The Straightjacket of Cold War Doublespeak: Capitalism, Socialism, and the American-Soviet Global System
By: Henry Silver
Tags: Socialism, Communism, Cold War, Politics, Soviet Union

From the conclusion of the Second World War to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the world’s two principal propaganda operations — the far larger setup in the United States and the crude Soviet mouthpiece— insisted for contrary reasons that each hegemonic power practiced a particular political worldview and economic model. On one hand, the U.S.S.R. and its clients insisted that the United States was capitalist in order to defame capitalism and insisted that they practiced socialism in order to usurp the appeal of having developed ostensibly the world’s first egalitarian and classless society, a far cry from the reality of life under Bolshevik or Bolshevik-style rule and the effects of Leninist economic programs, such as the New Economic Policy (NEP) and fast-paced Stalinist industrialization. On the other hand, the United States and its clients insisted that the U.S.S.R. was socialist (or, sometimes, communist) in order to defame socialism and insisted that they practiced capitalism in order to shield their prevailing economic framework, unshakably contingent on state intervention and coordination, from all internal dissent. The Soviet nomenklatura and party hacks dismissed all objection to Bolshevist despotism or the anti-socialist bent of Leninist dogma as “revisionist,” “infantile,” and inclined towards collusion with putative Western infiltrators. Accordingly, any protestation in the United States and its sphere of influence against the drudgery and coercion of wage slavery and the totalitarian character of private firms — centralized command economies of unanswerable private tyranny, corporate mercantilism, and Taylorist administration in which orders come straight from the top and are handed down to voiceless automata — instantly aroused denunciations of sedition and collaboration with the dastardly Russians.

With most of Europe reduced to rubble and smoldering cinders, the United States emerged from the Second World War with about half the world’s wealth, the overwhelming majority of global munitions, and a degree of power simply without historical precedent. After American and British state planners had concluded that any hope of the defeat of Hitler’s Wehrmacht and Germany’s Axis subordinates demanded Stalin’s legions of expendable Russian soldiers, a tacit post-war settlement and even a fragile rapprochement of sorts developed according to which the United States, seizing the torch from the British Empire, would become the incontestable global mafia don with unbounded sway so long as the Soviet Union, the exception, would have its own dungeon, bounded and unobtrusive. Notwithstanding the unspoken accommodation that the two powers reached, the United States and its Western consiglieri still despised Russia for its withdrawal from the Third World in 1917, its insolent desertion of its traditional status as a pillar of the Eastern European service area, and its pursuit of a do-it-yourself approach to autonomous development.

Streets of Budapest overrun by Soviet tanks, 1956

With yet stranger concordance of purpose, both powers conducted themselves remarkably similarly to enforce their straightjackets of state theology and to contrive justifications for wanton bellicosity, constricting all sober discourse and thought in a tight grip and molesting most of the world with missiles and machine guns. For instance, Soviet state planners exploited the procurement of arms and equipment from the West by the rebellious Budapest civil service confederation as a pretext for squashing the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 with brutal and iron-willed determination. Of course, apparent to all disinterested observers was that those same state planners had for years meticulously alienated Hungary from all its natural allies and tyrannized the domestic population to foster the conditions under which popular discontent would spill into a riotous uproar and dissidents in the government would accept aid from the West. Western politicians and intellectuals howled with indignation at the injustice of Soviet aggression against Hungary, while Soviet apologists offered the typical excuse that they had to “save” Hungary from “falling” to a pernicious capitalist influence.

