Have all Communist/Socialist nations turned into. . .

Factual Questions
1

. . . totalitarian/fascist nations? I mean, it’s kind of hard to see how the socialism in China, The Soviet Union, Cuba resulted in better things for the “common man.” It seems instead that these nations turned into totalitarian regimes.

  1. Granted, it’s much more complicated, but do you think this is generally true?

  2. Are there examples of Communist/Socialist nations that have been good for the common man?

And totally free-market/capitalistic nations have their failures too, the rich do usually get richer. But, that’s not the question.

2

There are elements of totalitarianism and fascism in all nations. The US spies on and collects data without a warrant on its own citizens. Are we a totalitarian state? England and a lot of Europe have much stricter laws on slander and what people can say and print, are they totalitarian?

For the record, I don’t consider China to be that totalitarian. They have some issues, but its hard to manage more than a billion people and there will be elements that conflict with freedom just as there are ones that doesn’t

3

That’s generally true, but in China, they do restrict the internet and definitely control free speech. That’s much worse that anything I’ve heard about in the US.

4

Well, obviously, not all socialist nations have turned into dictatorships but that is a minor clarification to your overall point. The point that all communist nations have led to a dictatorship and been a failure is, I believe, indisputable.

5

You’ve got the cause and effect backwards here.

It’s not like these countries were functioning liberal democracies who voted in communist/socialist economic policies, and they gradually turned into totalitarian dictatorships.

Instead all these communist states were the product of revolutions, where armed violent people overthrew the existing state, and set up their state. These countries were authoritarian from the very start, they started off by shooting the people who wanted to stop them from ruling the country, and never stopped.

6

Are you sure that every single communist country started violently?

7

Yeah, good point. But, each revolution had leaders that pushed the socialist message, and perhaps believed it, and then pretty much turned into a dictator.

8

Well, it’s hard to argue that the Soviet Union, China and Cuba didn’t have violent beginnings.

9

The problem is the tendency (I believe Jerry Pournelle quotes this maxim frequently ) bureaucracies will quickly change from providing the service they were intended to provide, to ensuring their own perpetuation. We see this with the encroaching powers of the Patriot act and its spawn, we see this in such behaviour as the dwindling effectiveness of Freedom of Information Act requests; but as the OP says, we see this most readily in the evolution of totalitarianism in Communist countries.

It’s pretty simple - communism saw itself as a struggle between “the people” and the capitalist, anti-revolutionary and other forces determined to take them down. Therefore, the people creating the State gave themselves the power to neutralize counter-revolutionaries. It’s not a big leap from “attacking the core communist values” to “Criticizing this bureaucracy’s policies” and of course the State would logically apply the same defences to anyone who appeared to criticize.

I remember the rabid communists on campus in the days of my youth - They claimed they supported freedom of speech, but they stated there was “no freedom of speech for fascists”. Well, guess who got to decide who was a fascist? Apparently, it embraced anyone who disagreed with them…

10

The “common man” might be much better off under a totalitarian regime. What you don’t want to be is a political opponent. Soviet citizens had a reasonnable standard of living, a lot of social services, remarkable access to culture, etc… And in fact many people are still nostalgic of the Communist regime nowadays.

In any case, I’m not aware of any communist country that wasn’t also a dictatorship. Allende views for Chile seem to me to have been close to a concept of communist democracy, but he didn’t have time to implement them.

The less oppressive communist country was probably Yugoslavia under Tito. Less repression, much more decentralization, large freedom of movement for both Yugoslavs and foreigners, etc…

11

There are examples where communism didn’t arrive by violent revolution. Venezuela is one recent, well-known example. Hugo Chavez was elected, fair and square, in 1999, making clear promises to seize certain industries and greatly increase central control of the economy. For the first years, he pursued these goals while the country remained democratic. Over the years, Venezuela’s economy began to break down, as always happens under communist rule. Rather than acknowledging failure, Chavez ramped up censorship and violent suppression of dissent. He attempted to short-circuit the democratic process, gain control of courts, and avoid legal restrictions on his own powers. Chavez died in 2013, but his successor continues the violent suppression.

12

Venezuela, though, isn’t particularly communist. The Communist Party of Venezuela is a minority member of the ruling coalition, and they have very much a mixed economy. The country is more like a combination of socialism and old-school Latin American “big man” autocracy.

13

Strictly speaking, none of these countries are communist. They are all socialist of course. There are many non-totalitarian countries with greater or lesser degrees of socialism. Sweden is a good example. UK ante-Thatcher with nationalized coal, steel, and medicine. Essentially every advanced economy except the US has socialized health care. Obamacare is not socialized–or only in part socialized–since it is profit-driven at every stage. Switzerland (which I have lived in for about three years) has private insurance companies, but they are by law non-profit. When my son was born there in 1967, the entire pre-natal care, delivery, and seven days in the hospital (it was a different era) cost me Fr350 (7 days times Fr50 in fact), which was about US$81 in those days, $65 of which was reimbursed by my US health insurance.

I don’t think there is any necessary connection between socialism and totalitarianism and South America used to be rife with right wing totalitarian dictatorships. Arguably, that is Russia right now. I don’t know what to call China. Not exactly socialist, not exactly totalitarian, just their very own combination of features.

14

Well, you can’t really blame the Chinese government’s violent beginning on the communists. The country was basically in a state of anarchy from 1911 on after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the communists just happened to be the winners of a pre-existing civil war. Lemur basically has it right: communist governments arose in states which already had repressive (generally monarchical) governments.

