Why Marx Was Right Read Free Page B

so steep partly because of the
hostility of the capitalist West. That hostility also forced the Soviet Union
into an arms race which crippled its arthritic economy even further, and
finally pressed it to the point of collapse.
    In the meantime, however,
it managed along with its satellites to achieve cheap housing, fuel, transport
and culture, full employment and impressive social services for half the
citizens of Europe, as well as an incomparably greater degree of equality and
(in the end) material well-being than those nations had previously enjoyed.
Communist East Germany could boast of one of the finest child care systems in
the world. The Soviet Union played a heroic role in combating the evil of
fascism, as well as in helping to topple colonialist powers. It also fostered
the kind of solidarity among its citizens that Western nations seem able to
muster only when they are killing the natives of other lands. All this, to be
sure, is no substitute for freedom, democracy and vegetables in the shop, but
neither is it to be ignored. When freedom and democracy finally rode to the
rescue of the Soviet bloc, they did so in the shape of economic shock therapy,
a form of daylight robbery politely known as privatization, joblessness for
tens of millions, stupendous increases in poverty and inequality, the closure
of free nurseries, the loss of women's rights and the near-ruin of the social
welfare networks that had served these countries so well.
    Even so, the gains of
Communism scarcely outweigh the losses. It may be that some kind of dictatorial
government was well-nigh inevitable in the atrocious conditions of the early
Soviet Union; but this did not have to mean Stalinism, or anything like it.
Taken overall, Maoism and Stalinism were botched, bloody experiments which made
the very idea of socialism stink in the nostrils of many of those elsewhere in
the world who had most to benefit from it. But what about capitalism? As I
write, unemployment in the West is already in the millions and is mounting
steadily higher, and capitalist economies have been prevented from imploding
only by the appropriation of trillions of dollars from their hard-pressed
citizens. The bankers and financiers who have brought the world financial
system to the brink of the abyss are no doubt queuing up for cosmetic surgery,
lest they are spotted and torn limb from limb by enraged citizens.
    It is true that capitalism
works some of the time, in the sense that it has brought untold prosperity to
some sectors of the world. But it has done so, as did Stalin and Mao, at a
staggering human cost. This is not only a matter of genocide, famine,
imperialism and the slave trade. The system has also proved incapable of
breeding affluence without creating huge swathes of deprivation alongside it.
It is true that this may not matter much in the long run, since the capitalist
way of life is now threatening to destroy the planet altogether. One eminent
Western economist has described climate change as ''the greatest market failure
in history.'' 2
    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
that this was possible, including Lenin, Trotsky and the rest of the Bolshevik
leadership. You cannot reorganise wealth for the benefit of all if there is
precious little wealth to reorganise. You cannot abolish social classes in
conditions of scarcity, since conflicts over a material surplus too meagre to
meet everyone's needs will simply revive them again. As Marx comments in The
German Ideology, the result of a revolution in such conditions is that
"the old filthy business'' (or in less tasteful translation, ''the same
old crap'') will simply reappear. All you will get is socialised scarcity. If
you need to accumulate capital more or less from scratch, then the most
effective way of