Stephen Kotkin: recommendation

Transcript context

…And real slavery. Exactly. Everything is to eradicate capitalism to get you to socialism. It turns out that doesn't deliver freedom, it doesn't deliver prosperity, and it doesn't deliver peace. It delivers massive state-ization. Because once you eliminate private property and individual choice, the state is now responsible for everything. It delivers ration tickets and the Gulag. You get a bunch of socialists that break from this. They say Lenin is wrong. Eradicating private property, markets, civil liberties, and parliament is a mistake. We have to accept private property, markets, capitalism, and parliaments because that's the only way to get to freedom. Otherwise, you get to the Leninist dictatorship, total state-ization, Gulag, and ration tickets. These people are denounced as revisionists, like Eduard Bernstein in Germany, for example. The Swedish Social Democrats, they say, “We accept capitalism, markets, and private property. We want to redistribute the income because it's tough for some people to make their way in the system. The system produces inequality. Let's make it more equal with social engineering redistribution. But we keep capitalism, we keep markets and private property, and we keep democracy, voting, rule of law, et cetera. We'll evolve towards full socialism and eventually communism, but we will not do it the Leninist way.” There's this huge break in the socialist movement between those who are real revolutionaries and want to overthrow, eradicate capitalism to get to the just and prosperous and peaceful future, and those who want to use the existing system and evolve, embrace, and accept it. The left has a civil war, a civil war on the left which is still going on. It’s between those who say capitalism is evil and must go vs. capitalism has a lot of problems, but we need it in order to have peace and prosperity, in order to have freedom. We need to manage it better, redistribute. This civil war on the left, which arises in real time, the critics of Lenin's revolution, the German Social Democratic Party, people like Bernstein and the rest of them, they are critics in real time of this. Yet, some of the critics who are what we would call the social democrats of Europe… Lenin was also a member of the Social Democratic Party of Russia, but the communist thing makes this divide between those who are serious about destruction of capitalism and those who are, “revisionists”, this denunciatory term. What happens is that some of the people who are in the revisionist camp begin to flirt with the “capitalism is evil” analysis. They begin to truck with the communists that they've broken from and are in civil war with. You get left-wing social democrats who are closer to Lenin than they are to right-wing social democrats like Bernstein and the rest who are pro-capitalism but pro-redistribution. This is confusing to people because not everybody is a communist. Some people, like in Sweden, accept private property and markets. ernstein and the rest who are pro-capitalism but pro-redistribution. This is confusing to people because not everybody is a communist. Some people, like in Sweden, accept private property and markets. But some of the people in Sweden seem to go back on that promise of accepting it, and argue that if we don't get rid of capitalism we're still going to end up with an evil system. This civil war on the left never gets resolved, it's ongoing, and the right uses this confusion to paint everybody as anti-capitalism. The left gives them ammunition by talking about the evils of capitalism, even when they've come along to accept private property and markets. You have this deep and fundamental problem for the left. The tragedy of the left that it's never able to overcome, even to this day, where it comes out and says, “No more anti-capitalism ever, that is over. That leads to death, bloodshed, Gulag, ration tickets, war that actually is worse than the original problem it diagnosed.” Think about Marx. Marx says that you get rid of private property, markets, capitalism, and you're going to get freedom, you're going to get abundance. You don't get that. People say, “Marx wanted freedom, he didn't want Stalin's dictatorship. It's not Marx who's the problem, it's Stalin who deformed Marx.” We see this argument all the time. Stalin is a deformity, whereas Marx was about freedom. Think about a nuclear bomb. You're going to do a nuclear bomb. You're going to nuke a population, but you don't want to kill any people. Your goal is to nuke them, but nobody dies. That's what you say. You're going to get rid of capitalism, you're going to nuke them, but instead everybody's going to live. You give that order to your generals. You say, “Nuke them, but everybody lives, nobody dies.” They nuke them, and everybody dies instead of everybody living. You say, “I never said to kill the people, I said that they should live.” But once you nuke capitalism, you're going to lose freedom, you're going to lose the ability to have politics, you're going to end up with some version of a Leninist system. The ideology is going to drive that to the doubters. You're going to get a second wind where you get Khrushchev, as you said. He comes into power, he denounces Stalin's crimes. He doesn't praise capitalism, private property, and markets. He doesn't undo collective farms. He doesn't undo state ownership of property. He doesn't undo the planning system. He just undoes Stalin's personality. He's trying to subtract… The de-Stalinization is to take away Stalin. It's not to take away any of the other attributes of the system. It's a second wind that it was Stalin who was the problem, not the system that was the problem. So here we have the experience of going through the horrors, then having those horrors publicly denounced within the party. The Secret Speech is not published in Soviet newspapers, but it's discussed at party meetings in all locales. Within the Party, there's a public dimension to this. All party members become familiar with Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin. They experience the horrors in many cases firsthand. They enacted the horrors in many cases themselves.…

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