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?
OP, do you have any knowledge about the CIA in the United States having involvement in “every single instance” you speak of?
Can you also please name those instances to better inform this conversation?
Instead of being condescending, how about you just go ahead and contribute that information yourself? Sheesh
Because that serves the “beg the question” crowd looking to sap energy with insincere questions. I don’t need to just agree with their premise. They stated “all these instances” so why not give them the chance to qualify that and then we discuss? Sheesh.
Why don’t you give them some credit that they may be sincere, as I’m trying to do?
Because Communism only works on paper. (lolol idiots can down vote me to Hell) Name ONE country communism has worked in.
Just one.
[Double Plus Edit] Just a single one. I’m still waiting. Now. Still. Now. Still.
Ignoring everything that American media will tell you about China, the Chinese people seem to be quite happy with their central government. Far more than any western country would even consider possible for themselves.
It stands to reason that a capitalist state which hopes to maintain even a sheer facade of democracy and freedom of the press and speech, would do everything in its power to ensure that public opinion considers even the most successful socialist states as abject failures and something to be feared, maintaining that capitalism is the best thing the human mind can possibly conjure. This would ensure that the public never considers socialist ideas to be a realistic option worth educating each other about or exercising any of their democratic power to push for, so that the state never has to seriously confront anyone questioning the power of capital, and even gives the state cover to operate against socialist regimes and actors as a “humanitarian” or “national security” threat.
The delegitimization is already done to the point that the question of socialism is a non-starter, all thought is terminated at the mere mention of it, and the state media can jump straight to calling people terrorists and dictators without anyone questioning it or the words losing any weight.
Lololol. Nice try. My Chinese girlfriend would strongly disagree with you.
Also China is not communist in case you haven’t noticed. Billionaires don’t exist in communism.
[edit] Your downvotes don’t make it any less true. But you all have taught me a valuable lesson. I will say that. I had no idea that there was a group of people with less intelligence than MAGA. Enjoy your fantasy world!
Cuba exists and has better rankings than the US in higher education, and life expectancy.
I’ve been to Cuba several times. You can call it communism, but it’s not. For Christ’s sake the Cubans were doing Air BnB during Darpanet, when they didn’t even have phones. I’ve only stayed in a hotel there once, my 1st time there 30 years ago.
They live under a hybrid system of dictatorship, capitalism, communism.
Get out of the basement and go see some of these places. Your book smarts aren’t.
Neither of those things are true.
According to Wikipedia USA life expectancy is 79.3, Cuba is 78.1
Ranking higher education is much trickier but pretty much every list I could find puts USA right at the top. American higher education institutions are world class and remains probably America’s biggest competitive advantage (i.e. brain drain).
Also Cuba probably isn’t the best example to rebut the “why does communism always turn into a dictatorship” question.
Every single one its been tried in without exception
Is “working” a sliding goalpost for you, or can you define it? You made the claim that Communism only works on paper and are asking people to disprove your claim, rather than substantiate your claim yourself. Surely you can see why others find your comment unproductive, correct?
Uh huh
How’s capitalism working out for ya
About the same way communism has
So capitalism has never been implemented and is mainly a term used by people who only “know” what state propaganda taught them to refer to things they don’t like?
Chile was a communist country and didnt become autocratic because of it, the US murdered their democratically elected president then planted a dictator in his place. So my guess is it doesn’t always end that way on it’s own. Russia speedran the capitalism to fascim transition to, it’s been capitalist since 1991, sham elections since 2005, so they’re not a good example of any kind of economic or government system. China has a tight grip on their population but don’t let the propaganda distract you from the fact that the US is just as much a surveillance state as China with the one exception being how much China micromanages it’s people when they leave the country, but I wouldn’t bet against America keeping tabs on expats the same way it was found out that America was spying on its allies in the EU.
I think this question ignores mountains of contexts in an attemtp at reducing a problem into one facet.
The US may collect as much or more information as China but their enforcement actions taken based on this information are far far more limited.
Not always. The US bombed striking workers on Blair mountain, and bombed a Philly neighborhood in the 80s to target activists. A portland protestor who shot a fascist demonstrator in self defence was summarily murdered by the cops days later before they even announced their presence. An unarmed cop city protestor was shot dead after one cop pretended a gunshot behind him was from the protestors. And god help you if youre a Boeing whistleblower or sex trafficker to the politicians. Even if China does this more often its hard to ascribe that to communism if the most anti communist nation in history does the same thing but just less often. These targeted things hide in the statistics for killings by cops because cops in the US kill more people annualy than mass shooters do.
The US has many flaws and these incidents were terrible. But these largely didn’t involve the modern intelligence apparatus we are discussing. We have large numbers of people here on Lemmy actively calling for a socialist revolution but they’re completely safe as long as they follow the law.
