Conversations with Marx

• How's Mr. Carlos doing?

• Okay, fine, missing the fight a little.

• How do you see things from the Hereafter?

• You can't see anything, young man. That's why I tell you, I miss the fight, the meetings in the cafes, the discussions...

• So you didn't hear about the Russian Revolution?

• No, not at all. Don't tell me that there was finally a bourgeois capitalist democratic regime!

Not exactly: there Lenin - I do not know if he knows it - instituted the Dictatorship of the Proletariat with the aim of building socialism

- Build socialism? But that is not built against nature, it is the natural continuation of capitalism. But in Russia, as far as I know, there was no capitalism. It had to be built.

• Well, it seems that the Party was in a hurry to reach Socialism.

• It is not a matter of haste: it is a matter of objective and subjective conditions for achieving socialism. So how'd it go?

• Well, it's a little long. In order to simplify Lenin requisitioned all the peasants' wheat production to feed the workers, which led to very bloody peasant rebellions.

• Too bad! I suppose parliament has enacted laws to put things back.

• In Russia there is no parliament, there is only executive power.

• Well, but the parties of the revolutionary left will say their thing, won't they?

Prohibited and their leaders executed, exiled or confined to concentration camps

- Concentration camps? I don't know what that is: open prisons?

• No, fields, very closed and guarded. Death from hunger or disease was common.

• What a hell! But, well, sometimes revolutionaries think they have to teach hardness lessons. But what did this Lenin do to develop the capitalist productive forces?

• Nothing: a few years after the Revolution, industrial production fell to levels of twenty or thirty years ago. Lenin banned the markets, at first.

• But how will there be development of the industry without a market!

• There was a famine that cost five million people dead among the peasants and a war against the Tsar's supporters that cost about two million. War Communism was established. Trotsky, the second on board, decreed the militarization of the workers and assimilated absenteeism with desertion, with severe penalties.

• And why was there absenteeism?

• Because the workers needed to eat and for that purpose they moved several times a month to the countryside to exchange local produce for wheat. And they were missing work.

• Let's see if I understand: peasant production was requisitioned and markets were banned. The government seized the grain and distributed it to the masses, but apparently that was not enough for everyone.

• Exactly: there were very strict categories. Those who ate best were the workers of strategic activities: transport, communications, heavy industry. There were more than 30 categories. The last ones received only a handful of grain and had to go out and pick it up.

- and freedom of the press, was there? Freedom of assembly, freedom to form political parties... all that?

• Nothing, nothing like that.

• And Lenin, you say, declared himself a Marxist?

• Obviously.

• I always used to joke that I wasn't a Marxist. I was exalted, I admit. But it would never have occurred to me to execute a rival

• Or put together a Cheka.

- Cheka? What's that?

A political police officer responsible for the “security” of the Revolution. He was engaged in kidnapping opponents, collecting ransom millionaires, assassinating without trial not only the “bourgeois” but socialists, anarchists, social democrats... Tens of thousands of people fell into his hands. It was the largest budget and most personnel body in the entire Soviet state.

• Like the Tsar's police, right? The ear, if I remember correctly...

• But, at one point, Lenin seems to have reconsidered and declared the NEP, the New Economic Policy: markets opened up, trade allowed, and then wheat reappeared, peasants were able to improve their condition, traders prospered and finally Russia knew a little peace. Even Cheka almost stopped acting.

• Well, finally! Revolutionary processes are very complex and you are always very close to error. But at least, it seems that they reculated and returned to what they should never have abandoned: a process of free economy, which would allow the development of capitalist productive forces, develop a democratic political system and build a medium-term socialist alternative under these conditions.

“Yes, Lenin said in his last months of life that Socialism would come in one or two generations, in the meantime it was necessary to continue with the NEP. But many were against: the ultra-left and Stalin

- Stalin? Who was that?

• A dark aparatchnik, man of the Party apparatus. For years he forged alliances, appointed officials in the various republics who assured him loyalty. It was populating the Party with ignorant and arrogant people who despised the Bolshevik “intellectuals”, many of them, in addition, Jews.

• Jews. Like me, though I always hid it. I don't sympathize with Jews. I think your god is money.

• That's what Hitler said.

- Hitler? And who is that?

• A German dictator who murdered six million Jews around 1940.

• Six... million! Don't tell me he was also Marxist!

• No, he was anti-Marxist, but he was defined as Socialist, National Socialist.

• You can imagine that my antipathy towards the Jews was theoretical. My uncle was a Rabbi. It was a way to break with the ghetto and be a citizen of the world, of modernity. Six million!

• Back to Stalin. He had him seduced Lenin by his execution. But Lenin knew he had little light, so in a not very clear way he ordered Stalin to be fired and not to become his heir, for he knew he was dying. But Stalin maneuvered so that the document would not be made public and, owner of the apparatus, he had little difficulty in removing Trotsky, his only competitor of weight, and soon became owner and lord of the party.

• But he went on with the NEP?

• Just mouth out, for a few years. By 1929, he declared that the Kulaks had to be exterminated and the entire Russian camp collectivized.

