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Criticism of communism

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Note that Communism is a branch of Socialism. This article only discusses criticisms that are specific to communism and not other forms of socialism. See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general.

Criticisms of Communism can be divided in two broad categories: Those concerning themselves with the practical aspects of 20th century Communist states, and those concerning themselves with communist principles and theory. The two categories are almost entirely distinct: One may agree with communist principles but disagree with many policies adopted by Communist states (and this is quite common among communists, particularly in the case of Trotskyists), or, more rarely, one may agree with policies adopted by Communist states but disagree with communist principles.

20th century Communist states

Strictly speaking, the term "Communist state" is an oxymoron, since the communists themselves define communism as a social system that has abolished private property, social classes, and the state itself. No country or government ever called itself a "Communist state". However, during the Cold War, the term "Communist state" was coined in the West to refer to single-party states where the ruling party officially proclaimed its adherence to Marxism-Leninism. It is these "Communist states" that are the targets of criticism presented below.

For related information, see the discussion regarding the definition of a Communist state.

Anti-communist critique of Communist states

Censorship, personality cults, and foreign policy

The Communist states often practiced censorship. The level of censorship varied widely between different states and historical periods, but it nearly always existed to a greater or lesser extent. The most rigid censorship was practiced by hardline Stalinist and Maoist regimes, such as the Soviet Union under Stalin (1927–53), China during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), and North Korea during its entire existence (1948–present). This censorship took various forms:

Both anti-Communists and Communists have criticized the personality cults of many leaders of Communist states, and the hereditary leadership of North Korea. Milovan Djilas and others have also argued that a powerful new class of party bureaucrats emerged under Communist Party rule, and exploited the rest of the population. A Czech proverb observed, "Under capitalism, man exploits man; under Communism, it's the other way around." (See also nomenklatura.)

The Communist states also suppressed mass dissent: either by prohibiting emigration, as in the building of the Berlin wall; or by forcibly suppressing internal uprisings - from the Kronstadt rebellion to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Prague spring and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution have been criticized as imperialist wars where military force crushed popular uprisings against a Communist state.

Human rights violations

Large scale human rights violations occurred in Communist states. The most common of these were restrictions on freedom of speech (in the form of censorship, discussed above). Such restrictions existed, to a greater or lesser degree, in nearly all Communist states during most of their existence. Usually, newly established Communist states maintained or tightened the level of censorship that was present in those countries before the Communists came to power; indeed, the Communists themselves had most often been the targets of this previous censorship. As a result, after coming to power, they argued that they wanted to fight the former ruling class using its own weapons, either as a form of vengeance or to prevent it from staging a counter-revolution.

However, some Communist states - particularly the regimes of Stalin and Mao - engaged in far more severe human rights violations. Most prominent were deaths due to executions, forced labor camps, genocides of certain ethnic minorities, and mass starvations caused by either government mismanagement or deliberately. The exact number of deaths caused by these regimes is somewhat disputed, but extensive historical research shows at least tens of millions (see, e.g., the estimates reached in The Black Book of Communism and the references below). It is interesting to note that this figure far exceeds the number of deaths under fascist regimes during the twentieth century (including Nazi Germany).

Lesser violations include religious and ethnic persecutions, systematic use of torture as part of police procedure, lack of democracy, and the fact that workers were not allowed to join free labor unions.

Some advocates of Communist states find this approach simplistic, noting that executions, forced labor camps, the repression of ethnic minorities, and mass starvation were patterns in both Russian and Chinese history before their respective Communist revolutions. Critics argue that past evils in an old regime cannot be used to justify new ones, while advocates reply that they only seek to put the events into perspective, not justify them.

Economic and social development

According to the United States Department of Energy, the Communist states maintained a much higher level of energy intensity than either the Western nations or the Third World, at least after 1970. Energy-intensive development may have been reasonable. The Soviet Union was an exporter of oil; China has vast supplies of coal.

