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The communist platform emphasized the phrase “scientific communism,” with
contrived stages of development in an attempt to give it a scientific facade. Communism, as a concept and linguistically
derived from the Latin word “communis” (shared) is neither scientific nor “shared.”
The theory of scientific communism had to be developed and propagandized
and the Communist education had to be improved. (p. 124)
Public education was required to prepare citizens for vocations needed
by the communist society. Children were to be molded into “harmoniously
developed members of Communist society” and the “elimination of substantial
distinctions between mental and physical labor.” The principles of the
“Communist outlook” were to be taught and school children were to be engaged in
“socially useful labor to the extent of their physical capacity.” (Program of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Crosscurrents Press, New York, 1961,
p. 112)
The parental influence of their children’s education had to be harmonized with “their public
upbringing.” Schools were meant to inculcate not just “love of labor and of
knowledge in children” but also “to raise the younger generation into the
spirit of Communist consciousness and morality.” (p. 113)
Literature and art had to be “imbued with optimism and dynamic
Communist ideas.” (p. 119)
Collectivism was highly encouraged and the cult of the individual was discouraged. (p. 124)
The Party’s banner was inscribed, “From each according to his ability,
to each according to his needs.” The
Party’s motto was “Everything in the name of man, for the benefit of man” and
the militant slogan proclaimed, “Workers of all countries, unite!” (p. 9)
In case there was any doubt that the socialist world was expanding and
the capitalist world was cut down to size, the program proclaimed that
“Socialism will inevitably succeed capitalism everywhere” because it is the
“objective law of social development.”
When communism eventually accomplished its mission, the Soviets said,
there will be no social inequality, no oppression, no exploitation, no war,
just “peace, labor, freedom, equality, and happiness on earth.” I wondered how
the 100 million innocents worldwide who were killed by communists would have responded
to such empty and meaningless rhetoric.
“Capitalism extensively exploits female and child labor.” (p. 11) Before
this document was published, child labor was a thing of the past in the United
States, and women comprised 29.6 percent of the labor force in 1950. Many women
stayed home to raise their children and care for their families. http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf
Communists, under the leadership of Lenin, “worked out a plan for the radical transformation of the country,
for the construction of socialism.” The plan had three prongs: the
industrialization of the country, agricultural cooperation, and the Cultural
Revolution.
Industrialization
As those who lived through socialism can attest, forced
industrialization into a large scale modern industry resulted in an
impoverished populace who survived on the crumbs left after a lot of funds and
natural resources, that should have been earmarked for improving the population’s
standard of living, were used to industrialize a poorly run centralized economy
that wasted a lot of resources.
The program of the Communist Party proposed the development of a
first-class heavy industry, defense, and services for the population in the
areas of “trade, public catering, health, housing, and communal services.” As we well know, life under communism was
very brutal in every aspect.
Total industrial output proposed was to exceed in 10 years 150 percent
of the 1961 level of the U.S. industrial output and in 20 years by 500 percent,
leaving the U.S. far behind. This was to be accomplished by raising
productivity in ten years by 100 percent and by 300-350 percent within 20
years. The goals are laughable today
just as they were in 1961. (p. 65)
Major economic areas were set up in the Urals, the Volga, Siberia,
Transcaucasia, the Baltic area, and Central Asia and production planning was
centrally done. (p. 82)
Labor productivity was supposed to
increase in agriculture through the kolkhoz (collectives) system as charted by
Vladimir I. Lenin by merging kolkhoz property and individual property into one
Communist property. Productivity was to
increase 150 percent in ten years and then 5-6 times more in the following ten
years. That certainly never happened. Machinery, spare parts, and repair know-how
were lacking and the young agricultural labor force tended to seek employment
in cities for better opportunities. (p. 74)
Agricultural
Cooperation
Agricultural cooperation meant that everyone had to give up their land
for the common good, willingly or by
force, with no compensation whatsoever, and form cooperative farms from which
the communists derived the lion’s share of income from crops, cattle, pigs,
horses, and chicken. Peasants were lucky to escape with their lives and the
clothes on their backs, and very fortunate to survive the forced move into high-rise
concrete block apartments located in very crowded cities.
“Millions of small individual farms went into voluntary association to form collective farms.” Large-scale
“socialist farming” predicated on confiscated land destroyed the formerly
plentiful crops of each individual family who brought home the fruits of their
labor. Now each family had to be content with the leftovers after the Party
claimed their planned share.