Try calling for revolution in China and see how it goes. Leaders of even relatively non-political protest movements or advocates for minority rights are frequently disappeared or executed. In the US, there may be isolated incidents of this nature (typically by local law enforcement) but largely social critics are free to organize legal resistance to the state without repression.
Of course, there are reasons to worry we might be headed in that direction. All the more reason to organize and resist while you still can.
To be clear, I don’t ascribe these actions to communism. China is not communist by any reasonable definition. I ascribe these actions to authoritarianism. While the US is somewhat authoritarian, it is less so than China (at least within its borders—foreign policy is a different can of worms).
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”.
but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class.
This isn’t always true, and is arguably not the natural state of capitalism. Capitalism, without state intervention, will tend towards monopoly as economies of scale and market power push out any competition.
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.
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.
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)
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
ITT
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).
In modern communist societies the government has an insane amount of power and control over just about everything. This power and control attracts a certain type of person who thirsts for power and control. People usually develop a bloodthirsty desire for power and control due to underlying psychological issues. These issues influence the person to think they ALWAYS need more power (think anorexic person who weighs 95lbs but still insists they are overweight).
It’s a human nature problem imo.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Those who seek power least deserve it
I think those quotes answer your question well enough
Because there was never anything communist about these states in any way whatsoever.
Communism is a state (as in a social, political and economic condition, not a government). None of these states ever reached this condition, and, therefore, was never communist. And, one could argue, that their development literally went the opposite way to what could be called communist with a straight face. As the anarchist Bakunin famously said, “the people’s boot is still a boot.”
This is why the Maoist-types call this shit “democratic centralism,” which is essentially just double-speak for “what the party says goes.”
This does not make the idea of communism invalid - but it’s still as perfectly vague as ever, unfortunately.
slight correction, you have state and government backwards.
Communism is a stateless, classless, currencyless society in which the workers own the means of production.
Because at its very base it’s conceived in violation of consent.
“From each according to his capacity” is the absolute essence of exploitation. Like, there’s no more straightforward way of saying “You look like resources and we’re gonna take everything you have”.
It’s only a “good idea” if you don’t think of people as having free will and the ability to consent. Communism is a great idea if you’re playing Command & Conquer and all your little units exist only to act as pawns in your game.
I don’t think there is a more straightforward way of saying you believe some people deserve more than others.
The pawn analogy is a little misplaced.
Capitalism is effectively the bishops, rook, and knight exploiting profit from the pawns. The king and queen exploiting everyone in the pyramid beneath them.
is that not what taxes are? not being facetious, just genuinely trying to understand the difference
"From each according to his capacity” is the absolute essence of exploitation.
…This is bait, right? It has to be, right? It’s such a profoundly ridiculous statement that it can’t possibly be anything else.
Lots of good answers here - it’s the kind of question where lots of explanations are partly correct. For me, the decision by early communists to advocate for violent revolution as the only or main way of bringing about communism is a key factor.
It’s pretty common for revolutions to produce dictators, going right back to the fall of the Roman Republic. Ironically, the Roman Civil War that preceded the fall was won by the populares - the people’s movement, as opposed to the optimates, the aristocracy. And yet, the end result was the abolition of the tribunes, which had been the people’s branch of the legislature, and the establishment of the Dictatorship of Julius Caesar, then the Principate of his nephew, Augustus, who we now regard as having been the first Roman Emperor. It wouldn’t be accurate to project back our exact ideas of democracy or class politics to the Romans, but it’s pretty telling that one of the first explicitly ‘class-based’ civil wars in history turned out this way.
Many centuries later, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles had a similar outcome: the royalists were defeated by the parliamentarians, only for the victorious generals to set up one of their own as what we would now call a dictator (Oliver Cromwell as ‘Lord Protector’), who was virtually a king himself.
(Worth noting here that many people assumed George Washington would turn out to be another Cromwell. The fact that he didn’t and the question of why he didn’t, is not something I know enough to even begin to speculate about, but is definitely something to look into when trying to understand this topic.)
Most relevant for the early communists was the French Revolution, which led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte who, more or less explicitly imitating Caesar and Augustus, made himself sole ruler of France, first as ‘Consul’ (a title also borrowed from Classical Rome), then Emperor. He was also followed, a little later, by his nephew doing a very similar thing, again explicitly imitating the Romans.
Ironically, Marx himself wrote about this exact tendency, even calling it ‘Bonapartism’, to warn revolutionaries to try and avoid it. I don’t know how exactly he missed the point that the very thing he elsewhere advocated for - violent revolution - was itself the cause of Bonapartism but it seems he did. Plainly, the early Marxists didn’t sufficiently heed this warning, for whatever reason (and see other replies in this thread for many good suggestions!).
