THE PARTY OF NYET

Red was always the color of the left. In America today it's the color of reaction.

Perhaps that is appropriate in one narrow way, because the Republicans have recast themselves in the mold of the old Soviet Reds. They are now the ones who forever say no, hell no, never, nyet. They cannot be reasoned with.

Despite their habitual intransigence, the leaders of the USSR did in the end manage to negotiate our differences. And they did modify their economic system as it became clear it wasn't working. But they didn't do the latter sufficiently to save it. To do so would have meant freeing and empowering the people and ending the Communist party's hegemony.

The topheavy Soviet system destroyed economic incentive. What the people wanted was to be able to work to advance themselves individually; that was refused them. They were expected to be idealistic, but they saw the self-serving nature of those at every level above them.

By suppressing criticism and limiting free speech, the Communist party held down feedback and adaptability so as to keep control in its own hands. Everything in Russia became a racket, where lip service was paid to equality while the economy was based on bribery and who you knew and sweetheart deals.

Thus privilege, the very thing it professed to have rooted out, was the essence of Soviet society, garlanded with hypocrisy. The Communist party and the lords of management and technology were the new ruling class, as was argued by Yugoslavia's dissident Communist Milovan Djilas.

The USSR failed not because it was left-wing but because it wasn't left-wing enough. Where the people can get their hands on capital and collaborate in private ventures, the economy does well. Where they can speak freely and there is equality of voice, there can be accountability and reforms and smart adaptation. Those are expressions of equality, of what it is to be lefty.

Now look at our country, where again most of the wealth and discretion are with the people on top. But here we don't call them the Communist party. No way!

Under Reagan the gigantic tax cuts for that oligarchy and the enormous deficit spending on defense, undertaken in part to deny money to the welfare state, resulted in a depression. We did get out of that one, but under Dubya the same measures landed us in a worse one that we are in some danger of being submerged by. And the Republicans' answer to that - cutting back on spending - would guarantee our submergence.

Starving the welfare state is economic suicide. If the poor don't have money, they can't spend money and so the economy languishes. They have little or no access to capital and so can't participate in the entrepreneurial ventures that lead to expansion of the economy.

Economic success requires the Golden Rule. Equality isn't just a nice idea, it's an economic necessity. When one class enjoys the lion's share of the wealth and the prerogatives, look for calamity eventually if not sooner. The Soviet Reds and the Republican reds proved themselves masters at generating economic failure by putting too much money and too much say into too few hands.

There is only one thing to say to the prospect of more of that: Nyet!