Maine's Statehouse Paintings

Recently on the cable news there was a lot of discussion about the paintings that were taken down from one of the rooms in Maine’s statehouse. These were large drab looking murals of workers. At first blush it seemed like a pretty petty thing for the governor of Maine to do but on further reflection, though I disagree with his reasoning, I understood its source. The paintings in the Maine statehouse could well have hung in one of the halls of the Kremlin. The former Soviet Union proclaimed itself as the “workers paradise”. It put workers and peasant farmers on pedestals, glorifying them in statues, literature and paintings. Even the symbol of communism, the hammer and sickle, was deference to the working class. Most of us here do not understand the various economic systems and words or images like “workers”, “social”, “people’s”, “working class” or “welfare” are automatically associated with the now defunct Soviet Union, President Ragan’s “Evil Empire”, the “mother” of all socialist states.

Today the word socialism means many different things to different people as discussed in a previous post. Some believe providing a safety net in the form of welfare, healthcare, food stamps, education assistance etc. for those at the bottom is socialism. Others see in the competition between labor and business, anything favoring labor as socialism. Still others see any attempt by the government to improve the state of a society as socialism. Despite what they are called, these are things that exist to varying degrees in all modern advanced free market capitalist societies. I suspect that among the misinformed there are even more creative concepts that I am totally unaware of. The formal definition of socialism I adhere to is the one that defines it as the government owning the means of production and distribution of goods. That is the system that existed in the Soviet Union and still exists to a great extent in China. The problem with the Communist Party was not its claim to be the party of workers (I doubt whether the powers that be were any more interested in workers than most other governments) but fundamental flaws in Soviet economics and politics.

It had a one party system and though the population voted, they had only candidates put forth by the Communist Party to approve or not. In contrast, one of the strengths of western democratic systems is the fact that there are voices representing different points of view so that even with only two parties, as is the case in the US, the system self corrects making the pendulum swinging from left to right, generally brought back to somewhere around the center. The Soviet system lacked the “push and pull” of the populace and thus had no method of correcting and once on a path it plunged forward, however disastrous the end.

The idea that it was a “worker’s” state was propaganda employed by the bureaucrats in the government to placate the “working class”. So statues were built, pictures painted, songs sung and stories told glorifying the workers all in an attempt to make them feel like they were part of something they were in fact not. Members of the Politburo were selected by and from the ruling elite, with little, if any input from the population at large. This group made all decisions. Unfortunately the propaganda also infected the west and any leaning in favor of workers is connected to socialism. I believe the governor of Main, being old enough to remember the “cod war” and not really understanding socialism, wrongly saw the paintings of workers as an encouragement to socialism.

TO BE CONTINUED