Liberalism vs. Communism

Lets start by getting into concrete terms. Liberalism is the governing philosophy that that emerged out of the works of enlightenment era philosophers, it was the basis for liberal revolutions which usurped feudalism and put an end to the rule of kings and queens and aristocrats and the system of hereditary rule, and instead established principles of governance around the equality of man and human rights. So the American revolution was a liberal revolution, documents like the declaration of independence and the constitution are liberal documents, and so on. It is on these governing philosophies that modern capitalism is built on top of, and this is due to the specific way liberalism defines human rights as extending from property rights.

We're all familiar with the phrase that you could say that the philosophy is built around, the famous phrase, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

However, this version that ended up in the constitution is slightly different than the way liberal philosophers thought about human rights, and is a slight edit of what John Locke defined the inalienable rights as, which was "Life, Liberty, and property."

But we still see this centralization of property as a human right throughout the rest of the founding documents and how these governing philosophies propose that you can protect our inalienable human rights. The right to life is considered the right to own property, because it is through your work with your land and your property that you can provide for yourself. Freedom is considered the freedom to do what you wish with your property, and that all transactions and dealings with property shall be carried out through the free association of the property owners. Equality was the equal treatment of the people by the laws that establish and protect these property rights.

However, we quickly run into contradictions with liberalism that it's not equipped to handle. For one, we see this liberal democracy that is founded on the grand proclamation of the equality of mankind that still has slavery. But even if you ignore that as an oddity that was eventually remedied, you still have the reality that the capitalist relations of production that grew and flourished as a result of these philosophies created a society that was deeply unequal, and continued growing more unequal as time went on.

From this, you get two different strains of liberalism, strains which have more or less existed throughout the history of America and are currently represented by the democratic and republican parties. The conservative strain and the progressive strain. The differences in these strains come from how they respond to these contradictions.

The general rationale liberalism gives for inequality tends to be "well we can never guarantee equality of outcomes, only equality of opportunity."

The conservative strain of liberalism takes this rationalization and uses it as justification that the system is fine as is and nothing needs to be changed, or changes that have been made should be rolled back. Usually this is accompanied with additional rationalizations that if you're poor you must be lazy, or didn't make good decisions, or didn't take advantage of the opportunities available to you, and offers you the advice of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and that the only thing stopping you from pursuing the American dream is yourself.

The progressive strain instead assumes that if there is inequality, then that means the promise of equality of opportunity must have been broken, and pursues solutions to fix this broken promise. This leads to progressives pursuing policies to tweak capitalism like affirmative action, diversity quotas, means tested government assistance, and so on.

However, both these strains of liberalism remain steadfastly united on the centrality of property rights, and see the fundamental role of the state as existing to protect, enshrine, and administer these property rights, and only ever infringe on these property rights in a significant way in instances of catastrophic market failure. But both fundamentally believe that the administration of economic activity should be left up to agreements with the owners of private property.

What this idealist conception of human rights as property rights and the ability of the market to naturally figure out the most fair way of organizing society misses is an analysis of the economic laws that develop out of this construction and the inevitable consequences of organizing society in this way. The problem with free market competition is that competitions eventually have winners. This is a good thing for a certain period of human development, you want a lot of competition when resources are scarce because competition helps to guarantee that scarce resources go to the people who use them in the most efficient and cost effective way. This makes sure that our scarce resources don't go to waste, and can work out beneficially for all parties. After all, you don't want to send your lumber to the guy that takes an entire tree to make a single chair. But as markets and economic development matures you begin to see the consequences of this organizing model. This free market competition has winners and losers, and the reward for the winner is a greater and greater market share. Hand in hand with this natural process of the market is the development and investment in technologies that are used to carry out production on larger and larger scales, requiring larger and larger investments, which in turn creates higher and higher barriers to entry for anyone who wants to compete in any given market where large scale production dominates. So what you see as a consequence is markets with less and less competition as losers close up shop and go out of business, and a huge barrier to any new competition stepping in to take their place because of the upfront investment required to do so.

What we see is an inevitable tendency for wealth to centralize into fewer and fewer hands. And as this domination over production intensifies further and further, you have a growing divide and growing power imbalance between those who own society's means of production, and those who have nothing for sale but their own labor. You have a class relationship where one part of society owns the means of subsistence for the other part of society, and will only grant the masses access to these means of subsistence if they do some work that adds value to the capital they've invested in. The capitalist wants to keep as much of this value for himself, because that's how you "win" at the market. You extract as much profit as you can from the labor that's being done, you invest that profit into expanding your business and increasing your market share, and then you repeat the process on a larger and larger scale. And this doesn't happen because the capitalist is greedy, although they might be. This happens because if they don't do this they will lose out to competitors who are more ruthless and more cutthroat. If you aren't doing everything you can to maximize profits, then sooner or later you will no longer be a capitalist, and the only ones who are left are the ones who are the most ruthless and the most cutthroat.

