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Has Any Nation Ever Chosen Communism?
I’ve been reading John Lewis Gaddis’s book The Cold War: A New History, and a question occurred to me that I’d never actually thought about before.
Communism, at least as formulated by Marx and pursued by Lenin, was supposed to be a natural consequence of the failings of capitalism. It was supposed to be the masses, the proletariat, overthrowing the small minority that was oppressing them. As such, it was supposed to be what would make life better for the vast majority of people.
But that made me wonder: has any democratic country ever voluntarily chosen a communist government? Not just socialist (we have plenty of those), but full-blown communist? If communism truly is for the people, you’d think it would be the obvious choice of the majority of voters.
But I can’t think of an example of a communist government that was put in place by the consent of a voting majority. In every case I can think of, communist regimes came to power either through violent revolution (Russia, Cuba) or through being installed or sponsored by a foreign power (most of the Eastern Bloc nations, North Korea). In each case it seems that a communist majority managed to seize power despite the wishes of the populace, and then had to use force to maintain their grip on power.
But I don’t claim an exhaustive knowledge of history. Has there ever been a case of a democratic country, in a free election, voluntarily choosing a true Marxist communist government?
Published in General
The Vanguard of the proletariat and all that suggests that a small group has to take control, then perpetuate that control.
The only example I can think of is the Paris Commune. It is a sort-of. Sort of elected and sort of communistic.
Seawriter
When they first got to America, the original Pilgrims tried communism (all property held in common). Rush likes to read the story from John Winthrop about how it was a total failure, and they had to go back to individually-owned plots of land for each family.
If I remember correctly, Chile elected a Marxist president in the 1970’s.
The Pilgrims themselves were against holding the property in common, but the company in England who put up the finances insisted on it. If I remember correctly the Pilgrims divided up the land without their consent, because the results were so bad.
No nation can elect communism. Marx’s definition of it is an utopian end goal reached through repeated application socialism for the sole class of the proletariat (blue collar workers of the factory) by which society (and only the proletariat class will remain) goes from according to his labor to according to his need. It is a post scarcity society which allows any individual to get whatever they want whenever they decide to desire it(which eliminates the purpose of property).
Thus any “communist” (that vanguard) party is a party which seeks to apply socialism towards said end goal. They in fact are not implementing communism but rather working towards it.
As it relates to Marx’s prophecy the manner of getting to communism does not matter (at least in the manifesto there is no mention of any perfect or desired means, whether war or election but it is based on the proletariat realizing their class consciousness and working together towards taking power for themselves). Lenin did considerable work in reconciling the failure of a proletariat revolution to occur in Europe, which he argued was the result of colonial exploitation (taking wealth from third world to first world) as being used to sedate the proletariat with stolen wealth (it’s why later Soviet leaders spent considerable material and men supporting revolutions in the third world).
Because of this it really does not matter to Marx how the revolution occurs because Marx, and later communist thinkers, assumed a degree of ignorance on the part of the proletariat that would require leadership to resolve.
As to an election that went to Communists the 1946 election in North Vietnam went to the Communists under Ho Chi Minh allegedly.
The whole point of the Frankfurt School is to counter the fact that the proles don’t choose Marxism. Destroy the culture that is supposedly holding back the Revolution and all that. Lenin also recognized this, and his thing was that basically it was the responsibility of some elites (ie, him and the Party) to guide the people to the proper solution.
The Anabaptist Hutterites have lived communally for over a century in this country and Canada. They own their property in common, have their meals together, and elect their own “bosses.” They are agrarian, but don’t avoid technology and large machinery like the Amish do. They live out west, where the farms can scale up. (Well, there is a small group of urban Hutterites, which tends towards leftier politics and is anti-abortion, last time I read about them. But they don’t have a close link with the agrarian Hutterites.)
I think Rugby, in Tennessee consisted of a utopian society.
Venezuela.
Venezuelans elected Chavez. Then they voted to give him dictatorial powers.
