Thornton Blackmore
During an electoral debate recently broadcast by Maori Television, guest panellist Ella Henry, who is an Associate Professor at the Auckland University of Technology, referred to communism as a “badge of pride”.
Her comments, which were made toward the end of the debate, were directed toward criticism which had earlier been levelled at the Labour Party.
The Associate Professor retorted that “people who encountered our society prior to colonisation called us communists, because we had no state and we owned land communally. We were a very pure form – not the kind of Russian socialist oppressive regime – but totally shared ownership, shared values – and I take that as a badge of pride.”
While it is questionable whether one can sensibly compare pre-colonial Maori civilisation to a Marxist utopia, it is notable that Henry has been quick to deride socialism while speaking in favour of communism. Curiously, others have distanced themselves from communism while identifying themselves with socialism.
Indeed, while the Russians deemed themselves to be the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, their Chinese comrades stylised themselves as the Chinese Communist Party.
Still others, like Bernie Sanders and Jacinda Ardern, have referred to themselves as “democratic socialists” and “social democrats” in an attempt to evade stigma.
While nomenclature has been used interchangeably by these ‘enlightened beings’ of the far-left, the principle remains the same – that the dictatorship of the proletariat shall eliminate the evils of the free market through the state acquisition of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and that the all-powerful state will eventually dissolve into the vague and wonderful concept of utopia, without further need for government.
Socialism has often been used to refer to the transitionary totalitarian state, while ‘communism’ has often been used to refer to the later stage of anarchical utopia.
Democratic socialism is simply an attempt to soften the initial dictatorship of the proletariat stage by retaining some semblance of the democratic process. It is yet to be seen, however, whether the difference will amount to anything more than the sprinkling of a little ‘kindness’ on the masses while destroying their ‘non-essential’ businesses during lockdowns.
According to Nobel Prize winning economist Friedrich August von Hayek:
They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable, but that to strive for it produces something utterly different – the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: ‘What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven’.
Hayek has also written:
Our generation has forgotten that the system of private property is the most important guarantee of freedom. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. When all the means of production are vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of ‘society’ as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us. In the hands of private individuals, what is called economic power can be an instrument of coercion, but it is never control over the whole life of a person. But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.
The harbouring of Marxist sympathies, which seems to be common on campus, is less prevalent within the science and engineering faculties than it is in the social sciences – according to an American study. This may be owing to the fact that such disciplines necessitate greater emphasis on the scientific method of hypothesis, experiment and conclusion.
Indeed, while many armchair academics may freely espouse the virtues of Marxism from the comfort of the campus commons, few are willing to acknowledge the failure of the ideology in practice. One is left to wonder how many times an experiment must fail before the hypothesis is thrown out.
Perhaps a little field research in Venezuela might enrich our academia’s worldview.