Communism in Real Life

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WP thread on Communism

This is actually a different topic I think. The referenced thread (which sort of died) was about Communist theory and whether it could successfully be put into practice. This thread is about countries that have claimed to actually practice Communism or possibly still do.

A lot of this is about attracting sympathizers. So during the Cold War, the Soviet Union promoted Communism as a balm for much of the world's suffering. As a consequence, they gained sympathizers, if not a great many allies, all over the world. In particular, they were highly successful in gaining a reputation for being staunchly opposed to racism, colonialism, etc. Because the United States was committed to opposing the aims of the USSR world-wide, they (the US) often supported régimes that were blatantly authoritarian or fascist (depending on what one means as fascism). It wasn't hard for the USSR to convince people that support for these régimes revealed the true nature of "democracy" in the US. Those people didn't necessarily embrace Communism however they also didn't necessarily think Communism to be a Bad Thing in contrast to most Americans. Which brings another point to mind, which is that, if you grew up in the US or a country with a similar political orientation, most of what you knew about Communism was from propaganda, in other words, however bad Communism might be in reality, what you were told was framed in such a way as to convince you to hate Communism. Sometimes that might backfire, for example, some Warsaw Pact countries weren't overtly oppressive in atmosphere, at least to a casual tourist, however Americans had been led to believe that anywhere behind the Iron Curtain you would experience a grim atmosphere and people who were visibly in despair, so when such a tourist experienced life in such a country that didn't jibe with that image, they then questioned much of what they'd always been told.

There is also reason to believe that at least some Communist policies were genuinely humanitarian, for example guaranteeing child care to working mothers. So far as I know, there were people in those countries who sincerely wanted to make Communism work and joined pro-Communist organizations and volunteered to help the less fortunate in their communities, all with the expressed, if at least somewhat cynical, approval of the government. I think this is the main distinction between Communism and Fascism, they are not mirror-image forms of government because Fascism is purely about authority and depends solely on brute force to advance itself. I won't try to offer proof, but I have seen evidence on Reddit of people who lived in the former DDR who don't really think their lives got that much better after German unification, in fact some people really thought they gave up a lot. So it's not a black vs. white comparison.

Here are a couple of example of where Communism scored successes appealing to the hearts and minds of the world:

1.) Vietnam — The US spent years prosecuting a war there in support of a side that had few sympathizers outside the US. In addition, the leader of the opposing side, Ho Chi Minh, probably had more admirers than any US President of that time. Vietnam was a huge win for the Communist cause (both metaphorically and literally).
2.) Chile — The US orchestrated overthrow of President Salvador Allende Gossens was universally condemned. This was enough to convince a lot of people who the REAL Good Guys were. When the DDR was dissolved, Erich Honecker and his family were offered refuge there; they saw him as a true friend if not a bona fide hero.
3.) Cuba — The only country still practicing Marxism/Leninism today. It's my understanding people there aren't very happy nowadays (closing the country for COVID-19 as opposed to what Mexico did, which was the opposite, has left things in pretty bad shape). But at the same time, the Cuban Revolution has always had millions of admirers for no other reason than that Cuba has always been seen as thumbing its nose at the US which taps into the resentment towards the US so many people have felt since WWII. One example of this I could give is the English-language Wikipedia article on Fulgencio Batista which reads more as a justification of the Revolution than actual facts about Mr. Batista. In particular, there seems to be a huge degree of sympathy for the Revolution in Canada, the apex of this being Pierre Elliott Trudeau's bromance with Fidel Castro which occurred during the height of the Public Relations successes for the USSR i.e. Vietnam and Chile. To this day, Canadians seem to react badly to Americans who point out anything unenviable about the life of ordinary people living in today's Cuba.

Like I said, although I don't support Communism at all, I also don't think Communism can be dismissed out of hand. BTW I wouldn't know how to characterize my own politics, in fact I am inclined to think the US is a better country to live in than a lot of people, both inside and outside the US, who think this US is a hell hole, although I do hate Donald Trump (although lately he has seemed like less of a threat) and I also see strong parallels between what Putin is doing in Ukraine and what GW Bush did in Iraq 15-20 years ago, which could be seen as some sort of left-leaning opinion.

