What exactly is communism?
Communism is usually portrayed as the fascism of the left. When I think of communism I associate it with harsh dictators like Stalin and Mao. The communist economy is devastating, slow, and inefficient. There are no human rights and everything is controlled by the government. The bourgeoisie is replaced by the members of the state. The people live in fear of the government where punishment is unfair and harsh. Corruption is rampant. There is no democracy only a merciless authoritarian dictatorship. It's a living nightmare.
Is that an accurate description of communism? Is that what the creators of communism had in mind? If so, why would ordinary people allow themselves to succumb to a communist society? Nobody in their right mind would want a society like that (except those in power). Surely this can't be what people had in mind by "communism".
Is that an accurate description of communism? Is that what the creators of communism had in mind? If so, why would ordinary people allow themselves to succumb to a communist society? Nobody in their right mind would want a society like that (except those in power). Surely this can't be what people had in mind by "communism".
Comments (58)
No, that is a description of what communist dictatorships have been in practice, and describes communism as an ideology about as accurately as the systematic killing of jews describes capitalism.
Oh except for this part:
Quoting Purple Pond
That part was about right.
There's quite a distance between Communist ideals and Communist reality - but actually it's the ideals that are the problem, that lead to the shitty reality despite the undoubted best intentions of many rank-and-file Communists.
Nevertheless, due to the unparalleled scale of destruction and death associated with communist regimes, I would like to see the word "Communism" buried, much like "Nazism" should be.
There is similarly 1 state, the USSR, that established the first communist government and set the pattern. These two states shared their ideas and methodology with other states that also established communist governments in the PRC, North Korea, Cuba, and the eastern European bloc countries.
It has been pointed out many times that Russia was not a promising economy in which to apply Marxist thinking, but it none the less found enthusiasts well before the 1917 revolution. China was also not a promising economy.
The "flavor" of Soviet communism derived much from the personalities of its founders -- Lenin, Stalin, et al, and the project which they attempted to achieve: transform a very lightly industrialized agrarian economy with a long history of absolutist rulers, covering a vast territory populated by widely varying cultures, religions, geography, and so forth, into a heavily industrialized nation in a short period of time while engaged in two world wars, neither of which they started.
Both the USSR organized a very authoritarian governments (secret police and all) and operated a command economy (as opposed to a market economy) with the state serving as the Corporation. The State Corporation was not totally unsuccessful but it left much to be desired.
None of this is in Marx, Engels, or any major socialist/communist theorist. The Soviets (and others) tried for a giant leap-frog over the slow, historical development of a working class capable of seizing the means of production, and they failed miserably.
The results were both significantly good and really very bad.
No. They had in mind the following: a stateless, classless, moneyless world wherein human beings collectively own the means of production. That is the definition of communism.
What you have in mind are those societies that were governed by communists, not societies that were communistic. The USSR, China, etc were/are trying, at least on paper, to get to the state of being described above. Were they successful? Clearly not.
Herein also lies the fundamental defect of communism: it is unimplementable. Whatever else it is, it's an absurd utopian scheme that, whenever tried (in the sense of certain countries and individuals ideologically committed to bringing it about), has resulted in societal, economic, and moral implosion and degeneracy, or in a word, totalitarianism.
Without the state, without the bourgeoisie extracting surplus value from the workers (the profit, in other words), society will evolve to exploit the new economic circumstances. The demise of capitalism will not solve all problems, of course, and issues like global warming and environmental degradation are going to follow us to our graves, regardless of which political/economic system we have.
Still, I'd rather have a system friendly to the idea of "production for human need" rather than one based on "Production for maximum profit".
I agree.
Just saying.
No.
Marx and Engles would have been horrified to have seen Stalin and Mao; how "communism" had been hijacked by a system of State Capitalism.
FINALLY. Someone mentions it. Thank you. It was State Capitalist, yet everyone says it was a failure of communism. Most of the confusion with the word ( and in debates about communism vs capitalism) is from a failure to define terms. When you do, it is clear that the systems in China, USSR were not like Marx and Engels described.
What people who read Marx (long before 1917) presumably had in mind were medieval communes. Groups of peasants, or tradesmen, or the inhabitants of a town or parish, forming associations to protect themselves. That is fundamentally Marxism; that an individual will always be weak within an economic system; that they need to realise their collective strength.
They paid warlord/aristocrats for protection. That is not Marxism. Marxism is a passive wait for history to reveal its purpose.
Communists chose not to wait and instead devoted themselves to destruction with some blind faith that whatever grew back in its place would be better. It wasn't.
