Democratic Socialism

 

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

Cultural Inoculation

 

One of the results of the Covid pandemic is that by now practically everyone has some knowledge of how the human immune system works to attack and destroy foreign invaders into our bodies. The microscopic warfare is almost immediate, and by now we are all familiar with the symptoms. 

A few months ago an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal indicated that we also have a political or cultural immune system that works to repel foreign ideas. A lawyer with a 44 year career with a prestigious law firm attended a conference call called by the firm to discuss the implications of the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. When she dared to assert that many legal scholars agreed with the Court that abortion should be left to the States, the response of her colleagues was immediate and visceral. Some even claimed that they could not breathe.

Many recent reports indicate that this visceral reaction to unwelcome ideas is prevalent today throughout our country, and most especially on college campuses where unwelcome speakers are harassed or shouted down before they can utter a word.  It is obvious that most of the protestors are very left of center. They call themselves Progressives but they are actually Regressives harking back to the days of Socialism and Communism.  

For most people Socialism is a political and economic system but it is also, and always has been, a cultural phenomenon. Years ago I read practically all the novels and historical works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author of the twentieth century, whose writings contributed enormously to the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 

More recently, I found a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward at a library sale. It is a novel about the inmates and staff of a cancer facility in the Soviet Union of 1954. It is semi-auto biographical since the author himself had been treated for cancer after years in USSR prison camps. The story of the novel grips the reader from the start but it also turns a spotlight on the cultural revolution that resulted from the triumph of Socialism after the Revolution of 1917.* 

One of the patients in the ward is Dyoma, a young man who is suffering from a deadly tumor in his leg. Here is Solzhenitsyn’s account of a significant aspect of Dyoma’s early education. 

Ever since he had been in the first class, before he could read or write, Dyoma had been taught, knew for certain and fully understood that religion is a drug, a three-times reactionary dogma, of benefit only to swindlers. Because of it the working people in some places had been unable to free themselves from exploitation. But as soon as they got rid of religion they would take up arms and free themselves. And Aunt Styofa with her funny calendar, with the word ‘God’ always on her lips, with her carefree smile even in the gloomy clinic, and her pasty, was obviously a thoroughly reactionary figure. (138)

The fruits of this cultural revolution could be seen in 1954 in the plight of young Russian women like the attractive nurse Zoya in a world without religion.

Did this mean that marriage was the only alternative, that that was where happiness lay? The young men she met all danced and went for walks with the same aim in mind: to warm themselves up a bit, have their fun and then clear out. They used to say among themselves, ‘I could get married, but it never takes me more than an evening or two to find a new “friend”, so why should I bother?’ 

Indeed, why marry when women were so easy to get? If a great load of tomatoes suddenly arrived in the market, you couldn’t just triple the price of yours, they’d go rotten. How could you be inaccessible when everyone around you was ready to surrender?

A registry office wedding didn’t help either. Zoya had learnt this from the experience of Maria, a Ukrainian nurse she did alternate shifts with. Maria had relied on the registry office, but a week after the marriage her husband left her, went away and completely disappeared. For seven years, she brought up her child on her own, and on top of it all, she was trapped by her marriage. (172)

Solzhenitsyn wrote Cancer Ward almost seventy years ago but the fruits of the Socialist cultural revolution are very evident today in the massive problem that Russia has with orphans or just plain unwanted children. 

A couple of years ago former President Trump vowed that America would never be a Socialist country, but there is no doubt that the Socialist cultural revolution has already come. Its tenets have been taught in American schools for years, and the results are more and more obvious. 

###

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin book edition 1971.

The Governing Class

 

The recent mid-term elections brought to mind a post I wrote a few years ago about Alexander Solzhenitzyn's novel, The Cancer Ward in which he depicted a member of the Communist party governing class in the former Soviet Union.

Every society has its governing class. In America they don't call themselves Communists, but an increasing number describe themselves as Socialists. For the most part the governing class in America is made up of members of the Democratic party. Did you know, for example, that in the 2020 Presidential election the District of Columbia, the seat of the Federal government, gave 317323 votes to Biden and only 18586 to Trump?

Historically, the governing class never makes up more than a small minority of a country’s population. Even in countries where Socialist or Communist revolutionaries triumphed and seized power, the ruling party remained an elite group with membership severely restricted. 

