ENRIQUE KRAUZE
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indeed, I think that Leninist version , the despotic totalitarian ver–
sion of socialism, was not essentially a distortion of Marxism. I
think it was a well-substantiated variant of Marxism, and there
were other variants as well. This continuity can be seen in the fact
that Marx really did believe in the perfect community of the
future in which the entire realm of production and distribution
will be taken over by the state . In other words, it was supposed to
be state socialism. After all, it was Marx and not Stalin who said
that the entire idea of communism can be summarized in one
single phrase: abolition of private property.
If
so, there are no
reasons to claim that totalitarian , despotic communism of the
Soviet type is not communism in the sense of Marx because pri–
vate property has been abolished. Now, Marx took from the
Saint-Simonians the slogan that in the future there will be no
government over the people but only administration of things.
But he failed somehow to ask how things can be administered
without people being used in the process . Eventually his entire
project of a perfect society was the centralization of all means of
production and distribution in the hands of the state: universal
nationalization. Now, to nationalize everything means to na–
tionalize people; it is a blueprint for slavery. And we did not need
to wait for the Bolshevik Revolution to make this discovery
because during Marx's lifetime many people - expecially the
anarchists- pointed out quite clearly that the Marxian kind of
socialism, state socialism, is an announcement of a new tyranny
much worse than those in existence.
It
was noted already by Prou–
dhon in his critique of Marx, that communism means in fact state
ownership of human beings. It was Bakunin who predicted that
socialism
a
la Marx would lead to the despotic rule of upstarts
from the working class who will replace the present tyrants and
the existing tyranny with another even worse.
It
was the
American anarchist, Benjamin Tucker, who made the remark
that Marxism knows only one medicine for all monopolies: a
single monopoly. It was a Polish anarchist, Edward Abramovski,
who predicted that if by chance communists manage to seize
power by a kind of revolutionary providence in a society which is
not morally prepared for it, it would inevitably result in a society
strongly divided into hostile classes of the privileged oppressors
and exploited masses. All this had been noted in the nineteenth
century, which proves that it is not the case that Sovietism has
nothing to do with Marxist ideology. I'm not saying, of course,
