Communism, flaws and repression.

Great Debates
1

I love reading and watching documentaries about authoritarian political regimes. Or anything where there is an absolute ruler. Religious cults with strong leaders also fascinate me.

About Communism. Last night I saw two documentaries last night about the Khmer Rouge and starving children in North Korea. It made me wonder what it is about Communism that was so repressive.

I think that the Communist economic system was very flawed. It was flawed because it went against human nature, and that nature could not be fixed. Communism expects all the workers to work towards one goal, and that no one is more important than another. Then there is incentive, if someone makes the same amount of money that I do, I am not going to work any harder than they will. Why should I work harder if I am not going to receive the extra benefit?

In every Communist nation, there is a leadership who live much better than the commoner, in a society where everyone is supposed to be of the same class. Many times there is a personality cult with this leader, and this leader tends to stay until they die, or were removed from their position

North Korea is a horrifically repressive country. Absolute dictatorship, concentration camps, no freedom of movement inside and outside the country. The country is truly a prison state, something so absolute that it really cannot be overthrown. It is basically a tiny elite group of people who live like billionaires on the backs of starving people with a standing army that defends them from the people, with no tolerence, absolute punishment for someone who says anything against them, at all…

and then, the poor people are stuck in a framework of Communist economics that doesn’t work and a periodic repression of private enterprise and free markets. Any food they grow goes to the military.

North Korea is actually not the first nation with this type of repressive state. Albania between 1945 to 1985 had a similiar system ran by a “Great Leader” named Enver Hoxha who basically isolated the country, shut down all the religious institutions and was so impressed by the Cultural Revolution in China that he had one of his own in Albania. The country was also very militerized because they were afraid of invasion from either Yugoslavia or the West. People worked in agricultural communes or factories where no one worked because there was no incentive, until someone from the government comes with the guns and muscle to make the proles work.

Jim Jones and Jonestown is an example of Communism on a small scale. Jones was a Communist who wanted to bring about a Socialist Utopia with a group of people, and felt that the Christian churches, especially the poorer churches in the inner city was a good place to bring in his ideas of socialism and equal equality. I think everyone knows what became of Jim Jones in the end.

Jones methods might have been honorable at first, at least in his mind, but by the time they got to Guyana, the people were living in poor conditions, unable to leave the compound beyond razor wire and armed guards, with a mandatory love of their “Great Leader” Jones. Meetings, punishment, brainwashing, isolation. In many ways it was a microcosm of what North Korea is now.

Does Communism allow for more than one opinion?

2

If you look at a traditional, pre-money economy, you’ll find a lot of quirks that strike a modern person as being very odd. Most particularly, the idea of personal property isn’t really there. If you need a car and you know someone with a car, you go and take it out and when you’re done you park it in front of your place. At some point, someone else will come along and take it. This isn’t theft, it’s just using items as communal property.

The problem is that no community like this would ever actually develop a car. A foreign company could come in, start a factory, and pay the workers to work there making cars, and some of those cars may make their way into town, but the initiative to do scientific research, engineer, set up a factory, expand operations, etc. aren’t there without any way to personally profit – which can’t happen without private property.

But that doesn’t mean that a community like this can’t exist more or less peacefully for tens of thousands of years. They have. So it’s not quite right to say that it goes against human nature.

The problem comes when you try to take a place with an economy like this and expect the people to have initiative and to innovate. It simply doesn’t happen. You can give up and let the country turn into a 3rd world country that slowly gains cast-off items from modern nations, or you can become a ruthless dictator who uses bullying tactics to force people to do good work. But even in the latter case, unless you’re actually sitting on your creative people (like in the Russian space agency), they tend to slack off. You have to constantly rotate your goons around to spur the workers. And of course that raises ire, meaning that you have to then keep a lid on the media and insurrections, etc.

