Has there ever been a non-oppressive Communist government?

Great Debates
41

The best answer I can give is to say you should read The Road to Serfdom, because Hayek lays out the answer very well and at considerable length.

But I’ll present a hypothetical scenario that covers one of the main points. Imagine we’re in the the Totally Democratic Communist Country (TDCC), and the biggest economic issue is iron ore mining. A democratic election is held and the Pro Iron Party wins, and immediately sets about implementing its iron mining agenda. They seize lands with iron deposits, begin digging enormous mines, recruit and train millions of workers, build the necessary machinery. They are almost ready to begin actually digging up iron ore and then another election is held and the Anti Iron Party wins. The new ruling party is totally opposed to all iron mining, so they shut down the mines, destroy the machinery, fire the workers. Vast amounts of capital have gone entirely to waste.

A real communist state could never allow such things to happen, so what would they do instead? They would step of a Commission of Democratic Mine Administration, which would specifically be insulated against democratic control, and would be allowed to continue with construction no matter what happens in any election. And they would declare that mining iron is a necessary part of democracy and protection of the Glorious Revolution, and therefore that anyone opposed to iron mining must be an Enemy of the People and can therefore be arrested for treason and so forth.

The bottom line is that if you have democracy, then things can always change. The people may choose to elect new leadership and demand new things for any number or rational or irrational reasons. But you can’t have a centrally-planned economy if the central planners and their plans are constantly getting yanked around and sent in contrary directions by democratic processes. Thus communism and democracy are incompatible.

Although the USA today is certainly not communist, one can see the basic problem at work when the government tries big, long-term projects. Some may recall that when President Obama was in office and the Democrats held power in 2009-10, one of their big ideas was building high-speed railroads. The federal government and the state of California eventually agreed on a massively expensive plan to build a new high-speed train route from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Somehow billions of federal and state dollars got spent but no train was ever built, demonstrating the hazards of trying to have the government plan and build something while new elections and democratic give-and-take keep pulling the rug out from under them.

42

And in order to make quota, they would mine the cheapest iron possible, since all that matters is that you make your quota.

Like the Shoe factory: Ordered to make so many shoes, they made them all in one size. Ordered them to make more sizes, they made them all only in left shoes.

43

Oh yes, like that crappy useless interstate highway system they built. :rolleyes:

44

Salvador Allende in Chile might be the closest example of a Marxist head of a government who tried to remain in the bounds of liberal democracy for a time. Ultimately, it was a hard balance to strike, and even before the coup, events in Chile came to a crossroads.

This Times article has a good overview of the “trap” Allende faced in the Cold War- too far left for the U.S. and Chile’s conservatives who feared his nationalization of mines, but also not leftist enough for the Soviet Union and Latin American communists who wanted to see Allende suppress his opposition.

45

In 1920 Gen. Wrangle occupied the Crimea with the remnants of the defeated White Army. As he began to form a provisional government he was approached by representatives of the local soviets and informed that the country had a functioning Communist government. Workers ran the farms and industries and chose their management by ballot. They did not need help from bureaucrats. Wrangle is credited with implementing reforms. In his biography “Always With Honor” Wrangle says it was handed to him.

The brief Communist period in the Crimea was successful under the capable leadership of Gen. Wrangle.

46

I can defend my statement (with reference to Marx even!), yet I also recognize that would be very off-topic from the present discussion. Probably shouldn’t have brought it up here, but it’s a personal issue for me.
To be more on-topic, I would however, present the following dichotomy, based in the fundamental difference between economic/political systems as conceived of by Adam Smith and Karl Marx. It’s often forgotten today, but Smith wrote and lectured quite a bit about government as well as society, so in his own way was as expansive as Marx. And there are elements to his thought which are not necessarily well-regarded now.

Nonetheless, it’s worth noting that he recognized many key relationships in economic production, as well as laying out a theory of how individual interest helps society, and how moral moral sentiments affect both. He neither endorsed any specific religion and was evidently not imaginative enough to contemplate anything apart from a fairly banal Anglicanism, but was emphatic in the importance of morality in these relationships.

Perhaps more importantly, he was very clearly trying to recognize and theorize about something which definitely existed. He was not trying to develop new things, although in time people would use his work, most importantly his insights into the nature of supply and demand, to create new ideas.

But Smith was doing real science, even if it was social science - the study of how people produced, and why they produced, and what the important influences on production where. Thus, even if he occaisionally went wrong, he was constrained by actual events, history, and information from being in a complete fantasy. Smith saw events, gathered, puzzled out relationships between them, and tried to create theories based on his information.

To see why Marxism is different, and why it lends itself so well to extreme authoritarianism, we should look at some of the aspects of its foundation. Marx declared that the theory was “scientific” in contrast to the “Romantic” Socialism that preceded it. However, he was making a prediction about future events and imagining an end-state to human development that was implicitly Utopian. His version of events also imagined new enemies that were conveniently present in all Western nations to some degree, but fortunately did not enjoy a great deal of political power. In addition, his chosen “Capitalist” scapegoats were also sufficiently vague in description that the test could be “adjusted” to other cultural environments. This made it exceptionally useful for political radicals; where most utopianism imagined the world as it , Marx included the perfect excuse for any failure. The disciple no longer had to worry if the plan ever failed. Later Marxist regimes would prove that whenever a plan did fail, well, there was an enemy to be destroyed.

And of course, what came first was a theory. Nobody ever saw Communism actually functioning, and the closest societies that did work were often not very socialist, small in scale, isolated, and riven by some form of Cult of Personality - and yet all the Socialist collectives that formed in the 19th century were functionally gone by the early years of the 20th. If they survived even that long, it was only by gradually ceasing to be socialist.

The final element to look it is the sort of personality that thrived in the Communist radicals, and took leadership positions within them. Communist/Socialist intellectuals historically displayed some pretty extreme levels of intrigue, infighting, and treachery long before actually gaining power anywhere. The Russian revolution, certainly, was not just “Bolshevik” revolution but an alliance of various factions, of which the Bolsheviks were not necessarily even the most important at the start. Communism grew up in an atmosphere of constant political intrigue - and the experience within the USSR would continue that culture.

Finally, the various national Communist movements were all aggressive conquests. Yes, they certainly portrayed themselves as liberators, but in practical terms they were overthrowing governments that, popular or not, had enough support to be seem as legitimate even when they were disliked. For example, not many people in late Imperial Russia really admired the Czar, but they didn’t necessarily favor Communism as the alternative. This meant that, from the beginning, virtually every Communist state was beset by those inside who did not accept Communism as true, let alone the only legitimate government. Since Communism surely can’t be wrong*, dissenters had to be perverse agents of evil.

Or, alternatively, radical movements tended to give rise to the biggest bastards and the biggest bastards tend to rise up within them. Take your pick there.

*It is. And don’t call me Shirley.

47

Yes depending on your definition of government and communism.
Read about the Communist Party of India (Marxist) here : Communist Party of India - Wikipedia

They are not active in the national level but at the state level particularly in one state : Kerala, one of the most socialist state with higher median income , social justice and education rates. Communists used to run another state in India : West Bengal but that ended decades ago.

48

Yes, but that’s a state, and it is not even a communist state, despite the fact the Communist Party of India is the majority. It doesnt qualify at all.