Communist state

In common speech in the Western World, a communist state is one ruled by a single political party which declares its allegiance to the principles of Marxism-Leninism. In Marxist political theory, however, "communism" is the final stateless stage of society; therefore, these countries called themselves socialist states instead, representing a stage prior to communism in their political view.

Terminology and political classification

While the West generally divides governments into (1) the "Free World", (2) the Communist bloc and (3) the "Third World"; advocates of communism generally classify societies by their economic system, especially "capitalist" vs. "socialist". Both sides identify themselves as the true representatives of democracy, however they differ as to the very notion of democracy besides the literal meaning of the word.

There has never been a state which has called itself communist (lower case 'c'). Countries that are given this label by many non-communists usually called themselves socialist instead. In these countries the only legal party is the Communist Party, and distinctions between state and party become blurred. There is usually a planned economy. These states often modelled their political and economic systems after the Soviet Union, which in the mid–20th century appeared to them to offer a mechanism for rapid economic development.

This definition contrasts with governments in multi-party systems, in which the governing elites, though they emerge from highly disciplined political parties, govern through state rather than party structures and exercise less control over the state and economy. For example, the governments of the Indian states of Kerala and West Bengal, while ruled by communist parties, operate in a multi-party framework.

Likewise, it also contrasts with those one-party states where the party is based on fundamentalist religious or on non-Leninist nationalistic principles, and with states with military dictatorships. For example, anti-Marxist one-party states such as Nazi Germany and authoritarian regimes such as the Republic of China in Taiwan in the 1960s did not adhere to Marxism-Leninism and are therefore not communist states.

It should be noted that the term "communism" and ideology has a history that predates Marx, however, closely associated with libertarian socialism (also known as anarchism, though that term has come to be associated with other political philosophies).

Historical examples of communist governments

Governments run by a communist party typically arose during times of general international unrest as a result of revolutions led by national communist parties. Such parties often operated illegally for a period before the revolution and developed disciplined and effective structures and a cadre of committed leaders marked by both idealism and skill at organizing successfully among the disaffected classes of the preceding state, generally workers, intellectuals and, especially in the case of China, peasants. Following a successful revolution, a switch in orientation is made from seizing power to building a new society.

Early examples

The short-lived Paris Commune of 1871, a brief revolutionary government after the defeat of France in the Franco-Prussian War, was an early attempt at instituting a socialist regime, and Marx wrote approvingly of it.

20th century

In the 20th century, a number of Communist parties attempted to put Marx's ideas into practice, organizing such successful coups or revolutions and establishing governments in various countries. Them and parties allied with them became the only legal, governing parties. The most notable examples of these "communist states" were the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China.

Other communist states which have existed during the 20th century include the Soviet Union's satellite states Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Mongolia), Albania, People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Cuba, Vietnam (and previously North Vietnam), Kampuchea (Cambodia), Laos and North Korea.

For brief periods, communist regimes existed in Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique and in other developing countries. Towards the end of the 20th century nearly one third of the world's population was ruled by Communist governments.

After the dismantlement of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact in the early 1990s, all European communist party-run governments abandoned communism. Only the People's Republic of China, Cuba, North Korea, Laos, and Vietnam still remain under such rule in the 21st century, though some have deviated from the general pattern: The People's Republic of China and to a lesser extent Vietnam have both moved toward market economics.

North Korea remains a traditional totalitarian communist party-run country. Cuba and Laos remain communist party–run states, but differ somewhat from the general pattern.

People's Republic of China

The People's Republic of China today has moved to a system of market allocations of resources, what it calls "market socialism" or "socialism with Chinese characteristics", and claims to have preserved socialism under this framework, sustaining the world's highest rate of per capita economic growth for over two decades.

In China, it has been firmly established that the party is subordinate to the state and the state has the power to regulate the party. This and the receding of the Chinese state from the economy have caused some political scientists to question the applicability of the term "communist" to the Chinese governing elite, and thus whether the term communist remains an accurate description of the Chinese system.

However, Marxism-Leninism nominally remains the basis of the Chinese state in the Chinese constitution, and the Communist Party of China retains extensive influence over the state. Furthermore, although Marxism-Leninism has been reinterpreted to allow extensive debate on some economic and political issues, the validity of Marxism-Leninism is still not subject to open debate. As a result, the term communist state is used by many, though not all, political scientists to describe China's current system of government.

For a complete discussion, see Politics of the People's Republic of China.

Communist theories and ideologies of government

The dominant form of communism today is based on Marxism: a political and economic philosophy derived from the works of Karl Marx that considers history in terms of class relations. Various revolutionaries in the twentieth century have contributed to Marxist theory, especially Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mao Zedong.