The reasons for the rise of communism were legitimate. if you take Russia, millions of peasants were forced to live in feudal subsistence conditions, The Tsars and their sycophants in the aristocracy, merchants and rich landlords had no desire to change the unequal power structure right up to end of WWI. The people eventually had enough, getting screwed by unscrupulous landlords, having little or nothing to ear, then seeing their families getting sent to battle to be killed by warmongering Germans.

In the case of Cuba it was run by the Cuban Mafia who relocated to Florida after Castro's rise to power and like the good criminals they were became staunch supporters of the republican party.

I am not a fan of communism, but I no longer consider it the "Red Menace" that it was in the 1950s.

Unfortunately, too many people still subscribe to that notion, especially the MAGA crowd. Even so much as getting vaxed for Covid is considered communist.

There is some irony that another thread MAGAs find it distasteful to be labelled fascist but have trouble labelling anyone who is against them as "communists"

Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto offered an excellent and accurate critique of capitalism. But they were quite vague on how to address it. The book offers very little direction or guidance in creating a communist society. In fairness, I don't think Marx and Engels intended it to do so; the book was primarily a critique.

But this reflects the course of a lot of communist movements in history. They come to power addressing legitimate grievances and problems, but run into trouble because they don't necessarily know how to proceed from there. A lot of times they end up replicating many of the problems of the old systems simply because that's what they know.

Ideal communism doesn't strike me as feasible. Plus, even if we did remove class and money, some people would still be more likable and charismatic than others. But I do think we need to create stronger social safety nets at the very least, and then see where we go from there.

I've known people who've survived communist regimes, and the stories they've told me are blood-curdling. That makes it difficult for me to sympathize with people who still call themselves communists. But, as before, a lot of their critiques are correct and we'd be wise to heed them before things get even worse.

Basically, communism is useful for identifying the problem. Not for coming up with a practical solution. But identification is still the first step.

Last edited by Minder on 17 Dec 2022, 11:59 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think what's tricky about the topic of communism is, at least across Russia and much of Asia, and yes - many other parts of the world, you had Nameism (ie. Lenninism, Stalinism, Maoism, etc.) and these were specific, ugly, instantiations of the ideas in practice. What I think a lot of these turnouts show is that you can't have a positive impact with military dictatorships, cults of personality, etc. because the information will not flow, if you're like Russia you can end up buying (at least in the early 20th century) Lysenko's ideas which probably on their own cost millions of lives. One thing communism never seemed to sort out is parameter limits on what its own claims would entitle different people to - and that became the narcissism competition one would expect.

I think if we were to actually take a shot at anything like it today - we'd be primarily concerned with those of Marx's critiques of capitalism that still stand as relevant, consider what we value as private citizens, and try to find ways to pull those back from the all-consuming machine which seems to try to turn everything and anything into standing reserve (the dystopic place where we need to monetize every recreational activity to stay afloat). To get any of that right though it really has to be deeply evidence-based, also very deeply informed by Darwinian game theory and knowledge not of what decent people would do but what 'wins' in absolute terms and knowing that if any part of the systems structure creates incentives to defect and loot the system - there are people who will sniff that corner out immediately and like an ant trail many more will follow until it becomes a serious problem. My guess is, by the time you make all of these fixes, you're really dealing with something much more like very competent technocratic social democracy rather than communism anyway.

What scares me right now are the alternatives of democracy turning to chaos as basic shared reality breaks down on one hand, and on the other - expedient solutions to that problem such as China-style dictatorship and social credit scores. What I don't know is what would be economically viable in terms of trying to turn data streams, oracle services, and all kinds of different public ledgers into questions of how we can use that data for reasserting things that are important to us (like health care, childhood education that's strengthening but not traumatic, the ability of one parent to be home with the kids again if desired, less absolute reliance on consumerism like individual cars and major appliances) so that we could actually find ways to move back toward what we care about without making tradeoffs that sound great in a political speech but have such rotten downstream consequences that even suggesting them is a straight-up grift.

