borrowing what seem to be good ideas from whoever may have had them, and leaving their bad ideas behind.