- Kulaks?

• Yes, rich peasants.

• And why exterminate them, it's not enough to expropriate them?

• They didn't own much land. Remember that in Russia there was not individual private property but communal property: each village owned the land, and peasants of its animals and tools. A very cumbersome and low-productivity pre-capitalist system.

• Naturally, the natural thing would have been to encourage a small individual property for a while, to adopt capitalist production techniques and then, yes, to nationalize the land.

• It was not so: Stalin collectivized in five years much of the best land of Ukraine, the Russian barn: the cost? Five million people killed by hunger and repression. Two million kulaks killed.

• Those figures... millions over here, millions over there. What a shrink was the world after my death, wasn't it?

• With this effort, it was proposed to industrialize Russia quickly, expeditiously.

• But who did he sell the production to?

• It was not a consumer industry: it was heavy industry, and machinery construction, especially military. People didn't improve their standard of living. What's true is that the hunger went down. Of course it will have helped that now there were no five million peasants to feed...

• Go on...

• Not content with having “won the war against the kulaks”, Stalin pointed towards the Party. He was annoyed by the Left Opposition, the Troskists and the Right Opposition, headed by Bukharín. He waited until a crime - not yet clarified - against a communist leader unleashed the witch hunt. They were known as the Moscow Processes, but this conceals the fact that in reality almost a million communists were shot, not just the best-known leaders. All the old Leninist guard, plus almost all the senior officers of the Red Army, industrial engineers, priests, etc.

• I suppose the Socialist International has denounced this.

• It's wrong. The international had been divided between the “Third” - Stalin's follower and the “second”, which housed the socialists. But the Socialists, out of cowardice, ignorance or calculation, never condemned the Soviet Union. They kept “tactical” deferences but instead of assuming themselves as the voice of socialist humanism — if anything like that exists — they shut up or sailed criticism in private. Remember Kerensky?

• Yes, of course, a theorist who took care of my legacy..

• For Lenin it was the “renegade Kerensky”

- Renegade what?

• Marxism, Leninist version. The poor man died writing against Leninism, but no one gave him greater importance. He once confessed that they had not fought for socialism, but for the happiness of man. That socialism was a tool for that, not an end in itself. A little late.

• Socialism is a necessity of history, it is as inevitable as the night following the day. It is clear that we wanted a humanity free of chains, a complete human being, without capitalist alienation. But, perhaps, we became too hard in the political struggle that began to be a struggle to come to power, rather than a struggle to build freedom from power.

• Well, let's move on. The intelligentsia almost without exception supported Stalin, despite the horror stories of the Moscow trials. Only André Guide- a fervent communist - after knowing the USSR wrote a blatant denunciation of that failure. It was quickly radiated by the international writers: criticism was not admitted. Arthur Koestler was another brave Communist who knew how to renounce his identity and condemn communism.

• But how do you explain so much violence?

• Stalin apparently feared an imminent war, an attack from Germany and Japan, allegedly assisted by “infiltrators” from the interior. The experience of the Spanish Civil War, in which there were tremendous internal strife between communists, Trotskyists and anarchists, convinced him that in addition to the fascists, all glimpses of internal opposition had to be destroyed, cut in the bud before the war broke out. (Although this argument does not explain why Stalin eliminated 70% of the official Red Army, the only one with experience and ability to oppose a German attack) Another element was Stalin's increased paranoid fear of “enemies” reinforced by his wife's suicide in 1932 and the assassination of Kirov in 1934. “treason trials”, conducted between 1937 and 1938, in which all internal opponents (Zinoviev, Piatakov, Bukharin, Iagoda, etc.) were sentenced to death. Each condemned leader left his political “clients” in the orphan, the cadres that answered him. In that way, 116,000 party members were shot in those two years. The higher the post, the more risk it would end up on the wall, as the internal enemies thus gained a rise in the structure of power. I read this: “Of the 139 members of the Central Committee elected to the 17th Party Congress in 1934, 102 were arrested and shot (...) 56% of Congress delegates were imprisoned. The Red Army was decimated even more: 412 of the 767 high-ranking members were executed, 29 died in prison, 3 committed suicide and 59 remained in prison.” The innocent, it was known, were in the majority: “Stalin commented that if only 5% of those arrested turned out to be real enemies, that would be a good result (...) According to Nikita Khrushchev, who was then chairman of the Party Committee in Moscow, “used to say that if a report (complaint) had 10% truth, we should consider it valid,” “Better too than insufficient,” the head of the NKVD — the heir of the Cheka — warned his agents.

• I can't believe this... it's absurd.

• It's not absurd: it's the practical application of your writings, Carlos.

- How dare you!

• I dare, because I believe that in you lived in some way two personalities: the scientist who seeks the truth and the fanatic who believes that he has already found the truth and wants to apply it at any cost. I read a paragraph: A revolution is undoubtedly the most authoritarian thing that exists; it is the act by which a part of the population imposes its will on the other side by means of rifles, bayonets and cannons, authoritarian means if any; and the victorious party, if it does not want to have fought in vain, must maintain this rule for in the midst of the terror that their weapons inspire reactionaries. Do you recognize him?