In Marxist theory, communism is the final evolutionary phase of society (coming after socialism) at which time the state would have withered away: the ideal stateless, propertyless, and classless society in which is no oppression or exploitation. Marx specified that the workers would rise up to destroy capitalism and replace it with socialism, the transitional stage during which the state holds the property on behalf of its citizens. Communist theory argues that this in turn is destined to be replaced by a classless communist stage of society, after the socialist state "withers away". Marx did not explain how socialism would transform into communism, which anti-communists consider a serious theoretical flaw.

Supporters of current Marxist-Leninist regimes consider these states to be practicing socialism, and not communism -- no Marxist government ever actually claimed to have instituted a "communist" society. In addition, current states are believed to be in either the capitalist or the socialist phase of history, and the role of the Communist Party is to pull a nation toward the communist phase of history by first implementing socialism.

Leninism or Marxism-Leninism is the name given to Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin's system of thought, which emphasises a type of governing structure known as democratic centralism, and the need to spread the revolution to other countries, and to exclude any compromise with the bourgeoisie.

Lenin's rule gave way to Joseph Stalin's style of dictatorship (see Stalinism). Stalin's government was violently repressive of individual liberties and of political dissidents and featured five-year plans, collectivization and industrialization, as a means of constructing socialism in one country. Leon Trotsky opposed the doctrine of "socialism in one country", and criticized Stalin's regime as being a "bureaucratically deformed" worker's state. Followers of Trotsky are known as Trotskyists.

Although they promote collective ownership of the means of production, they are also characterized by strong state apparatuses. Many have characterized the old Soviet command model known as state socialism or state capitalism. At various times they have had to allow or even encourage certain forms of private property.

However, critics have often claimed that as practiced in nations such as the former Soviet Union it created a new division of power (see nomenklatura).

The practices of Mao Zedong are known as Maoism. Maoism differs from traditional Marxism in the fact that the peasants are perceived as a larger source of revolution as opposed to the proletariat.

The history of communist party run governments since 1917 is varied and complex, but it is possible to make some valid generalizations which apply to most examples: communist party run governments have been historically been characterized by public ownership of productive resources in a centrally planned economy of the Soviet-type and sweeping campaigns of economic restructuring such as nationalization of industry and land reform, collective farming, or state farms.

Relationship between party and state

Political scientists, however, have developed the concept of communist state to reflect claims made by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and others that the revolutionary state must be a "dictatorship of the proletariat," and that the working class is represented by the Communist Party. In practice, according to this theory, state and the party are effectively identical, and govern all aspects of the society -- economic and cultural, as well as political.

In the Soviet Union for example, the General Secretary of the Communist Party did not necessarily hold a state office like president or prime minister to effectively control the system of government. Instead party members answerable to or controlled by the party held these posts, often as honorific posts as a reward for their long years of service to the party. On other occasions, having governed as General Secretary, the party leader might assume a state office in addition. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev initially did not hold the presidency of the Soviet Union, that office being given as an honor to a former Soviet Foreign Minister.

Within most communist states there are no restrictions in theory and few restrictions in practice on the power of the state, resulting in state structures which are either totalitarian or authoritarian. The mainstream branch of Marxism-Leninism sees restrictions on state power to be an unnecessary interference in the goal of pulling the society toward communism. Other Marxist-Leninists have argued that a state with absolute power is incapable of moving society towards a democratic system such as communism.

In some communist party-run states, such as the Soviet Union, a large secret police apparatus closely monitors the population. Autocratic methods are often employed to crush opposition. Some political scientists have argued that there are deep similarities between communist states and fascist ones and that both are examples of totalitarian states.

The nature of each example of the communist party run state differs widely both between countries and within each individual state. Policies which incorporate the policies and techniques of the orthodox Stalinist state of the 1930s are characteristically more totalitarian, impoverished, militaristic, and static as can be seen in the examples of North Korea and Albania. Attempts to incorporate democratic principles as in the case of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, socialist principles as in Yugoslavia, or capitalistic techniques as in China result in some mitigation of the negative features of the communist party run state but sometimes result in dynamic situations which may undermine the control of the party over the state or even lead to its collapse.

The People's Republic of China and to a lesser extent Vietnam have both moved toward market economics.

Criticism and Advocacy

Advocates of communism praise Communist parties for running countries that have sometimes leaped ahead of contemporary "capitalistic" countries, offering guaranteed employment. Critics of communism typically condemn Communist parties by the same criteria, claiming that communist-run countries all lag far behind the "Free World" in terms of industrialization and general prosperity. They regard the frequent Communist practice of making it illegal to quit one's job, or to hire a dissident or his relatives, tantamount to slavery.

