Tom Elliot on socialists and the Soviet Union

Tom Elliot, like many who engage in yellow journalism, recently wrote a screed decrying socialists who opposed the bigoted "Reclaim Australia" rallies. His article, of particularly low calibre, raised the hoary old suggestion that these wicked socialists should experience the Soviet Union to find out what the world was really like then.

The following is a response, emailed directly to him.

Tom Elliot,

Your short piece really does need some help. Let me give you a few factual pointers. Because the more you learn, the better your material will be - and it has a long way to go.

a) Central planning works well with goods with low market complexity, exchange mechanisms with high complexity. "A fascination" with central planning will not disappear as the problem of complexity falls.

b) Socialist Alternative do not have a desire to "to remove choice from elections, rob people of ambition and reduce society to the lowest common denominator".

c) The Australian female you mention supports the right of people to have their own religious faith. That does not mean they support the right of religions of any variety to engage in subjugation of women. The former does not trump the latter.

d) When the person in question claimed that that socialism was the only path towards true democracy, and your thoughts were of the various Stalinist regimes, you must understand where they are coming from. The Socialist Alternative are a Trotskyist party, and their particular tendency would argue that the Soviet Union etc were a type of "state capitalism", where the means of production are effectively owned by a clique of Party chiefs (i.e., rather like capitalism), with some added authoritarianism thrown in the mix.

e) Such regimes are rather distant from "the Karl Marx-inspired norm". Marx supported government through worker's councils, with officials receiving the same wage as other workers. Somewhat different to politicians of the Soviet Union or Australia!

f) It would not be "our high standard of living, political freedom, generous welfare state and tolerance for other cultures" that they would have criticised, but the need for their expansion.

g) The Soviet Union was a terrible place, especially in 1987. But I don't suppose you made the effort to visit the former Soviet Union in the subsequent twenty years *after* the fall of "communism". Life expectancy declined. GDP per capita declined. Alcoholism worsened.

In future, try to derive your political opinions from facts, rather than other way around.