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?
What makes sense to me, is that unlike capitalism, communism requires a government to function. Well, and how do governments fail? By turning into a dictatorship.
lol… imagine capitalism without police
imagine any regime with out monopoly on violence…
Capitalism requires a State to enshrine Private Property Rights, neither can exist without a form of government.
because of a few things
a) when you start a game of monopoly, everybody is equal. by the end of the game, wealth (think of wealth as an analog to power) snowballs and only one or two people will have all the resources.
when you start a communist government, it’s not a fresh game of monopoly. it’s a continuation of the previous game. and the vast majority of people are joining in after the wealth has been accumulated. therefore, power remains in the hand of the powerful
b) there is a large variance in human capabilities. to be frank, the vast majority of people are sheep. their world view is narrow and motivation stunted. they don’t really care very much about things outside of their life and they don’t want to learn, grow, etc. there isn’t anything wrong with that, and there’s sort of a whole religion based on this
but some people are very talented, ambitious, and greedy. these people will end up at higher positions, no matter your form of government. humans tend to naturally distribute ourselves in hierarchies. aka pyramids
this goes all the way back to our primate roots. look at chimps where the male leader of the pack has dibs on which female monkey he wants to mate with. the weaker monkeys have to bow their head and take what they can get.
tldr: hierarchy and pyramids are in the very fabric of human existence. doesn’t matter what form of government or economic system you pick. pyramid will develop somehow, someway
Calling the skill and ambition distribution a pyramid is really an artifact of history, not biology. If you want to take on ‘human nature’ you have to examine millions of years of evolution as mostly egalitarian troupe hominids, and state that groups bigger than 100 people are something we haven’t had time to evolve for yet.
So you put in checks and balances, it’s what makes governance complex, and egalitarian governance is ironically going to be more complex and relational.
The Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederacy is a good example of how to approach such a problem.
mostly egalitarian troupe hominids
“mostly” is pulling a lot of weight in that statement, eh?
sure, we took care of the elderly and others in the tribe. packs of wild dogs and monkeys have been seen to do that as well. share food, etc. but if our early tribes are anything like what we see in primates, and it almost certainly was, the distribution of power was not equal.
there are monkeys with differing levels. baboons have a much stricter hierarchy than bonobos, but the structure is still there
The Haudenosaunee / Iroquois Confederacy is a good example of how to approach such a problem
I do not claim it is impossible, although I also do not believe that the exceptions disprove the rule. My favorite example personally is the brief anarchist experiment during the Spanish Civil War. The anarchists managed to at least for a short period of time replicate what I believe would be the ideal society.
the issue is that this type of society simply loses to other more authoritarian ones in a sort of Darwinist playing field. the vanguard party commies beat the anarchists and then the nationalists beat the communists. bye bye egalitarian power structure
Calling the skill and ambition distribution a pyramid is really an artifact of history, not biology
let’s say i am a foot taller than you and weigh 100 pounds more. we have just finished a hunt and we are distributing the spoils. let’s say I take double your portion. you speak up “hey I deserve an equal amount” and then I simply look at you and say “no”
what are you gonna do? my genetic makeup (along with external factors of course, like my mother’s nutrition while i was in the womb) caused me to have more physical power than you. you have no choice but to bow your head and take what you get.
that doesn’t mean it’s impossible, for example, to create alliances with others in the tribe and end up with a “social victory” and we actually see these types of behaviors in chimps. but I think that in itself is just another form of power. social intelligence, political and diplomatic maneuvering is a function of intelligence which like physical strength is a makeup genetic (as well as external, like before)
so you may be physically weaker, but mentally stronger. but in the end, power is power.
the older I get, the more I realize how deeply ingrained this structure is in our societies. I wish it weren’t, but it really is. the only way around it, I think, would require a radical restructuring of our society and would necessarily have to be just as dystopian as the opposite extreme
To simplify, two main reasons. First when done via revolutions it often causes economic and societal shock in which autocrates take the power away from the people. And second, when done peacefull, foreign intervention of secret agencies which again try to put autocrates in powerful positions.