No it is not. Marx and his followers have always enjoined the class struggle.
In today's terms it would equate to workers co-operatives. The state's role would be provide legal frameworks for them to operate fairly.
This has never been seriously tried on a wide scale. Within the current capitalist system companies would be encouraged to give workers shares as part of their wages, until the whole was in the hands of the workers. This could really incentivise productivity if workers know they are working for their own benefit and not some fat prick living in Switzerland.
Abe Lincoln's famous joke comes to mind: "How many legs does a dog have if you call his tail a leg? Four. Saying that a tail is a leg doesn't make it a leg."
The fact remains that in terms of scale of destruction, communist regimes have no equal.
What they did was to establish themselves within the feudal system. A commune took on the role of a person, like a lord, in the same way as a company today takes on a legal personality. Like everyone else they were part of a system; they had rights and duties.
Remember Marx is from a medieval city which would have had strong guilds. It was part of the Holy Roman Empire which was itself a sort of commune.
It is no good reading Marx as if he is a twentieth century, let alone a modern writer. It is absurd to try to understand what he meant by communism by looking at regimes that only came into existence around 40 years after his death.
And Marx was under no illusion that all you had to do was await history to do its stuff. He wrote numerous studies of failed revolutions. To say capitalism was unstable because it contained inherent contradictions did not imply that it must inevitably be replaced by communism. People had to make it happen.
Yes. It's called a corporation. The concept is from Roman law. It's beginnings in northern Europe were travelling merchants who needed a place to stay during the winter. They would camp by castle walls and pay for protection. The phenomenon evolved into cities which paid nobles for the right to incorporate. Corporations were also dependent on nobles for defense.
It's a system that transformed European warlords into aristocrats. The situation was different in southern Europe.
Point is: the Marxist vision was global in scale. It was supposed to unfold naturally and organically. The transition to active architects of change is an issue Trotsky wrote about.
Did you not read the statistics I summarised? The largest loss of life by a huge margin caused by deliberate human activity was the advertising and commercialisation of cigarettes. 79 million dead and still counting. The second largest (depending on estimates) was the colonisation of land occupied by tribes with a significant history of isolation, possibly up to 50 million depending on sources. Communism is at least third, and that's taking it as a whole. Just one single act of free market capitalism has killed more than every act of communism across the world put together.
It depends on the communist. But if we go with what's most influential now, Karl Marx's communism was the end-goal of his revolutionary program. The states established along that revolutionary program only reached the stage of socialism (again, as defined by Marx -- since that word also depends on the socialist who uses it :D). Communism would be achieved after the state withered away. It's a social condition without either economic class or authoritarian state.
In some ways the end-goal of Marxists and Anarchists is very similar. Their main disagreement is with respect to methods.
It's a little easier to pin deaths on communist regimes because there are records left from the time and we know that actions that resulted in depopulation were deliberate and in line with communist policies.
It's not as easy to pin 79 million smoking deaths on advertising, and even if you succeeded there, you would have to show that communists did not engage in advertising. Of course they did. It was just government controlled.
What you could argue is that if the west had been more socialist, then deaths from cigarettes would have been reduced due to the government control over industry. Maybe. It's in the realm of speculation.
The primary source of death there was not colonization. It was the introduction of the measles by the Spanish. Notably, measles doesn't have an ideology.
As for what happened to the Native Americans who did not die from the measles: look at the populations of North and South America. You're looking at their descendants. Native cultures were destroyed. The actual people survived and were absorbed.
No, I'll grant that a socialist government may have done a better job of recognizing and doing something about the threat of cigarettes. Deaths from colonization? That was primarily accomplished by diseases spread by travellers. Measles has no ideology.
Meanwhile, it's easier to pin deaths on communist regimes because records are left from the time and we know actions that resulted in depopulation were deliberate and in line with communist party policies.
No way. Ideal capitalism is one massive fat person owning everything in the world; the end game of competition, with the rest of the world dancing hand and foot on his every whim hoping to make enough money to buy enough to live on.
Regarding the history lesson, we are discussing what 'communism' is. I'm saying that if somebody had looked up the word in a dictionary when Marx was writing they would have found references to medieval communes, since neither the Soviet Union nor hippies existed yet. Since a commune was a collective organisation of people like peasants or craft workers and Marx was advocating a collective organisation of people like peasants or craft workers that would have made sense.
If they had instead understood it to mean what you say, 'a system that transformed European warlords into aristocrats' how would that have made sense? Marx was not suggesting the workers unite for the purpose of establishing an aristocracy.