Cultural
Revolution
The Cultural
Revolution included the forced indoctrination and reeducation in labor camps of
those who resisted communism: “skeptics,
capitulators, Trotskyists, Right opportunists, nationalist-deviators, and other
hostile groups.” (p. 15)
To achieve this Cultural
Revolution, illiteracy had to be wiped out. The socialist intelligentsia
was created through indoctrination and the so-called classless society was now
comprised of workers, peasants, and intellectuals, all ruled from the top by
the communist party elites.
The ridiculous idea that now citizens have a material interest in the
fruits of their labor was expressed in the motto, “we pretend to work and they
pretend to pay us.” They never raised the people’s standard of living as they
claimed, on the contrary, they impoverished the former well-off farmers whose
land they confiscated.
There was never an awareness that workers labored for themselves and
society. The awareness was that everyone worked for the government bureaucrats
who were beholden and answered to the communist party elites.
Although freedom of speech, press, and assembly were written in the
Constitution which was often revised, nobody lived under the false sense of
being able to speak their minds without disappearing the very next day and
never to be seen again.
Because the Socialist revolution “established the dictatorship of the
proletariat,” 100 nations and nationalities lived harmoniously within the USSR. At least that is what the propaganda led you to believe. The only dictatorship the
Eastern European block has experienced has been the dictatorship of the
Communist Party elite and its chosen dear leader.
“The Socialist reorganization of society” has been so successful,
claimed the Communist Party’s program, that “The highroad to Socialism has been
paved. Many peoples are already marching along it, and it will be taken sooner
or later by all peoples.” (p. 21)
“The countries of the Socialist system have accumulated considerable
collective experience in the remolding of the lives of hundreds of millions of
people.” (p. 22)
I can personally attest to this
remolding of our lives. We were comfortable and had a home one day and the
next day we lost everything to the new communist regime. Several family members
went into gulags for being “bourgeois,” some survived, some did not, property
was confiscated, everyone was impoverished overnight, savings and personal
belongings taken, and forced re-education into the cult of personality and adulation of the president and his wife
Elena.
According to the Program of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,
the Socialists had in common:
-
Same type of economy based on the social
ownership of the means of production
-
Same type of political system based on the rule
of the people led by the working class
-
Same Marxist-Leninist ideology
-
Same defense against the “imperialist camp”
-
Same common goal of communism (p. 22)
Communists believed that their number one responsibility was to
educate the “working people” in the vein of “internationalism, Socialist
patriotism, and intolerance of all
possible manifestations of nationalism and chauvinism. Nationalism is harmful
to the common interests of the Socialist community.” (p. 25)
It is now easy to understand the planned drive to erase national
borders and sovereignty that have previously defined successful western nations
with capitalist economies. “Bourgeois nationalism” and “national egoism” are
vehemently opposed, however, “Communists always show utmost consideration for the
national feelings of the masses.” (p.
26)
It is interesting to note how much money, force, police, and military might
the Communist Party employed to keep the masses from escaping the borders of
the impoverished, poorly-run and spirit-suffocating socialist states, heavily
guarded by devoted and brain-washed apparatchiks and well-paid informants. The
East Germans even built the Berlin Wall between them and their West German
brothers and sisters who believed in freedom. The wall was built not to keep
people from coming in but to keep people from escaping communism.
The Soviets stated that World War I and the October Revolution caused a
general crisis of capitalism. Part two of its crisis began with World War II
and the Socialist revolution. ”World capitalism has now entered a new, third
stage of that crisis, the principal feature of which is that its development is
not tied to a world war.” (p. 26)
In their 1961 opinion, world wars, economic crises, the military
industrial complex, and political unrest accelerated the transformation of “monopoly
capitalism into state-monopoly capitalism.”
“The oppression of finance capital keeps growing. Giant monopolies
controlling the bulk of social production dominate the life of the nation. A
handful of millionaires and multi-millionaires (make that billionaires today)
wield arbitrary power over the entire wealth of the capitalist world and make
the life of entire nations mere small change in their selfish deals. The
financial oligarchy is getting fabulously rich.” (p. 27) Of course they left
out the Communist Party elites who were also getting offensively rich at the
expense of the proletariat. The paragraph contains eerily similar developments
today.
“The state is becoming a committee for the management of the affairs of
the monopoly bourgeoisie. The bureaucratization of the economy is rising
steeply.” The Communist Party recognized bureaucratization because they perfected it to
an art.
