The basic principles of Communism, I understand them, are straightforward.
Instead of private individuals owning the “means of production” (all the factories and land in a nation), the citizens collectively own everything. Instead of rewarding people by the market price for their labor, you give everyone what they need, and I guess some people were rewarded for their skills and accomplishments somehow. I’m uncertain on how that worked - I understand that more skilled workers in Communist systems were rewarded somehow.
Instead of relying on markets to decide what gets built, a Central Committee, supposedly elected by the citizens, decides what is to be built and produced over the next 5 years and what national projects are to be funded.
So one would expect under this system a lot of inefficiency because there’s not the direct feedback between consumers and producers (through money exchange) of a market system. You’d expect for those 5 year plans to contain a lot of things that are impossible, and won’t be completed, and other goals that are too easy, and get completed and the workers are then idle.
But I don’t see how this turned into “mass murder and dictatorship”. Fundamentally there’s no reason why the Communist government couldn’t hold fair elections and allow the people to vote for the representatives they want. Basic tenants of Communism could be enshrined in a Constitution, so the elected representatives can’t override that, but various compromises would be possible within it’s guidelines.
So what mechanically about Communism enables the State to slaughter people by the millions? What allows the State to subvert any pretense of democracy and to instead be run by a single dictator? There must be some trend, some mechanism that led to this happening, some failure of the system.
Exactly. Imagine if the government controlled everything, including the press and all other media. Imagine if keeping your job depended on you not criticizing the government. Corruption is pretty much guaranteed.
Ok, then why was corruption tolerated? Why didn’t communist governments take seriously any reported corruption and hold the government officials accountable? Unlike in a capitalist system, an accused government official wouldn’t be able to hire better lawyers - he would get a public defender like everyone else.
The fundamental problem was that full-on communism has never been popular enough to come to power by peaceful or democratic means, which ensured that the governing class had to be ruthless and paranoid to hold on to power. In places with democratic governance and pluralistic traditions, it has been perfectly possible to nationalize whole industries without bloodshed or repression. That doesn’t go all the way toward remaking society, though, and it can be prone to swinging back toward private ownership.
In theory, the violence of communism was transitional. It was necessary to take a lot of property away from its owners, after all. In practice, the inevitable failure to live up to production targets was a political embarrassment, and it was always tempting to blame those failures on the sabotage by enemies. Foreign enemies were of course constantly held up as a threat, but domestic individuals, institutions, or classes that might have formed power centers independent of the state could be targeted as well.
You can enshrine all the rights you want in a Constitution – it doesn’t mean a thing as long as you take care to include weasel words.
Section II, Chapter 7, Article 39 of the 1977 USSR Constitution:
It sounds good, doesn’t it? But notice that last part about “by Soviet laws”? If the ruling class think that the people are getting out of line, all they have to do is change the law. Presto! Certain pesky “rights” just disappear.
And of course, the poor economic conditions made a mockery out of a good bit of that chapter.
And then there’s a real gem in Article 56:
Do you begin to see how the mere existence of a Constitution guarantees nothing?
The original version of Marxism was based on the idea that people would willingly work to their full potential in support of the idealistic paradise they lived in. You just had to remove the capitalist exploiters and everything would fall into place naturally. Communism was the normal state for human beings to live in unless capitalists interfered.
Then Lenin came along and introduced some new ideas. He said that the world didn’t have to wait for the ideal communist society to appear naturally. If a small group of communists worked together they could create the conditions for a communist society to appear. A lot of people might not see the benefits of such a communist society in advance but the communists would be pushing ahead anyway for the sake of these people.
So in the real world communist regimes were based on the idea that you didn’t just wait for communism to happen; you had to make it happen. Some people might resist you now because they didn’t know any better. But you were doing this for their own good and they would eventually see that once you were done. So communism in the real world was sort of partial version of communism that would lead to ideal communism.
And because communism had reached its ideal state and some people didn’t understand the process, it was necessary for the communist regime to push them along the right path. With force, if needed. The regime justified this by saying it was for everyone’s own good.
The other justification was that communism didn’t exist in isolation. There were plenty of capitalist societies out there and they wanted to thwart communism in order to preserve their own power. So capitalist societies opposed communist societies, both openly and covertly. Communism, which was working for the good of everyone (even people living in capitalist societies), had to defend itself from these capitalist attacks. So when a communist regime killed off a bunch of its capitalist enemies, it was only acting in self-defense.
The Russian Revolution was a violent affair. It wasn’t like everyone just voted for the Bolsheviks, who gradually turned repressive. Instead it was a literal civil war, with people shooting each other, armies marching, bombs going off. The Russian Empire was an autocratic absolute monarchy that was destroyed by people with guns shooting people.
And so using violence to sweep away the old dictatorship, it was very natural for the people who seized power to continue to use violence to ensure that they came out on top of the new system. And then when they controlled the new government, it was natural to continue to use violence to consolidate their control, kill their political opponents, and seize property to be put to use for the purposes of the state, with those state purposes decided by them.