You write: Point is: the Marxist vision was global in scale. It was supposed to unfold naturally and organically. I would disagree. It could not be global because change would be provoked by the crisis in capitalism, but this would only come about in advanced capitalist societies.
As I wrote before, Marx himself was a political refugee and his work is full of studies of failed revolutions, from the middle ages, the French Revolution, 1848, the Paris Commune etc. He is under no illusion it will simply unfold. What distinguishes Marxism from other movements is the expectation of reaction; the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' is required because it is assumed the revolution will be instantly under threat. There were movements that thought that the system would gradually reform itself, without the need for revolution, but Marx disagreed.
Not really. The beautiful side of it was all the naive hopes of 19th Century liberals. It was all about trust in nature and devotion to freedom. Pure capitalism failed spectacularly. It produced the cultureless wasteland of early Chicago.
Are you saying that Marx was advocating a medieval social arrangement?
The thread is 'What exactly is communism?' As my contribution I'm suggesting that when Marx used the word it was a reference to medieval communes. It could not have been a reference to social arrangements that did not come about until long after he was dead.
The mechanisms of capitalism regardless of a narrow idealistic viewpoint is more likely to lead to the horror I suggest. Te question is who owns the word?
Quoting charleton
It did lead to horror. So did communism. ?
Capitalism itself is a global phenomena. I think in that sense, at least, the aims were global. Capital would spread across the world, and the contradictions of capitalism would be its undoing on the global scale.
Or the mir.
It's an example of a commune, not Communism.
Just as one example, the Indian Famine of the late 19th Century, caused directly and with full knowledge by British colonial policy, killed 29 million.
The rest add up across the world. Over half a million Native Americans killed directly in wars, Australian aborigine massacres probably totalled the another half a million, each African colony almost without exception has its massacre if not several. Then there's slavery...
Quoting frank
... and there's the 22,000 children UNICEF on estimate die every day, directly as a result of poverty much of which is laid at the door of capitalist trading policy, colonial history and disastrous Western political interventions.
It's not easier to pin deaths on communist regimes, it just suits the right-wing agenda to do so.
I'm more than happy to learn something new. Could you explain how this famine was a result of colonialization? And more specifically, how did it result from capitalism?
Quoting Pseudonym
If we assign those deaths to capitalism, we still don't have quite a holocaust there, with a holocaust being a unit of mass death equalling about 6 million people. Those victims should be remembered, but they don't make it to the top of our list of human failures. Communism sits squarely in that position. This isn't controversial.
Quoting Pseudonym
I'm not right-wing, but I doubt they have much interest in the topic. They have no need to speak out against communism. It failed utterly.
Quoting frank
But it was already determined that those examples of "communism" were far from what Engels and Marx described. So putting it on "communism" in the case of Mao and Stalin is actually putting it on state modulated capitalism, not communism as described by Marxism. The vast majority of the deaths in those regions was a combination of bad science (Lysenkoism) that spread to China, on top of droughts in those regions (especially China). The one very good thing about Pure Capitalism is the split responsibility inherent. If your crop fails, you still might not starve because others don't use the same methods, and thus don't have their crops failing. If everything is under state control (State Capitalist) and they all follow the same bad science then that leads to mass famine. This is what happened in those "communist" countries, which caused the starvation of millions. It is a warning against Authoritarianism, and not diversifying, not against the failure of "communism". As was mentioned by others, Marx and Engels would be appalled at the so called "communism" practiced by the USSR and ROC.
The main cause of the famines listed by Ajit Ghose's study were the Raj's implementation of free-market pricing on corn which meant that as corn became more scarce, prices went up such that the starving farmers in their millions could not afford it. At the height of the famine, the two most affected provinces (where nearly five million people starved) were actually net exporters of wheat. Capitalist free markets were actually buying (what was to then) cheap wheat from starving peasants who couldn't themselves afford it.
Harsh Mander, includes in the list of causes - colonial rack-renting, levies for war, the expansion of export agriculture, and neglect of agricultural investment.
Mike Davis, in "Late Victorian Holocausts" adds that export crops directly imposed by the Raj displaced millions of acres that could have been used for domestic subsistence, and increased the vulnerability of Indians to food crises.
The Indian famine was not the only example of this policy of exporting cheap often non-subsistence product from the colonies whilst the native population starved. Some estimates put the total death toll from the imposition of colonial export crops at 50 million.
