The Entrenchment of the State; M. Hoffman

66 The Entrenchment of the State by Matthew Hoffman M ikhail Gorbachev's new themes for the Soviet Union, glasnost (open ness) and perestroika (reform), and their scant but widely publicized concrete man ifestations, have caused a great stir in the West. Speculation about what has caused the Soviet leaders to attempt such changes varies widely, but one of the most popular theories is that they are desperate: their empire is crumbling from within, and if they do not change their system and relax controls, they will lose their power completely. To classical liberals, this line of reasoning is appealing, for it is consistent with the principles of the free market. The lack of productivity in centives, supplied in a private property order by the availability of profit, as well as the ineffi ciency of a vast, corrupt, bureaucratic system of economic management devoid of the benefits of monetary calculation, will cripple the economy of any socialist nation. As Ludwig von Mises wrote, "In the face of the ordinary, everyday problems which the management of an econ omy presents, a socialist society would stand helpless, for it would have no possible way of keeping its accounts. ,,1 The theoretical unworkability of socialism is, without a doubt, consistent with socialist expe rience. To dispute this would be to contradict the implications of almost all available data gathered from numerous failures of socialism around the world.

Mr. Hoffman is a senior in the media department of the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts in Houston, Texas. It is wrong, however, to conclude that the failures of the stated goals of socialism, and the resulting public dissatisfaction with the system, are the causes of the reformation movement currently under way in the Soviet Union. In reality, the popularity of an entrenched Com munist government is not a factor in its behav ior. To such governments, public opinion is ir relevant, because it is for all practical purposes impossible for the populace to rebel success fully against their rulers. In fact, no major Com munist government has ever been overthrown from within. To discover why this is so, we must analyze the system. The Use of Terror One of the principal ways a Communist to talitarian regime maintains its grip on the pop ulace is the unconstrained use of terror.

The Bolshevik Party, for instance, had only an estimated 200,000 members when it over threw Russia's Kerensky regime in 1917. 2 Aleksandr Kerensky was a member of the So cialist Revolutionary Party, which had the sup port of vast numbers of peasants, and received 58 percent of the vote in the elections of the Constituent Assembly, a congress elected by universal suffrage. 3 The Bolsheviks quickly abolished the Assembly, but the fact remained that the majority was clearly against them. How, then, did they maintain their power? A short lull followed the Bolshevik:coup, but preparations to consolidate their power began almost immediately. On December 20, 1917, Lenin established the Cheka, a secret police or ganization designed to "combat counterrevolu tion, speculation, and sabotage.' ,4 Several months later, after a failed assassina tion attempt directed at Lenin, the Central Com mittee resolved that, "To the white terror of the enemies of the Workers' and Peasants' Govern ment the workers and peasants will reply by a mass red terror against the bourgeoisie and its agents. ,,5 With this decree, the Cheka was unleashed upon the population, indiscriminately arresting and torturing thousands of people, especially intellectuals. They paralyzed the country with fear, eliminating trust by creating false resis tance organizations, and extracting "con fessions" from victims at any cost.6 The Cheka, today called the KGB, has grown over time, and now penetrates every sphere of Soviet society. It contains hundreds of thou sands, if not millions, of people and maintains a vast network of informants.7 Dissidents are regularly arrested by the KGB and tortured in mental institutions.8 The country is held in an iron grip of fear.

The use of terror to consolidate power has been adopted by many, if not all, Communist regimes. The Chinese Communists, after prom ising to maintain private property and free en terprise in 1949, began in 1950 a program of mass terror against property owners and "counter-revolutionaries," in which millions died.9 The Khmer Rouge annihilated approxi mately one-third of the Cambodian people dur ing their four-year reign. to George Orwell, who ironically was a social ist, had a keen understanding of the ability of totalitarians to maintain their power, despite a lack of popular support. He modeled the work ings of his futuristic police state in 1984 after the Bolsheviks, who practiced most of the re pressive measures that Orwell's imaginary Oce ania used. Orwell has the novel's antagonist state: "Obedience is not enough. Unless [a man] is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. ' ,11 67 After a Communist government secures con trol over a people, it usually sets out to con struct the utopia it has promised them. This of ten satisfies the socialistic intellectuals who may have been spared in the initial purges, as well as the masses, who often believe the party line. Many are convinced that their economic and political hardships are merely temporary, and will fade away as the Communist paradise evolves. In the new atmosphere of fear and lofty promises, dissent tends to abate. The govern ment then will attempt to implement its poli cies' which usually include the complete aboli tion of private industry and free trade, the collectivization of farmlands, and bureaucrati zation of the economy.

