Mass murder and public slavery: the soviet experience.

AuthorMaltsev, Yuri N.
PositionEssay

In Man versus the State, Herbert Spencer concluded that "all socialism involves slavery" ([1884] 1992, 2.30). Thirty-three years later, with Vladimir Lenin's coup d'etat in October 1917, Russia opened the most deadly experiment in human history, which resulted in the establishment of a regime of total public slavery. Destruction of market incentives led to the establishment of central planning, coercion, violence, and the subsequent mass murder of slaves. It was the only way to manage production and distribution under socialism.

In The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels defined socialism as the abolition of private property: "The theory of the Communist may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property" (1848). The first and most important component of private property, self-ownership, was abolished by Soviet socialism first. Many Americans believe that socialism is essentially good and acceptable, whereas communism, fascism, and Nazism (National Socialism) are violent and antidemocratic. Public-opinion surveys prove that general assumption: 43 percent of respondents younger than thirty have a favorable view of socialism; only 32 percent have a favorable view of capitalism (Rampell 2016).

Another recent survey, by Republican pollster Frank Luntz, found that 58 percent of young people choose socialism over capitalism, which was chosen by only 33 percent of young people as the most compassionate system. Two-thirds say corporate America "embodies everything that is wrong with America," compared with only one-third who say corporate America embodies what's right with America (Tupy 2016).

Many Americans do not realize that communism was never practiced and that the term Communist applied to countries or parties meant a goal rather than an achieved "higher stage" of socialism. Marx and Engels believed that it would take three hundred to four hundred years to achieve this stage where the "State would wither away" and "nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, ... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic" (1848).

Marx developed the Communist utopia as a major tool of promotion of socialist slavery. His loyal student Joseph Stalin well understood it: "We are for the withering away of the state, and at the same time we stand for the strengthening of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which represents the most powerful and mighty of all forms of the state which have existed up to the present day. The highest development of the power of the state, with the object of preparing the conditions of the withering away of the state: that is the Marxist formula. Is it 'contradictory'? Yes, it is 'contradictory.' But this contradiction is a living thing and wholly reflects the Marxist dialectic" (Stalin 1949, 369-70).

The spread of the anticapitalistic mentality has brought enormous suffering and mass murder in all socialist countries, has greatly reduced standards of living and the quality of life in mixed economies, and is a powerful warning against socialism, statism, and interventionism in the West today.

It is beyond the ability of economic analysis to calculate the opportunity cost of the socialist experiment, and there are various estimates of the account of socialist murders. Demographer Rudolph Rummel estimated the human toll of socialism to be about 61 million in the Soviet Union and roughly 200 million worldwide (1994, 1). These victims perished during government-organized famines, collectivizations, cultural revolutions, purges, campaigns against "unearned" income, and other devilish experiments in social engineering. The horrors of twentieth-century socialism--of Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, Mao, and Pol Pot--can be considered the logical result of Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto.

Murray N. Rothbard characterizes socialism as the "violent abolition of the market" (1970, 765). Hatred was the chief motivator of the Socialist...

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