The Specter

After twenty years, a familiar specter is once again haunting the developing world. A wave of audacious left-leaning politicians has been swept to power in Latin America, and a few months ago Thailand's Red Shirts staged a mass protest against the military government that brought Bangkok to a standstill. Maoist groups are rising throughout the Indian subcontinent, through election as well as armed uprising. The Left has returned.

While the American mainstream doubtless looks upon these events with horror, for progressives the reemergence of the Left from the shadow of 1989 is rightly viewed with ambivalence and uncertainty. While these movements have enormous potential to alleviate human suffering and raise the living standards of the poorest of the world's poor, they also carry the potential for a reprise of all the bloody, despotic excesses of 20th century Communism.

What are the possibilities and limitations of this recrudescence? What is the appropriate attitude of American liberals and Leftists toward it? In the 20th century, rivers of blood were shed by Communist governments, as well as by their enemies. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, most of that suffering and sacrifice appears to have been for nothing. Answering these questions is of burning importance to anyone concerned with avoiding pointless horror.

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The problem with the Communist states of yesteryear was not really that they contravened human nature, as fashionable as it is nowadays to insist otherwise. Nor was it because of the inherent inefficiency of central planning, though the command economy did suffer a great deal of that. It was not even the economically undeveloped conditions in which the Left was forced to take power, as many Marxists have alleged - though the initial poverty was doubtless, at least, a major permissive cause.

No, the real problem was the total lack of freedom. This means not only the absence of political democracy, but also the bureaucratic stultification of economic life. The only conceivable justification for a new round of social revolutions, in light of the horror and failure of past experiments, is a self-conscious effort to avoid authoritarianism and bureaucracy, to the extent that conditions allow.

Freedom is thus the primary standard by which the new wave should be evaluated. So far, most of the Latin American governments have, for the most part, respected democratic norms. In some cases, such as Brazil and Chile, deference to parliamentary principles has been accompanied by a move toward the center on the part of former Left parties. This has produced both good and ill effects for their respective nations. Although the Chavez administration in Venezuela has some worrisome autocratic tendencies, its own base and the other Left parties have mostly kept it in line.

In Thailand, the Red Shirts have been consistent critics of the monarchy and the military, and advocates for parliamentary democracy - even though it earned them a brutal crackdown by the military dictatorship. Likewise Nepal's Maoist party, which participates in routine elections, and has thus far used violence only to prevent a military takeover.

One of India's Maoist factions, however, has used guerrilla tactics against India's elected government to take over sections of the countryside. Admittedly this was probably the result of decades of neglect of India's rural poor by its government, elections notwithstanding. In any of these cases, it is not necessarily the willingness to use force, which unfortunately is unavoidable in some circumstances (just ask George Washington), but rather the end for which force is used, that is essential.
One unfortunate quality that most of these groups share is an unwillingness to rethink statist and bureaucratic alternatives to private enterprise. Although not all experiments with nationalization of industry have been failures – one has only to think of the TVA or South Korea's Pohang Steel – history seems to teach that adopting state ownership as a general rule tends toward bureaucratic sclerosis and undemocratic concentrations of power.

Thus far, no current movement has yet attempted a thorough collectivization of the economy, doubtless due, in part, to the memory of the Eastern European experience. However, in cases where alternatives to private ownership have been sought, as with energy resources in Venezuela and Bolivia, these have usually taken the form of old-fashioned nationalization, rather than, for example, experiments in ownership diversification. Although cooperatives have played a relatively large role in Venezuela and Bolivia, and to some extent in Argentina, in no case have they received primary emphasis.

It is clear that any attempt to supplant capitalism, particularly in the developing nations where such projects are likely to be instituted, will face enormous difficulties. If the new revolutionaries are wise, they will build on the experience of such moderate Communisms as those of Cuba or Mozambique, while experimenting with democratic institutions, ownership diversification, and individual proprietorship in land and small business. Of course, nothing perfect can reasonably be expected from any form of government under developing-nation conditions, but perhaps the partisans of the new wave can at least make life more bearable for their countrymen.