Notwithstanding the fact that growing products for export in a market free to set prices according to supply and demand is pretty much the definition of capitalism, I don't see why you're asking for a direct link. Are you suggesting that Communism itself has as its doctrine that the leader of any revolution should kill their opponents in the millions? If you're blaming Communism for the actions of states which happen to be communist, then why are you not prepared to blame Capitalism for all the deaths that have taken place in states which just happen to be capitalist ones? On equal terms (deaths from avoidable cause which take place under the respective governmental styles) early capitalism outstrips the death toll of early communism by millions.
Quoting frank
It absolutely is controversial. For a start, there's all the data above, which I've given in different formats several times now but which you seem to insist on ignoring. You've glossed over that fact that the advertising and commercialisation of cigarettes happened almost entirely in capitalist countries and has the highest death toll of any single anthropogenic event ever. But even with specific reference to the massacre of native tribes, you're forgetting that each massacre (whilst below holocaust size on its own) was carried out by one of the same few countries (England, France, Belgium, Germany), so to be a fair comparison, to all the communist atrocities (which you have taken as a group) you'd have to add them all up - All the tribal massacres put together, all the famines and epidemics caused by trade policy and land-grabbing, all the deaths cased by the advertising and sale of cigarettes, all deaths in wars aimed at securing resource supply. All added together. That's the death toll of capitalism by the same metric as you're using to count those of communism.
Change the metric, and you still don't have Communism on top. The biggest single event death toll was probably the Taiping Rebellion at 40 million (nothing to do with communism). If you're going by single country it's easily Great Britain who have to account for hundreds of individual massacres, famines, epidemics and wars directly the result of colonial policy. If you want to look at individuals (or small groups) then it is the chairmen and board of directors at British and American Tobacco who we now know had full knowledge of the harm cigarettes did, but carried on advertising them nonetheless. I'm struggling to see what convoluted set of caveats and exclusions you're using in your attempt to make Communism come out on top of the world's most deadly ideas.
There was a particular global club in the 20th Century called Communists. Among their famous members was Lenin.
If any commune is an example of Communism, then the average Catholic monk is a Communist. I have no problem straying from the default, but that seems a bit far.
I'm more than happy to revise my thinking and name the British the greatest example of human failure. I'm just missing the facts that would allow me to do that. Wikipedia says there were four 19th Century Indian famines. A fat Wikipedia estimate of the death toll is about 6 million. Where did the estimate of 50 million come from?
I do see the part that capitalism played in it. Two questions I would take with me into an investigation would be: 1) To what extent could pin these disasters on poor management?, and 2) Did racism play a part?
Quoting Pseudonym
For the record, I didn't ignore your presentations. I didn't see them.
Quoting Pseudonym
Pseudonym, communist governments killed with intention. The point was to force cultural change. Since the topic is now starting to become sickening, I say we should make a deal: if you will honor the victims of Russian and Chinese communism by openly and honestly admitting how they died, I will honor all those who died directly or indirectly as a result of capitalism. And we'll leave it at that.
It is as specified, the total death toll "from the imposition of colonial export crops", not the Indian famines alone, and it comes from calculations done by historian Mike Davies who puts the figure as between 32 and 61 million, the majority of which could have been avoided had subsistence farming still been in place, and export prices not been set by free markets.
Im only trying to establish a like-for-like comparison. How short a time counts as a single event? How influencial does the regime have to be in the deaths to be classed as 'causing' them? Are we limiting it to actual soldiers and employees of the government, or extending it th policies which put people in a position where they were likely to die (like removing their food source)?
Quoting frank
Difficult, but we'd need to ask the same question of communist regimes.
Quoting frank
Not a difficult question - yes. Churchill, during the last Indian Famine under British rule described the Indians ad a "beastly race" and declared the famine their own fault.
Quoting frank
My apologies for the misrepresentation.
Quoting frank
Good idea, the killings of the communist regimes were some of the most barbaric and horrific genocides ever carried out and should act as a lesson never to go down those paths again. As should the excesses of imperialism, fascism and trust in the free-market.
I think you probably know this, but I'll just point it out because it's something I'm unusually sensitive to. Mike Davies is a Marxist activist. It doesn't mean he is unreliable. It means he is known to be biased. Bias tends to result in inaccuracy. And, in fact, he has been accused of inaccuracy.
I read a lot of history and I just have zero tolerance for biased views. One biased sentence and I close the book and move on, and that's bias of any kind, rightist, leftist, or centrist.
But I think that where we agree is that both capitalists and communists have a history of screwing up spectacularly.