Why were most Communists totalitarian?

Great Debates
1

I’ve seen this discussed before in short form, usually with glib, easy answers like, “power corrupts”, or “they just hijacked the ideology because they wanted power”. But as much as I love to punch totalitarians, it doesn’t ring true to me. Fascism was always just as attractive during the time communism rose, and it seems a lot simpler: there’s us, there’s them outside our borders(as well as minorities inside our borders), and you should be for us. Oh, and here’s a dab of socialism so we seem to be champions of the working class. Communism, though, was freakin’ complicated. People don’t need to be educated to make a nationalist pitch to them. Communism by contrast requires indoctrination and some fairly complex ideas. Plus there’s limited appeal. Nationalism can be sold to poor, middle class, and rich alike. Communism is primarily a lower working class phenomenon. Even the middle class is generally hostile to the idea. Just seems an unnecessarily complicated way to just take power and lord it over people.

But nowhere among those ideas is totalitarianism really a selling point. Nor does it seem particularly necessary to control people’s lives to the extent communist nations did. Why are free unions a problem? Why is a free press a problem? Why must foreign ideas be kept out? Why must the world of the arts be controlled? Why can free elections never be allowed? And most importantly, from an ideological standpoint, what was accomplished between the Bolshevik Revolution and the 1980s when it all started to crumble? Was there any progress at all towards any communist goals? It was just all sacrifice and toil all the time for the workers and not so much as reliable bread supplies or a decent car or house 60 years later, and all the authorities had to offer were exhortations to work harder. They were full of five year economic plans but did they have any plans to actually make the system work for the average person at some point?

2

Because the Soviet Union and Maoist China were Authoritarian socialist states.

The political-economic spectrum is a plane and not a line. The political and economic aspects are separate axis.

3

You think politicians actually believe the messages they use to manipulate the masses?

4

Yes, but why did they choose that? And why did they not change course at some point? Many right-wing dictatorships have transitioned to democracy, but it only happened in communist countries through sudden overthrow. I’d be interested to see what a communist country slowly moving towards greater civil liberties and free elections would look like. We know what the right wing version looks like: Chile, Argentina, Taiwan, Brazil, Haiti, South Korea. Why did no Communist countries attempt this and why are the holdouts still insisting on totalitarian government even as they liberalize their economies?

5

It’s theoretically possible that the issue was simply the inertia of the political reality of those places. The people expected a dictator, and so they got a dictator. You can’t rule through any means other than totalitarianism, because it just don’t work in those places and won’t until the culture adapts.

Except that there were the Utopianists, in the US and elsewhere, who tried to make a go at setting up Socialist/Communist communities where there was no property, everyone got an equal slice of what everyone produced, according to their need, etc. and ultimately those all either fell apart or started to take on dictatorial rule to try and enforce the system. So I don’t think the cultural inertia theory holds, entirely, in this case.

Probably your best answer would be to read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Her politics and philosophy be as they may - which I’ll call the woo fan-girlism of Capitalism - if you ignore that part of the book, which is really sort of the minority of the text, what remains is basically a sequence of vignettes where she goes through and details how Communism promotes bad behavior - bullying, corruption, racketeering, tyranny, etc. - which doesn’t come from her fan-girl philosophy, that part comes from being a person who lived in the USSR and saw how Communist economics interacted with human psychology. As someone who did not grow up under Communism, I am less able to accurately describe the sequence of events that leads to misbehavior.

But basically, humans expect a hierarchy. If forced to live without one, they’ll create one. And, similar to how outlawing alcohol leads to crime but doesn’t make alcohol go away, outlawing hierarchies doesn’t make them go away, it just makes all of the hierarchies criminal. And hierarchies are a lot more fundamental to humanity than alcohol, so that need either ends up tearing everything apart or the criminal hierarchy that is produced will end up taking over and living for itself.

There are just some things about humans - drinking alcohol, having sex, aborting fetuses, cheating on their spouses, forming a hierarchy, etc. - that you can’t stop. Any system you set up will probably do better managing those things rather than criminalizing them, to get the best results.

6

Only, Communism hasn’t only been totalitarian in those countries in which it became the political system, and what in Cuba’s history makes it more likely to be totalitarian than, say… Costa Rica?

The moment Communism is summed up as “the dictatorship of the masses”, you’re saying it is inherently authoritarian. You’re part of the masses or you’re against the wall.

7

Also true.

8

What is a dictatorship of the proletariat though? That sounds to me like democracy, since that’s the only way the will of the people can be roughly ascertained. It would be an authoritarian democracy, with no limits on government other than what the majority wanted, but it would still be democracy.

9

No, because in a democracy people don’t get thrown in prison or killed for disagreeing. A democracy is pluralist; a dictatorship isn’t.

10
11

Short answer: Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

As for what it achieved… Well, rapidly enforced large-scale industrialisation and (some aspects of) social modernisation, surviving and overcoming the Nazi invasion and rebuilding thereafter, but all at great human cost, and only by ingraining habits of a command economy that simply could not adapt to an economy based on small-scale innovation focussed on individual and variable consumer desires (and the political corollaries thereof).

Hard to know whether or how anything different would have been achieved if the Bolsheviks had been seen off in the first place, but you can be reasonably sure that it wouldn’t have been a socialist or communist alternative.

12

I think the appeal of communism is partly the worker’s paradise stuff but also, perhaps mainly when it comes to near-term matters, that it promises ant colony-like unified collective effort. For all its faults, it can be extremely effective at a small number of objectives chosen by central command like getting heavy industry in the '30s, producing weapons in the '40s or the space and nuclear programs in the '50s. In that way, it’s reminiscent of the military and government under conditions of total war. Note how communism gained popularity in Germany, Russia and China after those countries were defeated and vulnerable. See how much more North Vietnam had its shit together than South Vietnam. Also note how the military doesn’t have that much of a pay gap between privates and generals.

