Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Attempts to implement communism at the scale of a nation state have always involved significant concentration of power. It may be impossible to do otherwise.
Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.
So you’re saying with enough checks and balances that distribute power widely enough through legal offices and separations of power, some sort of democratic socialism would in theory be possible (assuming a peaceful transition via pre-deternend legislative changes were in place and ready to be followed)?
For a real Marxist revolution to take place, the entire populace has to stand up at once and decide to make this change. This requires humanity to do some pretty broad and general evolution before we, as a race, are nearly ready. Checks and balances won’t fix the fundamental problem that humans are selfish and want more for themselves at the expense of others.
It’s odd that humans being selfish and wanting more for themselves is an argument for a system where stamping on people to make your share bigger and keeping others down is encouraged rather than trying to dampen those impulses.
Or on the flip side, maybe they seem so much of that philosophical/ethical black hole “Human Nature” in a system where they’re encouraged because our current economic mode strongly encourages them, rather than them being immutable fact?
I wouldn’t say it’s human nature, more like nature nature, as everything here seems to revolve around getting something at the expense of others. We’re just doing that at a larger/deeper/ a tad mo intelligent scale.
People forget that humans are evolutionarily based on familial groups above all else. People like to act like humans in the past were all sharing and helping each other for funsies when in reality you’d be slaughtering your neighbors children for their food if it meant your children got to eat.
Humans are 9 meals away from anarchy at all times. The minute things go south it’s every family for themselves. This is a fact for the majority of the human population. That fact extends to periods of prosperity as well because why would I share with a stranger when I could stockpile for my family?
I wouldn’t say it’s human nature, more like nature nature, as everything here seems to revolve around getting something at the expense of others. We’re just doing that at a larger/deeper/ a tad mo intelligent scale.
If you do the thing and you do it right and you don’t fuck it up. Then it might work.
Centralization of decision-making. It’s ironic actually. One of the main problems of capitalism that Marx described is the separation between labor and ownership. All the talk about “means of production”.
Communism actually makes it worse. In capitalism yes you have the owners who have all the control and reap all the benefits, but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class. The way communism was always implemented is through a communist party and state control of the economy.
You get an even smaller group of people controlling the means of production. It amplifies exactly the main problem of capitalism by creating a very hierarchical class society where the party leadership takes a role of what is almost “nobility”.
There’s also just a fundamental problem with planned economies from a purely economic standpoint: they are much less efficient at actually providing the minimum set of goods and services required by a population, and they’re worse at achieving growth. See the most recent Nobel Prize in economics for a citation. Funnily enough, the same paper’s arguments apply equally to oligarchic economies and crony capitalist economies, which are semi-planned economies by a small group of the ultra wealthy.
More specifically to the OP, communist countries have planned economies, which by nature requires a strong authority to tightly control production. Hence why communist states always have very consolidated political power structures. And once the power is consolidated, all it takes is one bad actor to get that power and ruin everything.
Géza Hofi was one of the greatest comedians in Hungarian history. He was active under and very outspoken about the failures of the ruling communist party. One of his most memorable performances was “How many pigs will be born?” (video, unfortunately without subtitles).
Party officials, wearing nice brown trench coats, visit old man Joe’s farm.
“Comrade Joseph, how many pigs will be born?”
“I don’t know.”
“Shut your mouth, peasant, and give me the number.”
“What’s the plan?”
“14.”
“Then it’ll be 14. Have you told the swine? Better that you talk to her, since you’re both on the same level.”(the story goes on, but I don’t want to translate the entire thing)
If you think about it every company is a tiny planned economy with all the power held by a few people, too.
Some of them even make brainwashing propaganda for their employees to think that sacrificing themselves to the company is glorious.
Not every company. There’s plenty of free-lancers around. There’s oddities like valve.
But yes, the idea is a mix of companies, different shapes and sizes, coordinating through markets.
Iirc this is what Trade Syndicalism was meant to solve. After all the talk about the people’s rebellion it gets into balancing power by keeping it distributed among unions. So your political career would be to get elected in your union and then serve on the councils at different levels.