Using the traditional, Marxist terms, all Communism is, is a stepping stone to Socialism – a government-free state where all are equals and everything is shared. Socialism is the one where you’re talking about something that’s humanly impossible. An anarchist state will just turn into thousands of little nation states. That’s not necessarily bad either, but it’s not Socialism. And in that sense, Communism is also impossible because an attempt to step out of it and into Socialism won’t lead to a Socialist state. But in terms of having a traditional, largely property-less state, you can see it in any native tribe and still lingering in many places throughout the world today. It’s not something that’s controlled or pushed onto the people by the government, it’s just a remnant from times past because the populace never fully had the “bizarre” idea of personal property trained in.

3

This question was thoroughly answered many years ago.

You need to pick up Friedrich Hayek’s Road to Serfdom. He lays out, in excruciating detail, why every fully-socialized planned economy is destined, by the very nature of its planning, to end in brutal tyranny. Regardless of whatever good intentions exist in the hearts of the original central planners, the ruling committees simply cannot govern according to their ostensible ideals without sliding into more and more coercive methods of control.

I avoided this book for the longest time because economically illiterate clods tend to cite Hayek’s book as proof against modern mixed economies. That is not the actual argument of the book. It is rather an indictment of the good intentions of socialists, with “socialism” here defined as government control of all major industries: a true centrally planned economy.

The book is dry. It’s a challenge. But it will answer practically any questions you might have on this topic.

4

Whatever the inevitable eventual outcomes of Communist regimes, I don’t think the Khmer Rouge is a good example, since they pretty much set out from the start to at least marginalize if not outright murder a good %10 of the population.

5

People make this claim a lot, but I haven’t seen anyone establish what human nature is beyond a shadow of a doubt. There are good arguments on all sides, but sweeping notions of “human nature” aren’t something I think it’s useful to deploy in general.

6

The failure of communism can be traced to the fact that human beings want to be free. Or, to put it another way, we don’t like it when someone else bosses us around and denies us alternative choices for the major decisions in our lives. So, in short, the state communism projects of the twentieth century could never have succeeded even if they’d somehow found leaders who weren’t tyrannical, bureaucrats who weren’t corrupt, and a system of organization that wasn’t massively inefficient. People would still have resisted and rebelled because a system where a group of officials controls those parts of human life that should be private cannot be endured.

However, a more loosely defined idea of communism can be successful. Groups such as the Hutterites have practiced it for centuries. The key is that every member of these groups has thee freedom to stay or leave.

7

I would assume communism is by nature authoritarian, people become authoritarian when they feel they are under threat by either domestic or international enemies. A communist nation is going to be one where the leaders are convinced that large numbers of the public and the international community are trying to invade and overthrow their government.

Right wing governments become authoritarian in those same situations. Military Juntas are very authoritarian for the same reason, they want to purge people on the ground, intimidate the public and fight off international interventions.

So the authoritarianism is probably more due to percieved threats than ideology on the right or left. Both Pinochet and Ho Chi Minh could be authoritarians.

My limited understanding of economics though leads me to believe communist economics do not work. Laos, Vietnam and China all gave up communist economics. North Korea still has them, but their society is dirt poor. China was dirt poor before reforming their economic system away from communism.

There is also the fact that communism picks up in poor nations that generally have a lot of corruption, repression and warfare before the communists take over. Communists didn’t take over peaceful, developed nations via democratic means. So if they did, the rule may have been different. If Sweden had elected a communist government I’m sure it would’ve been far different than the Khmer Rogue or North Korea.

8

I bought a book about the Khmer Rouge recently. I also spent a week in Cambodia in 2005 (30 days to the summer that Phnom Penh was evacuated.) I went to Tuol Sleng, the school in Phnom Penh that was the prison and torture center and the “Killing Fields”. I saw both of those places, but I saw The Killing Fields first and then Tuol Sleng, and I wished I did it the other way.

In the Killing Fields, there were bones just laying on the ground like felled branches. I walked into the Stupa of skulls and actually picked up a skull of a victim. The park had depressions in the ground where the mass burials took place. The Tuol Sleng prison was just depressing. There were children and babies in that place who were killed.

