COMMUNISM

The word Communism has been used in different senses by different authors, but from 1917 onward it was most readily associated with the type of political and economic system established in Russia and the other lands that became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). By the 1970s Communism in this sense of the term prevailed in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and parts of Bessarabia, all of which were incorporated directly into the USSR, as well as in Mongolia, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Albania, East Germany, North Korea, China, Tibet, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. A number of other states, including Nicaragua, Granada, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, and Ethiopia, were ruled by parties closely allied with the USSR, but whether they were full-fledged Communist states is open to debate. In addition, parties advocating the Soviet model of government formed in most other countries. These states and parties, although they used various names—workers, people's, democratic—were commonly referred to as Communist.

From its earliest period of development Communism made two important claims about its relation to science. The first was that it was itself a scientific theory. The second was that it put science and technology to greater benefit than any competitor political practice. Both claims were disputed by non-Communists.

Marxism-Leninism as Science

Although Communism was not alone among the various schools of socialism in tracing its roots to Marxism, Communists were the most emphatic in asserting the absolute validity of that doctrine. Under Vladimir I. Lenin (1870–1924), the founder of Communism, the scientific claims of Marxism were treated as undeniable dogma. Lenin wrote, "From the philosophy of Marxism, cast of one piece of steel, it is impossible to expunge a single basic premise, a single essential part, without deviating from objective truth, without falling into the arms of bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" (Lenin 1977,
p. 326).

Lenin wrote these words years before he came to rule Russia. Once he took power, the dogmatic spirit they reflect was reinforced by the exigencies of revolutionary government. Lenin's party, first called Bolshevik and later Communist, was a small, elite group. In order to hold onto power its members saw they would have to suppress the opposition, and Lenin made no bones about this. Since he was confident that his party was the authentic representative of the proletariat, any opposition would inevitably reflect hostile class interests that deserved to be suppressed for the sake of human progress.

Thus did Lenin introduce the practice of silencing criticism or dissent. Under his heir, Joseph Stalin (1879–1953), and their disciples in other countries, such as China's Mao Zedong (1893–1976), Communism assiduously policed the expression of opinion, exacting draconian penalties against any deviation from party policy. All of this was accompanied by sweeping assertions of the scientific character of Marxist and Communist doctrine, evidenced by the fact that almost any speech, book, essay, or paper required numerous citations from the texts of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. This semblance of scientific procedure was topped off by the claim that Communism was possessed of a unique form of philosophical reasoning called dialectic or dialectical materialism that somehow offered more penetrating insights than did conventional logic.

In the usage of Lenin and subsequent Communists, calling something science or scientific meant that something was true. To real scientists, the term has nearly the opposite meaning, connoting a search for truth in which all conclusions are provisional.

In the end even Communist leaders themselves acknowledged that the legacy they inherited was less one of science than dogma. In the USSR Mikhail Gorbachev, under the rubric glasnost, reversed the tradition initiated by Lenin and opened the way to freedom of speech. And in China Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997) sought to undo Mao's worship of doctrine, coining the slogan: "It does not matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice."

If free inquiry and acceptance of the notion that all conclusions are subject to revision in the face of new evidence are the touchstones of science, then Communism presented an environment that was inimical to science. This went even a step further in China, where for a time Mao actively discouraged the reading of books and education other than practical training. Peasants, although harshly exploited in collective farms, were nonetheless held by Mao to be the repositories of revolutionary virtue, and urbanites that fell afoul of the regime were often exiled to the countryside to "learn from the peasants." During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966–1977), schools were closed for years as teenagers were mobilized into perpetual street mobs in byzantine power struggles between rival party factions. All of this fierce anti-intellectualism, so at odds with traditional Chinese reverence for education, was justified as being egalitarian and antielitist. But such contempt for formal learning was also antiscientific.

Communist Achievements in Science and Technology

This is not to say that Communist societies were without their accomplishments in scientific fields. There were some, particularly in engineering and applied research. Great investments were made in military equipment and in other technologies such as space exploration that were part of a symbolic competition with the capitalist world. Moreover Communist regimes were disdainful or indifferent to soft fields of scholarship—the arts, humanities, and social sciences—so that the finest minds of these societies almost necessarily found their outlets in hard science or engineering.

In addition to discouraging free inquiry, Communist regimes sometimes intervened directly in scientific questions, most famously when Stalin directed Soviet biology to embrace the tenets of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976). Ironically, in light of Marx and Engels's belief that their theories were analogs to Darwin's, Lysenko was a Soviet scientist who dissented from a key tenet of Darwin's principle of natural selection. Lysenko believed that acquired, as opposed to inherited, traits could be passed on genetically. Because Stalin had a deep fondness for great projects of social engineering, the idea that one might alter life itself in this manner appealed greatly. For some years genetic research in the USSR was forced to devote itself to Lysenko's eventually discredited theories.