Advocates of Communist states often praise them for having leapt ahead of contemporary capitalist countries in certain areas, for example by offering guaranteed employment, health care and housing to their citizens. Critics typically condemn Communist states by the same criteria, claiming that all lag far behind the industrialized West in terms of economic development and living standards.

Central economic planning has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including rapid development of heavy industry during the 1930s in the Soviet Union and later in their space program. Another example is the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba. Early advances in the status of women were also notable, especially in Islamic areas of the Soviet Union. See Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919–1929, Princeton University Press, 1974, hardcover, 451 pages, ISBN 069107562X. However, the Soviet Union did not achieve the same kind of development in agriculture (forcing the Soviet Union to become a net importer of cereals after the Second World War). Other Communist states, such as Laos, Vietnam or Maoist China, continued in poverty; China has only achieved high rates of growth after introducing free market economic reforms — a sign, claim the critics, of the superiority of capitalism. Another example is Czechoslovakia, which was among world's most developed industrial countries prior to World War II, but fell behind the West in the post-war era.

Both critics and supporters also make comparisons between particular Communist and capitalist countries: Critics prefer to compare East and West Germany; supporters prefer to compare Cuba to Jamaica or Central America. All such comparisons are open to challenge, both on the comparability of the states involved and the statistic being used for comparison. No two countries are identical; the western parts of Germany were more developed and industrialized than the eastern parts long before the Cold War and the creation of two separate German states, and Cuba was likewise more developed than many of its Central American neighbors before the Cuban revolution.

Communist states often engaged in rapid industrialization, and in some cases this has lead to environmental disasters. The most cited example is the disappearance of the Aral Sea in today's Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which is believed to have been caused by the diversion of the waters of its two affluent rivers for cotton production. The Caspian Sea has also been diminishing; in addition, there was significant pollution of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the unique freshwater environment of Lake Baikal. In 1988 only 20% of the sewage in the Soviet Union was treated properly. Established health standards for air pollution were exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in 1988. In Eastern Europe, air pollution is cited as the cause of forest die-back, damage to buildings and cultural heritages, and a rise in the occurence of lung cancer. According to official sources, 58 percent of the total agricultural land of the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan, the Arctic Ocean, and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in 1992 that in the city of Moscow there were 636 radioactive toxic waste sites and 1,500 in St. Petersburg. However, many of these ecological problems continued unabated after the fall of the Soviet Union and are still major issues today - which has prompted many supporters of communist states to accuse their opponents of holding a double standard.

Technological progress in the Communist states was sometimes highly uneven, in the sense that some sectors surged ahead while others lagged behind. As noted above, the Soviet space program saw remarkable progress, and so did pure science and military technology, in all Communist states. Consumer products, on the other hand, were typically several years behind their Western counterparts. According to the CIA , a number of Soviet products were in fact using Western technology, which had been either legally purchased or obtained through espionage. This situation has been largely attributed to the fact that economic planners in the Soviet Union and elsewhere were accountable to the government, but, in the absence of democracy, they were not accountable to the people. Thus, their plans tended to focus on long-term goals and scientific and military development, rather than the short-term needs of the population.

Life expectancy has increased in fits and starts in the West. The latest of these began about 1970, and largely consists of improvements in cardiovascular medicine. Demographic studies (including this one) have concluded that the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe did not partake of this increase, as they had in the earlier ones; male life expectancies even decreased by a year - leading to a large gap between East and West by 1990. Since a market economy was introduced, a sharp decline in life expectancy was noted in the countries of the former Soviet Union. This decline has accelerated in Russia and Ukraine; in the Baltic republics life expectancy may have started to increase. In Eastern Europe, after 1990, the decline continued most notably in Romania, but life expectancy eventually began to increase in many of the other countries in the region. All these developments give information on post-Soviet capitalism, especially the economy of Russia, as well as on the policies of the Communist states.