It seems what the Khmer Rouge wanted to do was to extinguish anyone who wasn’t a member of the peasant class. Educated people were seen as possible opponents of the regime. Could a person speak french? Did they graduate school? Were they government workers? How much money and property did they have. It was a genocide basically of the higher classes and religious people. When all those people were dead and gone, the KR started blaming people inside their political organization to the point where everyone was an enemy of everyone else. So there was a devouring of themselves, like a cancer they started and could not stop. Then they were blaming the Vietnamese and was fighting them and killing their people with support from Maoist China (which was also a shocking government in and of itself.). Vietnam was going to take that shit and invaded and indirectly liberated the people from the KR.

Thailand was a player in Southeast Asian realpolitick, who seemed to back whoever was best for Thailand and whatever time and place. They were much like Italy in WWII. As a matter of fact, Thailand was on the side of Japan until it became apparant that they backed the wrong side.

Cambodia is a tragic country. It’s a lot like a person who was phychologically normal who was violently kidnapped, raped and tortured over a span of time who escapes through help, with the people who committed the violence never caught or prosecuted. How is that person going to be? Cambodia was once a peaceful, Buddhist nation. Poor, but the farmland was good and the waters was full of fish (the Tonle Sap is a huge river lake in central Cambodia that feeds from the Mekong).

So, why did the KR go in there and basically destroy everything and kill 15% of your people and create such a literal hell for the other 85% for a failed economic model and in the meantime, butcher everyone of intellegence? Makes little sense to me/

9

Sounds exactly like feudalism, which lasted for an extremely long time through the classical and the medieval period.

10

Lots of authoritarian governments worked for a long time. But they were also subject to a lot of violence, as that was the only way to fight tyrany.

11

Communist systems (and extremely redistributionist systems in general, left or right) must be repressive, because otherwise the most productive people would vote with their feet and leave to a less redistributionist society. The only two ways to avoid this:

  1. Exit is impossible, which implies extreme repression in other areas of life. See the unidirectional flow of people across the Berlin Wall.
  2. There are no other productive economies for productive folks to flee to, which implies Communist governments throughout the world.

It’s no coincidence that both of these were goals of the Communist party. The right of exit is vastly underappreciated, IMO. It’s a vital force to keep governments accountable, and an monopoly in governance is just as bad as a monopoly in any other industry. In this view, talk of “reducing tax competition” and making policies “universal” should be as unsettling as an announcement that Blackberry bought up the entire smartphone industry.

12

Not beyond a shadow of a doubt, but I think we know enough to use that argument in the case of communism or libertarianism. For example, and this is just one example: On Human Nature.. This is an excellent read, even if it is a bit dated. I highly recommend it.

13

Communism gives a small group absolute power over a larger group. If the small group are saints, the result will be benign. If they’re not, it will be brutal.

Thing is, one doesn’t get membership in the small group by being a saint.

14

Actually, you do, for certain definitions of “saint,” but that is no guarantee of benign rule.

From George Orwell’s 1941 essay, “Wells, Hitler, and the World State”:

15

Now, what we have is “Communist Lite” in China, Laos, and Vietnam. Really, the only thing that I see that these three governments have in terms of Communism is the control of the press, freedom of speech, and of religion.

I have been to China, Vietnam and Laos. The rule about religion is that religion has to be one acceptable and documented by the government. All the places of worship are allowed all over the country.

Vietnam and Laos also has free enterprise. How free is that, I do not know. But in both countries I visited foreign people were running restaurants there. Laos has countless temples abound. Vietnam has countless Catholic churches. In China, the Catholic Church cannot be led by the Pope in Rome. A Catholic Church not led by the Pope is like Penn State not led by Joe Paterno. I don’t know how that works.

