Zohran Mamdani, the newly elected Mayor of New York City, is a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist. Detractors call him a Socialist, or even a Communist because of his stated intention to take over the means of production in the city. All three of these labels have at least one thing in common: a belief that private enterprise, or profit making business, is inherently inferior to government or public run production.
Whatever the label, Mamdani brings to mind a character in a novel by the great Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest and most influential author of the twentieth century, did as much to shake the foundations of Communism in Russia as anything or anyone else. He began writing while a prisoner in Soviet labor camps for almost a decade. After serving his term, he was released into exile in central Asia.
While in exile, he developed a cancerous tumor and was allowed to return to civilization for treatment. His famous novel, Cancer Ward, is a fictionalized version of his experience in the hospital. He is obviously the main character but he describes the doctors, nurses, and other patients with great sympathy and understanding. *
However, he had little sympathy for Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov, the only Communist party member in the cancer ward. Rusanov was a party official who only consented to enter this remote facility until his wife could manage to pull strings and find an opening in Moscow. “But Pavel Nikolayevich was tormented no less than by the disease itself, by having to enter the clinic as an ordinary person. He could hardly remember when last he had been in a public hospital.” Rusanov looked down on the other cancer patients as riff-raff, non-Russian Asiatics, or even criminals.
Solzhenitsyn uses Rusanov and his wife, Kapitolivna Marveyevna, as examples of how Socialist champions of the People can morph into privileged bureaucrats. We must remember that Communists in Russia, like Democratic Socialists in New York, were a small privileged minority despite their rhetoric..
The Rusanovs loved the People, their great People. They served the People and were ready to give their lives for the People.
But as the years went by they found themselves less and less able to tolerate actual human beings, those obstinate creatures who were always resistant, refusing to do what they were told and, besides, demanding something for themselves.
The Rusanovs had an aversion to “teeming human beings, or jostling crowds.” They found travel on public transportation “disgusting” with loud, pushing, dirty workers struggling to get in. The worst thing was the “familiarity” of these people who would clap you on the shoulder and ask you to pass a ticket or some change along the car.
Eventually, the Rusanovs acquired an automobile of their own and avoided public transportation altogether. On railroads, they would only travel first-class on reserved compartments to avoid mixing with people “crammed in, wearing sheepskin coats and carrying buckets and sacks.”
Rusanov was a bureaucrat who had done very well in the Soviet system. He had a wife and two children, a car and a nice apartment as well as a small country place. It is true that he had never actually been a worker. He had never built anything, made anything, or designed anything. He had not even served in the military during the great patriotic war. His job had been to gather evidence and information that could be used to send enemies of the state to the labor camps.
Even though he loved Stalin, he was aware of the many shortcomings in his country. However, he blamed all Russia’s problems on speculation or what we would call private enterprise.
Over the years Rusanov had become more and more unshakably convinced that all our mistakes, shortcomings, imperfections and inadequacies were the result of speculation. Spring onions, radishes and flowers were sold on the street by dubious types, milk and eggs were sold by peasant women in the market, and yoghurt, woolen socks, even fried fish at the railway stations. There was large-scale speculation too. Lorries were being driven off “on the side” from State warehouses. If these two kinds of speculation could be torn up by the roots, everything in our country could be put right quickly and our successes would be even more striking. There was nothing wrong in a man strengthening his material position with the help of a good salary from the State and a good pension… Such a man had earned his car, his cottage in the country, and a small house in town to himself. But a car of the same make from the same factory, or a country-cottage of the same standard type, acquired a completely different criminal character if they had been bought through speculation. Rusanov dreamed, literally dreamed, of introducing public executions for speculators. Public executions would speedily bring complete health to our society. (162)
Socialism did not bring equality to the Soviet Union or to any other Communist/Soocialist country. Supporters of Socialism have always blamed others for its failures, and claimed that they could make it succeed. Progressives in our country, like Rusanov, blame capitalism and private enterprise for our problems. They want heads to roll, figuratively, or maybe literally. In the Soviet Union the only true equality was found in the cancer ward. Cancer was the great equalizer and treated rich and poor alike.
Everyone knows that Zohran Mamdani's background is not that of an oppressed worker or downtrodden peasant. Like other Democratic Socialists, his parents were well off, he went to the best schools, and never held down a real job. He is a member of a privileged elite who has somehow managed to capture the support of the Democratic party in New York City.
*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin books, 1971.
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Today's Quote: The urge to save humanity is almost always a face for the urge to rule it. H.L. Mencken
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