NEWS & ANALYSIS

Lessons of Communism

Jack Bloom says the system has failed in each of the 33 countries it has been tried

LESSONS ON COMMUNISM

Last month the SA Communist Party commemorated the 19th anniversary of Joe Slovo's death. He is buried beneath a Hammer and Sickle carved in stone.

Communism has killed millions of people, and millions more lived miserable lives under communist rule. As a symbol of death and destruction, the Hammer and Sickle is as heinous as the Swastika. How could anyone be proud of it today, or wish it to have it as a grave stone?

I recently met Professor Yuri Maltsev, a former senior advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, last ruler of the former Soviet Union. He says the only reason people worked in the USSR was because of fear. It was "one huge concentration camp".

A country that spanned 11 time zones, with immense mineral resources, had a GDP less than 10% that of America. Centralised planning meant shortages of everything, so queuing became a way of life. It has been estimated that Soviet citizens spent about 6 years of their lives queuing for basic goods.

There are no accurate figures for those who were murdered or died in famines in the USSR. Figures range from 20 million to 60 million deaths, but as Stalin said "one death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic".

Communism has failed in each of the 33 countries on four continents where it has been tried.

Slovo wrote a self-critical article in 1989 called "Has Socialism Failed?" He acknowledged the "mounting chronicle of crimes and distortions in the history of existing socialism". He blamed Stalinism and the blind communist acceptance of it, but maintained faith in "democratic socialism". It's a disingenuous article by someone who once declared that all Trotskyists should be shot. He wrote it when Gorbachev was still in power, hailing him for his reforms. But Gorbachev could not save communism as the whole system was totally rotten.

The core reason is that "public ownership" inevitably means state control, which inevitably curbs individual freedom. People are unlikely to challenge authority if the state controls their livelihood. Based on his USSR experience, Maltsev promotes the free market for both wealth creation and human freedom. He says that the market is a remarkable mechanism for cooperation, even between people who don't like each other.

There were no incentives under socialism, hence the joke "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work". The Economist reports that over the past 20 years, almost 1 billion people were lifted out of extreme poverty in developing countries.

This is unprecedented progress due primarily to liberalising of markets to let poor people get richer. This is true economic freedom, the exact opposite of what Julius Malema's Economic Freedom Fighters wish to achieve.

The EFF's proposed state grab of private assets is a recipe for human misery such as in the USSR and in today's Zimbabwe.

It's a lesson of history we should not repeat.

Jack Bloom is DA Leader in the Gauteng Legislature. This article first appeared in The Citizen.

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