Communism as we know it? Yes. Communism as Marx envisioned it? No.
It's all just semantics really:
1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid.
2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China."
3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup.
4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different.
5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.
I think all these semantic contradictions reveal a much more important truth: what -ism your government operates under or claims to operate under is about 1/1000th as significant as whether it aims to serve the people and respect the law. A corrupt communist state has much more in common with a corrupt capitalist state than with a respectable and well-run communist system, and vice versa. We should really focus a lot less on ideology in our politics and a lot more on basic ethics and accountability. Once we start getting those figured out, we can worry about the -isms.
But it's hard to miss the pattern - we have yet to see well run communist (not socialist) state. Every country that tried communism failed, and either are poor backwater countries (Kuba, North Korea), reverted to capitalism (Central and Eastern Europe), or kept communism on banners only, changing most of economy to capitalism under the hood (China).
We even have a few case studies, where one country is divided into 2 parts, and one half is made communist. Both in East/West Germany, and North/South Korea the differences are quite obvious.
Maybe it has sth to do with the system itself, after all?
The most well run communist state was probably Yugoslavia. I can see a few things which made it more successful than other communist states: it did not cut itself off from the world as a whole or associate itself with a much bigger and more powerful communist state and it allowed its citizens more personal freedoms than any other communist state. Of course it eventually collapsed due to internal and external pressure, but communism was not ousted due to a mass civil uprising (the wars were largely due to the policy of forcing a pan-Yugoslavian identity independent of pre-existing ethnic differences). In Slovenia, which only participated in the wars for a few days, the transition between communism and capitalism happened gradually and to my knowledge non-violently over 10 or so years.
Background: a group of farmers in a small Chinese village secretly agreed to start keeping their surplus crops for themselves.
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Before the contract, the farmers would drag themselves out into the field only when the village whistle blew, marking the start of the work day. After the contract, the families went out before dawn.
"We all secretly competed," says Yen Jingchang. "Everyone wanted to produce more than the next person."
It was the same land, the same tools and the same people. Yet just by changing the economic rules — by saying, you get to keep some of what you grow — everything changed.
At the end of the season, they had an enormous harvest: more, Yen Hongchang says, than in the previous five years combined.
It could, but the correlation doesn't automatically imply causation. Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption are more likely to give rise to communist regimes. If a society with stronger civil traditions or more capital attempted to implement a communist system, the result might be radically different than what we've seen so far.
I also think that in modern-day practice, the lines between what we term communist, capitalist, socialist, etc. are much blurrier than we tend to admit. The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric. If you could somehow find an absolute measure for the success level of each country in the world and plot it according to the political system they supposedly espouse, I don't think you'd find nearly as much cohesion compared to if you plotted them according to measures like the strength of judicial and education traditions, beneficial geography, balanced ethnic makeup, and so on. These labels get applied after the fact, they aren't the structural drivers that make various governments and societies function the way they do.
> It could, but the correlation doesn't automatically imply causation. Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption are more likely to give rise to communist regimes.
Communism was introduced by force in many countries, in few cases it was introduced to half a country, and the half that stayed capitalist, benefited. You'd need to assume countries with high probability of dictatorship and corruption are more probable to be forced to become communist states by others, and that the difference between West and East Germany, North and South Korea regarding authoritarianism and corruption tendencies are bigger, than the same differences between for example East Germany and Russia, or West Germany and Spain.
I think from the data we have it's more probable, that communism just don't work.
> The gp post demonstrates how so-called capitalist countries can enact strongly "socialist" or "communist" behaviors and polices, and vice versa--they just do so with different rationalizations and rhetoric.
Communism is "from everybody according to their needs, to everybody according to their needs". So salary and employement doesn't depend on productivity, free market doesn't dictate prices and volumes of produced goods and services.
Public road system, army, health care system and free education are implementation details, compared to centrally planned economy.
> Perhaps the pattern arises because societies with pre-
> existing tendencies to authoritarianism and corruption
> are more likely to give rise to communist regimes
Seems more likely that whenever someone wants to rise to power as a despot, it's a lot easier when you are claiming to be communist/a workers' paradise/a government for the people, even if that description is in name only. E.g.:
Why do you want to over-throw $despot? You must be
an enemy of 'the people.'
It's all just semantics really:
1) In the US, 'socialism' is a dirty word, but don't you dare mess with Social Security or Medicaid.
2) China's 'communist' regime is called the "People's Republic of China."
3) Burma is now called "Republic of the Union of Myanmar" after a military coup.
4) China and the former USSR are both referred to as "Communist," but the governmental structures seem vastly different.
5) The Khmer Rouge were known as the 'Communist Party of Kampuchea,' but referred to their country as 'Democratic Kampuchea' even though they implemented forced relocation and confiscation of private property.