If World War I was the death knell of capitalism, the Great Depression was a punch in the face to anybody who had any doubts. Even with Keynes as the standard-bearer of Capitalism Viable, everybody was scouring old philosophers for new guidance. Karl Marx began to rear his ugly head as revolutionaries began a new sheaf based on his post-capitalist model.
We’ll start with the big names.
The first obvious name is Lenin. Russian history through World War I virtually guaranteed that his Bolshevik Revolution would become a reality, and events in the postwar world only gave strength to his already deep-rooted faith in the necessity to eliminate capitalism. He had three imperative questions:
-He struggled to answer the question of how to run the economy after he killed every business owner and manager – and unfortunately someone only asked after they were 70% done. Lenin was impressed with what he had seen from Germany during the war and sought to emulate their organizational system.
-He then faced the question of how to industrialize Russia very quickly, in the accurate realization that Communist Russia would be in for the fight of its life against a modern army, probably in its first 20 years of life. He went with Marx’s interpretation of British industrialization – capitalists waged war against peasants, stealing their land and forcing them to become a penniless urban class, then squeezing their labor and using the profits to create a cycle that enriched the state and fueled further industrialization. So that’s exactly what he did, using the Russian state as the sole capitalist and justifying it as necessary to create a military that would survive the next inevitable war with a motivated capitalist state.
-The final question was the survival of the state. Lenin operated the Communist Party as a state that faced the constant and imminent threat of annihilation. As such, he created a bureaucracy that was completely and utterly ruthless, motivated solely by self-preservation. He scoured the Party constantly to remove the weak, creating a job title that motivated workers like no other: breaking rocks in Siberia.
The next name is Hitler. Hitler also went by the book, following fascist philosophy and his personal philosophy to the letter. He created an appealing philosophy of group before the individual, spending his money on public works and rearmament. He forbade wage increases but justified it by outlawing unemployment. He only allowed foreign trade by barter, i.e. he shot anyone who traded with non-Germans. He also imprisoned dissenters, persecuted Jews, and kept people distracted with rants about foreign conspiracies against Germany. With petty behavior, it wasn’t difficult to scare up a few ugly comments about Germans whenever Hitler needed it. Bickering among the Allies during the Great Depression also made it easy to scare common citizens that the rest of the world was less than friendly. What’s remarkable is that Hitler was extremely popular, much more so than any politician in the West. Germans were delighted to have full employment, a new military that confounded the West, and plenty of minority groups to direct any frustration and anger.
We also have Stalin. He took Lenin’s brutal bureaucracy and industrialization to whole new levels. The most dangerous place to be in 1930s Russia was ironically the Communist Cadre. Of the 1800 that hailed Stalin after he exiled Lenin in 1934, fewer than 80 would hail him at the next Communist Convention in 1939. The rest were killed, in prison, or exiled to Siberian labor. No general of the Red Army in 1934 survived to see 1939, they were all shot. Stalin had three generations of proteges in the 1930s and ended up killing them all. Stalin’s sole creed: “You’d rather this than go back to the czars”. Even John Maynard Keynes, who found everything about Stalin to be detestable, had to agree.