Lecture: What was Socialism and why did it Fail?, Katherine Verdery, 1996.
Keywords: Capitalism, Communist, Economic Sociology, Economy and Society, Evil Empire, Ronald Reagan, Socialism
University of Delhi
Bachelor of Arts
Economy and Society
Reading to be covered: Verdery, Katherine, 1996, What as Socialism and what Comes Next? Princeton N.J.: Princeton University Press, Chapter-1, What was Socialism and What Comes Next? pp. 19-38
Course Structure
Important points to be kept in mind while studying the article
Expected outcome
<Lecture in detail with comment and clarification>
Introduction
What was socialism?
Production
You must know: Meaning of totalitarian state
Speech: Evil Empire by Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
KNOW MORE: About KGB
Consumption
Bureaucratic factionalism and market
Why did socialism or communism fail?
International solutions to internal problems
YOU MUST KNOW: What is a structural adjustment?
No time for socialism
What comes next?
Important points to be kept in mind while studying the article
The different perspectives and concept of socialism.
What was the reason for the emerging and development of socialism?
How socialism was practised in different countries?
Why socialism or communism or communist social and political structures have failed?
Expected outcome
Students will be able to understand the reason behind the
emergence, development, fail of the socialism or communism or communist as a social and political structure.
Introduction
This article is about the history of development, ideology, implementation and decline of socialism in various countries. The article is examining why socialism has rise and fall in certain countries. Which ideology helped socialism to rise and which ideology counters it?
What was Socialism?
For several decades, the analysis of socialism has been an international industry, employing both Western political scientists and Eastern dissidents.
This is important to know the Production and Consumption to understand Socialism. Therefore we will discuss here these in detail
Production
The earlier days the communism has an image of “totalitarian” model or state including for America. The communism had an image that these kinds of the state are automatically implementing the all-powerful state inexorably imposing its harsh will o its subject. Even after most area specialists ceased to use the term “totalitarian” in their writing the image of totalitarian autocracy persisted Ronald Reagan’s view of the “evil empire” as late as the 1980s.
YOU MUST KNOW: Meaning of totalitarian state
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism (short)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism (in detail)
US President (1981-89) Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) use to call socialist as “evil empire” this is also proving that the image of socialism for the USA was not good. They thought that socialism is promoting the totalitarian state.
DEAR STUDENTS, PLEASE NOTE: That the socialist got this image because of their practice. If you anal use the communist regime than we can that, that was a totalitarian state.
PLEASE ALSO NOTE THAT The author of this article is basically talking about the communist regime. Therefore please take the word socialism as a communist state or regime. For example, India is a socialist country but not a communist country.
Speech: Evil Empire by Ronald Reagan, 8 March 1983
Dear students listen to US President (1981-89) Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) speech of “Evil Empire”
Text Of Ronald Reagan, “Evil Empire Speech” (8 March 1983)
According to the author, the image of a socialist as a totalitarian state was wrong because the communist party were not very powerful. They had very little power.
Socialism’s fragility (weakness) beings with the system of “centralized planning”, which the centre neither adequately planned nor controlled. Central planners would draw up a plan with quantities of everything they wanted to see produced, known as the target.
For the author the western capitalist society getting profit by selling the product however the main problem with socialism is an economic actor was to produce the things.
Capitalist firms compete with each other for markets in which they will make a profit; socialist firms competed to maximize their bargaining power with suppliers higher up.
The author just wants to say that capitalist rises because they can manage mass level production batten than the socialist mode of production, in the socialist regime government.
Structurally the worker’s position in the socialist regime is more powerful than the capitalist. However, in the capitalist society, the managers are having in the position to bargaining power than the socialist.
Author saying that in the capitalist society the production system is more successful than the socialist society because in the socialist society the workers always thinking between “us” and “then” where “they” are always exploiting “us”, here “they” means the owner of the means of production and “us” means we the labour.
Pg. 24. The reason behind the negative image of socialism was the working nature of socialite country such as Russia. They use their secret police and intelligence successfully to eliminate their opposition and enemy, for example, KGB. These systems were working parallel to the production of goods.
KNOW MORE ABOUT: KGB
Russian full form for KGB is ‘Komitet Gosudarstvenoy Bezopasnosti’, and English full form for KGB is ‘Committee for State Security’, this is foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union. You may know more detail about KGB here
Because of these things people were losing the trust in the socialist or communist countries, state, and regime.
These governments put their citizen under heavy surveillance.
But they had also a positive face of socialism. The positive face was social redistribution and welfare. Party was promised and also implemented social welfare and social justice to their citizens. They provided cheap food, jobs, medical care, affordable housing, education, and so on
25. The socialist or communist state redistributed the resources. In socialism, the point was not profit but the relationship between the thirsty person and the one with the lemonade, or we can say they to fulfil the basic need in the thirst of socialism – not the market.
Pg. 26. Socialist regimes wanted not just eggs but the goose that lays them. In simple words, they not just satisfy the current need bit they wanted to empower their citizen to make the part of the production.
The socialist regime got the legacy and acceptance through redistribution power.
Instead “efficiency” was understood to mean “the full use of existing resources,” “the maximization of given capacities” rather than of results, all so as to redirect resources to a goal greater than satisfying the population’s needs. In order words, what was rational in socialism differed from capitalist rationality. Both are stupid in their own way. Both are stupid in their own way, but differently so.