What does state-monopoly capitalism do? It combines state and
monopolies into a single power whose sole purpose is to enrich the monopolies, suppress
the population, and “launch aggressive wars.” (p. 27) The industrial military
complex eager to start new wars around the world comes to mind.
Some interesting points were made about technology that replaced
workers through automation, while displacing small producers. Using bombastic
language, the Communist Party stated, “Imperialism is using technical progress
chiefly for military purposes.” While devouring an ever-increasing fraction of
the budget, “The imperialist countries are turning into militarist states run
by the army and the police.” (pp. 28-29)
The Communist Party conveniently hid the fact that their police state
and military readiness kept the Soviet population in a constant state of fear
and of need. The communist platform identified the U.S. as the “world gendarme”
(police) who at times supported “reactionary dictatorial regimes and decayed
monarchies,” and at times opposed “democratic, revolutionary changes.”
Accusing the “exploiting classes” for “resorting to violence against
the people,” the Communist Party conveniently hides the fact of mass killings,
100 million innocents who lost their lives to the aggressive communist
movement, indoctrination, and power grab. (p. 39)
“Anti-communism is a reflection of the extreme decadence of bourgeois
ideology.” (p. 50) “Thus any staunch anti-communist born by solid experience
with the pathetic life people lived under socialism and communism, by this
definition is a decadent bourgeois individual.
The Soviets called the capitalist state the “bourgeois state.” It is a
“welfare state” for the “magnates of finance capital and state of “suffering
and torture for hundreds of millions of working men.” (p. 51)
The commies were wrong in that we have a welfare state for the masses –
50 percent of the labor force today does not work but receives “entitlements”
paid by those who choose to work for a living. Our “free world,” said the
communist platform of 1961, is a world of “lack of rights, a world where human
dignity and national honor are trampled underfoot.” (p. 51)
The Soviets would be shocked and disgusted with so many Americans and
illegal aliens on the dole. “It is impossible for a man in Communist society
not to work, for neither his social consciousness nor public opinion would
permit it.” According to the Communist
Party platform, “Anyone who received any benefits from society without doing
his share of work would be a parasite living at the expense of others.” (p.
108)
The communist moral code
included the following principles:
-
Devotion to the communist cause
-
Conscientious labor for the good of society – “He
who does not work, neither shall he eat”
-
Public duty and Intolerance of actions
harmful to the public interest
-
“Collectivism : one for all and all for one”
-
Mutual respect and humane relations
-
“Honesty, truthfulness, moral purity, modesty
and guilessness in social and private life”
-
Intolerance of national and racial hatred
-
Mutual respect in families and proper upbringing
of children
-
Intolerance to “injustice, parasitism,
dishonesty, and careerism” (p. 109)
The Soviets described capitalist
clericalism as using the church, political groups, unions, youth, and women’s
lobby to advance their agendas. Today these groups are used to advance the
communist agenda.
The Soviet people with their average equal incomes were never more
prosperous than employees of the capitalist economy. What Soviets termed “parasitical
classes” under capitalism were no more parasitical than all the communist
apparatchiks who stole left and right from the wealth of the people. (p. 84)
Did Soviet communists deliver the promised public consumption funds and
goods as promised, according to need and at public expense ? The answer is
generally no. When they did deliver some services, they were highly inadequate:
(pp. 90-91)
-
Caring for disabled people, orphans, and elderly
with no family left (few were cared for, were abused, and died shortly in their
care)
-
Free education (yes, but it was highly
competitive and unfairly distributed at the university level)
-
Free medical services (yes, substandard care and
full of malpractice that was never addressed because it was government run;
severe shortage of medicines)
-
Rent-free housing, free public transportation
(no, it was subsidized)
-
Free use of some communal services (yes,
libraries, bath houses, culture houses)
-
Grants to unmarried mothers (yes)
The communist experiment at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 failed miserably
when many starved to death. Bonded laborers worked on the communal land but
there was no incentive to do more. Crops were placed in storage from which everyone
took according to their needs but members worked according to their ability. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/bloggers/2120669/posts
Communism did not succeed around the world and will never succeed no
matter who is in power because it is premised on a highly organized society of
free, socially conscious workers who self-govern and labor for the good of the
people. Some men by nature work harder
and are more conscientious and altruistic than others. Responsibility,
consciousness, industriousness, equality, discipline, and devotion by
government fiat cannot be dictated or implemented. Some men or groups of people
will always be more equal than others.
© Dr. Ileana Johnson Paugh
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