Communism

A

Marxist-Leninist Ideology

A root feature of communist states has been their subscription to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism. As fashioned by Lenin, building on the earlier works of Marx and Engels, it is the belief that history advances by means of class struggle, always nudged in a benign direction by the leadership of a communist party. The theory foresaw that in capitalist societies, a small vanguard of professional revolutionaries was necessary to infuse the working masses with revolutionary fervor and overthrow capitalism. This would be followed by a brief period of proletarian dictatorship—in Lenin’s view, the communist party ruling on behalf of the working class—which would establish a socialist state and put in place the foundations of a communist society. Eventually class differences would vanish, the state would be abolished, and people would live in affluence and harmony.

The reality of communist regimes, however, was that of a dictatorial government of indefinite duration, and one that was as indifferent to the wishes of the working class as to every other social group. For several generations of communists, the contradiction between theory and reality could be rationalized as the unfortunate result of the poverty of their societies, of the mistakes of individual leaders, or of the malevolence of the capitalist world. Eventually, communist elites began to have doubts about the costs and benefits of a communist regime, especially as compared to liberal Western democracies. Ordinary people also questioned parts of communist ideology and offered passive and, more rarely, active defiance of the entrenched authorities. Surveys of Soviet refugees after World War II showed that younger people, who were born under communist rule, were more accepting of the values of the system than their elders, who had memories of life before communism. When similar surveys were done in the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the pattern was exactly the opposite. People in all age groups supported many fundamentals of the communist system, but younger people were cooler toward the Soviet government and more receptive to alternative institutions and policies.

B

Centrally Planned Economy

Marx and Engels conceived of communism as a society of abundance, equality, and free choice. They said little about how economic decisions would be made, other than that property would belong to society as a whole. Beginning with Soviet Russia after 1917, the rulers of real-life communist regimes were engrossed in setting up and working through bureaucratic agencies designed to mobilize economic resources for the industrial transformation of their countries. Industrialization became an end in itself, and the fantasy of the communist paradise receded into a cloudy future.

Communist systems relied on a centrally planned economy, also called a command economy. The centrally planned economy had four cornerstones. The first was government ownership of virtually all the means of production—farms, factories, scientific laboratories, shops, and so forth—and organization of those assets into firms managed by employees of the state. The second was control of those managers by party-appointed economic planners, who fixed output targets and prices and meddled in countless of the firm’s decisions, such as product mix and production scheduling. The third was a policy of giving the highest priority to industrial investment and—in the Soviet Union, North Korea, and several other countries—to military spending, at the expense of production of consumer goods and food products. The fourth central feature of communist economies was national self-reliance. Foreign trade occupied an inconsequential place in the economy, and trade that did occur was usually with other planned economies. Foreign investment was discouraged, and the communist countries, until late in their history, kept out of international financial institutions.

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Communist economies did achieve some success. Studies of growth trends from the 1950s to the early 1970s showed the centrally planned economies equaling and in some cases exceeding the growth rates of the capitalist economies. They also attained high literacy rates, made basic health care available to the population, eliminated extreme poverty, and avoided unemployment. From the mid-1970s onward, however, the communist countries lost ground, and their leaders began to contemplate unpalatable economic reforms in the interests of achieving technological prowess and a higher standard of living. In all of the Asian communist countries except North Korea, ambitious reforms did unfold. In the Soviet bloc, there were scattered attempts at reform (in Hungary and Poland, for example), but they were limited by the unwillingness of the USSR, until several years into Gorbachev’s administration, to give change the green light.

C

Single-Party Rule

In communist states, the communist party held complete and unchallenged political power. All other political parties were banned, except for minor procommunist parties in several Eastern European countries. The name of the governing party differed from country to country. Rather than calling themselves the “communist party,” some parties adopted variations like the “socialist unity party” (as in East Germany), the “people’s democratic party” (Afghanistan), or the “party of labor” (Albania).