Correct. One thing you have to remember is Marx and Engels were intellectuals and philosophers but they were not psychologists. They did not think how to overcome something as simple as human greed in some future idealistic society they dreamed up.

Both of them belonged to the very bourgeois class they critiqued. Essentially they were beneficiaries of the neo-colonial empires they lived in.
While that might make them hypocrites that they indulged in a lifestyle they preached against, it gave them first hand experience to see how unsustainable the rule of aristocracy and merchant class was in the long term.

From a perspective of a former "communist" state that later became part of the "First World":
Communism was economically inefficient. That's the most obvious difference.
Comparing ourselves to "traditionally capitalist" states, I think former communist Europe (I don't have enough knowledge on Asia or Latin America) does better - but not perfectly - with gender equality and it has less rigid social stratification.
It was particularily interesting to see a map of female employment in Germany in the 2000s. The border between East and West Germany was clearly visible. I think it mixed since then, though.

Marx and Engels lived in mid 19th century Victorian England. So they lived the heart of a COLONIAL empire. Not of a 'neocolonial' empire. Why did you use the word 'neocolonial' when you meant 'colonial'? "Neocolonial' applies to the post WWII era when third world countries were all granted independence from their former European masters (like Britain and France), BUT continued to be treated as subordinate vassals by those European powers anyway.

Also Marx was not even opposed to colonialism anyway, but wrote that "colonialism is a progressive force drawing backward peoples into civilization" (Typical European attitude of the time). It was later thinkers, including Lenin and Mao, who extended Marx's theories about class struggle to explain, and to blast, European colonialsim in the third world.

I often wonder whether any of those governments even intended to implement communism in the first place. I'm sure they paid lip service to the people's this and the people's that, but I suspect what was going on in their noggins was rather different, and more about advancing their own personal power. OTOH I can't say for sure that it wasn't sometimes a case of good intentions that went wrong because of difficulties in running a fair society on a large scale.

Lenin had been a pretty dedicated Marxist and socialist for most of his life. He had to break somewhat with Marx, because Marx had insisted that a society needed to go through multiple stages of development before it could become communist: primitive-feudal-bourgeois/capitalist-socialist-communist. Early 20th century Russia was seen by most Marxists as still being in the feudal stage in most respects, so Lenin had to adapt Marx.

This isn't to say that I think the Soviet Union failed due to a lack of adherence to Marxist orthodoxy. Merely that, while Lenin was not necessarily a doctrinaire Marxist, it strikes me as fallacious to insist that he wasn't a true believer. Doing that is basically the "No true Scotsman..." argument.

In many cases, communism was forced upon countries. However, some of those countries still had longstanding communist movements that took advantage of the situation, so it's inaccurate to say that it was an entirely foreign transplant.

You did have some dictators who seemed to have pretty shaky understandings of Marx. Pol Pot and Kim il-Sung are examples of this. It's been argued that the Kim regime in North Korea actually does a lot to imitate the Japanese imperial regime, albeit even more draconian. Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceasescu in Romania also seemed to be more like opportunists.

But this could not be said for Lenin, Tito, and Ulbricht.

Sorry, my bad. The impact of communism was largely neo-colonial in that the ideas spread in newly independent post-colonial states such as Vietnam and Korea. But of course the authors of the communist manifesto lived during empire.

The Soviet Union was itself a colonialist regime, based on how it perpetuated the colonialism of the Russian Empire in Siberia, the Baltics, etc, and how it spread its rule to much of eastern and central Europe.

Some good points there, I think.

One could argue Russia still is, it has aspirations to absorb Ukraine into its borders. This is why I am not sure anyone who calls themselves a communist actually ever practiced the communism of Engels or Marx which was in itself flawed as the theories they come up with were untested in real-world situations.

Agreed, though as has already been said in this thread, Marx and Engels were basically pro-colonialist, at least in the sense that they saw it as a way to bring "progress" to people.