In China, after the initial purge and the end of the Korean War, the government set out to do all these things, as did the Soviet Union after its Civil War. The Soviets enacted programs such as "War Communism" and the "New Eco nomic Policy" (which allowed limited private enterprise), and finally settled on their system of five-year plans. Mao Tse-tung attempted "the Great Leap Forward, " the failure of which ultimately led him to unleash the "Cultural Revolution. " None of these policies stimulated the econo mies of the two countries or improved the citi zens' standards of living. However, they did put the economies under strict central control, exercised through immense bureaucracies. To day, for example, the People's Republic of China has approximately ten million govern ment officials.12 Governments of such size and economic power are not overthrown. The only coups that take place do not result from mass uprisings, but from struggles within the bureaucracy. Vik tor Suvorov, a defector from the Soviet Army, describes gigantic hierarchical factions within the government, supported by a system of interdependency.13 These struggles may lead to government manipulation of the general popu lace, often using mob psychology.

When Stalin wished to collectivize Soviet farms in the late 1920s and early 1930s, he met with great resistance from the upper class of peasants (the kulaks) as well as the vast middle class (the seredniaks). Both groups had nothing 68 THE FREEMAN. FEBRUARY 1989 to gain from the collectivization of their lands. However, the lower class, called bedniaks, were quite poor and favored the plan. Stalin turned the bedniaks against the other groups, allowing them to attack the other peas ants and take what they would. A great civil war erupted in the rural areas of the Soviet Union, and Stalin used the opportunity to force the col lectivization. In doing so, he caused a famine that killed between 5 and 10 million people. Yet, they did not rebel against the government itself. Stalin had transformed a statist imposi tion into a conflict between groups. 14 When the paranoid Stalin perceived the growing power of his rivals, he began to elim inate them one by one, in numerous assassina tions and bogus trials. In order to consolidate his personal control of the state, he engineered the Great Terror, which resulted in millions of deaths. Under these horrible political condi tions, the people did not rebel.

Similarly, with the failure of Mao Tse-tung's "Great Leap Forward" in China, various fac tions within the government suggested revising policies in order to cope with the economic problems of the country. Mao perceived this as a direct threat to his power, and struck at his enemies within the party by unleashing the "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" in which children and teenagers were organized in ,'Red Guard" groups, and told to annihilate anything "traditional," "luxurious," or ,'revisionist. " They swept over the country in what may have been the most phenomenal orgy of destruction in history, and successfully purged the party ranks of anti-Maoists. The economy was left in ruins. The people, how ever, did not rise up against the government. IS As the antagonist in 1984 said: "It is time for you to gather some idea of what power means. The first thing you must realize is that power is collective." 16 Entrenchment in the United States Because of the growth of government power in the United States during the last century, America has acquired some of the characteristics of the totalitarian nations that facilitate the entrenchment of power.

Our government continues to send its tenta cles deeper and deeper into the nation's eco nomic life. The federal, state, and local gov ernments employ almost 16.7 million people, about 7 percent of the entire population!17 The collectivization and factionalization of our society continue, as special interest groups vie for coercive privileges, power, and govern ment largess. Today, 90 million Americans de pend on the government for support. 18 In addition, the state controls our children's intellectual development through compulsory education laws, public schools, and school li censing. The regulation of thought is essential to the entrenchment of the state. If we do not wish to meet the Orwellian fate of the citizens of the Communist nations, we must halt the growth of our government, and reverse the coercive, collectivist trends that threaten to deliver us to a potentially eternal tyranny. Walter Cronkite wrote in his preface to 1984: "It has been said that 1984 fails as a prophecy because it succeeded as a warning.

Well, that kind of self-congratulation is, to say the least, premature. 1984 may not arrive on time, but there's always 1985.,,19 0 1. Ludwig von Mises, Liberalism (Irvington-on-Hudson: The Foundation for Economic Education, 1985), p. 72. 2. Robert E. Elson, Prelude to War (New York: Time-Life Books, 1976), p. 45. 3. Ibid., p. 53. 4. William R. Corson and Robert T. Crowley, The New KGB (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1985), p. 31. 5. Edward H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1952), pp. 151-183. 6. Corson, pp. 41-42. 7. John Barron, KGB Today: The Hidden Hand (New York: Berkley Books, 1985), p. 385. 8. Ibid., pp. viii-ix. 9. H. E. Chen, The Chinese Communist Regime (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), pp. 3-4. 10. "A Mass Murderer's Exit," Maclean's (September 16, 1985), p. 22. 11. George Orwell, 1984 (New York: New American Library, 1949), p. 220.

12. Encyclopaedia Brittanica, 1986, vol. 16, pp. 57-58. 13. Viktor Suvorov, Inside the Aquarium (New York: Berkley Books, 1986), pp. 81-82. 14. Basil Dmytryshyn, USSR: A Concise History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), pp. 170-171. 15. Anne F. Thurston, Enemies of the People (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987). 16. Orwell, p. 218. 17. U.S. Department of Commerce, Statistical Abstract of the United States (Washington D.C., 1987). 18. Hans F. Sennholz, Debts and Deficits (Spring Mills: Liber tarian Press, 1987), p. 11. 19. Orwell, p. 3.