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The principle that should guide the attitude of American progressives toward the new wave is restraint. The reemergence of the Cold War liberal who gleefully jumped aboard the Right's anti-Communist bandwagon is probably the worst possible outcome.

If a half-century of Cold War taught us anything, it is that the developed nations' militant reaction against Communism made the Communist states worse than they otherwise would have been. Whether intervening in the Russian Civil War, appeasing Hitler, or making the provocative moves that helped touch off the Cold War, the unrelenting hostility of the capitalist powers doubtless contributed to a hardening of attitudes among Communism's leaders, and the rigidification of its bureaucratic police states.

American radicals, on the other hand, eventually discovered that they did little service to their cause or to any attempt at expanding their relatively small numbers by an all-too-frequent naiveté – even, in some cases, willful denial – regarding the true nature of the Communist nations. This was not universally true, of course; the Bolsheviks had many critics on the Left, such as Emma Goldman, from the very beginning. Nonetheless, whether Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, or even, initially, the ghastly Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, many radicals found a train of disappointments in too much of the Really Existing Socialism.

The notion of restraint signifies dedication to realistic foreign policy. Neither the Cold War zealotry of Lyndon Johnson nor the misguided affection of Henry Wallace are appropriate. Rather, what is needed is the hard-minded realpolitik of then-prominent journalist Walter Lippmann. Unlike most liberals, Lippmann criticized the Cold War policy of containment at the outset. Instead, he proposed to build on the Yalta agreement, having the superpowers divide the world up into formal spheres of influence. This was, to some extent, done eventually anyway.

In our contemporary situation, progressive realism mostly means extricating America from the new wave's path, to whatever extent the line-up of domestic forces within the United States allows. We could, perhaps, blockade the flow of military merchandise into conflict zones, and supply aid to civilians. We can seek agreements with other powers to adopt similar policies. In brief, we should help people, or get out.

Something like the existence of Maoists in Nepal only becomes of concern to us if, for some reason, it has implications for the global balance of forces. Then our government might have to consider a range of responses. Since these movements are simply too small to have more than regional significance at most, the point would seem to be moot.

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In Marx's theory, the economic principles that guide human history will eventually bring about the realization of the good society everywhere on earth. The particular is ultimately resolved into the universal by capitalist laws of development which are themselves universal. Since the difficulties of this tantalizing vision became manifest during the 20th century, invocation of universal principles has gone out of fashion entirely.

The Marxist vision indeed needs to be rethought, even by those movements which claim inspiration from it. Nevertheless, the positivist and postmodern approaches that have gained cachet among much of today's intelligentsia, which often deny universality altogether, are deeply unsatisfying. This is all the more so because they have so little to offer the impoverished masses of the developing world.

Let there be a virtuous mean between these vicious extremes. I propose that progressives take a letter from Aristotle, and seek the universal-in-the-particular. What this means, in concrete terms, is that the possibilities and limitations for social change and international peace should be expected to vary with situation, and the response from progressives should likewise vary.

As in Aristotle's Politics, the world will likely consist of various forms of state, from Persian Gulf monarchies to European social democracies to Latin American developing capitalism, for a long time. Likewise, there will be a welter of competing political factions and social groups in any given nation. There will be international conflict, and even war, just as there will be counter-movements for peace.

What distinguishes this view from mere relativism, however, is that it posits the existence of better and worse forms of each polity, and of objective principles that regulate their development. It offers a conception of the good life, certain elements of which are common to all people, and which may serve as the objective standard by which the values of all societies, and the policies of all governments, can be judged.

The specter of Marx is once again haunting the slums and peasant villages of the developing nations. We shall see whether history repeats itself and how, as tragedy or as farce. For now, revolutionaries in the Third World, and reformers in the First, have an opportunity to create something new.