The Systems we Choose to Pursue
Communism's supporters wanted a people-powered government. What they got was the exact opposite.
How to Change the World is a weekly blog about reversing American decline. I will (1) study successful models of governance throughout history, primarily in the West, (2) highlight what’s going wrong leading to institutional decline or ‘political decay’, and (3) present models of democratic innovation that could lead us into a prosperous, peaceful and abundant 21st century.
This is part 4 in a series exploring ideas in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. You can find Parts 1, 2 and 3 here. Thanks for reading.
The history of civilization is a history of decentralizing power. The United States at it’s apex was the most decentralized major country in history which led to it being the most creative, rich, free and powerful. The same was true with England, in it’s time. It’s the good fortune of mankind that these things travel together. Since our trend toward re-centralizing power, all of these things have been on the decline, unsurprisingly. Why then, after so much success, would we centralize? Because a centralized country is easier to control, and facilitates expert rule which is the goal of many elites.
People long for decentralized power, which is synonymous with self-governance. But they lack leaders so wise and selfless as to bring it about.
This week we’ll talk about Communism, if anything a sincere and heroic attempt to put government in the hands of the people, yet fated to achieve the exact opposite. Everywhere it was tried it failed spectacularly. We will look for a fatal flaw in Communism’s execution by comparing the approaches of two party leaders, Vladimir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. The former was the embodiment of centralization, the latter, a true champion the people. If you’ve been reading my pieces you’ll detect this as a pattern, a classic battle of centralization vs. decentralization.
Lenin
Lenin’s strategy for communism was to have a group at the top who made all of the strategic decisions which would then guide the proletariat.
Lenin's design for the construction of the revolution was in many ways comparable to Le Corbusier’s design for the construction of the modern city. Both were complex endeavors that had to be entrusted to the professionalism and scientific insight of a trained cadre with full power to see the plan through.
Ah yes, scientific insight! Again and again, the justification for gatekeeping - for differentiating between the leaders and the led. It’s one of the things that rings true 100 years later.
The relationship envisioned by Lenin between the Vanguard party and its rank and file is perhaps best exemplified by the terms mass or masses… Once the rank and file are so labeled, it is clear that what they chiefly add to the Revolutionary process are their weight and numbers and the kind of brute force they can represent if firmly directed. The impression conveyed is of a huge, formless, milling crowd without any cohesion– without a history, without ideas, without a plan of action. Lenin was all too aware of course that the working class does have its own history and values, but this history and these values will lead the working class in the wrong direction unless they are replaced by the historical analysis and advanced revolutionary theory of Scientific Socialism.
Although the spirit of communism may very well have been the liberation of the worker, in the mind of an authoritarian like Lenin, the worker was merely a cog in a giant machine which he must control.
“It must be said that large-scale machine industry– which is precisely…the foundation of socialism… calls for absolute and strict unity of will, which directs the joint labors of hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people… But how can strict unity of will be ensured? By thousands subordinating their will to the will of one… We must learn to combine the public-meeting democracy of the working people – turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood – with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet Leader, while at work.” - Lenin
Here is how Lenin felt about peasants:
“Until we have remolded the peasant, … until large-scale machinery has recast him, we must assure him of the possibility of running his economy without restrictions. We must find forms of co-existence with the small farmer,... since the remaking of the small farmer, the reshaping of his whole psychology and all his habits, is a task requiring generations.” - Lenin
He wants to remold and reshape the peasant. He is a fanatic.
“Electrification was, for Lenin, the key to breaking the pattern of petit-bourgeois landholding and hence the only way to extricate the “roots of capitalism’ in the countryside, which was “the foundation, the basis, of the internal enemy.” The enemy “depends on small-scale production, and there is only one way of undermining it, namely, to place the economy of the country, including agriculture, on a new technical basis, that of modern large-scale production. Only electricity provides that basis.”
In modern America, the critique of capitalism is that it has led to concentration of commercial power. Interesting to note that capitalism in Russia facilitated small land holding, a decentralization of power that Lenin sought to crush with state-owned industrial farms.
Rosa Luxembourg
In my last essay, we discussed how Jane Jacobs understood the city as the complex assembly of individuals. She saw the city as bottom-up. Here, we see Rosa Luxemburg taking that role regarding governance. Although also a communist with fatally flawed views, she was an opponent of Lenin’s regarding both tactics, and the ultimate goals of Communism.
“But with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become crippled. without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of the press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution… public life gradually falls asleep… in reality only a dozen outstanding heads [party leaders] do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously.” - Luxembourg
Luxemburg is both an illuminating and tragic figure. The quote above suggests she was a freedom lover. Looking back at 20th century communism and noting the degree to which it extinguished the human spirit, it’s surprising to learn that the movement had sincere, freedom-loving thought leaders with a faith in humanity greater than their lust for power.
I had heard that communism road in on the enthusiasm and naïveté of such people but had never learned much about them. Luxemburg believed in the people. She didn’t envision a flat proletariat taking orders from the Vanguard party. She envisioned a communism that would produce educated, empowered, creative people of agency and power.
But the major, recurrent theme of Luxembourg's criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks generally was that their dictatorial methods and their mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism… Unless the working class as a whole participated in the political process, she adds ominously, “socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals.”
Luxembourg’s heart for the people and desire to build a communism worthy of them is palpable. Unfortunately she had chosen to back an unworkable system. Lenin’s hierarchical socialism won out, as is did in national socialist Germany, China, Cambodia and everywhere else it was tried.
Luxembourg was assassinated during an attempted revolution in Germany in 1919 so never got to see it.
If you run the tape forward from Luxembourg’s death to the fall of the Soviet Empire in 1989, the people of America ‘oppressed by capitalism’ became richer, freer and more creative while Soviet Russia became a prison and home of one of the greatest mass democides in history. Estimates of Communism’s death toll range from 60 to 150 million with the vast majority being killed within their own country, by their own government.
This reveals a brutal reality about the systems we choose to pursue. Communism had brave, brilliant, and kind people in it’s ranks - at least in the beginning. But the toxic system took them all down with it and eventually only the brutal thrived.
While it could be said that Luxemburg’s heart was to give power to workers, the system she backed was destined to centralize. When the power centralized, it became so firmly entrenched that it imposed terror on it’s own population unopposed, for the better part of a century.
This leads me to a final puzzle: could the early supporters of Communism possibly have known that it would turn out so murderous? What level of responsibility do those like Luxemburg bear, who had good intentions but ultimately backed an evil ideology? The reason given for Communism’s catastrophic failure is sometimes termed “internal contradictions,” i.e. the system itself wasn’t logically consistent or in line with human nature. In other words, there was such a gap between Lenin’s vision for humanity and actual human nature, that he had to murder millions to try to get them to conform to his vision. And it never worked - he and his predecessors eventually failed.
That same system of communism was chosen, in it’s infancy, by millions around the world. They could have never imagined that by simply misunderstanding human nature, their good intentions would give birth to one of the darkest systems ever produced by man.
It’s not enough to speak of decentralized power. It’s critical to understand and back systems that actually do decentralize power. If you do, you can be confident you will be on the right side of history.
Matt Harder runs the civic engagement firm Civic Trust, where he helps cities strengthen their civic environment by helping residents, civic organizations, and local government work together to create public projects. Follow him on Twitter.