Combine that with ignorance or denial of the importance of supply/demand-derived price as information & incentive for economic calculation & innovation purposes and it can be tempting to have a whole society where everyone is made to shut up and pull in the same direction already. Since commies can hardly let profit serve as carrot, they have to use sticks.

13

In typical situations, the governing elite more or less let’s the people do what they do and simply skims off the top or makes modest changes to their practices. Communist elites wanted to change things quite a bit. This requires force.

I think part of the problem was communism didn’t happen like theorists thought it would. Russia was not a matured industrial base ripe for a turn to communism. Neither was China. In Russia, you had the most improbable of successful coups by a middle-class movement, this is not what Marx would have predicted. Therefore, you had ideological folks trying to mold and shape a populace to fit into the box they created.

14

Oh, I know what it achieved in practice, I was just wondering if there was something they were trying for in theory that they made progress on in 60 years when it came to making citizens’ lives better. Was it ever going to be a priority or was the leadership too focused on the struggle and spreading Communism?

15

That sounds reasonable, but it doesn’t explain why the Soviets enforced their version of communism on their satellite allies. Dubcek in 1968 and Solidarity in 1980 shouldn’t have been a threat at all, just different ways of doing things under the communist system.

16

On the hoof opinion, but as communism constitutes among its characteristics a fundamental rejection of the previous order - overturning the law and appealing directly to the sovereignty of the people - that attitude leads directly to authoritarianism, as it’s easier to justify violating settled (even communist) law in the name of the people. It’s a fundamentally anti-minority rights and anti-rule of law ideology.

17

The ideological justification was the vanguard theory of Communism which Lenin added to the original Marxist form of communism.

In the original Marxist idea, communism was something that would happen inevitably when the time was right. Lenin put forth the idea that it wasn’t necessary to wait until the time was right. As long as there was a group of right-minded communists in charge, the vanguard, they could push things along ahead of schedule.

This theory justified a lot of what communist regimes have done. They could argue that resistance to their rule didn’t invalidate it; it was just a sign that some people hadn’t caught up with communism yet. But the regime would carry on and lead the way and eventually everyone would realize how great communism was.

It also meant that the regime was justified in holding power and denying it to anyone else. As communists, they alone were leading society in the right direction even if the non-communists didn’t see it yet.

Think of it as a parent and child relationship. The vanguard theory saw the communists as the parents and everyone else as the children. The parents needed to have absolute authority over the children because the children didn’t have the wisdom to run their own lives. But the parents were acting in the children’s best interests and their goal was to raise the children up to the point where they would see this and be able to run their own lives.

18

Marx posited that thev move to Pure Communism would involve transitional phases. The first he termed ‘socialism’ (not to be confused with the identical word we use to refer to modern welfare states) in which there was an acknowledgement that ‘bourgeois law’ still had an impact on society and it would be necessary for ‘the people’ embodied by the state to redistribute resources and equitably manage the means of production. So there was a universal agreement that a state was needed during this transitional period, but Marx and Engels didn’t really spend a lot of time thinking about how this state would work. They seemed to think that it was largely a temporary thing that would soon disappear due to the inevitable rise of true communism. This meant that these early revolutionaries didn’t really have a plan in place for governing. They agreed that the proletariat couldn’t do it en masse because they were too beholden to capitalist cultures in which they existed and would do more harm than good. So they knew that the people truly dedicated to the cause (ie themselves) would have to rule somehow during this transitional period. So the rise of a one-party state really seems inevitable in Marxism. The fact that they didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about the structure of these one-party states made it nearly inevitable that people would soon be exploiting these power structures and that’s really exactly what happened. I don’t know that I would say that a Communist revolution inevitably leads to authoritarianism, but the real lack of political philosophy behind the transitional government makes it very likely.

What you see with the second wave of revolutions is that it was in large part a sort of reaction against the first wave. The first wave was really all about politics. It was about checking the natural tendency of human society towards authoritarianism. The people in that revolutionary era were largely wealthy people shut out of the power structure, so they invented a power structure that made sure that their interests were taken into account and they knew that other wealthy people would want to infringe on their wealth, so they spent a lot of time thinking about how to prevent that. The Marxist revolutions really didn’t spend any time thinking about politics. They saw economics as the great destroyer, so spent a ton of time thinking about how to better balance economic output to deal with inequality. The first suffers from runaway capitalism and the second from authoritarianism.

19

Survival of the fittest, sort of. People in a complex society won’t willingly live in a communist system for very long, so any state that tries democratic communism isn’t going to last more than a few years-- maybe just a few months. The ones that do last are the ones where the system is imposed on the population without the choice of voting it out, so those are the ones of note.

Communism works well at the smallest of social levels-- family group or maybe a little larger. Parents will often sacrifice almost anything for the children. Once you have large, complex societies, the bonds that bind humans to each other like a family group break down.

Extreme political systems like Communism or Libertarianism just don’t last through many election cycles. And that’s because they are not suited to the way people actually want to live in complex societies. They don’t want to share everything but they don’t want to be completely on their own, either.

20

Communism has to be totalitarian to work on a large scale, because it goes against human nature. People like to own things and be paid based off of work or contribution, not some system where everyone makes the same even if a slacker.

As much as people claim to want equality, they actually don’t want equality. Nobody plays the Powerball thinking, “I want to be like the 99.99999% who don’t win.” They want to be that lucky one.