History's Palate Cleanser part 2 of 3

As my family and I traveled through China, I read two autobiographies each by Chinese women. The first, “Wild Swans” chronicles the life of three generations of Chinese women from the 1920 to the 1970s. The author’s parents were high-ranking officials in the Communist Party but that didn’t prevent them from being denounced and purged as “capitalist roaders” when they fell out of political favor. In her youth, the author was a member of the infamous Red Guard –a nation-wide mob of idealistic youth who Mao manipulated and leveraged to shore up his faltering popularity. (Wild Swans is illegal in China and I felt a little subversive carrying around my English-language copy.)

The second book, the ironically-titled “Socialism is Great!” is set in the 1980s and tells of the author’s coming of age and her growing disillusionment with the Regime in the years when China was just starting to emerge from its dark years of self-imposed isolation.

Both books chronicle not only the tragic consequences of communism on a national scale, but on the personal level as well. As the nation blindly followed communist ideology and Mao Zedong’s collectivist policies, the economy was devastated. Families were debased. Neighbor turned on neighbor, student on teacher.

During the decades when so many nations from Africa. South America, and Asia were embracing communism, alternatives existed. These nations could have followed any of the numerous examples from around the world and built their societies on free markets, the rule of law, and individual property rights. But they chose a different path for themselves. Eventually they found that communism is not only an ineffective way to organize a society, but it actually makes life worse for the people it claims to help. As a result, almost all of these nations have abandoned communism. Even China is undergoing rapid market reforms. After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, Deng Xiaoping put China on the path –albeit a slow and highly controlled path- away from communism and toward markets and private profit. If China continues on the trajectory she is on, within a generation or two she will be communist in name only.

It just seems so tragic that so much of the world’s population had to suffer through years of communist oppression before realizing the hollowness of its rhetoric and the emptiness of its promises. If only history had unfolded differently, it wouldn’t have been necessary for so many to have toiled and suffered at the hands of dictators who used sheer force to impose their vision and will on the people.

I struggle with this. Why couldn’t they have seen then what they see now? The lost years and the lost lives seem like such as waste. These countries have ended up in a place where they could have been decades ago. Seeing all those Mao ashtrays and lighters in the Night Market certainly doesn't help ease my frustration.

But, as people in the twentieth century tried to overcome colonialism, poverty, and feudalism, I guess the rhetoric and promises of communists were just too appealing to avoid.

Perhaps that’s it.

Maybe that's the role that communism plays in human history. Communism was never a sustainable system to organize ourselves; but maybe the radical revolutionary rhetoric and the utopian promises of communism were what was needed for some societies to rise up and throw off their past.

There is no love lost between me and communism. It is a failed ideology that increases human suffering. But maybe –just maybe- communism has played a role in moving nations from where they were to where they need to be. Maybe Marx got it backwards. The natural progress is not for nations to go from pre-industrialized to industrialized to communist as he predicted. But instead, the natural progression –for some nations- is to go from feudalism, poverty, and colonialism to communisms to market-based economies rooted in individual rights and private property.

Taking this perspective, it is possible to think of communism as a cosmic solvent that washed away so many of the antiquated structures of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Just as leaders such as Nehru, Ho Chi Mihn, and Lumumba were great at rallying the masses to revolution but were not effective at administering once they were in charge; so it is with communism. Communism didn’t offer a better alternative to what came before, but it cleared the slate. It is not a good way to govern, but it sure has great rhetoric if you are trying to foment revolution and make a break with the past.

Perhaps communism is history’s great palate cleanser.

If that’s the case, it still seems tragic and avoidable, but I guess I can wrap my brain around that. As we wait for the last remnants of communism to be shrugged off and to fade away, I think I can make my fragile peace with communism and the role it has played in world history.