In 1919 the newly independent state of Georgia freely elected out right Communists to power with no violence of any kind. The new Georgian government was communist through and through and the Georgian nobles surrendered without any fight. Because their transition to power was so peaceful it also had compromises. For instance Nobles lost their lands but kept their houses and money in the beginning. The state did not own all the land they redistributed fairly to the Georgian peasant and planned to have them voluntarily collectivize the land. This made the Communist government incredibly popular with the typical Georgia citizen they enjoyed immense public support as they waged small and successful wars against the White Russians in the north, in the region of Abkhazia. and with Armenian nationalists in the South.
Their only real enemy were the Bolsheviks who hated the Georgian Communists. Stalin was famously beaten up in an all Communist brawl at a party conference in the Georgian city of Batumi. After that Stalin and other Georgian Bolsheviks left the country mostly going to Baku but some went north into Russia.
The only time they ran into native resistance to their rule was when they tried to encourage the Georgian farmers to collective their farms the Georgian did not like the any idea even a little bit and they flat refused to do so. For the typical Georgian peasant Communist utopia was reached when they owned their own land.
We have no idea how that would have turned out though since Stalin had some Bolshevik activist in South Ossetia stage a public riot when the Georgian police restored order Stalin used it as an excuse to invade take the country over in 1921. Then the second Communist regime was imposed by force but the first was not.
On a little side note the Soviet Union spent an enormous amount of time trying to discredit this first Georgian Communist regime. Anticipating the Marvel Universe movie by 50 years the Soviets scanned the records for Georgian Bolshevik resistance to the Mensheviks and found a few bandits and outlaws that claimed Bolshevik sympathy during the short run of the independent Communist Georgia. They created 8 men into brave Resistance fighters and made them all connected to each other in one way or another. Then after having fiction written, tv shows or a movie made about each of them they were all brought together, Avengers style, into one big movie that had them all team up against the corrupt Georgian Mensheviks, who were really dupes of the Georgian nobles, don’t you know.
Anyway the resistance of these Communist super heroes were so inspiring that in the end the Russian Bolsheviks invaded Georgia to aid these men and their fight for true Communist justice. Even today many Georgians that hate the Communist love this old movie and think these Bolshevik super heroes are really cool. I find that to be pretty funny.
Second MJBubba on Venezuela. The people elected him on a platform of socialism, they re-elected him with even more power, and they still mourn his death today from their food lines.
The road to serfdom is a road to serfdom because it appeals to the masses and is used by an elite to gather power to themselves. We’re on it. Marxism is behind pretty much all modern and collectivist movements including the leadership of the Democratic party al be it a flabby superficial neo marxism it’s adherents don’t fully understand. The only other socialism is a flabby neo christian utopianism that Marx dismissed as foolish. Marxism itself is pure abstraction that appeals to youth because it allows one to know everything about every thing without the effort of actual learning. For this reason the perpetual adolescence of our youth is a real threat to our future.
Look how that worked out…
Israeli Kibbutz’s were voluntary communism. In that form, they basically came and went.
So did the American versions of Jewish communes that preceded the kibbutz’s.
I got to wondering whether the Hutterites have been following in the path of the Amish and becoming less agricultural. According to this web page, the answer is yes: http://www.hutterites.org/day-to-day/livelihood/manufacturing/
I was going to mention the Paris Comunes and the Anabaptists, but that’s been well-covered. Of course, those weren’t “nations”– and neither was the early church. See Acts 4:35-35: Christians sold their possessions and pooled the money, “And distribution was made unto every man according as he had need.”) (KJV)
…or else! Peter struck one couple, Ananias and Sapphira, dead on the spot for holding back a bit of profit.
Is anything in the NT more chilling than Peter’s words to Sapphira when she backs up the word of her husband, who has already paid with his life, unbeknownst to her:
“‘Behold, the feet of them which have buried thy husband are at the door, and shall carry thee out.’
Then she fell down straightway at his feet, nad yielded up,the ghost; and the young men came in and found her dead, and carrying her forth, buried her by her husband.”
Now, that’s pure communism!
I was just reading on the Hutterite Brethren web site about the practice of some families earning a little extra personal spending money by working away from the colony. It seems it’s strictly forbidden in some colonies, while others are more lenient and turn a blind eye to the practice if it doesn’t get out of hand. It seems this story of Annanias and Sapphira is always kept in mind.