So we need to destroy the means of production, got it. Down with anything built after 1825, we living like its 1799!
Couldn’t we live like it’s 1825 if everything after that was destroyed?
Yeah, but I can’t sing that to the tune of Prince’s 1999
Marx opined that certain material conditions had to be achieved before a socialist state could be successfully made. These material conditions include bourgeois capitalist democracy. Marx explicitly said that capitalism forges the tools with which it will be destroyed.
A certain subset of communists known as Marxist-Leninists decided that bourgeois capitalist democracy wasn’t necessary if you just oppressed people REALLY hard, you could skip straight to a socialist state. And because they ‘succeeded’ in overthrowing traditional Marxists in 1917 Russia and getting the full power of a massive country to spread their ideology, they’ve had bootlickers calling their particular brand of insanity the only ‘real’ form of communism ever since.
When we think of ‘communist’ countries, we think of Marxist-Leninist countries which tried to jump from feudal societies to socialist societies, which, quite obviously from the results, doesn’t work. Doesn’t stop the cultists from licking boots, of course.
There’s also a story in the hammer and sickle itself. It was spun as a symbol of ‘all workers’ but its original purpose was to depict an alliance between farmers (who owned the land they worked) and the tiny population of wage earners in Russia’s largest cities (who didn’t even own their homes). The farmers saw no reason for the new policies so concessions had to be made.
Lenin’s Russia had to leverage the state apparatus to fiercely industrialize and capitalize, effectively creating an enormous business conglomerate with a company store that encompassed nearly every product in the nation outside the black market. But with all the complacency of abject monopoly. They couldn’t skip generalized capitalism, and so they created it in a way that seriously disadvantaged workers as capitalism does.
In other words: state monopoly capitalism. Wrong direction from marxist withering of state: instead seeks to establish a permanent totalizing state, oppressing all, including the vanguard. Stalin’s paranoia metastasized and now oligarchs pick over the bones.
Ideologically, Leninism supported vanguardism, a variation on Marxism that said that the Communist party was supposed to drag the early-20th-century proletariat into the revolution, instead of waiting for late capitalism where the proletariat would (according to Marx) naturally become revolutionary. This, and the notion of “false consciousness”, authorized Communist parties to go against the expressed (democratic) will of the proletariat, on the theory that the proletariat’s judgment was clouded by false consciousness, while still claiming to act in the interests of the proletariat.
Basically, “we (the party) know better than you (the people)” was ingrained into Leninism from the beginning, and the major communist revolutions either were or became Leninist. Maoism was a branch off of Leninism as well.
Keep in mind that it wasn’t even the proletariat that accomplished the Revolutions, it was the peasantry. Marx wasn’t against the idea but he would have been surprised.
I love learning new things that had just never occurred to me before. It happens a lot more here than it ever did back on Reddit.
Lots of reasons, but here’s one:
Because one of, if not the main purpose of money is to provide a decentralized way of transferring information about economic needs and capabilities. Without that mechanism in place, the only way of determining where goods can be created and where they need to go (a massive problem that it is a daily miracle we don’t generally have to deal with) is by an overbearing authoritarian state.
It’s the opportunist problem. We see this throughout rebellions in history, not just when communist countries are made. Basically, anytime conditions are bad enough for the people to demand change it’s really easy for someone to trade on their ignorance. They can push policies that sound like they’ll help but really consolidate power. And if anyone speaks up, they’re an enemy of the people.
For a non Communist example of this in modern history check out the French Revolution.
Check USA right now.
Yup. And I’ve spent the last decade and a half telling people the working class isn’t going to take it anymore.
The Paris Commune is a great example of the class war being brutally engaged by the bourgeois.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Those who seek power least deserve it
I think those quotes answer your question well enough
Because communism is the end goal, but one of the transitionary phases is the dictatorship of the proletariat , where a representative of the people is given sweeping power to prevent a counterrevolution from the bourgeoisie.
But that kind of power is hard to give up; foreign powers are trying to sew discord, and it’s really convenient to get stuff done. It’s ok, you’re one of the good guys anyways, right?
