Communists loudly trumpet their sympathy for the
"working classes" whom they claim to be the "oppressed."
But what they say is one thing; their actions over the century or so that
communist movements have risen to power in various places show quite another.
The Communists' dealings with agriculture most perfectly illustrate this, and
it is not surprising that those dealings have been the Achilles' Heel of
communism as a political movement - a nation can survive almost anything except
a prolonged bout of starvation. Both Communist China and Communist Russia
managed to bring about the greatest starvations in history. Theirs had the
unique distinction of having nothing to do with the weather or the soil: they
were due entirely to Communist politics. The West bailed out the Russians,
along with the proceeds of the 3% of agricultural land that was permitted to
remain in private hands; and collective agriculture was scuttled in China soon
enough to put that country back among the ranks of the well-fed. But the
catastrophic failure of the system was evident enough to any thoughtful
observers.
How does it happen? Marx seems to have had an enormous personal contempt and
antipathy for farmers, for one thing. And then, of course, the small
independent farmer is the exact antithesis of everything Soviet. What Marxists
want to do is to decouple production and consumption. Control over production,
they think, should be in the hands of the intelligent intellectuals who know
how to do things. Farmers are just machines, with arms and legs to be directed
by the Commune rather than by the very people who possess those arms and legs. From
the point of view of production, in the communists' view, farmers are just so
many horses and mules - their brains just aren't on the scene. So despite the
communists' crocodile tears for the supposed oppressed, they turn out to be the
peasant's deadliest enemy. If you want to befriend the peasant, you let him own
his own land and make his own decisions about what to grow on it, and you let
him charge whatever he wants at the market - the very things that communism is
inherently allergic to. And befriending the peasant turns out to be a great
idea if one is interested in eating steadily oneself. Over the many millennia
that patient, hard-working, and savvy farmers have been at it, they have
learned a thing or two - a lot more than scatterbrained marxist theorists, as
it turns out.
Communism is big on "collective decision making." Was this sincere,
or not? It scarcely matters, for collective decision making, as we know in
spades since the Arrow Theorem among many other findings, collective decision
making comes pretty close to being a contradiction in terms. What actually
happens is what explains its popularity with real-world Marxism: namely, the
decisions are made by a handful of pointy-heads in the back room, and their
decisions are transmitted to the "masses" through, as Mao put it, the
barrel of a gun.
I don't think it's any surprise that communism invariably turns into
totalitarian dictatorship. If you think you know what's good for people, and if
you have total contempt for their own ability to pursue it anyway, then the
political power craved by communists is bound to be used by the leadership in
an uninhibited and, of course, irresponsible way.
Contemporary Chinese Communism retains political power but has happily allowed
economic power to be divided indefinitely. The right people are now guiding the
economic destinies of her people: namely, people themselves - capitalists and
workers trying to make a living and being allowed to do so. Will this happy
situation last? It's obvious that it is the 180 degree opposite of classical
communism; the term 'Communism' functions as a mask for the current leadership
to retain its overwhelming power against the people of
Professor Jan Narveson, (Ph.D. Harvard, 1961)
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada