Why did Communism mean dictatorship and mass murder?

Great Debates
41

Communists don’t see it that way. They feel their system is the natural one and capitalism is the artificial one.

And if you try to see it from an objective standpoint, they have some justification. Capitalism, after all, is not a natural system. Animals aren’t capitalist. Even among humans, capitalism isn’t natural. Capitalism was invented in the 18th century.

But you can find some version of communism in nature. The most basic element of society, the family, works on a communist system. You don’t charge your children for the services you give them. You give them what they need simply because they need it not because they pay you for it. And you work hard to obtain the things your family needs. Communism is simply those same economics applied to the entire world instead of just the family.

And Leninism also finds an analog in the family. The communist party is the parents. They’re the ones who know what’s best for the family so they set the rules. They love the children and want what’s best for them but they’re also aware that the children are immature and don’t know the things the parents know. So the parents do things like force the children to brush their teeth and do their homework and get off the computer and go to bed. Their children complain bitterly about how mean the parents are. But the parents are doing all these “mean” things with the best possible intentions; they want the children to grow up into mature responsible adults who will look back and realize the parents were right.

That’s the way the communist party sees itself in relationship to the people it controls. Sure the people may complain but they just don’t understand that the communist party is making them do these things for their own good. Someday when true communism has been reached and the state has withered away, the people will realize the communist party was right all along.

The problem is that while these analogies sound reasonable on the surface, they’re wrong. Economics that work at a family level will not work at a larger scale. You can’t have a national economy where some people produce and others consume. A family is a unit of a small size that can by supported by one or two individuals. Trying to support a nation that way will just suck the producing individuals dry. A national economy needs pretty much everyone to be a producer as well as a consumer.

And it’s hubris that sustains the communist party’s belief that it knows better than everyone else. When people disagree with communist doctrine, it doesn’t mean that they’re uninformed children. They’re rational adults pointing out the real flaws in communist ideology.

42

Also, any dictatorship - regardless of the justification for it - lends itself to corruption.

I’m sure Stalin would buy into the justification given by Little Nemo above, but few if any people would take seriously the notion that his real motivation in his purges was purely about his being a “parent” who needed to protect and care for his “children”.

43

so if the communist hadn’t won they’d of had pretty much what they have now?

44

The Russians did have something like liberal democrats in power after the first revolution. One might say that they didn’t have much experience of the rule of law or liberal democracy but then, no country started out as a liberal democracy with the rule of law.

Or they might have ended up with something like Kemalism in Turkey: That’s also a large collapsing polity that lost a war and got invaded. Selective authoritarianism that turns into a liberal-ish democracy with intermittent coups and significant government intervention in the economy but nowhere near as bad as communism and not as messed up as Putinism. The process of converting into a communist country and out of it caused a lot of damage by itself.

Or they could have followed the same course as Japan after the Meiji restoration. We might call that fascist too. I don’t know how a fascist Russia would have gotten along with Nazi Germany. They might still have had a war over Eastern Europe or they might simply have partitioned it without a Barbarossa.

Which would have meant Germany didn’t have to concentrate on the Eastern front which would have let it focus Westward which must be the topic of an alternate history novel somewhere.

45

This is astounding coming from you. I always thought you were one of the more knowledgeable posters.

Some of the terminology may have been invented in the 18th century, but capitalism itself is vastly older. Some of Jesus’ parables involve the employee/employer relationship, and the paying of wages. And there’s the famous parable of the ten talents, where the people who invested their money and made a profit are praised. And the money-changers whom Jesus chased out of the Temple were most assuredly capitalists–they saw an unfilled market niche, and took advantage of it.

46

Real capitalism absolutely relies on formal capital and stock markets, which may predate the 18th century by a little bit but is not too far from the mark. The use of money and barter has an indisputably ancient history, of course.

47

The oldest writing sample known to exist is a 5,000 year old receipt for clothing sent by ship.
Someanimals do practice capitalist economic concepts such as supply and demand, and underground fungi exchange phosphorous for carbon with surrounding tree roots.

48

I dunno, we have a lot of accounts of various native American tribespeoples who used to torture and mutilate captives to death for entertainment. A lot of tribes called themselves “The People” and everyone else some variation of “those two-legged animals”. US servicemen fighting in Afghanistan have repeatedly made the comment about the locals that “if you weren’t born in their village they don’t consider you human”. This isn’t universal throughout all cultures but it occurs enough that I think empathy for strangers is something that has to be taught.

As for communism, I think it’s a number of things:

First, the ruthlessness necessary for a successful revolution. Take away the highblown ideals and what you actually see- the ground level view of revolution as it were- is hard-eyed unsmiling men with guns determined to order the world to their liking and ready to view anyone who would obstruct or impede them as enemies worthy of death. Since the People didn’t all spontaneously rise up against the oppressors like the anarchists called them to, and since they didn’t gain political consciousness like the socialists tried to teach them to, what was left was the revolutionary cadre making sure that if the masses are sheep, then by golly they’ll be the Revolution’s sheep- or else.

Then you have the fact that in a dirt-poor under-industrialized country the regime starts out with almost no assets except the power to organize labor. And since in the short term the state has next to nothing to reward the workers with, the only recourse is to force them to work for next to nothing in the interim. To more or less make them slaves of the state.

Then there’s the fact that in a revolutionary nation, ideology is power. One of Marxism’s central tenets is that social beliefs and customs are malleable,to the point where you can’t argue that something is “against human nature” because there is no belief in any such animal.You can’t say that communism doesn’t work, because it would presumably work IF everyone was a communist; so it’s part of the Revolution’s task to break the mores of society and remake society in the new pattern. This means changing peoples’ attitudes and beliefs. Anything can be ideologically reinterpreted to fit into the “new” mindset. Those who resist the process are reactionaries, perhaps even counter-revolutionaries! Meanwhile, exactly whose ideology becomes official policy becomes a bone of contention. You have the somewhat less radical elements, you have the radicals who insist on a total and clean break with the past, and then you have the ultra-radicals who consider even the radicals half-hearted compromisers. And as tyrants have known throughout history, there’s no faster and surer way of eliminating political opponents than to use the law enforcement authority of the state to declare them criminals. Made much easier of course in the climate of defending against “counter-revolution”. Simply to stay in power (and alive), the Leader becomes the undisputed Pope of communism, with whom even the smallest disagreement is treason against the Revolution.

And once politics suffuses everything, once industrial production becomes one of the government’s functions, that becomes politicized too. What matters isn’t doing a good job; it’s whether your superiors think you’re doing a good job. In fact reporting truthfully on how poorly everything is running becomes slander against the state. As long as you can keep your political masters happy, nothing else matters. With ideology and propaganda backed by ruthless force, the only reality that counts is the one that determines whether you’re interrogated to death in a cell by the secret police. When everything is a lie, what matters is whose lie wins.

This descent into solipsistic madness only gets short-circuited when either the regime is crushed from without, or when the necessity of dealing with external reality forces some compromise in the name of remaining functional. In a completely closed system such as North Korea or Orwell’s fictional Oceania, it could conceivably continue indefinitely.

49

If the use of money and receipts is enough to be capitalist, then every transaction is capitalist and that word loses all meaning - especially when using premises and arguments predicated on the presumption of a specific definition of capitalism, of which “money and receipts” is not.

As for that cute article… are you seriously saying that any form of market (supply, demand, and exchange between the two) is instantly capitalist? See above, but replace “money and receipts” with “any form of market.”

By your way of thinking, I could argue that Soviet Russia proved capitalism didn’t work by failing. They used money, receipts and even had markets. So lets not go there, yeah?

50

Under communism as envisioned by its creators their would be no money, and no receipts, and no markets. Everyone would contribute according to their ability and receive according to their need.
Thus what the USSR proved was that it was impossible to get to real communism and that even trying to do so meant mass murder and misery for the survivors.

51

You’re pretty much wrong about everything, there. Communism wasn’t meant to have elections, because it wasn’t meant to have a government. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat was just an intermediate step between Capitalism and being able to abolish the government altogether.

Five year plans are generally quite efficient, markets aren’t, and Communism doesn’t necessarily involve five year plans anyway.

The USSR has a constitution.

And ultimately your argument is based on a false premise, that there is a correlation between communism and despotism.

There were murderous communist dictatorships in Africa, like Mengistu’s Ethiopia, and there were murderous capitalist dictatorships, like Zaire under Mobutu. North Vietnam was preferable to South Vietnam on such issues. North Korea was no worse than South Korea to start with, obviously developments have taken place since then which change things there.

Most states that became communist dictatorships were already dictatorships. Castro was better than what Cuba had before. With the exception of Stalin there’s not much to choose between the Tsars, the Politburo, the post-Communist oligarchs and Putin.

Honestly, I can’t think of a single country which has gone from a democracy to a communist dictatorship, whereas I could name a dozen off the top of my head which have been destroyed by capitalism.

Perhaps a more informative thread would be “Why does Capitalism corrode democracy like a cancer on the body politic?”

52

The richest, most successful nations in the world today are generally considered ‘capitalist’. Every one of these nations does have some redistribution of wealth, and in some of them the government owns some of the means of production (sovereign wealth funds).