You can really ask the same question about capitalist societies. Why is there such oppression? Why is there a group that can do anything and a group that cannot? Regardless of your political system, human behavior is the same and it usually involves insecure ape-like people who want power for power’s sake. Communism, just like every political system ever created, trends towards this sort of behavior.
As someone else said, desperation will cause people to move towards authoritarian thought, be that the extreme right (fascism) or the extreme left (communism).
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).
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?
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.
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.
If you do the thing and you do it right and you don’t fuck it up. Then it might work.
Where was communism adopted?
Countries with a strong history of authoritarian leadership, which continued under communism but with a fig leaf of public support. Kind of like how the US was formed as a democracy, but only for male white land owners who were already the ruling class.
The governmental structure has an impact on culture, but it doesn’t magically override existing social connections and norms. The people really did elect Putin before he consolidated power and turned it into completely sham elections. The communist party in China was originally what the people wanted before being turned into an authoritarian regime.
It isn’t like this is that unique to the countries that adopted communism. Many large countries, including western democracies, end up leaning into authoritarian tendencies over time because central leadership structures tend to encourage the leadership styles of ‘strong men’. If the culture isn’t there to hold those that abuse their power accountable, that country will slide into authoritarianism over time.
Personally, I don’t see communism ever scaling well above maybe a few hundred people because the more people that someone doesn’t know is involved the harder it is for the whole to feel like a community. Democracy has a similar scaling problem, but it doesn’t lean into authoritarianism as fast. yeah,
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.
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.
This isn’t communism it’s every government type
If it’s not from the Communist region of China it’s just sparkling socialism.
Because people suck ass, and to successfully go from capitalism to socialism and then to communism, you need a whole population that puts the needs of the many above their own selfish desires. It’s not impossible, but it’s gonna be hard to truly accomplish.
I don’t think that is exclusive to communism. I rather assume that this has more to do with how the government is structured. Long-running politicians tend to being more open to corruption.
I can easily see Trump going the same way. He has assembled enough power within the system to break it from within like most dictators did.
Thats like asking why North Korea became a dictatorship when it is a people’s democracy.
Power gaps get filled, small states get conquered.
Because extremes don’t work.
From what I’ve seen over the past 100 years, pure capitalist societies fail (hello Americans!) just lie pure communist societies (hello Russia!)
What works well are free societies that mix strong capitalism systems to fund strong social systems and safety nets (hello, north west Europe!)
You’re being downvoted probably because your take is unscholarly, but it is not wrong.
Marx predicts the withering of the state by developing democratic socialism further and further until capital and its hoarders are fully enclosed. Northern Europe is a good example of this trend on the long term, and this is as predicted.
I think a lot of ideologues have an element of religiosity to their adoption of marxist analysis and that leads to religious timelines: The End Is At Hand.
But it’s not. Our lifespans are short compared with history. Late industrial capitalism will wither, and information capitalism will be further developed, before capital is enclosed by democratic development. Just waiting for how crazy genetics tech will make things… but I think we have to get through the fundamental questions that ownership of biology poses before we see the capacity for economic phase shift. History is accelerating, so…?
Gotta love how you talk about me being unscholarly, yet you literally pretend you can predict the future exactly
OK to be specific the USA is not pure capitalist as it has a huge number of public assets and social services, and the soviets were nowhere near pure communist, a long ways away from a stateless society run by a proletariat, more like state monopoly capitalism. Anyone who has studied the topic might be inclined to downvote such claims.
Anyway I was defending you not attacking, being pissy won’t help.
Of course the US is not 100 capitalistic not was the USSR 100% communist.
Having said that, to clarify, the US is WAY too much capitalistic and needs to tone it down vastly. The rich upperclass is not happy about that idea, of course
Russia wasn’t 100% communistic, and never could be because real communism will beber work as the vast majority of the population won’t want it. There is a reason why the purges from when communism started there ended with so many murders. Get rid of those that oppose communism, then get rid of those that oppose all those murders too. Anyone wanting “real” Communism really should watch “the chekist” as a good example of what is to come.
Like it or not, capitalism is by far the most successful system of driving humanity forward. However, you need to control it, you need a lot of strict laws in place to keep it from spinning out of control. Use a controlled capitalist system to fund and support a strong socialist network on top of that and you’ll end up with great countries
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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
