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COMMUNISM

How persistent can a failed ideology be?

Ninety percent of Swedish students aged 15-20 do not know what a gulag was, and some still insist that schools should not teach about the crimes of communism. How long will the elites continue defending a failed ideology, asks Nima Sanandaji of think-tank Captus.

Published: 27 August 2007 18:01 CEST

A recent study by polling company Demoskop, commissioned by the ‘Upplysning om Kommunismen’ (Knowledge about Communism) association, showed that Swedish students have a skewed view of the history of communism. Few are aware of the massive loss of life caused by followers of this ideology, and 90 percent of Swedish students aged 15-20 do not even know what a gulag was.

A recent opinion piece in Biblioteksbladet magazine (a periodical for Swedish librarians) denounced the government’s plan to spread knowledge to students about the horrors of communism.

In the article, two school librarians write that informing students about the crimes of communism would be wrong as it would risk making the pupils’ views more right-wing.

Former foreign correspondent Kjell Albin Abrahamsson, who has spent many years reporting from the former communist countries in Europe, reacted strongly to the piece.

Writing in tabloid Expressen, Abrahamsson points out how strange it is for two librarians to be so keen to preserve students’ support for socialism that they are are not willing to acknowledge the crimes of communism. He notes that a Russian government commission has admitted that the country’s former communist rulers killed 32 million people.

Support for communism, both hidden and visible, is still quite prevalent among many groups of intellectuals, such as journalists, librarians and those writing in the culture pages of the daily papers. Indeed, outright supporters of communism can be found not only in the Swedish Left Party but also in the Green Party and in the ranks of the influential Social Democrats.

One symptom of this tendency is the widely believed myth among Swedes that Cuba is a relatively prosperous welfare state, offering a decent quality of life and fantastic healthcare to its citizens. Few bother to question the official statistics from a communist country where thousands of citizens have lost their lives whilst attempting to escape on rafts to the United States. Cuba might have gone from being the richest country in Central American to being the second poorest due to Castro’s rule – but this has not stopped Swedish intelligentsia from spreading a positive view of his policies.

Similarly, Swedish journalists seem more interested in pointing out that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is a morally superior socialist standing up to the vile Americans, than looking at his dubious moves towards a socialist planned economy and authoritarian rule.

The socialist ideology is not only responsible for the deaths of upwards a 100 million individuals in the former communist countries, the oppression behind the iron curtain and widespread starvation in failed socialist economies. Socialist policies also account for much of the stagnation we see today in Africa, South America and the poorer countries of Asia. Indeed, the countries that today show the greatest rates of development are typically those who quite recently have abandoned socialism in favour of capitalism – India, China, Vietnam and many eastern European countries.

Given communism’s historical record, how long will the intellectual elites carry on defending such a failed ideology? How long will they keep giving moral support to radical left leaning youth organizations such as AFA, who are regularly involved in acts of violence? Shouldn’t modern socialism, if such an ideology is indeed needed, focus on welfare policies that can be combined with individual and economic liberty rather than nostalgia for Marxist class struggles?

Nima Sanandaji is the president of the Swedish free market think tank Captus and publisher of the weekly online Swedish magazine Captus Tidning.

www.captus.nu

COMMUNISM

Communist Manifesto anniversary: What does Marx still have to say?

On the anniversary of the publication of the Communist Manifesto on February 21st, 1848, we look at its controversial co-author Karl Marx, his beliefs, and what he means to Germany and the world today.

Published: 21 February 2019 12:50 CET
Communist Manifesto anniversary: What does Marx still have to say?
A statue of Marx in the city museum in Trier, his birthplace, in 2018. Photo:

Born in 1818 in Trier, Marx came from distinctly affluent stock. The son of a lawyer, Heinrich, the young Marx had opportunities and prospects that would set him up for life, if he had chosen them.

Yet Marx showed his radical colours early on, joining a number of societies that agitated against the absolutist policies still in place across Prussia, the kingdom of his birth. There, he came to the attention of authorities, and he’d be under scrutiny for the rest of his time in Germany.

SEE ALSO: Marx at 200: Germany torn over revolutionary's legacy

Ironically, considering his later work, Marx married up – way up. His wife, Jenny von Westphalen came from a well-to-do, newly ennobled family, and some considered their relationship scandalous, particularly since Marx’s family had converted from Judaism. Despite the up and downs of their lives together – and there would be several, as they experienced periods of sharp poverty – they stayed devoted to one another for the whole of their lives.

The young couple moved a lot over the next couple of years, as Marx worked as a writer and journalist, beginning to put together his theory of class struggle, based on the inequity he saw around him.

A statue of Marx in his hometown of Trier, which was officially unveiled on May 5th, 2018. Photo: DPA

Every civilization, he came to believe, was enabled by a working classes supporting a ruling class holding capital, or wealth. This was always doomed to failure by its very design, he thought, and the only way forward was socialism, where the needs of the many would be met by the equitable and sustained distribution of capital – the political ideology of socialism.

Having combined with a number of like-minded organizations in the 1840s, Marx and his friend Friedrich Engels formed the Communist League in 1847, and the following year, on February 21st, 1848, published their manifesto.

Outlining their idea of the class struggle, and defining what was needed to break the cycle of oppression, the rather brief work ends with an exhortation for world revolution – ‘Workers of the world, unite!’.

SEE ALSO: Walkers of the world unite: Marx traffic light installed in his hometown

Of course, ideas like this weren’t particularly popular in the Europe of the first half of the 19th century, and they became downright dangerous after 1848, when a string of revolutions led to the emergence of the nation state across the continent, challenging the old order. Marx was forced to flee to England permanently, where he would spend the rest of his life.

During his time in England, Marx would not only publish ‘Das Kapital’ (‘Capital’) – his in-depth, ideological outlining of communism – but play host to a number of groups and organizations that were attempting to put his words to effect. He would die in 1883 of respiratory disease – something that had plagued him his entire life. Smoking didn’t help either.

Over the second half of the 19th century, a number of uprisings, such as the Paris Commune, made clear the urgency and relevance of his words, but it was not until the dawn of the 20th century that his ideas were tested for the first time, in the Russian Revolution.

The Marx-Engels Forum in former East Berlin. Photo: DPA

The ensuing decades would see Russia becoming a communist superpower, and a boogeyman to millions. Conversely, the rise of the USSR was an inspiration to China and several former colonial possessions, who had their own communist revolts, to varying degrees of effectiveness.

Debate still rages as to whether the crimes of Lenin, Stalin and other despots who ruled over communist nations can be laid at the feet of Marx – indeed, now more than ever, battle lines are firmly drawn, with US President Donald Trump going so far as to denounce socialism in his recent State of the Union address.

SEE ALSO: 5 GDR monuments which still have a role to play in today's Berlin

Perhaps a more nuanced response can be seen in how Germany remembers him. While many of the trappings of the communist GDR have been shed, and rightly so, Marx is still remembered in street names, buildings, museums and other locations across the country. He occupies a similar space to many other German thinkers whose ideas changed our world through their influence, such as Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer.

If you’re in Trier, you can visit his birthplace, that is now a museum. Elsewhere in the city, there are occasionally exhibits dedicated to him in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier.

Additionally, items relating to Marx’s life and work sometimes go on display at the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin.

Marx’s legacy lives on, fractiously and and volubly, and that’s probably the way he would have liked it. He got many to question the power structures that surround us, and his ideas did demonstrably improve the lot of millions. That others used his ideas to establish tyrannies should also be considered. It’s a complex situation – but who said philosophy was meant to be easy?

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