So communism never really makes it past that stageMost universal answer I can give is:
Every country that has attempted communism has been desperate and vulnerable.
Desperate to find a strongman to save their crumbling old government, and vulnerable to having the CIA appoint their own strongman in turn.
That’s a dumb take, given that the two largest communist countries so far were both founded before the CIA ever existed. Lenin started the authoritarianism of the USSR by 1923 (not terribly long after WWI, although the Bolshevik coup took a while to consolidate power), and the revolution in China that put Mao Zedong in power in 1945, shortly after the end of Japanese occupation. But, as with the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution had been going on for some time prior to WWII.
Meanwhile, the CIA didn’t even exist until 1946. The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS (Office for Strategic Services) was founded in 1942, specifically as part of the wartime effort.
Moreover, the US fought in two wars to prevent communists from taking over, since the communist governments were unfriendly to US interests, notably Kim Il-Sun in North Korea (took power in '48), and Ho Chi Min in Vietnam (took over part of Vietnam in '45). Additionally, Fidel Castro overthrew the Cuban gov’t led by Fulgencio Batista; Batista had the support of the US, and was friendly to US interests in the region, while Castro was decidedly not. The US attempted multiple time to overthrow Castro, and failed each time.
So the idea that the CIA is appointing the heads of communist countries is simply not supported by facts.
Lenin started the authoritarianism of the USSR by 1923
Lenin started earlier than that… It started almost right after the Black Army aided the Red Army to defeat the White Army… The Red Army turned around, and murdered workers in the Black Army, because “They didn’t do socialism, and went right to implementing full communism”…
I should have been a little more precise; 1923 was, IIRC, when he’d consolidated power. It wasn’t an instant process as soon as the tsar and his family had been murdered, and the government overthrown.
This isn’t communism it’s every government type
If it’s not from the Communist region of China it’s just sparkling socialism.
Hate to break the news, but it appears capitalism is also heading in that direction.
The myth that Capitalism is immune to dictatorships was Cold War propaganda. Capitalism actually shows just how good a well established Democracy works to prevent Dictatorship. Because the defining trait of Capitalism is to concentrate wealth in the most efficient manner and money often equals political power.
There were plenty of Capitalist dictators during the Cold War and off the top of my head there’s still Saudi Arabia with a Monarchy.
I’m sure you know this, but for others that don’t: That monarchy in Saudi Arabia didn’t exist in 1916
The greater the income disparity, the stronger authoritarianism becomes, the more fascistic it becomes. It’s always the same, which is why it has to be held in check, something the USA outspokenly do not want to do. Communism, Maoism, Xiism etc. are just taking a shorter route to authoritarianism.
Always has been…
They had no communist intentions to begin with. The benefits of communism are just an easy way to market any nefarious movement with anticommunist intentions
The core principles of communism are basically an antithesis of these authoritarians/totalitarians/autocratics/oligarchs (how ever you want to describe them). Such a shift isn’t accidental
They had no communist intentions to begin with.
All (>30 countries) of them (1)?
Which ones aligned with the principles?
Eventually, “our” pretty much always becomes “my”.
Why? I’m not clear, but power corrupts regardless of the political system surrounding it (e.g. look at pretty much any HOA).
Most countries we would label as communist didn’t form as Marx expected. Marx expected relatively advanced nations to revolt and claim control over capital. Instead, most Communist revolutions occurred in generally despotic and less developed countries.
When times are good, the government can use the material improvement of people’s lives as a reason to be in power. However, if times stop being good, the government becomes more overtly autocratic to maintain control.
The same threat that democracy faces, it’s vulnerable to charismatic people who become entrenched and draconian. I’m not convinced it can ever work without some competing force that resists the consolidation of power, such as highly educated and politically involved populace.
Communism probably works at smaller scales but for larger populations it would only be feasible when the leadership is benevolent. A robot administrator would be an interesting experiment.
This is strongly supported by Wengrow and Graeber’s “The Dawn Of Everything”, though I think they would say that in the case of state communism, it’s bureaucratic power/control of information, rather than charismatic power. I think charisma is more relevant in fascist dictatorships (which I guess some communist systems evolve into).
