Wasn’t the real problem with the soviet state that it was never able to divest the rich? The tsarists were killed, but there was a structure of wealth and power still in place all the way from the beginning to now. Power based on connections and wealth in very real western terms of some people having many houses and cars and people to drive and tend them.
I.e., the class stuggle was won by the upper class.
Do I get full credit if I answer, “both”?
No government has really gone through with a full adoption of Marxist tenets; the Khmer Rouge’s “Year Zero” program is probably the most ideologically dogmatic attempt at complete social and economic egalitarianism. Of course, their attempt at enforcement reads like Kurt Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron as illustrated by Francis Bacon. Ultimately, the effort to make everyone economically, socially, and intellectual equal resulted in nothing short of effective genocide and decimation of their economy.
Efforts in larger nations, like the USSR and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, were mitigated more by rampant corruption (which often served as any underlying market-driven economy atop of the twin failures of collectivism and central planning) but that didn’t prevent economic destitution, not to mention the deaths of tens of millions of people under totalitarian regimes.
The number of “successful” (in terms of quality of life) Communist or dogmatic totalitarian-socialist nations can be counted on the fingers of one hand, and then only by overlooking the fact that these nations prospered by a net influx of revenue either from the sale of natural resources or strategic geograpic location.
Communism, it seems, is a system that is prone to corruption and failure through gross mismanagement by reality-challenged dominant personality cults. Unchecked laissez-faire market economies have their robber-barons and devistating cyclic fluctuations, to be certain, but they seem to rarely provide a rich environment for fomenting stable totalitarian governments; a government authority given too much control over economic markets begins to exert that influence over non-economic aspects of their citizenry. From thence, it’s a short road to authoritarianism. (Hence, the wise quasi-seperation of the Federal Reserve from direct government control.)
Stranger
?!?!?!? :eek: You don’t call it divesting the rich when you have the banning private ownership of land, nationalizing what industry existed, and sending not just the aristocracy but even independent farmers to the gulag?
The Soviet Union did have a ruling class (the nomenklatura) but not as a result of not doing away with the previous ruling class.
Some wit once characterized the Soviet Union as “the Post Office run by the Mafia.”
As flip as it might be, that little bon-mot comes close to describing just what did the Soviets in. That sort of thing can be held together only as long as the Dons don’t start fighting with each other. After all Russia knew only autocratic leadership or civil war from Ivan the Terrible until the 1990s and there is every indication that it has not slipped far from that model.
I think the real problem with the soviet state was that the centrally planned economy was unable to generate sufficient long-term economic growth - as a result living standards and overall output fell further and further behind western nations. All economic systems have various inefficiencies, including some losses to corruption, but if the pie keeps growing enough that most people get bigger slices on a yearly basis then they are usually sustainable.
The example most often quoted is China - corruption, social inequality and such are just as bad as they ever were in the USSR, but since most people can see if not improvements then at least the possibility of such, the system is moderately stable. To what extent history and culture affect things is unknown and a matter of considerable debate.
China has a dual-system and its recent economic success is probably due to pro-market reform.
http://www.1990institute.org/publications/pubs/ISUPAP9.html
IMO the Soviets were not primarily communists, but primarily totalitarians. Trying to follow Marxian communist ideals for large groups requires a police state to force people to behave in ways they would not otherwise behave. (And does not achieve communism, but results in a repressive police state.)
The Marxian communist ideal works well for small groups of people. (Most healthy families operate this way. To each according to his need. From each according to his ability.) But in a society of thousands to millions, without face to face contact between each or most of the members, there is no effective way to ensure most people are following the rules. (In a family, you chastise lazy uncle Bob, or remind everybody that little Mary really does need her glasses more than granny needs a new parka.) You get into having to tell granny she can’t have her new parka because some nameless faceless orphan on the other side of the country needs glasses. Why should granny believe you? Maybe faceless orphan has lost 20 pairs of glasses this month and needs to learn a lesson. Maybe granny has come down with pneumonia. Who is keeping track of all this?
In central planning, a small group of grey-haired men is supposed to be keeping track of all this. But they can’t, because it’s too much information. And if they could, they’d ALL have to be Incredibly Fair-Minded People, to not shunt a little something extra to their own grannies who are feeling a bit chilly these days. So they imperfectly, and usually unfairly, dictate to people what they can or can’t produce, and can or can’t consume, without an effective feedback system to let them know where/how they’re getting it wrong. (Granny can’t just announce at the kitchen table that her old parka got stolen, and her need is now in fact greater than Mary’s.)
All this can be avoided if you just let the price mechanism operate and harness the individual cost/benefit analyses of the thousands to millions of economic actors in the system.
Which is what China has discovered.
