Liz from Leeds and the economic, moral, and historical fallacy of communism

If you’re wondering why I – a conservative who profoundly dislikes socialism and communism (although I respect socialists have the right to believe whatever they wish) – reposted the video, the answer is simple. Because it shows how idiotic and immoral communism truly is. Let’s break down by each element what Liz actually said.

Liz: “Communism is a human society. It’s where we take care of each other and we’re not divided by racism, sexism, misogyny, homophobia…”

The notion of communism as a human society: what does this actually mean? Well, Liz doesn’t tell us, but the baseline assumption should be that she means communism provides for maximum gains for the maximum number of individuals. Liz seems to confirm this when she transitions to her key point: the notion that “we take care of each other” in a communist society.

Yet as is always the case with statist political theories like communism, there’s a deep authoritarianism lurking close to the surface. While Liz suggest that communism rids us of social ills like “racism and misogyny,” she doesn’t explain how. And that absent explanation is important because if Liz’s intent is to draw positive contrast with capitalist societies in which racism and misogyny are otherwise loathed – and tolerated only on the basis of freedom of belief and speech – she must explain how communism would make things better. That she does not matters, because communism’s history proves that while its adherents have no qualms about restraining the “bad ideas” of racism, neither do they have many gripes about restraining other bad ideas such as religion, political freedom against the center, and free-market exchange. Beware communists bearing the language of moral purity.

Liz continues by explaining that communism equally means “the profit motive no longer rules over us and we actually establish production on the basis of human need. It’s very, very simple.”

This is the central tenet of communist theory but also its most unambiguously foul. Where communists present profit as some malevolent jackal that constantly hunts and consumes us into a festering belly of despair, the opposite is actually true. What the communists always leave out is that our capitalist societies (at least in the liberal-democratic order that defines the vast majority of capitalist societies) are rooted in individual choices to consume or not to consume. Put simply, capitalism incentives the best goods and services by offering escalating rewards in promise of and for them. Think about why America makes the best medicines and high-tech companies. Capitalist societies are home not just to innovation but to maximal social happiness.

In contrast, Liz’s defense of establishing “production on the basis of human need” is a very thinly veiled endorsement of state control. And that state economic control has never ever worked except in times of war and even then, only on grounds of armament. The purest historic example of state economic control is the Soviet Union’s early 1930s agricultural collectivization program. Designed specifically to produce more food for more citizens, it actually led to the deaths of around 5 million Ukrainians and plummeting food supplies. Mao Zedong tried the same thing and got the same results (with double digit million deaths). The purest contemporary example is Venezuela: a place where the greatest oil reserves on Earth exist alongside starvation. Liz might perhaps be a little more skeptical of her “very, very simple” ideology.

Next up comes the real gem. Because Liz does for communism what socialists do for socialism. Namely, she tries to get around the structural failure of her favored ideology by claiming that it simply has never been tried right.

“The USSR, and China, and what have you, they were not communist countries. They were counter-revolutionary totalitarian dictatorships… there are no communist countries or societies in the world.”

Cue my laugh out loud.

After all, this is such a joke of a defense that it is practically unbelievable. Because in practical theory and policy, the Soviet Union and China were both manifestly communist in nature. This is a non-negotiable rendering of history as applied to Marxism, Leninism, and other communist theories. While China has moved away from traditional communist theory since Deng Xiaoping’s market-based reforms in the 1980s (note the not so coincidental fact that Chinese living standards have improved dramatically since the 1980s), it retains central economic planning to its detriment. Of course, North Korea is also a communist state in its mastery of economic power within the party and, for example, its forced education of students into the specialties where they are deemed most needed.

Yet Liz is not done. She had two final gems up her sleeve: “the Bolshevik Revolution was smashed to pieces by 14 foreign armies from Britain, Germany to Japan that is why that failed.”

This is ahistoric excrement. In fact, the Bolshevik revolutionaries defeated their adversaries and their foreign allies during the Russian civil war of 1917-1922. And the leaders who prospered most from that victory were the ideological core of the Bolshevik movement: Lenin and his successor, Alexei Rykov. But crucially, the latter splits in ideology under Leninism, Trotskyism, and Stalinism do not render communism dead or untried, rather they represent strands of the same basic communist ideology. It took America 50 years to finally rid the world of that despicable stain on humanity.

Last up, Liz tells us that “you build communism through our collective human struggles.”

Thanks, Liz, but count me out.