Through the concentration of material and human capital, Communist regimes competed effectively, albeit usually coming in second, in the fields of weaponry and space exploration. Sometimes what these endeavors lacked in fine-tuning they made up for in size—for example, less accurate missiles armed with larger warheads. Usually they competed a lot less well in technologies devoted to consumer goods. The lack of marketplace incentives to maintain or improve the quality of products, combined with the general dampening of innovation and the low priority given to economic planning involving consumer goods, resulted in a generally shoddy quality of merchandise. Popular discontent on this score was an important factor that eventually resulted in pressure for political change in China and the USSR.

The most singular episode in the history of technology under Communism was the Great Leap Forward (1957–1960), a program guided by Mao's conviction that a collective farm could produce industrial as well as agricultural goods and thereby become completely self-sufficient. In a fervent national campaign from which dissent was not tolerated, collectives began trying to produce industrial goods including that sine quo non of industry, steel. Mao announced that small backyard smelters could replace large steel mills. One of the many flaws in this theory was the absence of thought given to the question of material inputs for these smelters. Egged on and intimidated, peasants felt compelled to contribute not only scrap but whatever was available in existing tools and utensils, so that these might be melted down to make new steel. Little real steel was produced by this method, but many small tools and even cooking woks were sacrificed. Add to this the sacrifice of peasant labor diverted from the fields, and the result was a mass famine during the years 1959–1962 that most sinologists estimate took some 30 million or more lives.

Ethics: New Ends Justify Any Means

The large-scale loss of life under Communism in China, the USSR, and a few other places, notably Cambodia and North Korea, highlights the ethical issues raised by Communism. Although the facts of these cases were once hotly disputed, for the most part disputes ended when successor Communist rulers acknowledged the respective tragedies. That is, the deaths caused by Stalin's regime in the USSR were decried first by Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), then more fully by Gorbachev. The depredations of Pol Pot (1926–1998) were roundly denounced by the Communists who threw him out of power in Cambodia. And some of the carnage caused by Mao—that associated with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—was recognized at least implicitly after Deng Xiaoping took the helm in China in 1978, although Mao was not directly blamed.

The needless deaths of large numbers of human beings would in itself seem to constitute a moral transgression of the highest order. And yet under Communism this was not deemed axiomatic. Communists asserted the moral standards that were traditional to Christianity (and in the East to Confucianism or other longstanding codes) were themselves expressive of the domination of the wealthy classes. As Lenin put it: "People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learned to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises." (Lenin 1969).

Therefore the proletariat would embody its own ethical standards. And these would be closely tied to the fulfillment of its mission to overthrow capitalism and usher in a new historical age. Communism would provide a fulfilling life for all people, and since society would no longer be divided by classes, it would make possible for the first time the emergence of truly universal moral principles.

Since so much is at stake in the triumph of the socialist revolution—nothing short of the achievement of humankind's ultimate destiny—everything must be put at the service of this goal. As Lenin wrote:

"Our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the proletariat's class struggle. When people tell us about morality, we say: to a Communist all morality lies in conscious mass struggle against the exploiters. We do not believe in an eternal morality Communist morality is based on the struggle for the consolidation and completion of communism." (Lenin 1968).

In taking this approach, Lenin rested on a strong but nonetheless ambiguous tenet in Marxist theory. Marx and Engels asserted that all ideas spring from class roots, which suggests that no objective ethical standards exist. Yet their condemnation of capitalism drew its power from its implied moral terms. Marx and Engels often claimed that they had done no more than lay bare the laws of history, showing that capitalism was destined to be replaced by socialism. But if so, there was no reason to work for the advancement of socialism. In practice Marx and Engels worked with all the energy they could muster. They were as much activists as philosophers, and the only explanation for this, even if implicit, was that socialism was not only inevitable but also highly desirable—which implies some standard of good and bad.

At the same time, Marx also proclaimed that "Communism is the riddle of history solved." If indeed this is the case, then it is hard to take exception to Lenin's very instrumental approach to ethics, for nothing else could possibly take priority. The achievement of Communism would be the measure of all things.

A companion aspect of the view that all else must be subordinated to the fulfillment of the destiny of humankind as a whole is that any given individual'swell being might be subordinated to this higher, collective good. As explained by Aleksandr F. Shishkin, author of the leading Soviet text on ethics, Communist morality teaches the individual "not to look upon himself as an end in himself." Rather "the new society cultivates the individual in such fashion as to cause him to see the fullness of human existence to lie in struggle for a common cause and to be able to resolve in favor of society any contradiction arising between the needs of society and his personal ambition" (Shishkin 1978, p. 88).

JOSHUA MURAVCHIK

SEE ALSO Chinese Perspectives;Lysenko Case;Marxism;Marx, Karl;Russian Perspectives;Socialism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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