Supporters of the Communist states note their social and cultural programs, sometimes administered by labor organizations. Universal education programs have been a strong point, as has the generous provision of universal health care. They point out the high levels of literacy enjoyed by Eastern Europeans (in comparison, for instance, with Southern Europe), Cubans or Chinese. Western critics charge that Communist compulsory education was replete with pro-Communist propaganda and censored opposing views.

Communist critique of Communist states

Not all those who criticize Communist states are anti-communists. Some are communists themselves, who disagree with some or most of the actions undertaken by communist states during the 20th century. Many of the anti-communist criticisms presented in the above section (for example, criticisms of violations of human rights) are shared by the communist critics. Criticisms of Communist states from the Left began very soon after the creation of the first such state. Bertrand Russell visited Russia in 1920, and regarded the Bolsheviks as intelligent, but clueless and planless. Emma Goldman condemned the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion as a 'massacre'.

One specifically communist critique, however, is the allegation that the "Communist states" of the 20th century grossly violated communist principles, and were therefore only partially communist at best or completely un-communist at worst.

Firstly, all communists agree that democracy (the rule of the people) is a key element of both socialism and communism - though they may disagree on the particular form that this democracy should take. The leaders of the Communist states themselves frequently announced their support for democracy, held regular elections and sometimes even gave their countries names such as the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". Supporters of communist states have always argued that those states were democratic. However, critics point out that, in practice, one political party held an absolute monopoly on power, dissent was banned, and the elections usually featured a single candidate and were ripe with fraud (often producing implausible results of 99% in favor of the candidate). Thus, communist critics of Communist states argue that, in practice, these states were not democratic and therefore not communist or socialist.

A lack of democracy implies a lack of a mandate from the people; as such, communist critics argue that the leadership of Communist states did not represent the interests of the working class, and it should therefore be no wonder that this leadership took actions that directly harmed the workers (for example Mao's Great Leap Forward). In particular, Communist states banned independent labor unions, an act seen by many communists (and most others on the political left) as an open betrayal of the working class.

Trotskyists, in particular, have argued that Stalin transformed the Soviet Union into a bureaucratic and repressive state, and that all subsequent communist states ultimately turned out similar because they copied his example (Stalinism). There are various terms used by Trotskyists to define such states; see state capitalism, degenerated workers' state and deformed workers' state.

While Trotskyists are Leninists, there are other communists who embrace classical Marxism and reject Leninism entirely, arguing, for example, that the Leninist principle of democratic centralism was the source of the Soviet Union's slide away from communism.

Finally, it should be noted that many of these communist criticisms draw counter-criticisms from anti-communists, many of whom have attempted to establish a direct link between communist principles and the actions of Communist states. Ultimately, this comes down to a fundamental disagreement between communists and anti-communists as to what those 'communist principles' actually are. A glaring example is the issue of democracy: Communists claim that democracy is an essential part of their principles, while anti-communists claim that it is not.

In addition to Communism, the names of several other ideologies and political systems have been used by governments or political parties whose policies are widely regarded as being contrary to the basic principles of those ideologies or systems. The Democratic Republic of the Congo or the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea), for example, are universally regarded as highly undemocratic. Likewise, the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia shares virtually nothing with the ideology of liberalism.

Marxism and communist theory

See Criticisms of socialism for a general critique of socialism. The following sections of this article deal with criticisms that are specifically raised against Marxist theory.

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is normally considered one of the intellectual foundations of Marxism. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological, and more broadly, material factors, as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes and nations.

Critics argue that it ignores other causes of historical and social change, like biology, genetics, philosophy, art, religion, or other causes that are not "materialist" according to Marxists. Some, such as Karl Popper and others, have also argued that Historical materialism is a pseudoscience because it is not falsifiable. Marxists respond that social sciences in general are largely not falsifiable, since it is often difficult or outright impossible to test them via experiments (in the way hard science can be tested).