As a result of this need to be ruthless and cutthroat to survive, you have a capitalist class which uses the leverage it has against the working class to the greatest possible effect. You have a capitalist class which recognizes that the vast majority are forced to choose between working for one of these capitalists or starving on the street, and exploits that desperation to depress your wages as low as they can manage. After all, why would you pay the full value of someone's labor if you could just hire someone else who is more desperate and willing to work for scraps. Sure, you might be able to gain temporary advantages on the labor market by getting training for in demand skills that have a lot of competing employers, and that can give you leverage to negotiate for better wages, but this advantage can only ever be temporary. Whatever temporary advantages you can gain this way will inevitably erode away as either more people train in those skills trying to gain the same advantage and saturate the labor market with more talent than there are jobs, or the tendency of markets to centralize wealth into fewer and fewer hands results in fewer business competing against each other for those skills, which removes your bargaining power by limiting your options. Over a long enough timescale we are all pushed down to the desperation of those at the bottom. It becomes increasingly impossible to lift yourself from these conditions, because the market is simultaneously pushing your wages down further and further towards nothing but basic subsistence, just so you can stay alive and keep coming to work, and at the same time the barrier to entry and the investment required to enter into any given market as a competitive producer keeps getting higher and higher.

These are all natural consequences of organizing economic activity around concepts of private property rights and free market competition. As a result, what we see is that the principles of liberalism inevitably result in a dictatorship of capital, where all economic activity is organized around satisfying the profit motive of these private enterprises, and those who fall into the ranks of the masses who have nothing for sale but their own labor are forced to work for one of these tyrants of industry or suffer food insecurity, housing insecurity, health insecurity, ect. And liberalism enforces this dictatorship by unquestioningly enforcing the property rights of these massive industrial empires no matter the human cost of doing so, because liberalism holds a central belief that property rights are an inalienable human right that should not be violated. So what you see is the natural progression from the establishment of liberalism, followed by the great economic growth and prosperity of the competition between small scale producers, followed by a steady progression and concentration of wealth into fewer and fewer hands, into the growth of a police state that is used to protect the property rights of these growing industrial empires, into a cycle of boom and bust where economic activity stagnates into recessions and depressions as people can't buy the products capitalists are producing because no one is being paid enough to afford them, followed by huge booms in economic activity as new markets are discovered and created by the capitalist class that then throws the workforce back into motion to expand into and further dominate these new markets, and so on and so on until we exhaust the finite resources on this planet in pursuit of never ending accumulation for these private enterprise that we organize our society around.

There's no definitive point where liberalism stopped being democratic and definitely became a dictatorship of capital, but this is undeniably the case today. Liberalism results in higher and higher levels of dictatorship, with wealth and power accumulating in fewer and fewer hands, without the principles of liberalism ever needing to change. Instead, it is the development of the economic system that was birthed by liberalism that created increasing levels of dictatorship. This domination of the vast majority by a small minority of society developed as a result of changing material conditions, and the tensions created by this organization. But at it's inception it was an incredibly liberatory philosophy that put an end to the despotism of heredity rule and the divine right of kings, and established a society that was more free.

Though, it could be argued that capitalism developed so "successfully" in America because we've never really had a democracy that was designed to represent everyone equally. This country started out with a "democracy" that only allowed rich white land owners with at least 40 acres of land the right to vote and participate in government, not to mention the fact that we still respected slave-owners and allowed them to consider other people as their property despite proudly proclaiming all men are created equal. And every expansion in voting rights and representation that average people had to fight tooth and nail for usually end up being diminished by anti-democratic reforms like black codes, Jim Crow, Gerrymandering, strategically defunding and shutting down polling locations in targeted neighborhoods, and in modern politics we have a campaign finance system where practically the only way to run a successful campaign is either be to approved by the wealthy campaign donor class so you can raise the millions of dollars required to win most races, or you need to be independently wealthy. Either way, you end up with a ton of representation for the interests of the ownership class in our government, and practically no representation for the rest of us. So I could see an interpretation of liberalism which shows that it's a philosophy that's always had some dictatorial tendencies, and simply dressed itself up in populist rhetoric about how all men are created equally and guaranteed the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as a way to create popular support for this new ruling class and legitimize their rule.

