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 Lev Navrozov emigrated from the Soviet Union in 1972 He settled in New York City where he quickly learned that there was no market for his eloquent and powerful English language attacks on the Soviet Union. To this day, he writes without fear or favor or the conventions of polite society. He chaired the "Alternative to the New York Times Committee" in 1980, challenged the editors of the New York Times to a debate (which they declined) and became a columnist for the New York City Tribune. His columns are today read in both English and Russian.
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Private enterprise is as old as history. The word ÒcapitalismÓ was coined in 1854 by those who hated and/or failed to understand private enterprise, such as Karl Marx. According to him, a rich person invested his money as ÒcapitalÓ in a factory (or a farm, or a concert hall) and received a higher return on his investment than he would have if he had kept his money in a bank because he underpaid his factory workers (or farm hands, or performers).
In 1921, the dictator Lenin, hitherto assumed to be the most fiery Marxist hater of capitalism, reintroduced private enterprise, which flourished throughout the 1920s.
One comment is relevant. There were fighters against the Soviet dictatorship. Thus, one of them, the nationally famous poet, Nikolai Gumilev, was shot in 1921 for his Òparticipation in a counter-revolutionary conspiracy.Ó Many writers (Nobel Prize winning novelist Bunin), musicians (Rachmaninff), and other prominent figures in the arts and culture, kept emigrating as long as it was possible.
But I do not know of a single case of resistance on the part of capitalists. On the contrary, capitalists of the democratic West traded with Soviet Russia as eagerly as they did later with Nazi Germany or as they do with China today.
Nor did, as far as I know, any capitalist, Russian or Western, foresee in the 1920s what happened in Soviet Russia in the 1930s.
Stalin swept aside capitalism not because the capitalists underpaid their workers, but because, due to private enterprise, too much was spent on the production of consumer goods and services. Stalin's goal was the conversion of the industrially backward Russia into the world's most militarily powerful country. The ideal arrangement of the economy for this purpose should be military, in Stalin's view. Everyone receives rations according to his or her rank, and the rest goes into the growth of military might.
The capitalists were arrested, and those of them who were thought to be hiding their wealth were given in prison only salty water and salted food until they could not suffer thirst any longer, revealed their wealth, and were shot.
The new arrangementÑthe government production of all goods and services Ñ was originally called Òstate capitalism,Ó though it would have been more accurate to call it Òsupermonopolistic capitalism,Ó with Stalin and his ÒgovernmentÓ as the capitalist supermonopoly. Yet Stalin did not like the name, and renamed his arrangement Òsocialism.Ó Well, medical care was free of charge, as were university education, and residential rent was minimal. Surely these were attributes of socialism as it was practiced in the democratic West. Indeed, ÒsocialismÓ is a bad word in the United States, but many Òsocial benefitsÓ have been introduced in medical care and housing, and at least one of the Democratic candidates promised, during the recent primaries, free-of-charge university education for all capable of receiving it.
Outside the growth of military might, which culminated in the 1970s in the development of post-nuclear superweapons of global-scale destruction, Stalin's arrangement did not work, and the Soviet dictatorship itself collapsed in 1991.
In 1944, F. A. Hayek published ÒThe Road to Serfdom.Ó What is the road to serfdom? Socialism! Look at socialism in Stalin's Russia as of 1944. Surely it was serfdom! This is what socialism had led Russia toÑit was the road to serfdom!
Hayek and his book are Marx and his ÒCapitalÓ upside down. For Marx, capitalism is the road to the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and for Hayek it is the road to freedom. For Marx, socialism is the road to freedom, and for Hayek it is the road to serfdom.
Both Marx and Hayek play with words. Yes, Stalin renamed his economy Òsocialism,Ó but Hayek does not know that originally it was called, even officially, Òstate capitalism.Ó What Hayek calls ÒsocialismÓ in Russia was not the road to dictatorship: on the contrary, dictatorship was established in Russia in 1917, when its capitalism had been flourishing, and in 1921 the dictator Lenin restored capitalism, which did nothing to resist the dictatorship, and was brutally ÒliquidatedÓ by the dictator Stalin for the sake of maximum growth of military might.