Other claims include generous social and cultural programs, often administered by labor organizations. Universal education programs have been a strong point, as has the generous provision of universal health care. Western critics charge that Communist compulsory education is replete with pro-Communist and atheistic propaganda and that it severely punishes critical thinking, and that the level of health care that it provides is often extremely primitive and obsolescent compared to that of the West

Central economic planning has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, for example, rapid development of heavy industry during the 1930s in the Soviet Union and later in their space program. Yet other examples touted by advocates of Communism, such as the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba, have according to Western critics produced few discoveries of note (it is rather the West, particularly the US, which has produced the bulk of new drugs and vaccines). 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

Many Marxists and Marxist-Leninists argue that most communist states do not actually adhere to Marxism-Leninism but rather to a perversion heavily influenced by Stalinism, a "Caliban state" which sharply diverges in practice from the humanistic philosophy of Marxist revolutionaries. This critique is particularly strong among social democrats and some critical theorists who hold that Marxism is correct as a social and historical theory, but that it can only be implemented within a multiparty democracy. Trotskyists argue that the bureaucratic and repressive nature of communist states differs from Lenin's vision of the socialist state.

Regimes described as communist have, according to many Western observers and inhabitants of communist states, in practice been totalitarian and extremely abusive of human rights. Many of these regimes were responsible for deaths of millions of their population, see below and the history articles for the affected countries for details. The estimate of the number of such deaths during the 20th century under several most oppressive Communist regimes totals up to 90 million, although the direct relevance of this number is often questioned. One can add tens of millions of man-years spent in the concentration camps of the gulag and laogai. Democratic movements that arose within a framework of communist theory, such as that instituted by Alexander Dubček in Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, have been forcibly put down (see also Hungarian Uprising). Therefore communism is also used to refer to historical instances of totalitarian socialism, distinctly from democratic socialism or communism in theory.

One controversial doctrine that was popular in the 1980s was the Kirkpatrick doctrine which argued that communist states were inherently "totalitarian" while right-wing dictatorships which the United States supported were "authoritarian".

The crimes of Communism

According to Stéphane Courtois, writing in the introduction to The Black Book of Communism, using a rather liberal definition of crime, approximately 100 million deaths have resulted from the crimes of Communism over its 85 year history. He includes 20 million deaths in the Soviet Union including executions of hostages and prisoners without trial and killing of hundreds of thousands of rebellious workers and peasants during the period of 1918 to 1922; the famine of 1922, five million deaths; the extermination and deportation of the Don Cossacks, 1920; killing of 100s of thousands in concentration camps, 1918 to 1930; liquidation of 690,00 during the Great Purge; deportation of 2 million kulaks 1930-1932; deaths of 4 million Ukrainians and 2 million others during the induced famine of 1932-1933; deportation of hundreds of thousands of Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Moldovans and Bessarabians 1939-1941 and 1944-1945; deportation of the Volga Germans, 1941; deportation of the Crimean Tatars, 1943; deportation of the Chechens, 1944; and deportation of the Ingush, 1944. He also includes 65 million deaths in the People's Republic of China; 1 million in Vietnam; 2 million in Cambodia, one fourth of the population; 1 million in Eastern Europe; 150,000 in Latin America; 1.7 million in Africa; 1.5 million in Afganistan; and 10,000 by Communist parties not in power and the international Communist movement.

In the introduction to the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, Martin Malia, writing for the Harvard University Press, writes, 'The shocking dimensions of the Communist tragedy, however, are hardly news to any serious student of twentieth-century history, a least when the different Leninist regimes are taken individually. The real news is that at this late date the truth should come as such a shock to the public at large. To be sure, each major episode of the tragedy--Stalin's Gulag, Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge--had its moment of notoriety. But these horrors soon faded away into "history"; nor did anyone trouble to add up the total and set it before the public. The surprising size of this total, then, partly explains the shock this volume provoked.'

References

Andrew G. Walder (ed.) Waning of the Communist State: Economic Origins of the Political Decline in China & Hungary (University of California Press, 1995) hardback. (ISBN 0520088514)
Nicolas Werth, Karel Bartosek, Jean-Louis Panne, Jean-Louis Margolin, Andrzej Paczkowski, Stephane Courtois, Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression, Harvard University Press, September, 1999, hardcover, 858 pages, ISBN 0674076087
Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages, ISBN 0767900561