Although Hutterite communism has been long lasting and successful, outsiders rarely join. One of the main reasons given is that it’s hard to give up one’s personal freedom to make decisions, including financial decisions. And in studying the Hutterite system, one can see how it would never work on a national scale. The Hutterite system has safety valves that would be lacking in a national system. Some people leave, for example. And among those who stay, there are differences in practice from colony to colony of a kind that a national government would never allow. Even a relatively individualistic society like that of the United States has difficulty in allowing diversity of practice among the states. Look at the Republican Establishment’s onslaught on federalism and subsidiarity in the areas of food labeling, fracking, and professional licensing, for example.
Reticulator and Bartholomew X.O.: no of course it does not work on a national scale. It might work, for a while, with coercion, in a doomsday cult where the goal is not governance but proselytization in the very brief time remaining before The End. Witness the Sapphira story.
Every time somebody contrasts socialism and communism I wonder what the difference is. It’s not that I don’t think there’s a difference. Rather, I doubt we have a common understanding of what the differences are. The comments in this thread confirm my suspicion. We’re clearly not all talking about the same thing in regard to communism. So, what are the differences?
Read the communist manifesto (which I doubt many have). Marx clearly describes a post scarcity world, and explains it in a material way (never mentions spirtual fulfillment). In a world with post scarcity there is no government because property has lost all meaning (as property is a concept used in a world of scarcity to maximize allocation of resources) and so it’s simply perfect production of everything that anyone wants so they can get it whenever they want it (as Marx said from each according to their ability, socialism, to each according to their needs, communism).
Communism has no government whereas socialism has maximum government.
This thread has been quite an education!
I would tend not to count voluntary assemblies of people (communes, kibbutzes) because I’m not sure such voluntary sharing of resources really counts as communism. If for no other reason because it isn’t governmental. After all, my wife and I freely share our resources, but that doesn’t make our household communist.
But I think @couldbeanyone made an excellent point that I had missed: communism, even in theory, isn’t an “out of the box” solution. Even true believers like Lenin and his successors saw it as a goal they had to work toward, after they got hold of power. Even in the 1960s, by which time you’d think its failures would have been obvious, Khrushchev was still making promises that East Berlin would eventually provide a better standard of living than West Berlin. The Wall was necessary only as a stopgap. (Supposedly.)
So a democratic population could never voluntarily transform a country, overnight, into a communist state. But they could, if they believed it was the best way, elect leaders who promised to work toward that end. And it sounds like there have been at least a few cases of that, and maybe more, depending on how you define your terms loosely.
In over a decade of watching Russian movies, mostly from the last half of the Soviet decades and the post-Soviet decades, I’ve tried to pay attention to the uses of the terms “socialism” and “communism,” and can’t say I’ve figured out how one is distinguished from the other. The term socialism tends to be used much more frequently, though. I’ve heard the word “communist” used more often than “communism,” but neither is used very much.
Do you really think that secondary sources (if we are going to give Russian movie makers the honor of that distinction) are better than the primary source itself?
In order to communicate with people I’m more interested in how the term is actually used. And besides, nobody made Karl Marx the god of the dictionary.
I’ve run into leftists who try to draw distinctions between socialism and communism that amount to word games with their magical blowfish dictionary, as I like to call it, expanding and contracting definitions as it suits their purpose. I don’t like to let them do that.
Of course. Every Western European state and the United States have willingly, gleefully, and merrily chosen communism. Oh it’s called something else, but in practice it is the same. The only difference is that the dissidents are not thrown in to gulags, but believe me, as soon as the Left can convince people that it needs to happen, liberty minded folk are going to be “disappeared.”
Your right. Let’s apply that rule to other works, like the constitution or bible, that are misunderstood by leftists and thus distort the truth and muddy the waters further.
Not to derail the thread, but I was taught that Ananias and Sapphira were struck dead not for keeping a portion of the proceeds, but for lying to Peter and the Church (and ultimately to G-d and the Holy Spirit). Ananias and Sapphira told Peter they were giving the entire portion to the church. Peter even makes a point of asking Sapphira if that was the price they received for the land.