In Hitler’s Germany, for example, membership in the National Socialist or Nazi party never constituted more than 10% of the German people. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) members of the Communist party also were a relatively small elite group. Membership in the Party was a privilege and a sign of status. Even today in countries like China, Cuba, and Venezuela, party members make up a small ruling minority despite massive vote totals in elections. 

No one has described this class better than Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest and most influential author of the twentieth century. He began writing while a prisoner in Soviet labor camps for almost a decade. After serving his term in the labor camp, 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.  

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 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.

 

###

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: The Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin books, 1971.

Who Are the Socialists?

Historically, Socialists never make up more than a small minority of a country’s population. Even in countries where Socialist or Communist revolutionaries triumphed and seized power, the ruling party remained an elite group with membership severely restricted. 

In Hitler’s Germany, for example, membership in the National Socialist or Nazi party never constituted more than 10% of the German people. In the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) members of the Communist party also were a relatively small elite group. Membership in the Party was a privilege and a sign of status. Even today in countries like China, Cuba, and Venezuela, party members make up a small ruling minority despite massive vote totals in elections. 

The writings of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, arguably the greatest and most influential author of the twentieth century, did as much to shake the foundations of the Soviet Union as anything or anyone else. He began writing while a prisoner in Soviet labor camps for almost a decade. After serving his term in the labor camp, 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.  

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 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.

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin books, 1971.

###

Cultural Socialism

Russian Orphans

Socialism is in the air in the United States and will be a big issue in the 2020 Presidential campaign. Bernie Sanders, an avowed Socialist, is one of the front-runners for the Democratic nomination. On the other hand, President Trump vows that the United States will never be a Socialist country.

For most people Socialism is a political and economic system but it is also, and always has been, a cultural phenomenon. Many years ago I read practically all the novels and historical works of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian author of the twentieth century, whose writings contributed enormously to the downfall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). 

I recently found a tattered copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward at a library sale. It is a novel about the inmates and staff of a cancer facility in the Soviet Union of 1954. It is semi-auto biographical since that author himself had been treated for cancer after years in USSR prison camps. The novel grips the reader from the start but it also turns a spotlight on the cultural revolution that resulted from the triumph of Socialism after the Revolution of 1917.* 

One of the patients in the ward is Dyoma, a young man who is suffering from a deadly tumor in his leg. Here is Solzhenitsyn’s account of a significant aspect of Dyoma’s early education. 

Ever since he had been in the first class, before he could read or write, Dyoma had been taught, knew for certain and fully understood that religion is a drug, a three-times reactionary dogma, of benefit only to swindlers. Because of it the working people in some places had been unable to free themselves from exploitation. But as soon as they got rid of religion they would take up arms and free themselves. And Aunt Styofa with her funny calendar, with the word ‘God’ always on her lips, with her carefree smile even in the gloomy clinic, and her pasty, was obviously a thoroughly reactionary figure. (138)

The fruits of this cultural revolution could be seen in 1954 in the plight of young Russian women like the attractive nurse Zoya in a world without religion.

Did this mean that marriage was the only alternative, that that was where happiness lay? The young men she met all danced and went for walks with the same aim in mind: to warm themselves up a bit, have their fun and then clear out. They used to say among themselves, ‘I could get married, but it never takes me more than an evening or two to find a new “friend”, so why should I bother?’ 

Indeed, why marry when women were so easy to get? If a great load of tomatoes suddenly arrived in the market, you couldn’t just triple the price of yours, they’d go rotten. How could you be inaccessible when everyone around you was ready to surrender?

A registry office wedding didn’t help either. Zoya had learnt this from the experience of Maria, a Ukrainian nurse she did alternate shifts with. Maria had relied on the registry office, but a week after the marriage her husband left her, went away and completely disappeared. For seven years, she brought up her child on her own, and on top of it all, she was trapped by her marriage. (172)

Solzhenitsyn wrote Cancer Ward more than fifty years ago but the fruits of the Socialist cultural revolution are very evident today in the massive problem that Russia has with orphans or just plain unwanted children. 

President Trump may vow that America will never be a Socialist country, but there is no doubt that the Socialist cultural revolution has already come. Its tenets have been taught in American schools for years, and the results are more and more obvious. 

###

*Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Cancer Ward, 1968. Penguin book edition 1971.