Who ever heard of any German (or any other) capitalists resisting Hitler? Why, many of them helped him to come to power. When it became clear early in 1942 that Hitler would lose the war, the German military conspired to kill him. But the German capitalists loyally served him to the bitter end, and American capitalists continued to trade with Germany well into 1942, when the U.S. Government and the U.S. Congress stopped the trade by force.
What is the moral? It is wrong to stereotype capitalists either as the dictatorship-breeding villains of Marx or as the freedom-ensuring heroes of Hayek. They are just private individuals and corporations, investing, producing, servicing, and trading. From my experience I can say that outside investment, production service, and trade, they are no more politically enlightened than other people and they are no less interested in their income above everything else.
Today the United States is being ÒsoldÓ to China, and U.S. capitalists play a major role in this betrayal or national suicide, without noticing the danger, as Russian capitalists did not notice the danger before 1917 and after 1921, or as German, English, French, and American capitalists did not notice the danger in Germany in the 1930s and sometimes even during Hitler's war for world domination.
Western capitalists (1) transfer geostrategically important Western enterprises to China because of lower costs of local labor; (2) sell geostrategically important goods and services to China; and (3) give the dictators of China an enormous trade surplus to be spent at their will.
The quest of Western capitalists for ÒChinese profitÓ contributes to the Western oblivion of Òthe China threatÓ and of the Chinese dissidence or resistance to the dictatorship.
It is obvious that the Chinese dissidents' aim to Òprotect the country against the tyranny of the political rulers,Ó as John Stuart Mill put it in 1859, is beneficial to the West since dictators fear the subversion of their unlimited or unrestricted power by the very existence of the independent West as they fear the independent existence of Taiwan (a Chinese country without dictatorship) or as they feared the Tiananmen Square movement, seeking to limit or restrict their power.
Yet while the Soviet dissidence (which finally won in 1991), had attracted an enormous Western attention (Solzenitsyn and Sakharov became the best known Russians in the West in the history of Russia), the Chinese dissidence has become ignored almost immediately after the Tiananmen Square massacre about 15 years ago, and American capitalists rushed to do business in China and with ChinaÑoften without even a decent pause.
One fact out of millions of facts in the life of the Chinese dissidence can be mentioned. On June 27, 2002, Dr. Wang Bingzhang, who had been living in the United States as a political immigrant from China, disappeared, and in February 2003 he was Òsentenced to life imprisonmentÓ in China. A year passed. But who in the democratic West had heard of the event? Business as usual! I have received an e-mail from an American Òsmall-business womanÓ who writes that she deeply sympathizes with the Chinese dissidents, but the goods she sells are ÒMade in China.Ó Do I want her to commit a commercial suicide? How is she to make her living otherwise? By washing floors?
As for Chinese capitalists (who were re-established by Mao, assumed to be the most fiery Marxist-Leninist hater of capitalism), their behavior has been no different from that of Russian capitalists in the 1930s, except that Mao and his successors have used them far more creatively in the quest for world domination than Lenin had ever imagined possible, while Stalin and his successors did not understand that capitalists may be tools, nay, weapons, in the dictators' global Òpeaceful warÓ for world domination.
But while both Western and Chinese capitalists have ignored Dr. Wang's ÒdisappearanceÓ and life imprisonment sentence, Chinese dissidents and Western human rights activists did not allow the case to be forgotten. And on March 4, Dr. Wang was released!
Says Yung Jun Zhou, one of the leaders of the Tiananmen Square movement, who is now residing in the United States, and who works on behalf of the Campaign for the Abolishment of the Laojiao (ÒForced-Labor CampÓ) System (see www.laojiao.org). ÒWe had requested the U.S. government's assistance to investigate the Wang case.Ó
Says Betty Bandy, director of the American Women's Human Rights Association: ÒAmericans should not be the proverbial ostriches blind to human rights violations in China. But too many Americans are! And they are oblivious to the threat that China poses for the United States by molecular nanoweapons!Ó
Lev Navrozov's (navlev@cloud9.net] new book is available on-line at www.levnavrozov.com. To request an outline of the book, send an e-mail to webmaster@levnavrozov.com.