Contra terrorists congregating atop a hill for a celebratory smoke after destroying an FSLN base, 1987

Correspondingly, the architects of American foreign policy statecraft directed a campaign of economic strangulation, international terrorism, and military aggression against Nicaragua in the late 1970s and early 1980s to ensure that the Sandinista government would conclude its overwhelmingly popular policies of autonomous development, self-determination, democratization, political openness, agrarian reform, educational improvement, and other processes described even by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and Oxfam as “unique” in their experience of 76 developing countries and as “exceptional in the strength of that government’s commitment … to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process.” Therefore, the United States had to extinguish “the threat of a good example” and “successful defiance,” in part by thrusting Nicaragua into a corner from which it had little choice but to secure, according to American allegations, a few shipments of materiel from the Soviet bloc and Cuba and to pause its reforms. Now that Daniel Ortega could be excoriated as a sinister Soviet agent about to hop into a paddleboat and rape your grandmother in Kansas, the U.S. had an ideal pretext for intervention, this time through covert training and arming of Contra “freedom fighters” as part of Ronald Reagan’s underground foreign policy, shrouded in secrecy to smother the sort of domestic backlash that the Vietnam War generated. Soviet commissars and the front pages of Pravda thundered in outrage about American atrocities against the Nicaraguan people, while New York Times columnists and Western intellectuals rejoiced with nearly uniform euphoria at the “rescue” of Nicaragua from “falling” to “communist penetration,” by which they meant, as always, the embrace of a model of independent nationalism that others might wish to emulate. Plenty of other comparable instances emerged during the Cold War, including the uncannily precise controlled experiment offered by Khmer and Indonesian bloodbaths carried out simultaneously.

Photograph from the American moon landing, 1969

In another parallel of Cold War behavior, both the United States and the Soviet Union repressed fears in their respective spheres about the palpable threat of a thermonuclear holocaust by inciting mass hysteria about the accrual of arms by the other power, thereby not simply justifying the buildup of warheads and the aggravation of international rancor but also vilifying popular concerns about affairs at home (economic injustice, abridgement of civil liberties, etc.) as “seditious,” “subversive,” or indicative of “conspiracy with the enemy.” Anthony “Tony” Benn, the late British radical and parliamentarian, perorates cogently on this tactic in his inexcusably under-read Arguments for Democracy, published in 1981 at the peak of the nuclear arms race. He writes, “The real answer to state oppression in communist countries does not lie in escalating the size of our armed forces; if we do that, the oppressors will proclaim our action to be a threat to their national survival and use it, in turn, as an excuse for tighter internal security. The solution lies in widening contacts and moral support for those in such countries who are themselves campaigning for freedom. The excesses of Soviet military control over Eastern Europe which make the Warsaw Pact under the Brezhnev doctrine so oppressive cannot be eased by by a new arms drive to which the Kremlin will respond in kind, but only by adopting policies that might lead the Russians to recognize that their own security ultimately depends upon having, as neighbours, peoples who want internal freedom without becoming hostile to the independence of the USSR.”

As for the avowed practice of free-market capitalism by the United States, one need only read my articles titled “A Brief History of American Capitalism” and “Heretical Reflections on Ronald Reagan” to conclude that post-war economic expansion and technological advancement relied almost exclusively on state-run research and development, steep protectionism, huge barriers to trade with East Asia, massive military expenditure, and other governmental instruments for overcoming vexatious market inefficiencies. For example, anchored in fears that the communist menace had nearly colonized outer space, John F. Kennedy’s space exploration programs provided a facile pretense for the injection of vast sums of state money into the military sector to innovate the high technology subsequently handed off to the private sector for profit without any compensation for the taxpayers who financed it in the first place. Notice, too, the characteristic doublethink of Cold War political culture: the Soviets must be seen both as incompetent indigents impoverished by socialism and as mighty conquerors about to take over the cosmos any minute.