I read today that Afghanistan has a widening rich-poor gap, where peasants look for but can’t find jobs that pay $4 a day, while there are huge hotels for foreigners, built with reconstruction money, where the connected can buy $4000 wrist watches.
The revolution just changed elites… communism seems bound to fail especially if you engage in a Cold War that demands huge amounts of your GNP ! 
Leaving out all theoretical objections to Communism (as written by Marx), there’s a major, major problem with it. In practice, it requires everyone to suddenly and completely engage in behaviors wholly not in their own interest, with no information pipeline, in a manner which humans cannot actually do.
Marx postulated that workers would, more or less, rise up en masse and destroy the capitalists. The state would rapidly wither away, leaving merely the mass of the proletariat from one end of the world to another. Like it or not, this is contrary to human activity. There are always leaders. Some are wiser, more concerned with being a good representative, ec, but there are always leaders in any post-tribal society (and even in most tribal societies), because we can’t organize efectively without them.
Leninist and Maoist Communism was considerably different, but then, we’ve seen where that ended up.
This is probably true. This is also indiciative of a healthy economy.
Here’s the thing: you can never have a wealthy society with a rich-poor gap as tin as in a poor society, because while there is a limit on how poor you can be (broke), you can always get richer.
In Afganistan under the Taliban, economic activity was suppressed by virtue of the many restrictions placed on education, finance, foreign exchange and work, etc. There simply weren’t many opportunities. Now, not only has economic activity exploded, but numerous wealthy foreigners are visiting the country. This is a good thing.
Whoops, forgot to respond here.
Even before the WW2 or the Cold War, the Soviets were strip-mining their own economy. The gulag was, in some ways, an economic engine that keep the entire thing going, in the only way possible without disrupting the political status quo. While there were certainly other factors, I don’t think it entirely a coincidence that the Soviet economy started to collapse after the gulags were phased out (mostly).
Of course, I think the Soviets probably couldn’t aford to run the gulag, either. It drained too many resources itself, particularly human ones, and slowly ate away at the political moorings of society. Too many people came back from the gulags, and while they were mostly too beaten down to revolt, they could never serve the Party with the enthusiasm it needed. Something very similar happened in China, too. Essentially, Communism became a cancer so destructive, it started killing itself!
:dubious: I’m sure things must be better than under the Taliban, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone refer to post-Taliban Afghanistan as a “healthy economy”. It’s a basket case. The most important economic sector is opium cultivation. In fact, it came up in this thread – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304345 – that many Afghans remember the Communist period (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_Republic_of_Afghanistan), with Soviet intervention, as comparing favorably with everything that came before or after, including the present situation. At least the Soviets built roads and schools and things.
I’m actually somewhat curious as to why no one has bothered to take Stalin to task for the many horrors he inflicted on his people.
Clearly, a lot of what the Bolsheviks did under the banners of egalitarianism and communism bore very little resemblance to their namesake (and even less to Marx’s ideals), but I think it could be said that Stalin is the one who truly breathed life into the phrase, “the horrors of collectivism.”
The paradox of communism (less so with modern, Europian style socialism), is that because of human nature—either due to “shortcomings” of selfishness or a natural love of freedom, both personal and economic—communism and collectivism can only happen at the end of a gun. However, if it happens at the end of a gun, then it in no way resembles true communistic ideals. Whether or not the leaders of the Revolution realized this hypocrisy, I do not know, but it’s quite clear that Stalin was either completely blind (less likely), or just absolutely did not care.
It might be said by some that he was acting in a way that most communist leaders see themselves acting; that is to say, for the greater good of the people. To that I say: get a clue. Stalin was not a communist; he was a dictator, monarch, tsar, totalitarian, whatever anyone wants to call him. The true failure of the Russians was due to his sacrifice of the people to the great god of the state, and those after him who perpetrated his system of terror. None of this represented communism in any way other than rhetorical.
In short, as many in this thread have pointed out, communism has its obvious flaws and failings. However, I think it’s a bit shallow to equate the failure of the Soviet system with the inherent failings of communism.
I didn’t say the Afgan economy was perfect. I said it was healthy; growing. It can’t be expected to heal the wounds of years of Taliban-inflicted trouble overnight.
First off, Stalin did it biggest, but he was not the only nor the first COmmunist leader to create a horrific system of terror and repression. Lenin was his forerunner in all respects. So it can hardly be blamed merely on him. Mao certainly went pretty independant in that respect.
Secondly, whose Communism? Communism didn’t begin and end with Marx. Lenin had his say, and he differed considerably from Marx. Come to think of it, I’d have to say he was considerably more successful.
This is a response to someone else, I think.