Ultimate authority—subject to external audit from Moscow, in the heyday of Soviet power—was vested in a self-perpetuating leadership of perhaps 15 to 25 high officials in the party. The senior person in the ruling group wielded disproportionate influence over policy and personnel decisions. A single-minded leader—such as Stalin, Mao, Tito, or Castro—could wield supreme power over the entire political scene for decades on end. Organized factions within the top leadership were strictly forbidden. Stretching downward from the apex of the hierarchy was a sprawling and multilayered state bureaucracy. Owing to governmental stewardship of economic activity, public employees did almost all jobs, including those, such as selling newspapers and designing jet aircraft, that in Western societies would be the preserve of private business.

Communist parties often shared a similar organizational structure. The highest decision-making body, usually called the Politburo, consisted of a small group of senior party officials. Typically, the Politburo met weekly under the chairmanship of a top party leader to discuss high-level policy. A larger committee, usually called the Central Committee, included top executives of the government ministries, the military and police, and the party itself. Reporting to these high-ranking bodies was a separate administrative hierarchy composed of full-time officials of the party, grouped into departments in the capital city and at local and intermediate levels. Individual members of the party paid their dues and were subject to party directives in party cells (local organizations) nested in factories and other workplaces. Communist parties invariably judged control of personnel to be the crux of their control over society. In the Soviet Union, people appointed to important government positions were required to be vetted by party officials, a procedure known as nomenklatura. This system was copied throughout the communist world.

Communist states possessed elaborate pseudo-democratic processes for formalizing and publicizing political decisions. In the national capital, a parliament met once or twice a year to rubber-stamp laws and ratify selection of the members of the government. The legislators were chosen in elections in which the outcome was usually predetermined; with rare exceptions, the nominee of the communist party was the only name on the ballot. Similar rituals were replicated at the regional and local level. Three communist countries had federal systems in which the constitution divided formal powers between a central government and the governments of constituent republics: the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and, after 1968, Czechoslovakia. The federal republics were designated as the homelands of ethnic groups and were named after them. For example, Czechoslovakia consisted of the Czech and Slovak republics.

D

Restrictions on Individual Freedom

Another hallmark of communist states was the mandatory involvement of the mass of the population in political life. Most young people enrolled in party-controlled youth organizations, the entire labor force had to sign up in official trade unions, and the professionally ambitious were obliged to join the communist party and to submit to its discipline. Participation in state elections was all but impossible to escape, with turnout approaching 100 percent. Political education was also omnipresent. Political classes were organized in all schools (and textbooks in most subjects contained ideological content), and the program was continued in the universities and the armed services.

Complementing this compulsory participation was an extensive web of negative controls on personal liberties. For communist leaders, it was an article of faith that collective needs, as interpreted by the state, ought to override individual rights. Not without justification, they were wary that relaxation of controls might encourage individuals to seek wider freedoms and thereby to challenge the single-party system. Public assembly and voluntary association were prohibited; only meetings and organizations authorized by the state were tolerated. Communist states also limited, to one extent or another, individuals’ ability to worship, work, and travel as they pleased. The most intense restrictions were those clamped on the mass media, intellectuals, and artists, all of whom had to comply with party directives. Books, magazines, and newspapers were subject to pre-publication censorship in all communist countries before the Gorbachev reforms, and radio and television stations were owned outright by the state.

X

The Future of Communism

In the classic writings of Marx and Engels, capitalism was a dark presence and communism a thinly sketched picture of a radiant future. The intellectual forefathers of the communist regimes of the 20th century purported to study and criticize capitalism by means of rigorous science; communism they approached through a form of prophecy. There is no denying the appeal that both sides of their vision were to exert over the years. The revolutions made in its name were watersheds of modern history. But there is no denying, either, the illusory nature of many of the propositions they put into circulation. Time has not been kind to Marxism-Leninism or the communist ideal.

