It’s the weekend so people seem freer to share their recollections about the topic, so here goes one more round. I suspect it will be the last installment, but who knows? I hope readers find what other readers have to say as interesting as I do.
Let me add two of my many college encounters with regard to the Soviet Union and the communist bloc. When I took economics 101, in 1966, the textbook was Samuelson, of course. Inside the back cover was a graph comparing the gross national products of several countries over a long period of time (since 1900, I think). What it showed was that the US had the largest GNP, but it had grown through a series of severe booms and busts. The Soviet Union’s GNP was still somewhat lower than the US’s, but since the mid-1930s (the Five Year Plans, I guess) it had grown in a straight, sharply rising line (rising faster than US GNP at any point except major booms), that it had never experienced any downturns, and that it would quite clearly surpass the American GNP in the near future that was just off the edge of the book. This, then, was the “knowledge” that economic students at Brown received, in the mid to late 1960s; they certainly would not have thought of themselves as Soviet apologists for repeating it, as another occasion showed.
I was arguing about the economic merits of communism and capitalism with a liberal friend who was an economics graduate student. Deferring to his greater knowledge, I humbly brought up the East Germany vs. West Germany comparison. He replied that in fact the East German economy was larger and stronger than the West German economy, and that East Germany even produced better cars. That would be the two-cycle, lawnmower-engine Trabant, I guess. Unfortunately, at the time, I did not know the Trabant. But the conversation taught me a useful lesson: Get the facts; impressions cannot trump misinformation.
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I was reading your posts on liberals and communism over at Volokh.com and it reminded me of an experience I had while a graduate student at Brown. I was sitting down waiting for a talk to begin and my putative advisor was talking to another professor who asked her what she thought about the then-newly released Black Book of Communism, since her specialty was in post-Soviet politics. She sort of sniffed and said, “Well, it’s really a biased perspective. It’s certainly not the whole story.”
I think that sort of sums up how a lot of liberals felt about the USSR. It certainly had a lot of disagreeable features, they thought, but the visible egalitarianism seemed really appealing. All you have to do is to read Barrington Moore’s The Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, where he explicitly (in the introduction) argues that the communist road to modernity was no more wrenching or destructive than the liberal or fascist one.
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When I was in elementary school and high school, the teachers would often say things like the following:
Communism is the best system in theory, although capitalism may work better in practice.
The Native Americans lived under a basically communist system, and everyone was happy and no one starved, so it’s obvious it’s better when people do it right.
In general capitalism and communism were presented as equally valid choices with communism perhaps holding the moral high ground. This was pretty shocking and memorable to me, since my family had escaped a communist country when I was very young.
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UPDATE: Another reader writes:
. . . Modern liberals/moderate-leftists, I think, are not the descendants of the communists of old. They are rather Mensheviks, at the radical end, and the ‘social reformers’ against whom Marx rails, at the moderate end. A welfare state is entirely antithetical to Marxist theory, as it is an abhorrent compromise with the bourgeoisie. Therefore, I cannot say that the experience of the USSR need tell us anything about the
impact of liberal policies on the United States. Perhaps if liberals understood that they are not necessarily on the same political bench as the communists, there would not be so much sympathy for communist regimes.
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