Consumption
Socialism’s redistributive emphasis leads to one of the great paradoxes of a paternalist regime claiming to satisfy needs. The government was busier with production than how to distribute for consumption. Author claiming that form a consumption point of view the redistributions were not working.
Pg. 27. The socialist social contract guaranteed people food and clothing but did not promise (as a capitalist system do) quality, readily available, and choice. Thus the system’s mode of operation tended to scarify consumption, in favour of production and controlling the products. This paradoxical neglect of consumption contributed to the long lines about which we heard so much.
Sometimes the consumption becomes a political activity because the government is controlling the consumption of the citizen. It emends that people were not free to what to consume and which is not. Everything including consumption was centrally controlled by the government.
Pg. 28. Consumption becomes politicized in yet another way: the very definition of ‘needs’ become a matter for resistance and dispute. “Needs,” as we should know from our own experience, are not given: they are created, developed, expanded – the work especially on the advertising business. It is advertising’s job to convince us that we need things we didn’t know we needed, or that if we feel unhappy, it’s because we need something (a shrink, or a beer a Marlboro, or a man).
Our need requires only a name, and it can be satisfied with a product or service.
Naming troubled states, labelling them as needs, and finding commodities to fill them it as the heart of our economy.
Socialism, by contract, which rested not on devising infinite kinds of things to sell people but on claiming to satisfy people’s basic needs, had a very unadorned definition of the 0 in keeping with socialist egalitarianism. Indeed, some Hungarian dissident wrote of socialism’s relationship to needs as an “editorship.”
At the same time, however, regime policies paradoxically made consumption a problem. Even as the regimes prevented people from consuming by not making good available, they insisted that under socialism, the standard of living would contently improve. Moreover, socialist ideology presented consumption as a “right.” The system’s organization exacerbated consumer desire further by frustrating it and thereby making it the focus of effort, resistance, and discontent.
Anthropologist John Borneman sees in the relation between desire and goods a major contrast between capitalism and socialism. Capitalism, he says, repeatedly renders desire concrete and specific, and offers specific- if ever-changing- goods to satisfy it. Socialism, in contrast, aroused desire without focalizing it, and kept it alive by deprivation.
As people become increasingly alienated from socialism and critical of its achievements, then, the politicization of consumption also made them challenge official definitions of their needs.
Bureaucratic Factionalism and Market
Pg. 29. Politicking the party bureaucracy was also one of the reasons to fail socialism. The party middle level bureaucracy distinguishes between the “strategic” and “operative” elite, the state bureaucracy and the “global monopoly” and the “operative” elite, the state bureaucracy and the “global monopoly.” The bureaucracy and the party elite, “in-house” and “out-of-house” party workers, and so forth.
The pressure was partly from those in the wider society to whom not enough was being allocated and partly from bureaucratic themselves whose prestige and, increasingly, prospects of retaining power depends on having more goods to allocate.
Why Did Socialism or Communism Fail?
For the author, the main reason for the decline of socialism or communism is the problem with the internal organization as well as the external environment.
The internal organizational problem was like the bureaucratic structure and nature of the party and the external environment against socialism and communism.
Among the external cause, it was tension between “capitalist” and “socialist” as short term history.
Pg. 31. In the event-history term, it was the fall of socialist countries.
International Solutions to Internal Problems
There are several tensions of working of socialism which affects the system capacity of the extended reproduction. Tease tension opens up the market for the western countries. The external environment brought socialism into a tighter relationship with capitalism, it had fateful consequences.
Pg. 32. Western banking establishment decided not to lend more money to the socialist countries. And they give loan only after a significant round of structural reforms. In these circumstances, the balance of power titled towards the faction within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union that had long argued for structural reform, the introduction of the market mechanism, and profit incentive, even at the cost of the Party’s “leader role”.
YOU MUST KNOW: What is a Structural Adjustment?
Know here about the structural adjustment in detail: https://bit.ly/2Y5IW17
Pg. 33. The state bureaucrat started to misuse their power and position for their own profit. They had started running their own business. Misuse of the state power for their profit is called “poetical capitalism” by the author.
Pg. 34. The socialist productions have a lack of coordination between the different means of production and need. These let the collapse of the socialist mode of production.
Pg. 35. All these internal and international failures invited pressure from both international and international for privatization. They insist on the privatization of state property.
Privatization is pushed even in the face of some economists’ objection.
No Time for Socialism
Capitalism is existing because of the fundamental dimension of human affairs, taking different forms in a different kind of society.
Capitalism was rising because of increasing profits by increasing the velocity of capital circulation and production. They tried to satisfy the consumer.
Pg. 36. Socialism has collapsed apart from the massive rupture produced by its collision with capitalism’s speedup. Socialism did bear the pressure force from the ninetieth century’s capitalism.
What Comes Next?
Pg. 37. The outcome of the confluence (=coming/meeting together) between socialist and capitalist created a new regime “species” that have emerged with changes form of government in socialist countries.
Pg. 38. The author is saying that in the post-colonial era the privatization, democracy, property-rights, civil-society, constitution etc. is making favourable condition for massive political and ideological upheld for capitalism.
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