Blame Stalin, Not Marx

It might just be true that real communism was never tried. I'm not sure if real communism — the stateless, classless, utopia — was even written about in any detail. Marx certainly didn't. He deliberately didn't. He thought himself a scientist, studying the laws that propelled the economy of his time. Marx was not prescribing, he was predicting.

Much like matter in space transforms according to physical laws, Marx believed that history proceeds according to historical laws. A careful analysis of the forces that undergird a society can reveal, he thought, a vision into its future. And that's what he set about to do.

This doctrine, known as Historicism, is completely false. The future arcs of humanity are unpredictable for the simple reason that human creativity is unpredictable. New memes, whose birth can't be foreseen, could infest a population and animate their stories. You can't peek into the contents of future ideas. And therefore, you can't know what's going to happen. Nothing is inevitable; it all depends on our collective yet-to-be-determined choices.

In any case, Marx was engaged in two things: (i) documenting a theoretical account of the machinery of the capitalist economy and (ii) prophesying what follows as capitalism buckles under the weight of its own contradictions. Based on his theory (which turned out to be false), the rate of profit would steadily fall as labour is replaced by machines. This is because he imagined that all the value imbued within a commodity is sourced exclusively from human labour. The price of a commodity also eventually settles to its true (labour derived) value; so that when the owner sells the commodity for a profit, he is necessarily stealing from the workers, and therefore with a smaller fraction of the work done by humans, there's less to steal, and thus less profit. With more automation, Capitalists would have to exploit the workers further, stealing even more of their value to satiate their greed; the class antagonism would keep boiling until it culminates with a rupture — a revolution where all bourgeois power structures are annihilated by the proletariat, who would then seize the means of production and erect a dictatorship.

Though not to worry, he'd say, this socialist dictatorship is only temporary; it will slowly wither away as society morphs into a stateless, classless utopia where you may do whatever you like and get whatever you need. At least, that's the theory. In practice, we found out that once men grab power, they don't easily let go.

Marx was careful not to write anything specific about what communism actually looked like. Nor did he write about how to get there. It wasn't for him to decide, he thought; when the time was right, the proletariat would figure it out. His job, as he saw it, was simply to reduce the "birth pangs" of the revolution by arming the proletariat with theoretical tools that could lubricate the transition.

After the Russian Revolution, as Lenin rose to power, he quickly found out that there were no blueprints on how to run this Socialism business. He could hardly find anything of practical use in Marx. Amidst the chaos of the ensuing civil war, he was forced to spin up socialist policies on the fly: one by one, he centralised the various industries, and when the growing class of sluggish bureaucrats led to poor harvests that caused millions to starve to death, he reluctantly gave way to pockets of free markets. "It was one step backwards", he remarked, "to go two steps forward".

Lenin knew that Russia wasn't ripe to become a socialist state. Marx was clear that communism only arrives to an industrialised capitalist society with abundant produce, like Britain or Germany; Russia, on the other hand, was a poor, agrarian, feudal state. Whatever Lenin was scheming was thus strictly off-script. Nevertheless, he marched ahead, relentlessly arresting, deporting, or executing anyone who stood in the way. There was no free speech, no liberties of any kind, and you dare not smell of counter-revolutionary tendencies. No price is too high for (future) utopia, you see.

After Lenin's death, Stalin took over. He was, as villains go, one of the worst in human history; I would go so far as to say he's at par with Hitler. Millions of people were sent to the Gulags (forced labour camps), most of them "political prisoners", meaning their only crime was being suspected of not being aligned with Stalin. It was essentially slavery. And it's upon this free slave labour that much of the Soviet industry flourished (to the skewed degree that it did). In 1932, in an attempt to suppress Ukrainian nationalism, he deliberately let over five million peasants starve to death while banning them from moving across cities in search of food.

The secret police were everywhere, and so you could never speak your mind around strangers. Even friends were not to be trusted, for everyone's trying to snitch on everyone else. And if your most loyal friends and family had the misfortune of hearing of your frustrations with Stalin, however mildly put, they'd be at the risk of being caught not snitching for which punishments were equally severe. Altogether, it was a completely debilitating horror show. All combined — the purges, the executions, the forced labours, and the famines — an estimated 20-30 million people died under Stalin.

But I'd not call any of this Marxism, nor would I say that this is a result of implementing Marxist policies. Marx gave very little in the way of concrete policies, and certainly no blueprint for a state. Stalin was a totalitarian dictator who merely paid lip service to Marx's ideas and who, after a point in his life, couldn't care less. There's nothing about the Soviet Union that derives from Marx's writings. It was just part of the propaganda; like Lenin and Mao, he used Marx's brand as a cover for his totalitarianism. Much of what happened within the Soviet borders remained a secret even decades after its collapse. Unlike in post World War 2 Germany, there was no interest in digging up the records to expose their horrid past. Right after the war, the German concentration camps were photographed and broadcast, and instantly, the world saw in full colour a malevolence of a kind it was thought civilised humans of the 20th century were incapable of doing. It was too much of a shock. And nobody has forgotten it since. Even today, the worst a man can be compared to, almost universally, is still Hitler, whereas in certain quarters of the world Stalin continues to be celebrated as a hero (if you can believe it, Tamil Nadu's current Chief Minister's name is M K Stalin).

In the wake of the war, as the world was recoiling from pictures of gas chambers and piles of dead Jews, thousands of miles eastward, across the Soviet interior, humans continued to be tortured in labour camps. The Soviet Union wouldn't disintegrate for another few decades, so we never got the photographs. We still don't know the worst of it, and we may never know.

Stalin's atrocities have nothing to do with Marx, who, while wrong in many fundamental ways, was a genuine voice against worker exploitation. And while it is not a well-thought out idea, it might just remain true that real communism was never tried.