• No, really.

• It's from your great partner Engels. And listen to this: “Since the State is a merely transitory institution, which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to subdue adversaries through violence, it is absurd to speak of a free popular state: while the proletariat still needs the state, it will not need it in the interest of freedom, but to subdue its adversaries, and As soon as it can be spoken of freedom, the state as such will cease to exist.” Lenin would repeat this phrase, with slight changes, decades later:

“The state is in the hands of the ruling class a machine designed to crush the resistance of its class adversaries. From this point of view, the dictatorship of the proletariat is fundamentally different from the dictatorship of any kind, for the proletarian state is a machine designed to crush the bourgeoisie.”

• I am not responsible for those who wrote my great friend Engels, let alone Lenin.

• But do you agree with Engels' assertion that the Revolution needs terror to coward off the bourgeoisie and that the machinery of the state must be used to terrorize them?

• It's implementation issues, which I'm not interested in...

• I read to you this summary of the action of communism during the 20th century: We can establish a first numerical balance which is still a minimal approximation and which would require long precision but which, according to personal estimates, provides an aspect of considerable magnitude and allows us to directly point out the seriousness of the subject:

• USSR, 20 million dead

• China, 65 million dead
• Vietnam, 1 million dead.
• North Korea, 2 million dead
• Cambodia, 2 million dead
• Eastern Europe, 1 million dead
• Latin America, 150,000 dead
• Africa, 1.7 million dead
• Afghanistan, 1.5 million dead
• International Communist Movement and Communist Parties not in power, about ten thousand dead.

A first comprehensive assessment of these crimes can be made:

• The shooting of tens of thousands of hostages or persons confined to prison without trial, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of rebel workers and peasants between 1918 and 1922.
• A 1922 famine that resulted in the death of 5 million people.
• Liquidation and deportation of the Don Cossacks in 1920.
• Killing tens of thousands of people in concentration camps between 1918 and 1930.
• Liquidation of about 690,000 people during the Great Purge of 1937-38. Deportation of two million kulaks (or people who were described as such) in 1930-32.
• Destruction by the provoked and unaided hunger of six million Ukrainians in 1932-33.
• Deportation of hundreds of thousands of people from Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic countries, Moldova and Bessarabia in 1939-1941 and then 1944-1945
• Deportation of the Volga Germans, 1941.
• Deportation-abandonment of Crimean Tatars in 1943.
• Deportation and abandonment of Chechens in 1944.
• Deportation-abandonment of the Ingush in 1944. Deportation and liquidation of urban populations in Cambodia between 1975 and 1978.

• Slow destruction of Tibetans by the Chinese since 1950, etc.”

• I plead absolutely not guilty to those butchers. We wanted to abolish the State, create a fraternal society that shared the fruits of labour, that eliminated the exploitation of man by man.

• But he did not hesitate to encourage the physical elimination of the bourgeois

• No way!

• You wrote in the Manifesto a very enigmatic paragraph: “A few words to avoid possible false interpretations. I didn't paint the capitalists and landowners pink. But people are spoken here only as an embodiment of economic categories, as carriers of certain class relations and interests. My point of view, which focuses on the development of the economic formation of society as a historical-natural process, can less than any other hold the individual responsible for relationships of which it is socially a product, although subjectively may be far above them.

• I'm right: he excluded repression against people.

• And never again warned about “false interpretations”. - Why? - Why? Didn't he read his own disciples, starting with Engels and continuing with his son-in-law, Lafargue? Do you recognize this letter from Lafargue? ::

“In the days of great popular festivities, where, instead of swallowing dust like August 15 and July 14 bourgeois, the Communists and collectivists will run the bottles, jog the hams and blow up the glasses, the members of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the priests in long or short suits of the economic, Catholic church, Protestant, Jewish, positivist and freethinist, the propagators of Malthusianism and Christian morality, altruistic, independent or submissive, dressed in yellow, will hold the candle until their fingers burn and live hungry with gallic women and tables full of meat, fruit and flowers, and they will die of thirst with overflowing barrels. Four times a year, at the change of season, like the dogs of knife sharpeners, they will be chained to big wheels and for ten hours they will be condemned to grind the wind. Lawyers and legists shall suffer the same penalty.” Do you think it's an innocent writing? “Chaining them, dying of thirst”: He is describing exactly what Leninism-Stalinism-Maoism would do decades later. He's not just announcing it, he's propitiating it.

• My son-in-law was an exalted romantic, but I can't take care of his literary excesses.

• I don't think you're taking care of anything. You set in motion a colossal machine, a process of violent takeover, a class war that brought in the energies of a century, and which we still suffer today. If you were such a brilliant analyst of reality, how did you not study the problem of the implementation of Socialism, of how to deploy measures in time and, above all, by what political mechanisms these measures should be monitored and, eventually, corrected?

I think you invented a very powerful weapon, but you didn't write the instruction manual and left it in the hands of late teens with serious psychological problems.