More of a GQ question, but I suspect it will be moved here to GD anyway:
Off the top of my head, I cannot think of any Communist governments that weren’t oppressive in some way, be it the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc. This isn’t to say, of course, that non-Communist governments can’t be oppressive too, but just asking about Communism specifically in general. Has there ever been a non-oppressive one? (which is heavily subjective, but let’s just compare against Western liberal democracies as the benchmark test - civil rights, free speech, minority rights, etc.)
If not, then what is it specifically about Communism that makes it so mandatory?
Communism is the attempt to implement the political concepts of Karl Marx and the other theorists who have followed in his tradition and built upon it. (I assume I’m just restating stuff you already knew at this point).
So let’s examine Marxist theory. It defines inequality and oppression in terms of unequal distribution of material resources. This is notable for what it doesn’t focus on, which is inequality of volitional choice. A slave is both deprived of material goods and resources and generally forced to subsist in the most impoverished conditions that won’t immediately imperil survival, but most of us would not consider that oppression was no longer present or relevant if, instead, the slaveowner put the slave in a feather bed, fed the slave on the best food available, gave the slave exquisite garments and jewels, and so on. But a definition of oppression that derives everything from material inequality makes it awkward and convoluted to speak of what is still missing if and when that is the circumstance.
Marxist theory is – in sociological terms – a “macro” theory, one that doesn’t address individual behavior but instead addresses categories of people, classes. Properly speaking, Marxist theory does not give you a framework for determining in any direct way that Joe the Farmer or Sue the Construction Worker are oppressed. What you get instead is a sweeping analysis to the effect that the means of production under capitalism are controlled by the ruling class, but that the labor activities that actually accomplish the act of production are provided by the working class; so the working class does all the work but the ruling class exploit them, getting all the benefit, owning the output of the labor, which they then sell for a profit. To address the situation of Joe or Sue, you first show that they are members of the working class, and then it’s established.
Marxist theory is also a “conflict theory” and contains the notion that this oppression is only able to persist because of false consciousness on the part of the working class – that they don’t get it, that they don’t realize they’re being had, because if they did, they have the numbers to bring the system to an immediate halt and rectify the situation. But because Marxism is a macro theory there’s no theory of interaction and cognition to explain how the heck individuals either get fooled or how they get past that to see things as they really are. It’s kind of tautological, in fact: the falseness of false consciousness consists of it being the wrong answers, the wrong awareness, which we know because we’re Marxists and see it to be so.
That means it provides no standards for communication that is fair and not chock-full of “ideology”, or as someone might say nowadays “fake news”. Instead the fakeness is an attribute of being on the side that the Marxist is against.
The remedy that Marxism proposes to fix capitalist oppression is that, first, the working class gains proper class consciousness, rises up, and overwhelms the ruling class – violent revolution. Then, with the only people left being all working class folks, they all produce and they share, each laboring according to their own abilities, each receiving goods and services according to their needs. But there’s no blueprint for how decisions and planning will take place, and decision-making structures are precisely where authority of some people over others — the creation of bosses, leaders, whatever you want to call them — takes place.
I am an anarchist (of which I’ll say very little more, don’t roll your eyes); when I propose that we don’t need authority of people over others, folks tend to be skeptical. It’s a healthy skepticism, because the devil is very much in the details. Marxism is implicitly anarchistic, without directly saying so, in the notion that the state will cheerfully “wither away” because we’re all working class folks and we got rid of the ruling class. But in real life a governing class of decision-makers arises, and they have the authority to prevent the ruling class from re-emerging, and that’s a lot of power. Corruption ensues. And the whole issue of abuse of authority isn’t even addressed within the theory so there don’t tend to be adequate precautions against it.
Has there ever been ANY non-oppressive government?
The OP gives a basis for comparisons between them.
There were a variety of utopianist villages formed during, I believe, the 19th century, trialing all sorts of economic variants.
For the most part, I believe that while a few local leaders became oppressive, they didn’t have the means to force anyone to stay, so they just drove their denizens away. Alternately - and, I believe, more commonly - the towns simply went bankrupt and had to close down.
Communist-minded folk don’t generally have a keen eye for business.
On the other hand, there was The Polyamorous Christian Socialist Utopia That Made Silverware for Proper Americans | Collectors Weekly
Of course, Oneida might not have been quite as successful at communism as it seemed - even during the time that it was still populated with people who were all true believers.
- A lot of the work was being done by hired workers, living a capitalist lifestyle. The people of the sect, effectively, got to live a more lazy life by living off the work of the hirees.
- A majority of information about the group was burned and it’s probably reasonable to assume that it’s only the things that made them look the most favorable that remained for historians to look through.