Based on historical materialism, Marx made numerous predictions. For example, he argued that the workers would become poorer and poorer as the capitalists exploited them more and more; that differences between the members within each class would become smaller and smaller and the classes would thus become more homogeneous; that the skilled workers would be replaced by unskilled workers doing assembly line work; that relations between the working class and the capitalists would get worse and worse; and that the capitalists would become fewer and fewer due to an increasing number of monopolies. The capitalist economists of his time, such as David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, agreed with most of these predictions, at least as the most likely forecast of events.

Some of these are debatable, while others have been clearly proven wrong. This is often cited by critics as evidence that historical materialism is a flawed theory. Communists reply with two arguments: The first is that there were a number of major events and trends over the past century and a half which Marx could not have predicted: imperialism, World War I, the rise of social democracy and Keynesian economics in the West (that introduced the concept of redistribution of wealth, thereby narrowing the gap between rich and poor), World War II and finally the Cold War. In response, critics maintain that if so many unpredictable events have happened in the past, then an equal number could happen in the future, and therefore historical materialism is not a reliable method of making predictions.

The second communist argument is a specifically Leninist one. Lenin, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, argued that capitalism must be viewed as a global phenomenon, and different capitalist countries must not be treated as if they are fully independent entities. Instead, one must look at capitalism worldwide. From this point of view, Lenin goes on to argue that rich, developed capitalist countries "export" their poverty to poorer countries, by turning those countries into colonies (hence 'imperialism') and exploiting them as sources of cheap unskilled labor and resources. Part of the spoils from this exploitation are then shared with the workers from the developed countries, in order to keep their standard of living high and thus avoid revolution at home.

The European colonial empires of Lenin's time all dissolved between 1947 and 1998 in the decolonization of the world. Communists maintain that economic exploitation of poor countries continues even in the absence of direct political control (see globalization and anti-globalization).

Labor theory of value

Fundamental to Marxist theory is the labor theory of value. It claims that the value (or, to be more exact, use-value) of an item is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. In other words, the greater the amount of work necessary to produce an object, the greater the value of that object. This implies that value is objective, and that it may not be reflected by the price of the object in question (since price is determined by supply and demand, and is not linked to the amount of necessary work that must be expended to produce the object). The labor theory of value was first fully stated by David Ricardo, from suggestions by Adam Smith, and later adopted by Karl Marx.

By contrast, most capitalist economists now use the utility theory of value, which implies that the only value of an object on which different observers can agree is its price on the market (which is based on the subjective utilities of the participants).

Critics of communism hold that the qualifier "socially necessary" in the labor theory of value is not well-defined, and conceals a subjective judgment of necessity.


See also

References and further reading

Anti-communist books

  • Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages, ISBN 0767900561
  • Becker, Jasper (1998) Hungry Ghosts : Mao's Secret Famine. Owl Books. ISBN 0805056688.
  • Conquest, Robert (1991) The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press ISBN 0195071328.
  • Conquest, Robert (1987) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195051807.
  • Courtois,Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674076087.
  • Hamilton-Merritt, Jane (1999) Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253207568.
  • Jackson, Karl D. (1992) Cambodia, 1975–1978 Princeton University Press ISBN 069102541X.
  • Kakar, M. Hassan (1997)Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 University of California Press. ISBN 0520208935.
  • Khlevniuk, Oleg & Kozlov, Vladimir (2004) The History of the Gulag : From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) Yale University Pres. ISBN 0300092849.
  • Natsios, Andrew S. (2002) The Great North Korean Famine. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 1929223331.
  • Nghia M. Vo (2004) The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam McFarland & Company ISBN 0786417145.
  • Pipes, Richard (1995) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. ISBN 0679761845.
  • Rummel, R.J. (1997). Death by Government. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560009276.
  • Rummel, R.J. (1996). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers ISBN 1560008873.
  • Rummel, R.J. & Rummel, Rudolph J. (1999). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. Lit Verlag ISBN 3825840107.
  • Todorov, Tzvetan & Zaretsky, Robert (1999). Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271019611
  • Yakovlev, Alexander (2004). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300103220.

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