The rise of the modern state has brought with it a new capacity for total war, genocide and other forms of state imposed mass mortality, such as famine and sanctions, that earlier thinkers could not have imagined. My political journey began with Marx and Lenin moving through Keynes and Hayek. The father figure of modern Thatcherism, the Austrian economist and writer Friedrich Hayek was a profound libertarian thinker. Currently, everyone talks about Ayn Rand, who I haven't read, but Hayek should be up there too.While studying a masters, I read 'The Road to Serfdom' which he penned in 1944 at the height of the war of totalitarians - Hitler and Stalin. He tried to explain how the state could never substitute itself for the hidden knowledge and ingenuity of individuals and entrepreneurs and claimed that socialism would lead to slavery. At the time one could see his point - although he was a lonely voice in the 1940s when state collectivism was widely employed to fight the war and was seen as part of an inevitable future. The book had a big effect on me, and added to my growing understanding of the failures of authoritarian collectivism, primarily Stalinism and its offshoots.
It was undeniable that Marxism had failed to foresee the capacity of all-powerful states to oppress and terrorise the population, often in the name of Marxism.
This does not mean that I think Hayek was right, or that Thatcherism was good - far from it. We live in a world in which the reality of oligarchical capitalism is far more relevant than the theory of the small firm. Small firms and workers ought now to be in alliance against oligarchy and corporatism. Traditional free market theory only serves to obscure the reality of a world dominated by giant firms.
For a quick summary of the death toll of the 20th century, by decade, we can see the consequences of war, state terror, imperialism and genocide. I have only included those incidents of more than 0.5 million dead.
Decade
1900-1909 - Belgian Congo - 5-8 million
1910-1919 - First World War - 10 million - (Germany, UK, France, Russia); Armenian Genocide - 1.5 million (Turkey)
1920-1929 - Russian Civil War famine - 7 million (USSR, UK, France, Japan)
1930-1939 - Stalin's Ukraine famine and terror - 10 million (USSR)
1940-1949 - Second World War and Holocaust - 40 million in Europe (32 million Central/Eastern Europeans, 7.5 million Germans); 20 million in Asia (Japan); Bengal famine and Partition - 4 million (UK)
1950-1959 - Korean War - 4 million (USA, UK, China); Chinese revolution - 2 million; Algerian war of Independence - 1 million (France)
1960-1969 - Great Leap Forward famine and Cultural Revolution - 32 million (CCP-Mao Ze Dong); Vietnam war - 3 million (USA); Biafra civil war - 2 million (UK, France); Indonesia, Suharto coup and terror - 0.8 million (USA, UK)
1970-1979 - US War in Cambodia-Laos - 1 million (USA), Khmer Rouge - 1.7 million (China); Bangladesh independence war - 1 million (Pakistan, USA); Uganda - 0.8 million (Idi Amin-Obote);
1980-1989 - Soviet Afghan war - 1.3 million (USSR); Iran-Iraq war - 1 million (Saddam Hussein, USA, UK, France, USSR); Mozambique - 1 million (South Africa); Angola - 0.5 million (USA, South Africa); Ethiopia civil war and famine - 1 million (USSR)
1990-1999 - Rwanda genocide - 0.8 million; DPR Korea famine - 1-2 million (Korean Workers Party); Iraq sanctions - 1 million (USA, UK).
2000-2009 - DR Congo - 4 million (various states - Rwanda, Uganda); Iraq war - 1 million (USA, UK).
In eight out of 11 decades, the consequences of leftist revolution and terror caused millions of deaths. The UK was involved in major mass mortality incidents in seven out of 11 decades, in some cases a junior partner; USA six out of 11. I include countries where they provide support to the genocidaires, such as US support for Indonesia and Pakistan, UK support for Nigeria in Biafra, and Soviet support for Mengistu in Ethiopia.
I still find this record hard to deal with as I was brought up a leftist and continue by and large to be one. Perhaps the very profound nature of the social struggles made such violence in part inevitable. On many occasions, the brutality was a consequence of attacks from imperialism and counter-revolutionary violence. The brutality of revolution does not happen in a vacuum - it happens in a life-threatening environment. Revolutionaries do not always start out as mass killers. However, the apparent success of the Bolshevik revolution with its liberal use of revolutionary violence had severe consequences throughout the 20th century. Only its failure and collapse in 1989-90 brought an end to the power of the example of October 1917. I too was a Leninist. I now prefer the model of participatory democracy as emergent in Latin America.
Imperialism of one kind or another is the biggest culprit in the great majority these atrocities and mass death incidents - if we include Soviet, as well as German, British, French and US imperialism. The biggest mass death incidents are the Nazi war and genocide (33m), Mao's Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution (34m), Japan's war in Asia (20m), Stalin's famine and terror (11m) and the First World War (10m).
Imperialism features in nine out of 10 decades, but the scale of deaths only reaches the truly staggering in Belgian Congo, First World War, and the Second World War at the hands of nazism and Imperial Japan. By contrast the biggest mass mortality incidents under communist rulers Stalin (10 million) and Mao (32 million) happened in peacetime, mostly as a result of state-induced famine.
The failure of both social democracy and other lefts to reap benefits from the Great Financial Crisis in part stems from from this legacy. If there is a future for actually existing social democracy it is by forging new paths out of new situations. The Arab Spring shows too that revolution does not have to have a leftist hue. A coherent ideology and unity are required to forge a vision for a different society be it secular or religious. The ability to win a significant minority, or as pollsters say a plurality, of society and to mobilise them to support such a vision is the point at which an altered society can be born. Today the people have knowledge and voice at their fingertips and need not rely on all-powerful leaders. The Greens in the West arguably have taken the mantle now from socialists, and may yet combine with various forces in resistance to the might of global capitalism. In Latin America it is variations on Bolivarian and populist democracy. But for now, despite the crash, capitalism in various guises (neoliberal or statist) prevails more than ever in all corners of the globe.
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