This article is part of a series on classical Marxism.
When Vladimir Lenin took power after a bloodless coup in November, 1917, shockwaves reverberated through imperial hallways the world over. The world’s first working class government was formed in Moscow and the response was swift. The world’s first working class government was formed in Russia and the response was swift. Intervening were 70,000 Japanese, 50,000 British, 15,000 French, 13,000 American and 4,700 Canadian soldiers ordered to throw back the socialist forces that had deposed the Tsar and aid the ultra-right Russian White Army in seizing Moscow. The Reds, of course, won this war with the support of peasants and workers. But it wouldn’t be long until the USSR was attacked yet again, as the largest invasion force ever assembled poured over Soviet borders under the command of Nazi Germany. In the years following World War II virtually every successful socialist movement—China, Cuba, Chile, North Korea, Afghanistan, Laos, Nicaragua and Vietnam—found itself enmeshed in bloody battles with the US army or CIA-funded guerrilla saboteurs. The 20th century is pockmarked by so much needless bloodshed between advanced Western countries and chronically-poor nations attempting to chart a sovereign path to modernity.
Under the unfortunate conditions of extreme foreign aggression and economic poverty, a heavy-handed, security-focused and state-oriented “siege socialism” developed—a term coined by Michael Parenti.1 They were tasked with both warding off foreign invasion and simultaneously rapidly growing the industrial base and social development of their people. Like their capitalist counterparts in the first and third worlds, these second-world socialist countries had plenty of defects and sometimes-horrific blights on their record of governance. But Parenti pushes back on any judgement of pitiable failure on their part:
To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. State socialism transformed desperately poor countries into modernized societies in which everyone had enough food, clothing and shelter; where elderly people had secure pensions; and where all children (and many adults) went to school and nobody was denied medical attention. Some of us from poor families who carry around the hidden injuries of class are much impressed by these achievements and are unwilling to dismiss them.2
The siege socialism of Marxist-Leninist regimes locked in an objective rise of living standards and quality of life—impressive, considering the headwinds they faced. But the experience of these states marks a deviation from classical Marxist dictates, which state that the emancipatory revolution must find a home with advanced capitalist states that have negated Western liberal capitalism into a higher order:
Marx himself never imagined that socialism could be achieved in impoverished conditions. Such a project would require almost as bizarre a loop in time as inventing the internet in the Middle Ages. Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik leadership.3
Karl Marx was aware of the cruelties that the bourgeois class and their armies were capable of raining down upon any threat to their economic power. Up to 20,000 people, including women and children, were massacred by the French National Army when they broke up the Paris Commune in 1871, events immortalized in Marx’s essay The Civil War in France. Only a nation that was economically advanced at the outset of revolution would be able to negate capitalist relations along humanistic lines while buttressing against foreign aggression.
Lacking this, 20th century Marxist-Leninist states came to resemble the “crude communism” of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, where “the role of the worker is not abolished but extended to all men.”4 Like the working classes under capitalism, wage labour in siege socialist regimes became universalized, with alienation piqued by irrational bureaucratic decision-making. Individuals in these countries often fell “between two stools,” where,
Workers were told that the property of the means of production belonged to the whole society, including them, but they did not have a decisive role in determining how to employ the machinery or how to dispose of the product. For that reason, Soviet workers considered the “socialist means of production” to be not fully theirs, but someone else’s—or, most often, nobody’s!5
And so, there was barely a whimper when party bureaucrats sold out their countries under the tutelage of Western economic advisors. Millions in Eastern Europe lost their job, healthcare, pensions—and starved. Hyperinflation over scarce goods ensued. Life expectancy crashed. Hundreds of thousands of East European women and children disappeared into sex markets, only to resurface over the Internet’s seamiest corners naked, humiliated, exploited. All was right in the world again.
Further reading:
Karl Marx, The Civil War in France.
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Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Books, 1997), 49-52. ↩︎
Ibid, 85. ↩︎
Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale University Press, 2011), 16. ↩︎
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. ↩︎
Chris Gilbert, “Luisa Cáceres: Commune-Building in Urban Venezuela,” Monthly Review, Vol. 74, No. 7: 26. ↩︎