Column: The 20th Century Defeat of Socialism
By Charles Jeanes
Me and some of my friends
we were gonna save the world
we were trying to make it better
we were ready to save the world
but then the weather changed…
We were pulling in the spiritual
Riding on the desert wind
We could see it in the distance
Getting closer every minute
We saw the lights and spiritual shining
Getting closer every minute
Then we skipped the rails, and we started to fail
And we folded up, and it’s not enough
Think about how close we came — Neil Young, Walk like a Giant on the Land
Everybody thought we could win with a vote
So the band went home without playin’ a note
I’m alright Jack see you round so long
I’m alright Jack see you round so long
And now today everyone’s a bit older
We’re gettin’ richer but we’re gettin’ colder
We’re lookin’ for somethin’ that just ain’t there
And it don’t mean nothin’ to have long hair
Whatever happened to the Revolution
We all got stoned and it drifted away – – The Skyhooks
Historians name Centuries
If I had to name the twentieth century, I would call it “Capitalism Victorious.”
A dream of defeated capitalism – see lyrics above – failed. Here is why, in statistics, that we should regard the twentieth century as capitalism’s win.
There’s nothing new in the stats. You know this. The top 1% of wealthy, or even worse, the top 0.1%, have become so immeasurably greater than everyone else, that no one could deny Capitalism – and Capitalists – Rule. People like Musk and Bezos, Zuckerberg and Gates never, ever existed in the past. [No, do not make a case that Genghis Khan or Alexander the Great were “richer”. Untrue. Your ignorance should embarrass you.]
Wealth of this magnitude moves one to ask, “Are these men even human anymore?”
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/012715/5-richest-people-world.asp
Capitalists now thrive in a dimension of private wealth so unprecedented, how would one make a case that Capitalism had not beaten its 20th Century rival? That rival was “Socialism”, which, if not dead, is surely dying.
Summary: a world moves, from 1900 to 2000
The human world looked nothing like this in the year 1900, before world wars and scientific discoveries previously unthinkable.
The First World War has been aptly called “the Suicide of Europe.” The Second World War has been less suitably titled “the last Good War” by Americans who see themselves in heroic light establishing global peace, law, and order in 1945.
After WWII, Europe ceased to be powerful enough to subject the other people of the globe to imperial rule, ceased to propagate ‘race-science dogma’, ceased to monopolize the economics of prosperity for their own nations. Europe withered.
The atomic bomb, space travel, and computing/electronics, altered reality. In all of this, capitalism was at the root, while socialism was aspiring to replace it.
Capitalism and Socialism: quite dissimilar propositions
I think it worth hammering on this point: Capitalism did not come into being as a counter-proposal to what went before it, whether we call it feudal- aristocratic or some other label. Capitalism developed from practice, from commercial activity and economic innovation during the long medieval era of feudal nobles ruling Europe.
When capitalism was matured in the United Kingdom first, and then the USA, France, and other west-European lands, it had its theorists, and then foes who wrote manifestoes against it, like Karl Marx. Capital developed organically.
Socialism was an idea before it was a matter of economic fact. Capitalism was fact, then texts; socialism proceeded from a critique of capitalism in theory. When the USSR was founded, its system had to be invented. From the start, the experiment defied Marx’s prediction. It happened in a backward land.
A century of bi-polar struggle, in three chapters.
Dividing the century in three parts, chapter one is the period of Europe at its peak of power, then its drift to war and slow social deterioration while a Socialist Revolution purports a better way. But the Socialist experiment begins badly.
The second chapter is the nadir of Capitalist democracies in the post-1929 market-crash, the apparent superiority of both Communism and Fascism to bourgeois-capitalist-liberal Democracy; a zenith of Capital ensues in the West after defeating Fascism. A Cold War of Capitalism and Communism results.
The 1960s witness a brutal US quasi-colonialist war in Asia, a space race won by the US over the USSR, and an unnoticed or unknown decline in the USSR while European colonial empires dissolve. Feminism erupts in the West only.
Chapter three is post-1975, capitalist crisis and strong recovery, collapse of the USSR’s communist “workers’ utopia”, the emergence of China with a quasi-capitalist economy, and the [transient] ascendancy of the West over all by 2001. The former USSR disappears, the former Soviet empire is wrecked.
