Lesson 4: The Critics: Solzhenitsyn, Mises, and Hayek
-Solzhenitsyn captured the brutal degradation of the human spirit inherent in communism
-Mises and Hayek demonstrated the flaws in its economic principles
1953: Death of Stalin
-end of WWII the relationship between USSR and the United States was shattered
-Germany was the middle glue holding them together
-After Berlin fell, the contradictions between them became apparent: Capitalism vs. Communism
-West learns about the treatments of peasants by the Soviet Union
-learned about the Gulag: brutal system of forced labor camps first established in 1919 and grew under Stalin’s reign as a communist dictator
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008)
-born during the revolution and was a convinced Marxist
-educated in Marxism and goodness of the Soviet Union
-he fought in WWII as front battery commander and was arrested by Society counterintelligence in the middle of a battle because he had made a joke in a letter about a man with a moustache meaning Stalin
-this began his dehumanization and terror
-author and Soviet dissident who helped to raise global awareness of
Two Works:
1-A Day in the life of Ivan Denisovich
1-Gulag Archipelago: the Soviet prison bureaucracy described mechanically as a “human sewage system.” It a compelling account based on his own eight years in Soviet prison camps and others he remembered, letters, and historical sources
-Gulag Archipelago was an indictment of Soviet slavery (known also as corrective or forced labor camps)
-people deemed unreliable placed in the camps
-Stalin set out to enforce socialism as a means to transform human nature
-Any left overs of self-interest needs to be cleansed from human nature
In the book:
-1st begins with the history of our sewage disposal system
-literal meaning is the Soviet regime is consuming its own people and flushing them down the sewage line
-grueling labor and harsh conditions was preceded by a series of events of a typical prisoner
-1st arrest
-2nd interrogation= torture by beatings, sleep deprivation, with the goal to get you to confess to whatever you were being accused of, break the body but even more the spirit of the human being
-the gulag was supposed to be educational for the public to teach you how to be a good Soviet citizen
-core experience: grueling work with little to no food
-Each camp had a quantity of labor necessary to attain food (dehumanizing and deadly)
Transformation
-he goes from being a believing Marxist until his arrest to being in the brutal and inhumane gulag
1940’s-Intellectual elite
-sympathy for the communist ideal
-even after the Cold War started-academia and news sympathized with socialism
-his book lived reality of the camps-opened eyes of the West
-the theory of Marx is very different when put into practice
-war of a particular political order against the Russian people
-showed through this horrific prison system was not accidental of the Soviet system but rather essential to the Soviet system
Why:
-goes back to Marxism
-in order to bring about the revolution you have to be absolutely ruthless against its opponents
-Marx & Lenin = Party discipline and crush the workers if they oppose you
-idea of history and politics leads to war between government and the public
-the system either causes you to lose your humanity or ascend into corruption
-the dividing line is will you do anything to survive or are there things you won’t do because they are wrong
-if you take a stand on principle even at the risk of your life you can ascend but if you will steal that bread from the weaker starving person then you are descending
-you can ascend if you refuse to cooperate with the regime even if it means being sent off to a labor camp where you will most likely die
-the socialism they instituted in the Soviet Union was a failure and will always will be because the goal of total abolition of self-interest is completely at odds with human nature and will always require at some point violence or tacit abandonment in order for it to survive
Personal Stories
-gave a human face on these doctrines
-classless society on paper sounds good, but not in practice
-Tyranny becomes human when you can relate to those experiencing that tyranny
-utter failings of communism, unworkability and an economic system, and its brutality as a political system
2 Economists come forward to fracture the economic theory
-late 40’s-early 50’s conflicting models
-West lost its faith in the Soviet model
-began to look at alternative versions theories of socialism
Ludwig Von Mises: Austrian
-notable voice pushing back on the intellectuals
-1920 wrote the essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth”: which argued that a centrally planned socialist economy would be unable to effectively allocate resources due to the lack of market prices, essentially making rational economic calculation impossible in such a system.
-Mises claimed that without private property and market prices, a socialist planner would have no way to determine the most valuable uses for resources, leading to inefficiency and economic chaos.
-all Marxists believe if you fully remove the need to make a profit and put the means of production into the hands of the government the scarcity disappears
-1949 Human Action: largest and most scientific defense of human freedom ever published and best defense for capitalism ever written
-1920 Economic
(1) capitalism, (2) socialism, (3) interventionism, (4) inflation, (5) foreign investment, (6) politics and ideas.
-without property rights and resources is impossible to have market prices so without marketing prices people have no idea of what products are in scarcity of what capital goods are
-leads to arbitrary uses of those products as no one knows which products people do want
-leads to rationing-no variety of products-;ong break lines- limits to what you can buy- high cost
-Socialism is not what it claims to be- it doesn’t build a utopian world but destroys-produces nothing-it only consumes the private ownership and productions that are created
Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)
-student of Mises
-moved from being socialist to a proponent of liberty and free markets
-libertarian economist
-university of Vienna
-Post World War II era and as the Cold War began
-showed people how economically socialist and Marxist economics doesn’t make sense and can only be destructive to prosperity and liberty
-continues to flush out the lie that there is no more need to have private ownership over production because we have access to mathematical economic models , statistically estimate what those prices would have been
-this is impossible because you couldn’t coolest all the data for the kinds of calculations you would need to give you the same kind of information you would get from market prices through the interactions of millions of people
Ex. United Mine Worker of America= mine is government possession so the government expect the miner to honor their contract to mine the coal which the nation needs
-markets: competition so state of rivalry to do appeal to customers more effectively
-if you do not have the possibility of private ownership of capital it is impossible to have liberty
-provision of coercion is to provide the freedom of private ownership
****warning to America about socialist promises that they can have it all: prosperity, equality, as well as all these liberties that we are accustomed to in the western world
-Hayek explains that oppression will inevitably take place and there is no way to avoid it
Causes of the collapse of the USSR are complex :
-military pressure from Reagan 1981 in Washington, contradictions of the socialist system of production was failing
-Spring 1985 reformist leader in Mikhail Gorbachev, but by this time Russia past breaking point so as he tried to fix it the more it crumbled
-Gorbachev resigns after unable to fix the repressive system through tyranny and terror, when he loosened the reins human nature took hold and people starting thinking for themselves, they wanted a better life and more freedom
-triumph over tyranny and totalitarianism by resisting lies
-Marxism is a vast construct of ideological lies about what it is to be a human being
-before the collapse of the USSR communism took foothold in China