We can apply this same material analysis should be applied to communism. The principles of communism were developed out of studying the conditions and toil that the vast majority suffered under the rule of capital and the domination of large scale industry. Marxism was developed as an analytical framework, and is applied as a deeply scientific study of capitalism, of history, and of the conditions that shape how we organize society.

From this study, we get a theory of change which concludes that we must reject the core principles of liberalism. This comes from a recognition that the free market competition which liberalism holds to be sacred will always result in a dictatorship of capital, and this will always result in a society where the interests of the vast majority are subordinate to the interests of this capitalist class, who withholds society's means of subsistence as leverage over the whole masses of society. In order to solve the contradictions of liberalism, communism asserts that we must abolish private property and establish democratic institutions to govern production that are based in principles of cooperation rather than competition. These democratic institutions are then able to shape society around advancing the interests of the vast majority of people who are doing the work, rather than organizing all of society around satisfying the profit motive of private enterprises.

To clarify here, private property refers to property you own but is not for your personal use. This refers to things like your workplace, store fronts, factories, ect. Communism has no interest in abolishing personal property like your house or your toothbrush. Just the opposite in fact, communism wishes to establish relations of production where we cooperate to advance our own interests, and establish a society where we all grow our personal wealth and live in luxury, precisely because the work we are doing is for our own benefit rather than the benefit of a capitalist who is endlessly accumulating as much of the fruits of our labor as they can.

So this utopian picture of communism sounds awfully democratic, so why do so many communists talk about things like a dictatorship of the proletariat?

That comes back to that analysis of capitalism and an analysis of our current material conditions that I spent so much time laying out.

If we recognize what the problems of capitalism are, and we correctly identify liberal democracies as the dictatorships of capital that they truly are, then we need a theory of change and a plan of action that can be used to break the shackles of this oppressive structure. We recognize that capitalism is maintained by a dictatorship of capital, and at this highly developed stage of capitalism we have a capitalist class that is organized militarily in the form of both private mercenary armies, and in the form of the United States military industrial complex who uses that military might to enforce the will of private enterprises around the world, and will often sanction, invade, bomb, blockade, coup, and otherwise cripple weaker countries in order to get them to agree to things like privatization and more favorable trade deals. Often we just install a hand picked leader in a far right military coup, and then they sell off public industries and natural resources on the cheap in exchange for the US helping them get into power.

This epoch of imperialism means that any attempt to challenge the right of capitalists to own private property, and therefore completely undermine the foundation of their wealth and power, will be met with fierce military or police backlash and repression by a capitalist class that desperately wants to hold on to their power. We see this not only in the case of communist revolutions that try to seize the factories and the machinery by force, but even in something as seemingly benign as workers organizing together to form unions to increase their negotiating power against the owners of private property. All throughout the history of capitalism, labor organizing has been met with fierce opposition and often with violent repression and murder of labor organizers. The first bombing of a US civilian target by the United States military was against striking coal miners in the battle of Blair mountain. The Pinkertons were private mercenaries hired by businesses to rough up or even kill union members that were organizing strikes. The term "Banana Republic" comes from the governments we installed in Latin America to violently repress native workers so that companies like United Fruit could come in and work the natives to death without backlash, and when they did organize strikes they were gunned down by the dozens.

Again, it's the most ruthless who make it to the top in capitalism.

So what is the answer that communist philosophies like Marxism give as an answer to the violent repression of this dictatorship of capital? It's the dictatorship of the proletariat. Marxism recognizes, through a material analysis of the world as it exists now and through an analysis of the history and motivations and forces acting on the world that caused these material conditions, that vast majority need their own dictatorship to enforce their own will against the will of a capitalist class who will happily murder you for not complying with their wishes. This communist dictatorship is democratic in the same way that liberal democracies are democratic, we are just changing whose interests this democracy represents. We can never have a true democracy that represents the toiling masses and the bosses equally, because their interests are often fundamentally opposed to each other. A decision has to be made on whose interests will win out when they come into conflict. Liberal democracy chooses to enforce the rights of private property, takes the side of the owners, and enforces a dictatorship of capital. Communist democracy, or a worker's democracy, chooses to enforce the interests of the working class, and therefore is a dictatorship of the working class.

However, this dictatorship is already far more democratic than liberal democracy could ever be, because it incorporates the interests of the vast majority. What form this takes can vary, and attempting to create a truly democratic society can be messy and difficult, and this difficulty is compounded when you factor in the inevitability of capitalist aggression against your communist project. Every communist project in the past century, and extending into today, has been a form of "siege" communism or "war" communism, because every communist project has been the subject of sanctions, invasion, coups, covert action, espionage, sabotage, slander, and so on by a capitalist class who desperately needs communists to fail, and who desperately needs people to believe that these are regimes of evil dictators, and desperately need people to believe that "the cure is worse than the disease," because capitalists desperately don't want anyone to emulate these projects of human liberation. They desperately don't want to be thrown from their paradise of vast riches that were built off the backs of our labor, and have us take control of our own destiny.