Round One [to 1935]
The Great War, or WWI, was a war calculated to deal a new hand of cards to ruling classes in Europe and American nations, gambling on the violent option in politics – “war is politics, pursued by other means” – strengthening one set of rulers and eliminating another. Ruling classes knew the pre-war challenge of Socialist Parties in electoral democracies might grow too strong; war was preferable. Workers at war succumbed to patriotism, killed one another, ruined the economies of several nations and put an end to four European empires.
War ensured the workers stayed in subordinate role, except in Russia where a ‘bolshevik’ Party seized power in the State, promised utopia for proletariat and peasantry, and proceeded to “build socialism.” With ideas of Marx, Lenin, and above all Stalin, the USSR experimented in the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Stalin’s state murdered millions, unbeknownst to socialists in the West; when 1929 sent Capitalism into a nadir, Stalinist Russia looked like the solution to the obsolete socio-economic order. This was Russia’s zenith; the illusion held.
But capitalist order in the West was maintained by political division. The capitalist path forked, into liberal-electoral democracies and fascist-nazi dictatorships. The radical-Right parties learned techniques for Party revolution from Leninist models; Mussolini led the way. Japan opted for 19th-century imperial warfare and militarism, a harmonious ally with Europe’s new Right.
Round Two [to 1979]
Communism was the avowed foe of capitalist options. Capitalist fascism started war with the liberal West, won in 1940, then attacked the Red East.
I never lose sight of this fact: Stalin’s brutal imposition of his vision to modernize Russia, to make it “catch up” with the West in heavy industrial production – “we have ten years to do it” was his correct analysis in 1929 – was what gave Russia a fighting chance against the might of Germany in 1941, and the Red Army was the one that broke the Wehrmacht, not the Western Allies
The US-USSR alliance was invincible. WWII re-distributed geopolitical power, leaving fascism and the British Empire prostrate, with two global superpowers – one American capitalist empire, and one Soviet [then Sino-Soviet] communist bloc. There was also a set of non-aligned [‘3rd-world’] states; after 1960, Red China under Mao aimed to lead decolonized India, Asia, Africa, South America. A classic Cold War flourished, with hot war in Vietnam.
The West won the contest to reach high standards of material living for the working and middle classes; Russia, after initial great gains after conquering Germany, became economically enfeebled. Soviet workers were miserable in the low quality of life under the planned economy and the lack of basic rights.
https://monthlyreview.org/1995/07/01/hobsbawms-century/
This stark contest, of “Freedom vs. Totalitarianism” as our media in the West liked to call it, went on all through my youth, with neither capitalism nor bolshevism attracting my generation born after 1945; the ban-the bomb 50s, the rebellious peacenik ‘60s, wanted neither the US nor the USSR to prevail. The bi-polar world went on and the two potent empires strained for victory till the mid-70s. It was a fact of life for us, that geopolitics would remain bi-polar.
A mid-East war in 1973 and the end of the Viet Nam war led swiftly on to a massive energy crisis; the Arab world forced the West to pay market value for fossil fuels. Meanwhile, the USSR quietly stagnated, preparing for a dissolution after 1980; the Russian invasion of Afghanistan signaled the downfall. Who knew the Soviet system was tottering? Gorbachev, for one, knew it well.
Round Three [to the end of the century]
Gorbachev believed glasnost and perestroika [openness and re-structuring] could save the USSR in the 1980s; a war in Afghanistan, a catastrophe at Chernobyl, and the resistance from the people of the Soviet empire, all played a role in utterly dismantling the power of Communism in the USSR and East Europe, and by 1993, there was no Soviet state, only the fragmented empire. But sadly for the Russian people, the end of communism did not liberate them.
Why the new Russian state was so wretchedly unable to transition out of the Soviet system into free-market, capitalist-liberal democracy is still controversial.
https://www.cfr.org/article/why-russian-democratic-transition-failed
https://happymediummag.com/2024/03/12/the-time-of-monsters-russias-failed-experiment-with-democracy/
Capitalism and capitalists saw in a collapsed Russia vast business/investment opportunity — that had nothing whatsoever to do with the stated objective of Western leaders to assist the Russians in transition to liberal democracy on the European model. Capitalism does not demand democracy be the political order of a State; it thrives in many varied political environments. The immediate post-Soviet chaos in Russia after 1992 was never unwelcome to capitalists.
China, in 1989, demonstrated at Tiananmen Square that the Party was in control, that democracy was not a Party plan, and that the Party could find a path forward that was quasi-market-capitalist yet kept State power totally in control of the economy and culture. Just what kind of society is China?