- Certain people were encouraged to have sex more and others to have sex less. Permission to have a particular partner would be granted or denied by the top guy. They might not have had money, but that doesn’t mean that they might not have been getting remuneration of some form, on the basis of how they were performing.
Nepal has a democratic communist government from what I know.
It’s a bit of a stretch to refer to it as non-oppressive.
Marxist-Leninism - the branch from which Stalinism and Maoism derive - lends itself to violence and oppression. But, what most people don’t ever stop to think about (because anyone born in any western society is trained not to) is to examine the conditions before the Marxist-Leninists (of whatever variety) took power.
Usually to get the masses to violently rebel against their “masters” it takes really, really, really intolerable conditions. Czarist Russia was not a Utopian paradise that one random day had a revolution brew out of nowhere. And there’s a reason the country-folk preferred the Communists to the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War - Nationalist China were anything but “nice guys” and if you doubt that, just ask the (native) Taiwanese what living under their rule was like after the KMT was forced out of the mainland. Pretty much anywhere a violent, marxist-style revolution sounds like a good idea to the people is a place where vile corruption, complete disregard for the rule of law, total disregard for human rights and dignity already is completely entwined and entrenched in the system.
That the “new masters” happen to shout utopian phrases doesn’t change the fact that they see everyday corruption, totalitarianism, etc as perfectly normal or acceptable behavior because that’s what they came up in. So it’s really no shock that wherever a violent revolution against oppression happens, there’s more violence and oppression by the revolutionaries. The revolution itself didn’t and can’t instill those values, which is a huge failing I believe of Marxism.
In fact, if you look at the British right around the American Revolution for comparison, sure they were kinda a-holes, but they weren’t brutal monsters like the Czars and Nationalists were. They respected the rule of law, tolerated far less corruption, upheld a certain degree of rights and due process etc… and the revolution that came out of that produced - surprise surprise - a society that tolerated less corruption, respected the rule of law, etc etc.
So, for a real test case you’d have to see a communist government form in conditions that weren’t already horrible to try to see how communism might work. No form of government works well when everyone is corrupt, backstabbing, violent, and has absolutely no respect for human rights. Just check out all the failed capitalist banana republics if you need examples of a functional system failing miserably under the weight of deep seeded issues surrounding corruption and human rights.
Capitalism is the economic system under which each person has the freedom to use their capital as they choose to use it. Communism is the economic system under which a central authority decides how capital will be used. Thus any communist government needs to oppress any people who don’t agree with the central authority’s decisions. If the central authority wants to merge all the farmland in a given area into large, centrally-owned farms, then they’ll need to violently take the farmland from the current owners. If individual owners can choose whether or not to give up their land, the whole system just won’t work.
F. A. Hayek explained the problem in The Road to Serfdom. Centralized planning leads first to economic oppression. Then, as people resist economic oppression, the planners find that their schemes can’t stand up to honest debate in a world of free thought, free speech, and academic freedom. Thus, next comes censorship, and show trials, and gulags.
At the risk of sounding incredibly tedious, this is not true and never was true. People used language so badly that it has come to be wildly misunderstood.
Capitalism means the economic practice of pooling wealth in order to invest in productive enterprises greater than one person can manage individually. This was, and still is, a huge step forward in economic “technology” because it allows for projects far greater than what even the wealthiest of entrepreneurs could create by themselves. However, Capitalism is not the same thing as a free market. Capitalism was, and still is, practiced in unfree states including China, where many markets are free, or even North Korea, where very few are free. It was practiced by the USSR, Italy, Holland, Great Britain, and the USA alike.
In free states, capitalism requires some level of legal protection and facilitation; in unfree states it’s pretty much the same but organized by the government. The pooling is very similar but the specific financial mechanism different.
Edit: To clarify, I am not disagreeing with the rest of your post.
Tanzania under Nyere was not horribly oppressive. People were relocated to villages, and detained without trial but there was not the millions dead that Communism usually brings. Still brought a horrible famine through economic policy.
Can you flesh this out a little more? I don’t disagree with you and (if you know my posting history, I am certainly not a Marxist) but I cannot understand why necessarily the oppression must follow.
The “honest debate” was one of Marxism which has convinced millions the world over. Of course, the very institution of central control of an economy must by definition deprive private property rights, but why the suppression of free speech, of the press, of religion, or of creative an internet firewall?
The government can say that the reason why we are centralizing these farms are because of our “founding father” Karl Marx. It is unfair that you work for peanuts or don’t have a job while Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos live in unheralded luxury. It is unfair that the guys you watch play sports for you make 20 and 30 times more than you.
