Ukraine’s independence in 1991 was not only a rebirth of Ukrainian identity, but an historic escape from state socialism and the catastrophic totalizing ideologies of the twentieth century.
I remember sitting in a café in Krakow, Poland in the summer of 1987, two years before the end of communism. I was a first-year undergraduate, planning a natural history expedition to the People’s Republic of Mongolia, and I had come to the famous 14th century Jagellonian University to find friends among the undergraduates there.
Convinced that linking up with another socialist country would help me get into the notoriously closed off Mongolia, I sought some allies. For those born after this time, I should point out that it was not especially normal for a teenage westerner to be behind the Iron Curtain on their own at this time.
I’ll come clean. At age 19, before I found myself in that café, I had harbored a fascination with Marxism. The singular vision of a scientifically organized society striving for technical greatness, carried forward by a collective utopian dream of a common cause, was enticing in the political romanticism of my youth. The Leninist-Marxist scheme seemed to have something of a grandeur about it.
On that first trip to Poland, and over the next five years as I returned to see my friends (and yes, we eventually did go on an expedition to Mongolia, arriving literally a day after the first free elections in 1990), I came to understand, in a visceral way, the poison that is Marxism. I realized how it harbors the same toxin that is embedded in every system that seeks a monopolizing field of action for the state.
It is often said that humans are not fit for communism, and that we have not yet developed the selflessness that allows this system to work. As a consequence, when it fails, the usual refrain is that “it was not proper communism.” Let’s give it another go and hopefully next time people will behave better, and it will work.
The flaws in Marxism
What I realized on my trips to the communist bloc was the opposite – that Marxism is unfit for humanity. Individual human beings can dream about their future and conceive of what they might become. But like human faces, none of those billions of calculations going on in each human brain are the same, and they change constantly. What you prefer to eat today might literally alter in the space of 24 hours. And so, any social system that seeks centralizing control is not equal to the variegated and wonderfully creative efflorescence of the human mind.
As Friedrich Hayek and other liberal economists realized, under capitalist liberal democracies we are all central planners. As we set about our lives and seek what we want, the system of prices and democratic governance respond to these millions of central plans all being implemented at once – the whole of society in a state of constant flux as it shape-shifts in response to these aspirations, primarily through voluntary interactions between people.
Let’s not be utopian – democracy and capitalism have failings. Markets allow for greed, exploitation, and there is poverty. But there can be no greater form of exploitation than a small group of people getting together, calling themselves “the state,” and imposing a central plan on the rest of us with the threat of prison or death for non-compliance. Not even the most ill-intentioned corporations in a free society aspire to this level of malfeasance.
But economics aside, what I did see in my trips to the communist bloc was the shriveled state of human potential. When society is ordered and directed under a single doctrine then, by definition, dissent cannot be tolerated since it challenges the necessary unity that must be maintained for the system to have any chance of working in the first place.
Since many of us cannot resist expressing our own ideas of a good life, then it necessarily follows that state coercion and brutality are an inescapable part of the Marxist creed, however and wherever it is implemented. Outbreaks of rampant individualism are dangerous to the immovable vision. That is why, of course, the state never can, and never does, “wither away” under Marxism, but becomes ever stronger.
State socialism and communism can convince even the most critical person of the beauty of collective action to escape the messy selfishness of individualism. Yet in so doing, it demands the destruction of the individual. This is hardly a new insight, but like a Marxist coming of age, it struck me forcefully, aged 22, in a quiet moment on a train traveling through East Germany in early 1989.
Of course, the most corrosive aspect is that intellectuals and their academies, the very people who are supposed to be offering a healthy challenge, are often partial to these visions because they fall in love with the rational clarity of the plan. Behind it, they might imagine their intellects will become the powerhouse of the new gleaming society; they implicitly assume that they will be the architects of the new order.
This has always been a fatal and tragic mistake. since it is intellectuals who represent the vanguard of the regime’s potential opposition and thus it is they who usually end up as the inaugural guests of the prison system, or worse. Nevertheless, intellectuals sometimes continue to be apologists for these systems of governance.
I also remember experiencing something else. In setting an unyielding social mechanism into play, the state creates, inadvertently, a culture of intense paranoia. In a society in which individualism is all but destroyed, the slightest deviation from regulations inspires an intense irritation from one’s neighbor. The more those regulations and confining influences are embedded into a greater range of activities, the more one friend is set off against another.
From this, a culture of observation and informants rapidly emerges and spreads. A paradoxical effect of zealous collectivism is the atomization of society in which not even family members can truly be trusted.
Ukraine’s chosen path
In the carefree summer of 1987, I chatted to my Polish friends about their ambitions. Tadek told me that he believed communism would never end. He really believed it, as did I. The all-pervasive presence of the state seemed unrelenting in its iron grip. It was quite impossible in that dimly lit café with the long curtains, the surly waiters, and the cautious conversation – all the trappings of that ineffable socialist ambience – to believe that in two years it would all be over.
When Ukraine declared its own independence in 1991, it sought a new opportunity to express its cultural and national identity, but it also set itself on a path away from the totalizing ideology of Leninism-Marxism, as did the rest of eastern Europe.
This is easily misunderstood as Ukraine becoming in thrall to the west. However, there is nothing specifically western about the idea of creating political and economic systems that seek to achieve great things collectively, such as building good schools and hospitals, whilst at the same time restraining the power of the state and allowing those millions of individual central plans to find their course.
Today, we face a growing strength in an autocratic vision of human organization. Our environmental challenges, especially, have given succor to those who would like to claim that to resolve these problems – pollution, loss of biological diversity, and changes in the atmosphere – we must turn to strong central direction.
Incidentally, it seems to me that few of those who make this claim have visited former communist bloc factories and power stations to see what state socialism does to the environment when there is little opportunity for people to raise objections. They should take a look.
We easily forget our history. The romantic power of elephantine social visions continues to entice us. It offers simplicity and unity in a complex world. It offers to the individual the negation of the obligation to take personal responsibility for life. Submission to the state and its clear-headed central aims is the most attractive form of freedom for the undecided.
To escape the seduction of state power and collectivist dreams, we must constantly use our rational faculties to understand that messiness in society – not conformity – is what is fit for the human mind. The tug and pull of millions of disagreeing people is not a failure of organization, it is the very embodiment of the kaleidoscopic capacities of individuals to imagine different futures.
Building societies that encourage forbearance between people without society disintegrating into anarchy, is certainly a daunting challenge to human behavior. But creating all-embracing ideologies that subsume human personalities into an undivided grand project is an utter failure of the imagination, not the realization of some brilliant apotheosis of social planning.
The year 2022 is a good year to remind ourselves of these things. Not least, as Ukraine celebrates independence, let us understand that it is better to live in a society with some division, inequality, and imperfection, but where people are free, than in a fabricated utopian dream of state perfection in which all of us are slaves.
Charles Cockell is Professor of Astrobiology at the University of Edinburgh.
The views expressed are those of the author and not necessarily of Kyiv Post.