The ideology’s fatal oversights partly have to do with capitalism, the economic order communists despise and seek to obliterate. Experience has shown privately owned, market-coordinated economies to be incomparably more robust and dynamic than Marx and his contemporaries dreamt possible. Over much of the globe, free enterprise has achieved steady rates of increase in productivity, output, and the standard of living. The perturbations of the business cycle, which at their most destructive gave rise to the Great Depression of the 1930s, have in recent decades eased. International flows of goods, capital, and information have burgeoned. In the most technologically sophisticated countries, service industries have displaced manufacturing as the hub of the market economy, meaning that unskilled manual workers, the proletariat in its original guise, are less and less of a factor. Through mass access to credit, stock exchanges, and mutual funds, ownership of economic assets has become more widely dispersed. Perhaps most important, political realities—democracy, the welfare state, policies for prudent monetary management—have shielded capitalism from its own worst excesses.

Where communist parties did make it to power, it was, in Marxist terms, in the wrong places—that is, in relatively poor countries where industrial capitalism was just beginning to develop. The dismal performance of the regimes they created constitutes another unfortunate consequence of Marxist-Leninist thought. These regimes, couched in the original theory as short-term improvisations that would tide people over until the promised era of plenty and classless harmony, in practice turned out to be long-term tyrannies that transformed society from above, sheltered themselves from public accountability, and did everything they could to perpetuate their hold on power. Until the 1970s, analysts of communist states, and apologists for them, could point to some evidence of economic accomplishment, albeit at grave political and social cost. From then on, however, economic ills beset all the communist governments, necessitating hard choices about reform.

As change accelerated in the 1980s, political forces long held in check by communist rulers—in particular, nationalism—came to the fore. In stunning sequence, the reforms attempted by the prototypical communist regime, that of the Soviet Union, led to the system’s collapse and to the emergence of the Russian Federation and 14 other postcommunist states. Soviet events undermined communist systems in Eastern Europe and, in most parts of the world, accentuated the loss of credibility of the nonruling communist parties and put an end to the instruction, aid, and encouragement they had long received from Moscow. In China and several other countries, communist leaders introduced economic reforms so serious that they altered the party’s self-image almost beyond recognition. Only in a few idiosyncratic locations—Cuba and North Korea, strikingly—did orthodox communists manage to stifle the pressures for root-and-branch change. In the first of these countries, the charismatic leader of the communist revolution, Fidel Castro, was still in power; in the second, the man at the helm, Kim Jong Il, was the son of the founder of the North Korean regime.

Communism as a coherent, centrally directed international movement is dead. There is no realistic chance that it will be resurrected. There has not been, and presumably there never will be, a proletarian revolution in any of the leading capitalist societies. Communist factions in virtually all of these places have either been reduced to esoteric left-wing sects or have reinvented themselves as reformist socialists content to live by the democratic rules of the game. Anti-government rebels in scattered Asian, African, and Latin American nations brandish some Marxist-Leninist slogans, but they indulge in this rhetoric indiscriminately and are bound to no common movement.

The prospects for communism are more complex in countries where communists have at one time or another governed. Local circumstances may permit diehards to prop up unreformed communist regimes. In Cuba and North Korea, the two places where this has happened so far, the equation could change instantly with a shift in circumstances, such as the death of Castro or an economic catastrophe in North Korea. In Eastern Europe, the formerly ruling communist parties have, by and large, transmuted into democracy-abiding postcommunist parties. Nothing will shake them from this mold short of a disavowal of the westernizing path taken by the countries of the region in 1989. In the biggest of the successor states to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, the communist party seems doomed to permanent minority status. Elsewhere in the former USSR, the mix of influential and marginal communist parties is likely to continue for some time.

The future of communism is hardest to predict in China, Vietnam, and Laos, where communist bosses have held out against political reform but welcomed economic reform. Of the three, China faces the most serious choices. Appalled by the chaotic crumbling of the Soviet system, China's leaders are determined not to repeat what they view as Mikhail Gorbachev’s mistakes. Plunging full speed ahead with economic modernization and liberalization, they have at the same time carried on with venerating Mao Zedong, barring opposition parties, and censoring the mass media. This dual strategy should be sustainable for some time, and it will draw sustenance, as the Chinese communists did before 1949, from Chinese patriotism. Ironically, the best hope for the survival of communism in some form well into the 21st century lies with the leaders of a relatively backward country whose priorities are to foster, not the emancipation of the international working class, but capitalism and the dignity of the nation.

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