Leninism, Asian Culture and Singapore (Part 2) posted on Monday, December 20, 2004
Few people would profess to be communists today. As everyone knows,
communism brutalized and impoverished nations; perhaps even more
importantly as no one likes to fail, it failed. Yet, we would do well
to remember that the idea once attracted some of the best and the
brightest, both in the East and the West. For example, Anthony Blunt
and Kim Philby, both highly intelligent and capable members of the
British aristocracy, took up communism at Cambridge and willingly
spied for the Soviet Union over several decades.
To both radical intellectuals and disadvantaged classes, communism
offered Marx's highly seductive and supposedly scientific analyses of
the shortcomings of capitalist societies, promising the inevitable
arrival of the proletariat utopia in which money and exploitation will
be unknown. With such ideological inspiration, and with highly
effective organizational techniques initiated by Lenin, communist
parties triumphed, however briefly, in Russia the largest country in
the world, and China the most populous, despite the backward
development of capitalism in these countries and their weak working
classes, while failing to make headway in the more mature capitalist
economies that are supposedly more ready to move to the next stage.
The cases of Russia and China demonstrate that, for the purpose of
achieving power, the political economy of communism is less important
than its organizational technique. If you do the second well, you can
succeed despite the low applicability of the first. For over half a
century Communism was the favoured ideology of all revolutionary
leaders, most of them of middleclass rather than proletariat
background, because it provided a ready-made set of propaganda and
organizational tools. Communism might die, but Leninism lives on. The
ideological buzzwords change, and photos of Yeltsin replace those of
Gorbachev, but the same machinery of control can remain in operation.
Lenin's revolutionary machinery, the Bolshevik party, was a network of
individuals whose total loyalty was devoted to the organization:
personal feelings and common humanity were not only secondary, they
were suspect and dangerous. Given such an "iron discipline"
organization, the trusted individuals were placed into all the
important parts of the society. Army units had their political
commissars, and civil service units, collective farms, factories,
schools, trade unions and sports clubs all had their party
secretariats. Among other things, the party achieved control over all
parts of the economy; hence, private ownership of property ceased to
exist, and a nominally Communist society came into being. Since all
aspects of life were under control, moulding a new man fit for the
communist utopia was realistic to contemplate. This seemed to be a
very attractive scheme to highly power-conscious revolutionaries out
to make a better world. The only drawback is: it did not work.
But perhaps the failure was simply due to its trying to achieve too
much? The communist utopia envisaged a society of selfless
individuals, who do not own and do not desire private property, and
who, without coercion, would work to their best abilities and take
only enough that satisfies their needs. The concept of economic
incentive is eliminated. The consequence was that, with the
suppression of market forces and individual initiatives that encourage
the production of food and consumer goods, the old Russia and old
China found themselves unable to deliver material wealth to its
populace, and hence, unable to provide adequate rewards to enforce
conformity.
However, there is no reason why a Leninist control structure cannot be
imposed on a capitalist society that fully accommodates market forces
and individual economic initiatives: you can still build up a network
of trusted individuals and place them in the key positions of all
organizations. It simply takes a higher and more refined level of
knowledge and skill to carry this out, instead of the crude and brutal
methods used by the communists. This was successfully achieved in
Singapore, a success which many other nations, whether communist,
feudal, colonial or already capitalist, seriously admire and are keen
to emulate.
--
2. Lenin
Few people would profess to be communists today. As everyone knows,
communism brutalized and impoverished nations; perhaps even more
importantly as no one likes to fail, it failed. Yet, we would do well
to remember that the idea once attracted some of the best and the
brightest, both in the East and the West. For example, Anthony Blunt
and Kim Philby, both highly intelligent and capable members of the
British aristocracy, took up communism at Cambridge and willingly
spied for the Soviet Union over several decades.
To both radical intellectuals and disadvantaged classes, communism
offered Marx's highly seductive and supposedly scientific analyses of
the shortcomings of capitalist societies, promising the inevitable
arrival of the proletariat utopia in which money and exploitation will
be unknown. With such ideological inspiration, and with highly
effective organizational techniques initiated by Lenin, communist
parties triumphed, however briefly, in Russia the largest country in
the world, and China the most populous, despite the backward
development of capitalism in these countries and their weak working
classes, while failing to make headway in the more mature capitalist
economies that are supposedly more ready to move to the next stage.
The cases of Russia and China demonstrate that, for the purpose of
achieving power, the political economy of communism is less important
than its organizational technique. If you do the second well, you can
succeed despite the low applicability of the first. For over half a
century Communism was the favoured ideology of all revolutionary
leaders, most of them of middleclass rather than proletariat
background, because it provided a ready-made set of propaganda and
organizational tools. Communism might die, but Leninism lives on. The
ideological buzzwords change, and photos of Yeltsin replace those of
Gorbachev, but the same machinery of control can remain in operation.
Lenin's revolutionary machinery, the Bolshevik party, was a network of
individuals whose total loyalty was devoted to the organization:
personal feelings and common humanity were not only secondary, they
were suspect and dangerous. Given such an "iron discipline"
organization, the trusted individuals were placed into all the
important parts of the society. Army units had their political
commissars, and civil service units, collective farms, factories,
schools, trade unions and sports clubs all had their party
secretariats. Among other things, the party achieved control over all
parts of the economy; hence, private ownership of property ceased to
exist, and a nominally Communist society came into being. Since all
aspects of life were under control, moulding a new man fit for the
communist utopia was realistic to contemplate. This seemed to be a
very attractive scheme to highly power-conscious revolutionaries out
to make a better world. The only drawback is: it did not work.
But perhaps the failure was simply due to its trying to achieve too
much? The communist utopia envisaged a society of selfless
individuals, who do not own and do not desire private property, and
who, without coercion, would work to their best abilities and take
only enough that satisfies their needs. The concept of economic
incentive is eliminated. The consequence was that, with the
suppression of market forces and individual initiatives that encourage
the production of food and consumer goods, the old Russia and old
China found themselves unable to deliver material wealth to its
populace, and hence, unable to provide adequate rewards to enforce
conformity.
However, there is no reason why a Leninist control structure cannot be
imposed on a capitalist society that fully accommodates market forces
and individual economic initiatives: you can still build up a network
of trusted individuals and place them in the key positions of all
organizations. It simply takes a higher and more refined level of
knowledge and skill to carry this out, instead of the crude and brutal
methods used by the communists. This was successfully achieved in
Singapore, a success which many other nations, whether communist,
feudal, colonial or already capitalist, seriously admire and are keen
to emulate.
--