Well, I used Stalin as an example because Russia was the topic of the original post. Mao was no better in that respect, in the same sense that none of the communist satellite dictators were true communist. My point was that his state run enslavement of his people was a key factor in the countries eventual downfall. Again, it’s the paradox I pointed out in my previous post.
Lenin’s oppression seemed more like the French Reign of Terror, in which the new revolutionaries get carried away in both their taste for vengeance with the previous oppressors and the need to consolidate their power. In neither case was it acceptable. Stalin’s horrors came from a different place: one being paranoia regarding outside threats to his personal absolute power, exemplified by his Hitler-esque purges of all actual or perceived political threats; the other being the inevitable total war with Germany.
It doesn’t matter whose communism it was. I am aware that Marx was not the originator, but there are basic principles that were followed by all schools of communist thought. First and foremost would be the sovereignty of the working class; however, these dictators have one by one tyrannically deposed this sovereignty in favor of their own agendas. This is communism? The terrible oppression and enslavement of the working class? I don’t think so, it was just the exchange of one oligarchy for another, one that was even less capable of maintaining working government long-term. And that is my point; it wasn’t necessarily communism that failed in Russia, but the oppressive system of Sovietism.
My point is that each of these people were certainly Communist according to them, and they often wrote theoretical works about their brand of Communism well before they took power. Coming off of his writings, Lenin’s acts as Soviet leader were not surprises.
In any case, we can more or less discount other Communism, because it simply didn’t work. Never has. It was empirically proven to not work in numerous instances in the 19th (yes, 19th) century, and not for lack of trying. The remainder is the Soviet and Chinese Communism.
Marxism, strictly speaking, is a third way. It’s also a dead end, and relies on the man’s own very incorrect assumptions, more or less none of which are accurate.
Hmm, what about the Communist government of the Indian state of Kerala? You may consider them disqualified as “real Communists” because they were democratically elected and because (like the modern Chinese) they operate with a market economy. But they definitely subscribe to all those Marxian principles about the importance of education and social support and worker’s rights and redistributism that many people seem to feel are simply impossible for human beings to implement on a large scale.
And they’ve definitely had some successes; Kerala has a higher standard of living than most of the rest of India, and much higher literacy/education rates, especially among women. I agree with samudra that a true communist structure (like a true libertarian structure) really works only in small, say family-sized, groups. But Kerala has certainly got close to achieving some of the classic communist goals in a state of some 30 million people.
Again, though, their economic system is fundamentally based on markets rather than central planning, so maybe this doesn’t “count” as communism per se. I’m inclined to agree that completely centrally planned economies just intrinsically cannot work on a large scale.
That suggests that the failure of Russian communism was intrinsic, in so far as it depended on the fatally inefficient centrally planned economy. On the other hand, a large part of the failure involved features of the system that aren’t necessarily intrinsic to communism, such as repression, corruption, denial of human rights, and lack of democratic accountability. So as Stranger suggests, the answer to the OP is probably “both”.
Kerala works because in India, the communists make up a small third party to the nationalist Hindus and the Congress Party. It exists in the space between the power of these two dominant forces, and has the effect of diffusing their power and therefore stemming the corruption that stops up the Indian bureaucracy everywhere else. Kind of an informal check and balance.
Which means that it’s the exception that proves the rule. As a rule, communism is all about grabbing all the power and putting it in one central place, which of course minimizes the checks (of the workers) and maximizes the balances (of the party).
And that, in a nut, is why it fails. Well, that and the fact that communism despises cities, and does an even more thoroughgoing job of milking their wealth than does the usual national government. The Khmer Rouge, in following the “purest” form of communism, emptied the cities, which is the natural end of the ideology. This also explains why its appeal has wound up being so much greater in rural backwaters than in industrialized countries. The allegedly less radical socialist parties of the West have and had, back in the day, very little in common with their Eastern communist cousins; the former are vehicles of trade unions, whose stock-in-trade is negotiation, compromise, and elections - for contracts and officers. The latter were, and to the extent they’re still around, are vehicles for power-crazed would-be dictators. I would guess that the communists of Kerala are a lot closer to Western socialists than Eastern Maoists.
The divide is defined today by looking south at Venezuela and Brazil. The right-wing at first went nuts over both Chavez and Lula; I said to any conservative who brought this up that Chavez would wind up being the nutcase, whereas Lula would wind up being a normal politician. Sure enough, to all but the most rabid right-wingers, this is today how it looks. Why? Because Chavez is a power-mad military man, and Lula was a trade unionist before he was a politician; the former has dictatorship in his bones, the latter democracy.
No. The real problem is that the economic model of communism fails once you get more than about 100 people involved. In other words, it could work reasonably well for a small village, but that’s about it.
Failure to follow through.
Yup.
They just didn’t get around to shooting everybody.