As for the avowed practice of socialism by the Soviet Union, one need only study the historical record to form a conclusive judgement. Following the Bolshevik putsch of 1917 sometimes falsely hailed as the “Russian Revolution” to lend it the undue virtue of an organic popular groundswell, the vanguardism of Leninist praxis demanded the dissolution of the All Russian Constituent Assembly; the forcible banishment of the non-Bolshevist socialist parties; the dismantlement of the workers’ councils; the disbandment of the soviets after which the U.S.S.R. was laughably named; the dismemberment of the factory collectives; the villainous eradication of independent trade unionism; and the enthronement of a self-proclaimed enlightened intelligentsia to the “commanding heights” of Russian industry who must whip the urban proletariat, a “labor army,” into subordination to the “maximal leader” without tapping into the revolutionary potential of the “primitive” Russian peasantry at all, the segment of Russian society that Karl Marx himself fancied best positioned to effect root-and-branch social change. Vladimir Lenin, who just a few months prior had published the April Theses and The State and Revolution to co-opt the libertarian and anarchistic spirit of post-Tsarist socialist ferment, now declared that Russia, a backward peasant society, was grossly unprepared for socialism and had to enter a phase of rapid industrial growth by means of the state capitalist NEP before even dreaming of a transformative upheaval of economic and social relations. In his 1921 prospectus for the NEP, Lenin unhesitatingly cautioned, “We must not count on going straight to communism. We must build on the basis of peasants’ personal incentive.” In brief, the uneducated Russian peasantry had to apply traditional capitalist techniques for agricultural production or else, Lenin presumed, the Bolshevist project would come to a halt. Despite his obstreperous expostulations against Frederick Taylor’s production model in 1914 as “man’s enslavement by the machine,” by 1918 Lenin had concluded that the urban working class must submit to the grim managerialism of Taylorist scientific techniques to stimulate industrial output, a premise from which leftists of all creeds ardently demurred. The Bolshevist economic system now just entailed a merciless capitalism, except controlled by state bureaucrats and some small businessmen (NEPmen) in place of private owners and industrialists.

Leader of the Black Army and Ukrainian Revolutionary Nestor Makhno, 1921

The common thread of all socialist persuasions was (and has always been, up to the present) the definitional goal of workers’ control of production, popular self-governance, and democratic management of resources and communities, but the Bolsheviks maintained that the decentralized syndicalist bodies that arose after the February Revolution — the soviets, the workers’ councils, and the factory collectives — had to be ripped apart to accelerate industrial development, that Ukrainian anarchist Nestor Makhno’s Black Army had to be demolished to hasten the defeat of the White Army and the foreign invaders, and that the Kronstadt mutiny had to be drubbed. Even Leon Trotsky, an opportunist who only condemned the Soviet Union as a “degenerated workers’ state” and a betrayal of socialism after Joseph Stalin trounced him in the bid to succeed Lenin and consequently exiled him, admitted that the Bolshevik takeover constituted a “holding action” before “the iron laws of history” would grind out an inevitable revolution in Germany, whereupon the Russian backwater would have a rich industrial partner to guide it towards the embrace of socialism. In fact, Lenin often contended that other European powers, especially Germany, were culturally superior to Russia, disparaging the latter as “one of the most benighted, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries.” He wished that the Russian populace, particularly the peasantry, would become more European and Western. The other Bolshevik frontmen, too, were well-known Germanophiles. Some historians speculate that in recognition of his uncompromising desire to withdraw Russia, an Entente power, from the First World War and to assure Ukrainian independence, a salient aim of the Central Powers, the German imperial war department might even have arranged Lenin’s return to St. Petersburg in 1917. The 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the annihilation of Makhno’s Black Army to guarantee both Ukraine’s neutralization and to cement the allure of the fascist Stepan Bandera, Stalin’s peculiarly stiff-necked nonchalance about Nazi Germany in the early 1930s, and the signature of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939 might well have reified Lenin’s German-allied motives.

After the bloody extirpation of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht’s 1919 Spartacist Revolt, Soviet mandarins determined that all mention of an emancipatory evolution towards socialism had to cease and that the state capitalism of the NEP represented the terminus of “communist” maturation. At this stage, “communism” departed from its anarchist, libertarian, council-oriented, and even Marxist associations and now virtually just meant centrally-coordinated state capitalist technocracy, no matter how impregnably hostile to workers’ sovereignty and industrial democracy it had become. In an interview with German-Swiss author Emil Ludwig from 1931, Stalin carelessly conceded that “socialism” in the Bolshevist reinterpretation consisted of state capitalism in preparation for some sort of utopian miracle giving way to “communism” and that “Russian Bolshevism [has] nothing in common with the equalitarian ‘communists.’” With unguarded candor, he confessed, “The roots of equalitarianism lie in the mentality of the peasant, in the psychology of share and share alike, the psychology of primitive peasant ‘communism.’” According to the Bolshevik paradigm, socialism’s egalitarian lodestar belonged to the fantasies of 19th-century rural anarchists, unfit for contemporary application.