Basically, if you’re going to advocate for the violent destruction of a system of government, you are running a major risk that in the ensuing chaos, someone very good at being violent and decisive will end with far too much power.
watch the video on the rules for rulers by the youtube channel cgpgrey for one explanation.
love that video
It’s just The Prince tho
I meant the series, probably should have specified
What tends to emerge from the ashes of war and empire.
By its nature, communism requires large amounts of control, as it’s a centrally planned economy. The state decides if it needs more coal, wheat, tools, steel, etc, then conscipts people as workers for various industries. Instead of an economy controlled by demand business owners, it is controlled by the state.
To maintain that control you need to maintain control of the people.
Because thats the end result of embiggening the state: The state gets bigger, and the oligarchs just changes faces.
It was something Marx remarked on later, post Paris Commune.
To clarify, Marx remarked that the existing Capitalist State cannot be merely siezed, it had to be replaced by a Proletarian State. This is because Marx viewed the State as an instrument of class oppression, as a Proletarian State gradually absorbs all Capital into the Public Sector as it sufficiently develops, it slowly erases class distinctions, the complete absorption marks the disappearance of the State along with the disappearance of classes. Government is not the same as the State for Marx.
Oh, I get what Marx had said… Marx also changed his view post Paris Commune. He started down the track that its impossible to abolish the state, after concentrating all power in the state, as those holding power will never give it up.
And yes, governance is not the state, and yes, Marx later agreed with that point, as well.
You’re a bit confused here. I’m explaining the takeaways for Marx from the Paris Commune. When the Communards seized the state, they did so on the basis of the existing state, they did not replace it but take hold of it, and as such they only held power for a short period as it quickly transitioned back to Capitalism. Marx then saw the need to replace the State with a Proletarian State. It isn’t impossible to abolish Marx’s conception of the State, rather, when the Proletarian State is founded and eventually folds all property into the Public Sector, there ceases to be a proletariat and a bourgeoisie at all, and thus there ceases to be a State. The State isn’t a special class, but an extension of the Class in power.
Marx started to rework (greatly) his ideas of “The state” and if it should be seized or abolished early. He started leaning to “abolished quickly, and early”.
He leaned towards elimination of the Capitalist State but that a Proletarian State cannot be abolished by decree, only via sufficient development of the productive forces and gradually wresting from the Bourgeoisie their control as such productive forces develop. To suggest otherwise would go against the concept of Scientific Socialism. Engels puts it best in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, which Marx said in his written preface in 1880 “best characterizes the theoretical part of the book, and which constitutes what may be called an introduction to scientific socialism:”
When ultimately it becomes the real representative of the whole of society, it renders itself superfluous. As soon as there is no social class to be held in subjection any longer, as soon as class domination and the struggle for individual existence based on the anarchy of production existing up to now are eliminated together with the collisions and excesses arising from them, there is nothing more to repress, nothing necessitating a special repressive force, a state. The first act in which the state really comes forward as the representative of the whole of society – the taking possession of the means of production in the name of society – is at the same time its last independent act as a state. The interference of the state power in social relations becomes superfluous in one sphere after another, and then dies away of itself. The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and the direction of the processes of production. The state is not “abolished”, it withers away. It is by this that one must evaluate the phrase “a free people’s state” with respect both to its temporary agitational justification and to its ultimate scientific inadequacy, and it is by this that we must also evaluate the demand of the so-called anarchists that the state should be abolished overnight.
Another emphasis, from Marx himself in Manifesto of the Communist Party, which Marx stood by to the very end with only slight alterations regarding the immediate destruction of the bourgeois state and replacement with a proletarian state after the lessons of the Paris Commune:
The essential condition for the existence, and for the sway of the bourgeois class, is the formation and augmentation of capital; the condition for capital is wage-labour. Wage-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers. The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by their revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Finally, Engels in Principles of Communism elaborating that the folding of Capital into the Public Sector is a gradual process and not an immediate one:
Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?
Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
Marx was not an Anarchist.
I never said he was an anarchist, and I never said he claimed it should or could be done in a single stroke.
Scientific Socialism requires one to learn from the past, and adapt as needed. It doesn’t mean a dogmatic prescription of “how”.
Then I fail to see how you can make this claim:
He started down the track that its impossible to abolish the state, after concentrating all power in the state, as those holding power will never give it up.
The withering away of the Proletarian State is not on the basis of “giving” anything “up.” The basis is on the State folding everything into the Public Sector, at which point laws like Private Property Rights disappear alongside it. When the government has folded all property into the Public Sector, the State itself ceases to exist, there’s nobody to “give up” and nobody to “give up” to. There is just the people, as they make up the “administration of things.”