What we have done here is fair. The people control the means of production, you have a job, and we give you all you need. Nobody is better than anyone else. You have no superiors to coerce your behavior. Of course, you must listen to the government, but that is true anywhere.
So by all means criticize what we are doing on the internet or in the newspaper and complain to your friends that our new farm centralization plan is unfair. Jeff Bezos will think it is unfair, but so what? His kind is why we formed this glorious new society. So we will meet that debate anytime!
Why not try that one?
You take ownership for granted as a natural thing. I don’t see it that way, with the exception of things that are literally in my hands or on my body. Even things that I myself made, if I lay them down, even in the place where I sleep, the sense that I am personally and permanently entitled to them, and no one else gets to have them, is a social thing, not a natural thing. (I don’t mean society is unnatural but I mean it’s not just self-evidently there, it is only there if and when there’s a socially shared understanding that says that’s how it is).
With that difference in perspective… Capitalism is the economic system under which each person is a competitor for capital, competing within a set of rules of fair play, the laws of the land, which under ideal circumstances apply equally to all of the players (more on that later). One’s winnings — the capital that one has amassed by out-competing the other people — are one’s own to use as they choose to use it (with the exception of prohibited behaviors as laid out within those same laws).
Communism is the attempt to not have a competitive society in which one has any such winnings.
It isn’t laid out very well, there’s a shitload of {Step One: Steal Underwear… Step Three: Cooperative Egalitarianism instead of Profit!!} pretend-logic, some of which I’ve already pointed to, but the oppression isn’t that it is taking away “your” capital. The oppression is that redistributing resources has always required someone to be in charge of redistributing resources, and if there are no successful capitalists with all the power of wealth and money, the people who end up with the big power are the ones doing the redistributing. AND for historical theoretical reasons that I’ve also already discussed, they don’t put in a lot of checks and balances in the form of laws that curtail what the redistributing powers can and cannot do, or what the individual ordinary people are protected from at their hands. THAT is where the oppression comes from.
Getting rid of the competition thing and sharing equally and all that “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” stuff is actually pretty groovy, and is LESS, not MORE oppressive, than the concentration of capital in the hands of the competition-winners.
Among other problems, the rules don’t apply equally to all the players. Like the resources themselves, the more of the resources you have the more legal justice you’re able to get. The law tends to be quite unequally on your side. It’s built that way, because the power of capital lets the winners make the system function that way.
I’m all in on that cooperation-not-competition thing. The communist folks just don’t have a viable blueprint for getting there, and instead they build a police state of absolute authority called The State.
Mosaddegh’s Iran was a socialist leaning democracy before the US-British backed a coup in favour of the Shah.
^^^ failed edit for timeout reasons: These two paragraphs in substitution for the last paragraph above:
Among other problems, the rules don’t apply equally to all the players. Like the resources themselves, the more of the resources you have the more legal justice you’re able to get. The law tends to be quite unequally on your side. It’s built that way, because the power of capital lets the winners make the system function that way.
I’m all in on that cooperation-not-competition thing. The communist folks just don’t have a viable blueprint for getting there, and instead they build a police state of absolute authority called The State.
Takoma Park, MD had a Communist mayor when I first moved there. I didn’t feel too oppressed. Milwaukee (according to Wayne’s World) had one, but Wiki described Milwaukee’s third-party mayors as Socialist (and there were three of them, the last leaving office in 1960). Not sure how oppressive they were and always assumed they were the result of a prank by Marquette students.
The reason is that communists always promised that if they got power they would deliver a higher standard of living because they had eliminated wasteful competition and profit. The problem with this is that usually profit seeking is not wasteful and the knowledge problem means that competition is the only way to find out the best way to do things.
Communism always leads to cratering the economy. No one in their right mind would keep communists in power after seeing how it immiserates the population so they have to keep people from finding out how bad things are there and how good things are everywhere else.
Mossaddegh had cancelled the election when it was going against him, so it was not really a democracy at the time of the coup.
One comment about some of the earlier replies: Having a Marxist-identified leader or party form a government, is not necessarily the same thing as having a communist (in the sense we usually mean it, i.e. Marxist-Leninist) politicoeconomic system of government in place.
With Leninism and its variants it’s assumed that in the process of bringing about communism one of the stages will be a “dictatorship of the proletariat”, and what we have experienced historically is that the parties never get past the dictatorship stage and eventually it’s not of the proletariat but of the apparat.
It may even be argued in the case of places like China that you may get to the point where what survives is the party dictatorship itself, and the sense that only they know the right path, but actual Marxist socioeconomics become mere ritual incantation and in practice you end up with a directed-capitalism economy for the profitable sectors and a fascistic political ecosystem.