I went to Saigon and found that they had a casino, KFC, Starbucks and whatever anybody would want. I bought my Chinese wife a $80 dollar bottle of Chanel No.5. In Vietnam, there is rich and poor and everything in between. The laws are a bit more strict than pre-'75 Saigon, but not that much. I was in Vietnam about a week and experienced mostly great people, fantastic food an interesting colorful country and a nice experience overall. I would of never guessed that there was a war or fighting or anything in this country. I was an American and was treated like everyone else. Vietnam is a cheap, kick ass country to see, party, and have a good time in.

I love Laos even more. A One Party government who abandoned economic Communism about 20 years ago. Even took the hammer and sickle off the money. Opened up to capitalism and small business, and abandoned collectives. Now it is basically a capitalist country with a poor economic base. The Laotian government could not seem to get over on the Buddhists.

Cuba is slowly giving it up economically. The Cubans are now opening up more items and merchandise the Cubans can buy, but no one can afford it. The Cubans really tried to create a Communist/Socialist society in the country, and in terms of women’s rights and equality in the races did very well. However, the nation is still very repressive economically and still clings to this clunky, not working and not worth a shit economic system. Instead the Castro’s are billionaires and everyone else suffers.

Che Guevara. The Jim Morrison (or rock star) of Communism. Teenage girls to this day think this dude is hot and would have loved to spend sweaty and mosquito bitten nights with the Che’.

I wish North Korea could be liberated. 22 million people live as prisoners of their regime. Literally. The very best of the middle class of the nation live in high rise apartments with no electricity most of the day and freeze in the winter. Electricity is in such short suppily that the only days promised to the people that it would be on is the birthday of Kim Sr. and Kim Jr.

I spent a winter in Korea. I am a southern guy, me no like snow and freeziings temps. But I was in the South where I could get warm (and eat some cheap, spicy, warming Korean food). I cannot imagine what Northerners go through. Hey Chicagoites, turn off your power for two days in late January and see what you do.

16

It also sound not a little like the average worker’s experience with capitalism.

17

Feudalism is more a dictatorship which emphasizes individualism to a far greater degree than the collectivizing fascism and communism. One of the key defining theoretical characteristics of feudalism is that it places no emphasis on The Will of the People and so is antithetical to Republics, even People’s or People’s National republics.

So there may be less of a slippery slope that is usually followed during feudalism, as there is no theoretical basis for further, organized, centralized, repression. The few exceptions are the crackdown on peasants and traveling workers across europe during the high and late Middle Ages, but they were not successful except in the far east of Europe. (The repressions that took place due to sheer raw power were bad enough, but the ones that were attemped in the West that were due to a theory of Feudal power generally failed.)

18

The Communist regimes were repressive because their economic policies were at odds with common sense. For example, agriculture: Russia had millions of small farmers, who managed to produce sufficient grain crops. Along came Lenin and his “experts”-they herded people together into “collective” farms-which failed miserably (causing widspread famine). The solution? Shoot the farmers to cow them into acquiescence!
Or China: Mao thought it would be a good idea to have people make steel in their backyards-the policy was a complete disaster.
the repression is required because most Communist economic planning was a disaster.

19

The problem with a communist society is not that it takes away from the productive and gives to the less productive. Although that is part of it. The problem with communism is that this distribution is decided arbitrarily by some central planning resource. This leaves it open to corruption and inefficiencies.

The average capitalist worker is able to look for a new employer or a new industry to work in. The typical feudal serf or communist worker cannot. Capitalism and free markets don’t create a utopia. They just provide people with the most freedom in terms of deciding where and how they will work.

Ultimately the problem is that there is work that needs to get done and not everyone can do whatever work they want. Otherwise no one would clean shit for a living.

20

I will read it, thanks for the recommendation! I guess what I mean more is this - in such an argument as this, when there are socioeconomic arguments to be made (and surely there are) it seems a little lazy and futile to resort to broad generalizations about “human nature.” It’s entirely possible, though, that Wilson has something to say on the subject I’m not aware of.