As promised in the last article this time I am going to take a look at the ideology of communism from an economic point of view (social policies whether good or bad won’t be analyzed in this article). As a disclaimer, some readers may already be familiar with and have some strong opinions on this topic. I would like to remind these readers that this is an introductory series of articles that are not supposed to take every small detail into account but to present a general overview and basic concepts. Last but not least, if you disagree with some of my arguments feel free to counter them in the comment section. That being said we are going to look, as suggested in my first article at the theory and then at how this theory was implemented.
Communism is the economic and political ideology where everyone shares things equally. In this system, no one owns more than others. Resources and goods are owned together, and everyone gets what they need. The goal is fairness and togetherness, aiming to eliminate differences in wealth and power for a better, more equal society. Crucially, it also has a strong authoritarian element in it, arguing that a state should have powerful institutions that control all economic aspects and supervise the population to ensure that everything is distributed equally making the society stable and thus its economy stable as well.
While researching for this article I stumbled upon a very interesting statistic which shows that in Western societies about 35% to 45% of the people don’t support communism while in Eastern European countries with the exception of Russia, about 80% to 85%, and in Czechia even 90% of the population is strongly against Communism. More than 140 years have passed since a communist state existed in Western Europe while communism in Eastern Europe ceased to exist 34 years ago. To put it simply people who have experienced it despise it, whilst people who didn’t are more open to this regime. But why? This is the point at which we have to analyze how the theory was put into practice.
The first communist state to ever exist was the Paris commune which existed for a few months in the 1880s but due to political reasons it was dissolved way too early for us to draw any conclusions.
The first state in which communism was introduced with visible effects was the Soviet Union established in 1922. In its infancy, due to the fact that many communist leaders were strong political advocates but incompetent administrators the country was plunged into civil war. Poor management of resources by radical administrators who failed to grasp the reality during the civil war led to approximately 1.5 million deaths and while the communists won the civil war, another famine in Ukraine was caused by the dictator Joseph Stalin (an opportunistic maniac who joined the leadership for personal gain) led to a deliberate famine that killed between 2.5 and 8 million people (sources are very conflicting on the numbers). China, another state that embraced communism after a civil war in 1949 had similar policies so disastrous that tens of millions of people perished due to famine (it got so bad that cannibalism became a norm in some provinces and in others people sold their children for rice). Yet there are also accomplishments of communism. In these societies in times when resources were properly managed people enjoyed a small form of prosperity with no inflation and resources sufficient for everyone to have a decent life (for example, in all its history from the 11th century till today, the best quality of life ever recorded in Russia was in the 1970’s during the Soviet Era) and in Burkina Faso during the 1980’s a communist approach to medical policies led to fair distribution of medicine and vaccines which in turn helped save hundreds of thousands of lives.
Today in a world that is becoming more unstable with high inflation and an enlarging wealth gap between the upper class and the other classes, the promises of communism become more and more attractive to people who haven’t experienced it. While it is important to observe how certain policies of communism succeeded in circumstances similar to ours it is also important to understand the disastrous consequences of communism caused by radicalism, incompetence, and lack of protection against opportunistic individuals like Joseph Stalin or Mao Zedong.
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do you know of any socialist thinker that advocated for a “strong state”?