So in a country where power flowed from the barrel of a gun, after the revolution power continued to flow from the barrel of a gun. From a system where the people had no rights came a new system where the people had no rights. But at least now every atrocity was done in the name of the people. And while the Russian people had no expectation of fairness, at least there was the prospect that once the old regime was swept away and things were being run on modern scientific principles there would at least be bread for the people.
Of course in the end what the people got was not an ancient aristocratic authoritarian government, but a modern scientific totalitarian dictatorship.
Perhaps you mean Marxist socialism? Neither the USSR nor Maoist China ever said they had a communist system. It goes like this:
Worker rapture/revolution which establishes socialism
Socialism
???
Communism
In a market economy, prices function as both information and incentive. Not just incentives for workers but for entrepreneurs to engage in creative destruction. Without that information, you get lots of the problems for which government projects are known. Without the incentives, how do you get people to do what you want them to do and to find the better ways to do it? Command economies are aptly named as you end up with a military-like system. There isn’t much in the way of carrots but there’s always sticks.
As for corruption, if you centralize nearly the whole society’s resources and give power over them to administrators, the main aspiration in society will be to become one of those administrators to have a turn at the trough.
Then perhaps the Communist Party of the Soviet Union shouldn’t have been the de facto ruling body and its leader the de facto and often de jure leader of the country, and the Communist Party of China shouldn’t be playing the same role there.
It’s just ludicrous not to call the USSR and China’s political structures communism. They are the definition of the modern sense of the term. It’s as silly as denying that the U.S. is a democracy because the Founding Fathers thought of it as a republic. The modern sense of the term democracy uses the U.S. as its definition. The meaning of words lies in their usage, not in their roots or some abstract ideal form.
“The first step to a successful revolution is destroying all competing revolutionaries.”
Unfortunately, Marxist Revolutions never end. They never reach a point where they have reached their goals (because they’re never really trying to reach a point where government disappears) so they are continually destroying everyone who is not strictly loyal to the party line, or who is suspected of not being loyal. Or are just enemies of the various level functionaries who have the power to kill their own opponents under the banner of revolution.
New Radicals, Jehovah Made This Whole Joint for You
Another factor that should be considered is that dictatorship is negatively correlated with education and per capita income, while being positively correlated with disease.
Which means the poorer, sicker and less educated the people are, the more likely the government is to be a dictatorship. And what kinds of nations are appealing to communism? Nations full of poor, sick, uneducated people.
So that probably plays a role. Has communism been tried on a middle class, healthy, educated nation? The USSR is about the only one I can think of, and they were more middle income than upper income. However rates of education were fairly decent and health wasn’t terrible under the USSR. But the USSR was still corrupt.
Also most of the deaths under communism were under Mao and Stalin. Once they were deposed, the deaths went down dramatically despite the governments still being communist.
Chinese “communism” is/was no less of a joke than the Soviet version. I hope someone can post a link to translations of the best whoppers. I mean, in no case were the people under any illusions.
it doesn’t. the problem is that Communism (as Marx defined it) only works on a small scale. a neighborhood, or village. when everyone in a (small) community knows each other, they’re all more willing to work within the “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs” standard. Because I can see the “from each” part I contribute to going to the “to each” part helping someone I know. We’ll all chip in to help old Mrs. McGinty get a new roof for her house.
On a nationwide scale, human nature just makes it unworkable. Cracked may be a humor website, but they published something relevant when they talked about how each of us has a “monkeysphere.” We’re almost all happy to help people we know (those inside our monkeysphere) in any way we can. Which is why the principles of communism work on a small scale. On the other hand, we don’t see people we don’t know (those outside our monkeysphere) as people at all, and we’re far less likely to be willing to give up anything to help them. how many upper middle class white people do you know who complain about “welfare queens” and yet they’ve never even met one person actually collecting welfare benefits?
Put simply, human nature means that communism can’t work on a national scale, and can only be simulated for a while at gunpoint. and to make that work at gunpoint, you need a rigid power structure. And as history has repeatedly shown, any power structure attracts the power hungry. and the power hungry are easily corruptible.
Communism or no communism, being an asshole just because you do not know someone is not human nature, merely asshole nature. So in this case it is best to remember that Cracked is a humour website (if it’s even still funny these days) and not take that stuff too seriously.
I went to a Catholic High School in the 1960s that was taught by the Christian Brothers. They were fond of saying that communism itself wasn’t evil, since they themselves lived in a communistic system in the Brothers’ House. (They said what was wrong was "atheistic communism.)
believe me, I agree with you. I attended Catholic school from kindergarten through 8th grade in the '80s, and feel the same way. It’s an uncomfortable truth that a large part of the Catholic Church’s teachings are inherently socialist (as the real Jesus Christ preached.) Y’know, the “give of yourself” thing, or “God will judge you based on your good works for others.”
it’s too bad that Republican Jesus has taken over everyone’s mindset.