The slogans for the new China: “enrich yourselves!” and “It is glorious to be wealthy!” Was this socialism? Yes, “with Chinese characteristics.” Deng won out over Mao, but Mao had to die first. Then came the enigma of new China. https://www.ruthlesscriticism.com/china_capitalism.htm [a very thorough look at China, in 1994]
The twentieth century surely ended with the capitalist West in apparent triumph since no other superpower than America existed in 2000.
The difference between a Plan and a Practice
The fact is that the very-substantial writings of Marx and Engels amounted to something like a plan for a socio-political-economic order ‘inevitably’ to succeed capitalism, yet theory never replaces actual concrete practice and the lived experiment of historical reality. Russia was not the kind of society or economy Marx had in mind for the place to build socialism, for he knew well that capitalism must accomplish many things before a society had the pre-conditions for communism. Russia lacked the foundation; Lenin and Trotsky tried to re-theorize the plan and Stalin tried to exercise brutal amounts of State power to make the plan work. The failure to match the dream was palpable.
The substance of socialism — as it really looked in the USSR and its client states — was undeniably miserable. The workers suffered much lower material standards of living than their Western peers, and suffered the absence of civil and political liberties the West allowed in democracies. When the USSR was gone in 1995 no-one mourned it, but today Putin does grieve the loss of power — and the Russian people do not think of the 1990s as a decade of liberation.
Within our own Western democracies, all of them founded upon an economic order of market and finance capitalism, the struggle of Left and Centre and Right has not been fought on a blank slate. The Left has been undermined deliberately, so that Socialist ideas and policies have never had an equal chance with those that support Capitalism. [Please see Appendix *.]
Socialism as the grand Plan for a new society after capitalism written in the works of Marx and Engels was flawed by its own admission, that before socialist order could happen, capitalism must have a long run of developing an economy. Chinese communism has learned that, and is setting capitalism “free” to make China rich where before it was poor, while still being ruled by the Party State. [ See https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2024/03/22/the-future-of-communist-capitalism-in-china/ for an essay on how the Party rules. ]
Conclusion: Socialism never fought Capitalism as a peer rival
I have always viscerally disliked planned societies, social engineering; therefore, the prospect of Socialism depending on plans in order to proceed, is repugnant. Yet without capitalist methods to found an affluent economy, it appears socialist order will fail.
The first goal of socialism is a good material life, and none of the 20th century’s self-labelled socialist states ever came close to reaching that end. Capitalism made middle-class life affluent while socialism in the USSR failed to generate prosperity. China learned, and builds a middle class with the unique form of state under Party control. [Please see Appendix **]
I have to conclude, as an historian of concrete societies and their difference from theorized ones, Socialism never moved from theory to practice.
The triumph of Capitalism over its so-called rival seems a victory by a system that operated, and still does, over one that never left the pages of planners.
Seen in that light, there is no reason to mourn Socialism in defeat. It was never in the battle on the same ground as its supposed opponent.
I began this column with song lyrics about changing the world; those were not about building Socialism. I think readers noticed. Revolution! was not Socialist politics for most ‘60s Youth. It was individual freedom we wanted.
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Appendix
*I do not fault capitalist States for their sustained effort to ruin Marxist-Leninist communism among people in their own societies by the machinations of agencies like the CIA to feed the “non-Marxist” cultural Left, as I alluded to above. What else would they do? Socialism from its inception declared class war against capitalists.
The CIA’s involvement in the cultural life of the United States, Europe, and elsewhere had important long-term consequences. Many intellectuals were rewarded with prestige, public recognition, and research funds precisely for operating within the ideological blinders set by the Agency. Some of the biggest names in philosophy, political ethics, sociology, and art, who gained visibility from CIA-funded conferences and journals, went on to establish the norms and standards for promotion of the new generation, based on the political parameters established by the CIA. Not merit nor skill, but politics–the Washington line–defined “truth” and “excellence” and future chairs in prestigious academic settings, foundations, and museums…. The enduring political victory of the CIA was to convince intellectuals that serious and sustained political engagement on the left is incompatible with serious art and scholarship.”
[ See https://canadiandimension.com/blog/view/the-cia-and-the-cultural-cold-war-revisited ]
** An alternative to the style of capitalism practiced in the USA is the style of Scandinavian nations, where capitalism is quite clearly the economic foundation but a unique and more-human variety, called social democracy.
https://nordics.info/themes/the-nordic-model
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