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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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).
Because most real-world implementations of communism was the idea that a “vanguard party” would excercise total control over the country. The idea is eventually the state would “wither away” after communism is acheived.
Yea imagine how that goes. Once a party gets total power, they ain’t giving it up, that’s the problem.
To play devil’s advocate, none of those vanguard parties were ever allowed to exist peacefully. They were always attacked, from the inside and out, by capitalist and fascistic powers. It’s kind of hard to get rid of the state when it is needed to defend from other nations and groups looking to destroy it.
I’m not saying that a Vanguard party would necessarily ever voluntarily give up it’s powers and disintegrate into pure communism without a large part of the world struggling against it, but it would be more likely to.
That is just pure speculation, though, because we live in a world that has shown that it will struggle against communism until the end. The Vanguard Party idea is flawed, because it fails to account for this indefinitely long struggle, and fails time and time again to offer a valid exit strategy into the next stage of Socialism/Communism.
Arguably defense will always be necessary until we actually achieve world peace, you can’t just unilaterally start acting as if you won’t get attacked. So the vanguard party thing is pretty fundamentally at odds with how the world works, if relinquishing control is actually the goal.
It’s crazy how far down one has to go for the right answer. MLs are by definiton highly authoritarian.
It’s like asking why successful fascist always creat dictatorships… Like that’s their plan.
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.
Equating all socialism with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century oversimplifies a complex political tradition.
Dictatorial tendencies are not intrinsic to socialism but are contingent on specific historical and political contexts.
Russia: The Bolsheviks’ turn to authoritarianism was partly due to the civil war, external invasions, and a lack of democratic traditions. These circumstances led to the consolidation of power to preserve the revolution, not as an inevitable feature of socialist theory.
In other contexts, socialist movements (e.g., in Scandinavia) have successfully implemented social democratic policies without authoritarianism.
The role of individual leaders and political choices in shaping socialist experiments. Figures like Lenin and Stalin made decisions that prioritized centralized control, which deviated from the principles of worker self-management and democratic participation.
These deviations were not a necessary outcome of socialism but reflected the particular decisions and dynamics of those historical moments. So a small sample size of major socialist states and people cloud judgement.
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures. For example, the USSR faced significant opposition from capitalist countries, which influenced its militarization and political centralization. This external pressure created a siege mentality that undermined the potential for democratic governance.
Democratic socialism has thrived in various countries, showing that socialism can coexist with democratic principles. Examples include the welfare states of Scandinavia, where socialism has enhanced equality and social welfare without undermining political freedoms.
There is some truth to this but it overlooks the fact that the Bolsheviks were distinct from other socialist parties from the very beginning by their top-down, authoritarian party structure, with Lenin in control. As soon as they gained power, they immediately worked to impose this type of management on the entirety of Russian society by crushing first the Duma, then the Soviets, and finally eliminating any autonomy exercised by their own supporters, the labor unions. They also immediately began engaging in electoral chicanery and postponing or rigging elections in their favor. By destroying or subsuming every other institution in society, the party structure became the primary structure of governance, and Russia became a totalitarian state. Most of this took place even before the civil war and was arguably a major contributor to it.
So why did Russia become a dictatorship? Because the Bolsheviks decided it was desirable based on their understanding and development of socialist theory, and other forces failed to stop them for various reasons. It’s pretty much that simple. The civil war and foreign pressures probably strengthened this tendency but I don’t believe it was the primary cause.
And of course, almost every other socialist revolution since that time was inspired by the Bolsheviks since they “succeeded”. So they largely sought to impose dictatorships as well.
Ultimately it all goes back to Marx and his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat which is one of the crucial flaws of Marxism in my view.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to describe the will of a fully conscious proletariat majority being executed by and with the consent of that class. In other words a democracy unclouded by bourgeois interest and false consciousness.
The problem was that at the time of the Russian revolution the proletariat weren’t the majority, the peasants were, and what proletariat there were lacked full class consciousness. So Lenin used the vanguard party to emulate what a dictatorship of the proletariat would do, but that wasn’t an actual one as Marxist would’ve described.
There has been some debate about exactly what Marx intended by this phrase but regardless his intentions, in my view it was always doomed to be abused in this way. This was pointed out forcefully by Bakunin and other contemporaries of Marx in the socialist movement, and it came to pass exactly as they predicted. Who decides what constitutes “bourgeois interest” or “false consciousness”? The party of course, and who controls the party? The party leadership, or in other words, Lenin, Stalin, or whoever else manages to connive their way onto the throne. This is far from a proletarian democracy, and if that’s what Marx wanted, he ought to have chosen his words far more carefully.
This also dovetails with another key flaw in Marxism which is its class reductionism. Political leaders can and do have distinct interests from the proletariat, even when they may have once belonged to that class. We see this tension clearly in every supposed proletarian government in history, and many others besides. So in addition to the problems of top-down hierarchy, the decision to have Bolshevik leaders be full-time revolutionaries was also a large contributor to their alienation from the people whose interests they claimed to pursue, and the horrific violence they soon inflicted in on them.
GREAT answer!
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures.
THIS. This is THE reason most Marxists give for the necessity of authoritarianism in the first stages of transition to a Communist society.
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures. For example, the USSR faced significant opposition from capitalist countries, which influenced its militarization and political centralization. This external pressure created a siege mentality that undermined the potential for democratic governance.
This is something that I wish more people who talked about this would acknowledge and engage with. I get it, authoritarianism isn’t good. It’s not like we want that. It’s not the goal. But it’s really easy to sit on the sidelines from a relatively cushy life in the imperial core and judge all the people out there who are dealing with the historical reality of colonialism and feudalism and the current reality of imperialism. They are actively engaged in the practical task of liberating themselves from forces, both external and internal (old power structures/privileges) that seek to violently return them to a condition of servitude. The decisions they made have to be viewed through the lens of that context.
That doesn’t mean we can’t discuss and criticize them, but it’s worth engaging in the nuance of the history rather than out of hand dismissing their attempts as inherently illegitimate, evil, and/or misguided. What were the conditions they were operating under? What dangers did they face? Were their actions the best strategy for achieving the future they wanted? Was what they gave up too great? Did they have the capability to take a more open path? Have/had their decisions irreparably led them astray or were/are they still on the path to that eventual communist society on some time scale?
If you think they’re wrong for what they did, you still have to be able to answer the question of how you protect your revolution from forces that will spy on you, sabotage your industry, fund right wing militias to terrorize people, sanction and blockade you, or even invade you? Or if you think the path wasn’t even violent revolution in the first place, what is your answer to how you get to where you want to be when the power structure that would need to allow this is also invested in not allowing this? It’s a bit harder to see how this is made difficult or even impossible in liberal “democracies,” but it should be uncontroversial to acknowledge that some kind of force was necessary to escape from illiberal systems like Feudalism in Russia/China or from colonial regimes like in Vietnam.
The one thing I’d push back on from your comment is about the welfare states of Europe. That’s not really what socialism is about. They’ve made life better for people in their own country, yes, but it’s on the backs of those exploited in the third world. That’s why communism is inherently internationalist. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” You need to be able to build a movement that can work to lift everyone up with you, or at least not drag them down for your own benefit. I’d be interested to have more of a discussion on this, but that’s the standpoint I’d start from.
democratic socialism has thrived in in imperial states
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.
Most 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.
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.
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 stageAbsolute power corrupts absolutely
Those who seek power least deserve it
I think those quotes answer your question well enough
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).