But it is also true that communist nations have made a great many mistakes, and in some cases even serious crimes. But what is important to keep in mind is the reality of capitalist encirclement and unrelenting imperialist aggression. These countries find themselves invaded and sabotaged and fiercely repressed by a global capitalist military alliance with nearly every step they take. And as a result of this these countries realize the necessity of building up instruments of state power, instruments of military power, instruments of espionage, secret police, and the like. And these instruments can make serious mistakes, and commit serious crimes.

 Michael Parenti makes this point incredibly well,

"If there had been no invasion, if there had been no espionage, if there had been no attack, if there had been no white guard army burning villages there wouldn't've been a Red army of that size. There wouldn't've been a Stalin, there wouldn't've been a KGB. If there hadn't've been a CIA there wouldn't've been a KGB. If there hadn't been a NATO encirclement there wouldn't've been a Warsaw Pact. And to lose sight of that fact is to lose sight of an essential force of what was going on over those 70 years, or these 10 years (in Nicaragua). And if you want to know what the Soviet Union went through in the early years just look at what Nicaragua went through in these 10 years and multiply that by 10. Every single one of those countries was targeted. They were targeted by missiles, they were targeted by acts of espionage, they were targeted by as they say economic embargo, and all sorts of other forms of repression. They were targeted by incredible propaganda barrages and the like. Unrelenting, unremitting. The most targeted socialist country in the world, is not Nicaragua, not even Cuba, it was the Soviet Union. All those missiles were pointing at the USSR, and they still are. And they're still building those missiles. And they're refusing to negotiate those missiles.

Mercenary armies, destruction of the productive facilities of society, more invasion, more sabotage, economic boycott, economic embargo, monetary embargo, technological embargo..."

So we see the communist projects and attempts at building towards communism in the past century inevitably building up military and police states, not because of anything inherent to a socialist economy or organizing production in a cooperative manner, but because they need to build these instruments to survive in the epoch of imperialism. And sometimes they get crushed anyway. And sometimes they centralize too much power in the hands of these military hierarchies and bureaucracies. And some times these instruments of power that you're forced to build up get co-opted by careerists or opportunists, or even agents of foreign powers. You are constantly walking a tight rope of balancing the internal contradictions of how do you build this new kind of society against the external contradictions of what you need to do in order to survive against seemingly unending repression and aggression. All the while the capitalist powers are constantly seeking capitalist restoration and the return of their domination over the national markets.

It is the same, ever increasing, ever heightening conditions of class conflict that requires more and more dictatorial measures from both liberal democracies in order to maintain the supremacy of capital over the masses, and communists projects which are trying to fight against those forces. We have this theory of increasing state power on both sides of the coin, and for both liberalism and communism the necessity of this state power comes from the ever intensifying and ever progressing class conflict of capitalism. However, liberalism sees no end in sight to this conflict. Liberal democracies that wish to uphold capitalism as the organizing principle for their society are required mediate this conflict forever, because this class divide and antagonism between an ownership class and a working class will always exist in capitalism. The same is not true for communism. If communist organization principles ever win out over capitalist ones, we no longer have the same irreconcilable conflict. If private property is successfully abolished and replaced with cooperative economies organized around advancing the interests of the working class, then there is no need for instruments of state power that are used for the domination of one class over the other. With no owners buying and selling your labor as a commodity, there is no class subjugation.

This kind of organization may not have been possible in earlier stages of human development. In times of scarcity, conflict is unavoidable. When food is scarce and there's not enough to go around, then there has to be conflict. You are faced with a dilemma of either everyone shares and we all starve because there's not enough to feed everyone, or we fight for our own survival in order to see who lives and who dies. But this kind of scarcity is so far removed from our current conditions that it seems barbaric. As a species we have built tremendously advanced tools and technologies together, and this has put us on the brink of realizing a post scarcity society if we would just work towards it. Instead, we have the shackles of capitalism holding us back, because there is a capitalist class who gets to dictate what our productive forces are used for, and they see more value in enforcing an artificial scarcity and leveraging that scarcity to increase their profits, with very little in the way of competition in most markets to prevent them from doing so.

There's no reason to keep carrying this 18th century economic system and governing philosophy into this new millennium. A better world is possible.