The major technical advances of recent times are generally credited with being made by a mixture of government funded research and consumer demand. Consumer demand is a crucial driving force. The reason why, say, smartphones get improved every year is because consumers prefer the faster, flashier phones over the older, slower models. Presumably under a central ‘5 year plan’, we’d all still be using Nokia brick phones because the State decided that was adequate for mobile telecommunications. (which actually wouldn’t be that bad…)

So believe it or not, I am not actually slanted against communism. Now that we are mere decades away from having intelligent robots perform nearly all labor, we kind of need a government structure meant for this situation. Capitalism will fail completely in such a world - all the robots and all the land and all the automation software IP would end up being owned by about 10 people, who would be trillionaires, while everyone else would be peasants and unable to find any job at all.

But last time Communism got tried, not only was it less efficient (which hardly matters if robots are doing the work - who cares if they are inefficient) but a lot of people were murdered by the state. So I’m wondering if the whole idea is inherently unfeasible or what. The “Universal Basic Income” that all the tech sites parrot around is basically communism.

53

Stalin and his supporters leaned more towards the “We must defend communism against its capitalist enemies” argument.

54

To add to what others have said, capitalism is more than just trade and the use of money. Capitalism is basically the idea that you can create wealth through trade; so two people can engage in a financial transaction and both of them can become wealthier. Previous economic systems had been based on the premise that wealth was essentially finite; if you got richer it meant that somebody else was now poorer.

Look at the classical views on lending money at interest, or usury as it was known. People acknowledged that it existed and that usurers were making a profit. But usurers were not seen as investors in the modern sense. The view was that they were preying on other people by taking their money for themselves.

55

I don’t think this is correct.

I don’t think this is true either. My impression is that people viewed usurers like we view loan sharks - or perhaps credit card lenders - nowadays. It’s not that they were taking other people’s money. Rather, it’s that they were getting people into debt that they couldn’t appreciate and which they found it increasingly difficult to climb out of.

Since the economy was less capitalistic to begin with, business didn’t conventionally operate based on borrowed money. Someone who borrowed money would generally be someone who temporarily fell on hard times, and needed to (hopefully) temporarily borrow money until they could turn it around. That didn’t always work out so well, and usurers would be the people who took advantage of these down-on-their-luck people for their own benefit. But that doesn’t imply that people thought wealth was finite.

56

That was my point above. It’s never been popular enough to win an election, and that’s why it’s inherently violent. One has to force people into communism.

57

<Snipped.>

No, it really is not. At no point in the history of the Soviet Union did the leaders (or anyone else) ever claim to have achieved Communism. It was always socialism working toward communism. The ruling party was the Communist Party because that was the political ideology and the goal toward which they were working (supposedly). I think it is not very useful to use the word Communism WRT the USSR or China. It may be a layperson’s shorthand for “one party rule with a centrally planned economy and a Communist ideology.” But in a discussion of political and/or economic systems, it muddies the waters to state that either of these countries ever achieved Communism.

58

That’s not really an endorsement of communism. If I’m following your argument, the regimes that were identified as communist in the real world were actually pre-communist. So their flaws don’t count against communism because communism itself wouldn’t have these flaws.

But that just raises a different objection to communism: is it obtainable? “Pre-communist” countries have spend generations moving towards communism. And they never seemed to be any closer to the ideal state of communism than they were when they started. Ideal communism appears to be a utopian system that can’t actually be reached by real societies. And if ideal communism can’t be reached, how do you justify the terrible things the pre-communism does in its efforts to move towards ideal communism?

59

“Communism” is a blanket term with many definitions. Not all of them agree on that, and the system you specifically describe has never been attempted in any grand scale. Other systems, markedly different, have been attempted and failed, but never has what you define as communism been implemented outside of very limited circumstances (where, generally, it is successful).

There is no reason that money could not be used as a medium of exchange, even if that exchange was limited to the state. The state is not required to monitor every single aspect of every individual’s nutrition to ascertain their need. They can assign a wage appropriate to their need and sell food using a currency that disallows direct transfer between citizens (ebay, where all sellers are the state).

No, what the USSR proved was one way to fail to make a light bulb. Are lightbulbs impossible?

60

The problem is that if the attempt to make that bulb resulted in millions of deaths, while in countries where they just kept doing things mostly the same did pretty well, nobody is going to want to make another attempt. Hence my interest in trying to understand what the heck happened : capitalism seems to be slowly heading for a long term outcome of 100 people as trillionaires and everyone else on the entire planet as destitute peasants. And with automation, there will be no need to pay those peasants anything because their labor is not required.