Ignoring political repression, as well as the effects of communist economic policies, what was the worst economic policy implemented by the USSR, China under Mao, etc.? I am not really looking for things like Lysenkoism or other crazy policies favored by the Fearless Leader, or judging them by the number of deaths they caused, but rather how much they contributed to wrecking that nation’s economy. I would guess it’s a toss-up between central planning and nationalization of industry, but I don’t really know.
I’d go with the Great Leap Forward or Cultural Revolution in China and the dekulakization (or whatever it was called) of the Soviet farms in the late 20’s or early 30’s at pretty epic economic failures. I mean, there are of course myriad failures in both the Soviet and Chinese Communist systems, but these were really beyond the pale and caused not only economic hardship but the deaths of millions.
Centrally-planned economy. Sounds good on paper, never worked in reality. Too many bottlenecks, points of failure, and no flexibility whatsoever. Major reason for Soviet Union failing.
Great Leap Forward (Backwards); gave people little incentive to work, or implemented ludicrous measures to “boost” productivity. Immense damage to China’s economy.
During the famines of the 1990s in North Korea, the international community kept telling the regime that they could feed their people with mild market reforms like private farms. The north Korean leadership preferred having millions starve over risking letting the peasants control such a small aspect of their own lives.
If I’m understanding what the OP is asking, I’d argue that a lack of quality control was probably the worst economic feature of communism.
Not all goods and services are created equal. Sometimes a higher cost is justified by higher quality. But most communist systems just looked at quantity (which is easy to measure and control). A company would be given a quota of something like “make ten thousand radios” without any standard on the quality of those radios. Naturally, companies would comply with the quota in the most effortless manner possible by making the cheapest and easiest to produce radios. The lack of free market competition meant there were no negative consequences for making low quality radios. So why put additional resources and effort into making quality radios when there was no incentive for doing so?
When you take the farmland from the people who have owned it, tilled it, and produced off it and give this farmland to authoritarian bureaucrats, you get famine and millions of deaths.
I sometimes wonder how it would have gone for Russia if the Socialist Revolutionaries had prevailed instead of the Bolsheviks. The SR version of “land-socialization” was to distribute land to the peasants instead of nationalizing/collectivizing it.
(An outcome where a faction not in any way “socialist” or calling itself “socialist” prevails is probably implausible under the circumstances; all such were comparatively marginal.)
[shrug] That’s a venerable American tradition, isn’t it? Every Homestead Act distributed to whites land that had been taken from the Indians.
In Russia’s case, the land would have been taken from the nobility, the landlords. Well, remember, the French Revolution happened at least in part because the lords were still demanding their feudal dues long after they had ceased to serve any function of visible benefit to their peasants. And the Russian nobility were a whole lot worse; there was little love for them (or in them).
Dekulakization was a counterpart to the more economic plan collectivizing farms. It was more political repression and liquidation of the kulak class that didn’t support what had been predominantly an urban revolution. The deaths were more a feature to achieve those ends than a bug. Mass executions, deportation to Siberia, and starvation were used to bring the rural areas under control.