I’m from Generation X. I’m old enough to remember the Cold War. I’m old enough to remember a time when much (if not most) of the population lived in fear of an exchange of nuclear attacks leading to the end of civilization as we knew it. I’m old enough to remember the bombastic arguments the West and the Soviet bloc lobbed at each other over the Iron Curtain.
Anyway, now that the Cold War is over and the Soviet Union collapsed, this is all fading from memory, and maybe people are starting to forget the arguments that were actually being made at the time. It recently struck me that neither side of the Cold War behaved like they believed their own arguments.
To explain that, I’m going to have to first explain the Soviet system and ideology for the benefit of younger people reading this.
The Dictatorship of the Proletariat
Modern Republicans have sold this idea to people that communism is an authoritarian system in which the state holds absolute power. The ultimate endgame of communism is much closer to anarchism. Let’s put it this way: libertarians want a weak national government, communists want no national government.
The dictatorship of the proletariat is supposed to be a transitional government. After overthrowing the capitalists, the workers would establish an authoritarian regime to manage the transition of society, the economy, and politics to the anarchism to follow. Marx himself didn’t provide much detail about what this dictatorship was to be or how it would work.
The “communist” governments of the Cold War were supposedly dictatorships of the proletariat shepherding the masses to a new communist utopia. Or at least, that’s what they said they were. This is why they called themselves socialist instead of communist.
Only they weren’t strictly socialist either.
Under socialism, the workers control the means of production, but under those Soviet-style governments, the state-controlled the means of production. The Soviets were theoretically a democracy in that people actually voted, but the details of how their democracy worked placed limits on how much power the people actually had over what the government did. The discussion of the flawed implementation of democracy used by Soviet-bloc nations is another topic for another discussion. Ask an old fart about it, but I imagine these flaws were by design as the Soviet Union was supposedly a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The Soviet Argument Against America
The Soviet criticisms of the first world (first world: those aligned with America, second world: those aligned with the Soviet Union, third world: those aligned with neither; people forget the technical definitions of those terms) are basically Marx’s criticisms of capitalism.
Because capitalists seek greater profits, they have a powerful motive to suppress wages. If their competitors suppress wages and they don’t, they could go out of business because they will have to charge more for their products. But if everyone suppresses wages, then over time, the population has less and less disposable income to purchase the products made by capitalist companies. Thus, capitalism will always consume itself.
The American Argument Against the Soviets
In retrospect, a lot of Americans like to pretend that we knew all along that the Soviet system would fail economically, and while people were making that argument during the Cold War, most of the arguments I recall coming from our side focused on the authoritarian nature of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the fact that once you give a group of people ultimate power, they will do everything possible to keep it.
In other words, there was no possible path out of the dictatorship of the proletariat that led to the anarchistic utopia dreamed by Marx. For all that I agree with many of Marx’s criticisms of capitalism and the inherently oppressive/exploitive nature of capitalism, I have yet to see a good counterargument from leftists addressing this concern with the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Also, I have serious doubts about the anarchy or near-anarchy that is supposed to be the ultimate endgame of communism. Personally, I think it would be very short-lived and would inevitably lead to city-states warring with other city-states, and Marx’s “scientific history” would start all over again, but this is a discussion for another time.
Both Sides Predicted Failure of the Other
The Soviets believed that capitalism would inevitably lead to economic self-destruction like the Great Depression, while Americans argued that the Soviet system just led to endless authoritarianism and possible economic self-destruction.
But if both sides believed the other would fail on its own, why did the Cold War happen at all? Why was there any conflict to begin with?
Let’s imagine for a moment that the Soviets were right: that capitalism inevitably leads to its own destruction. They, therefore, did not have to spend massive amounts of wealth using smaller nations as pawns in a global conflict with America. They didn’t have to waste so much of their nation’s wealth on their military (the thing that ultimately did them in). They could just sit back, wait for the first world to fail on its own, and say “Ah-ha! We told you so! We told you this would happen!”
Instead, they spent incredible wealth, lives, and resources actively opposing us and trying to defeat us. What would have happened if capitalism failed just as they predicted after a long, protracted Cold War? If that happened, the Soviets would not have been able to claim ideological victory. Why? Because every time they claimed that capitalism failed because it is an inherently flawed system, someone else would have been able to point out that it is possible capitalism failed because it was being actively opposed by the Soviets.
Because they were actively working against us for so many decades, there would have been no way for them to claim that capitalism failed because capitalism is a bad way of arranging economies. It would have been possible that opposition from the Soviets was the deciding factor in the collapse of the first world.
If they were really confident in the arguments they were making, what they should have done is help us, all the while saying “We know your system will ultimately fail, and we don’t want you to use us as an excuse when that failure comes, so we’re going to graciously help you rather than oppose you in order to take that possible excuse away from you.”
That’s not what they did. Instead, they did not behave the way one would expect them to behave if they really believed their arguments were correct.
But of course, the American system and the first world didn’t collapse, the Soviets and the second world collapsed, and we now have precisely the same thing in the opposite direction. The Soviets and the second world did in fact collapse, and in dramatic fashion, but we in the first world are not in a position to claim ideological victory because of our behavior during the Cold War.
We cannot say the Soviet system collapsed under its own weight because we did everything possible to add to that weight, and so now no one can ever be certain if the Soviet bloc would have collapsed without global opposition from those of us in the first world. Just like the Soviets, we did not behave like people who were confident in our own arguments. Although we argued that the Soviet system would fail on its own, we did not behave like we believed that to be the case.
The Cold War Could Only Result in Failure
The Cold War was not a war, but rather it was an ideological conflict. There was no declaration of war, and thus no treaty of surrender, which is why it was called a “cold” war.
The behavior of both sides ensured that ideological victory was not possible. Further, I think the only possible result was defeat for humanity regardless of the outcome.
The Soviets abused their own people (Gulag system, kangaroo courts, suppression of free speech, etc) and abused the environment (both liberals and conservatives in the first world keep forgetting that). What people forget is that this was how they behaved while they were putting their best face forward due to the ideological conflict of the Cold War.
They knew that they had to be on their best behavior because their task during the Cold War was to convince whole nations to choose to side with them instead of siding with the first world. If the Soviets won the Cold War, then they would no longer have had a motive to moderate their behavior, and all the abuses they committed during the Cold War would have become worse once the first world collapsed.
It was the second world that collapsed, and similarly, the capitalists who control our governments were no longer forced to be on their best behavior. They could go right back to abusing workers in all the ways Marx predicted because communism was no longer seen as a viable option by the public. The growing income gap, life getting worse and worse for workers started under Reagan, but if the Cold War never ended, rich people and large corporations may have stepped in to make sure life was less bad for the average working man if communism was lurking over their shoulder ready to offer a new way to arrange society at any moment.
Without the inconvenience of an opposing ideology, there are no brakes on the train. Here in America, we have a growing number of homeless people with full-time jobs. Health care is becoming more and more expensive for more people, such that diabetics are starting to die because they are diluting their own medications due to cost. If the Soviets were still around offering a (however flawed) alternative to the capitalism-liberal democracy preferred by America, then I have no doubt that the powers that be would have moved heaven and Earth to make life less bad for the working person.
No matter who won the Cold War, the side that won would inevitably make more egregious abuses of the masses. Thus, I think that no matter how the Cold War turned out, neither ideology would be the clear victor, and no matter what, humanity was doomed to be the loser.