Egypt adopted a quasi-communist system as a result of free-ish elections, though those were immediately preceded by an armed insurrection.

15

Communism was a political system that espoused socialism. But socialism and capitalism are first and foremost economic rather than political systems; communism and democracy are the political systems designed to implement those economic systems.

Capitalism has always worked much better than full socialism. You can see it in the relatively high-quality products produced in capitalist economies, versus the shoddy stuff that communist nations produce. You’ve all read about the quality of shoes in Soviet Russia, that fall apart after a few weeks. You’ve seen those pictures of markets in Russia (especially in Soviet days) with mostly-empty shelves, except in the big department stores in Moscow where the elites got to shop. Contrast with the massively stocked shelves in any Western-style supermarket. Ten brands of contact-lens-fluid to choose from, 20 brands of bread, 50 kinds of dry breakfast cereal, and on and on. You’ve probably read the old Soviet workers’ joke “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”

The point: Communist theorists have always known, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that their system couldn’t work spontaneously. A totalitarian government, with everything centrally planned and forced upon the people, was the only way that such a system could be maintained (and even then, as we’ve seen, it never worked terribly well).

The capitalist economic system, in contrast, thrives in a free market environment (or at least, mostly-free market), and it was understood from the start (at least as far back as Adam Smith and the other political/economic thinkers of the day) that a free market of ideas complemented this.

It was also understood by communist theorists, at least some of them, that communist nations could never compete well with free-market nations, for exactly these reasons. Thus, one thread of socialism that arose was “Revolutionary Socialism”, that evangelical form that seemed driven to export “Revolution” world-wide. Karl Marx, of course, was a primary proponent of this, so much so that this violent form of revolutionary socialism came to be called Marxism after him.

This was in contrast to “utopian socialism”, in which small communes of like-minded people build a small community with shared ownership of almost everything and shared decision-making. This was tried in a few places in America, but the movement never really sprouted legs here. There were other communes in Europe, and of course the Kibbutz system in Israel. This only works when the entire community is there voluntarily and “buys into” the system. And even then, they tend to get mired in local politics, especially if the commune grows beyond some small size. So these can never be successful at a nationwide level, but only as long as they are small local communities of like-minded people.

16

From the OP:

In theory (socialist theory, that is), of course it was supposed to be like this. The theory of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need” sure sounds good, according to a certain mind-set.

One might argue that it really could have been “good for the common man”, even much better than anything capitalism could produce. Of course, it was socialist theorists that made this argument. (See, for example, the final chapters of “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair.)

Well, maybe. Capitalism has its known problems. There is the problem that the rich can create monopolies and get themselves even richer and live utterly lavish lives, while the poor get poorer and live in the utmost squalor. (See: Maquiladoras.) Inequality, at least to some extent, is unavoidable in a capitalist system. It is mathematically certain that in a market-based economy, goods and services must necessarily be priced beyond the reach of some people who need or want those goods or services. (If a good was priced such that everyone could afford it, the sellers could increase their price, selling to fewer people, and increase their profit.) Capitalism, it has been argued, contains the seeds of its own destruction. There are also known market failures, such as “external benefits” and “external costs” which distort the markets.

Thus, progressive nations have found it wise to implement some controls or limits on pure capitalism (much to the horror of economic conservatives who should “Socialism! Communists!” at every social program that any liberal ever imagined). We have Social Security. We have anti-trust laws. We have minimum wage laws. We have workplace safety laws. We have anti-discrimination laws. We have regulations up the wazoo on every facet of economic life. These all fall into the category of “attempts (some more successful than others) to fine-tune the capitalist system to minimize the failures of the system”.

The socialist system purports to solve all the known failures of capitalism. Socialism might indeed be the optimal system, IF it could be fully implemented as theorized. That hasn’t happened, and isn’t going to happen.

17

There are two instances of communist governments being elected.

From 1945 to 1957, San Marino was ruled by a coalition of Communists and Socialists. It ended in a constitutional crisis, the fatti di Rovereta. When the crisis was resolved, a new government was elected, this time a coalition of Socialists and Christian Democrats.

In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas took power by military force in 1979. They won an election in 1984. Leftists claim that the election was fair, Rightists claim that the Sandinistas had their thumb on the scales. In 1990, the Sandinistas lost the election, and the National Opposition Union took power. in 2006, the Sandinistas won the election. International observers generally said that the election was fair.

By the way: According to The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities, by Matthew White, the Sandinistas were the only Marxist revolution in history where the revolutionaries did not rack up a higher body count than the regime they overthrew. Their body count was fairly typical for a Nicaraguan junta.

18

I don’t know about totalitarian and fascist but post-Lenin communist regimes are supposed to be dictatorships. It’s a feature not a bug. The communist party is supposed to run the country on behalf of the people and guide the country along the path to a pure communist society where they will no longer be any need for government. In the real world, no country ever reached that state and the dictatorship of the communist regime served mainly to perpetuate itself.

Socialism is a whole different matter. Lots of socialist countries have never been totalitarian or fascist or dictatorships by any reasonable definition of those terms.

19

I have a hard time believing that the German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany) had a higher body count than its predecessor. That’s not saying anything good about the DDR - it’s just that the Nazis had set the bar really high.

20

I think the distinction may be that the DDR didn’t “overthrow” their predecessor; the Soviets did that, and then they created the DDR within the Soviet zone of occupation. No Marxist revolution = no body count in that revolution.