(I would entreat everyone to read the early Soviet materials to which I’ve linked above. Many of them read like Milton Friedman tracts and reveal the depth and immediacy of Bolshevik defeatism and resignation to the persistence of capitalist production.)

Just as Thomas Paine’s radical treatise Common Sense only mattered in its rousing incitation of the colonists to violent confrontation with the British during the American Revolution and afterwards was savagely suppressed and even banned outright, Lenin’s libertarian oratory and texts from early 1917 only served the purpose of transporting him and the Bolsheviks, a minute faction consistently maligned as a right-wing deviation by most socialists at the time, to positions of state power. Lenin even rubbed the noses of those he duped with his “equalitarian” bombast by publishing his 1920 screed “Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” introducing “left-Marxism” and “left-communism” into the political lexicon to distinguish them from the once fringe but suddenly triumphant Bolshevik variations of “Marxism” and “communism.” The now forgotten mainstream of the socialist, anarchist, libertarian, and Marxist thinking uniformly reproached the Soviet Union as a gore-speckled dungeon of nefarious absolutism, savage venality, and shameless treachery against socialism’s egalitarian ideals and the Enlightenment-soldered commitment to toppling all forms of state, private, and ecclesiastical authority. Such left-Marxists and left-communists as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Liebknecht, Anton Pannekoek, Paul Mattick, Karl Korsch, and Herman Gorter all distrusted Lenin and the Bolshevik project from the beginning. Emma Goldman, Alexander Berkman, Peter Kropotkin, Karl Roche, Rudolf Rocker, and the other leading anarchists kicked clamorously against the Bolshevik contempt for participatory economics, industrial democracy, mutual aid, and workers’ self-management. Berkman’s Bolshevik Myth (Diary 1920–1922) and Goldman’s “There Is No Communism in Russia” from 1935 propound a percipient majority report on the stance of most leftists at the time about the misconception and miscarriage of the Bolshevist experiment. Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin eloquently prophesied in 1882 the rise of a “red bureaucracy” and “the most vile and terrible lie that our century has created” if Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” meant a workers’ state governed by a vanguard party rather than a stateless society of free associations of labor. In 1895, French anarcho-syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier presciently inquired, “Must even the transitory state to which we have to submit necessarily and fatally be a collectivist jail? Can’t it consist in a free organization limited exclusively by the needs of production and consumption, all political institutions having disappeared?” In his 1917 “Evolution of Industrial Democracy” pamphlet for the Industrial Workers of the World, Abner E. Woodruff wrote, “The modern socialist parties, which pretend to represent the workers upon the political field, but which are almost wholly ‘middle class’ in their aspirations and tactics, and are obsessed with a reverence for statute laws, propose that the direction of industry shall be placed in the hands of the ‘government,’ thereby illustrating their own fatuity, for government can only operate industries through the agencies of bureaus — and bureaucrats are primarily despots. In their keenness to be social saviors the politicians, who usually know very little about industry, fail to realize that the workers must control the industries through their own associations, if the spirit of democracy is to be preserved and promoted. Working class control of the industries means democratic participation and control in all production and in the social life flowing from it; therefore, the workers are not to be hampered by administrators appointed by some delegated authority…. To adopt such a policy, would defeat the ends of the social revolution and set up a new form of servitude, since the bureaucrat could only secure efficiency by adopting coercive measures.” Eric Blair (“George Orwell”) surmised that “socialism” in the American-Soviet doctrinal sense came to “[reject] and [vilify] every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it does so in the name of Socialism.” Choked by the stranglehold of Cold War dogma mutually entrenched by the United States and the Soviet Union, contemporary historians have all but airbrushed these strident critics of Bolshevism and Leninism from history in almost Stalinist fashion.