Has there ever been a point where communism worked well?

[Naskra]

Fr. Dobrizhoffer's first-hand account of the Jesuit Reductions is available online, as is Graham-Cunnighame's history, (c. 1900)

 

[amadeus]

Weren't New England's puritan settlers communists?

Yes, and half of them died in the first year.

(Conditions did not improve until private property was allowed, then the settlement flourished.)

 

[innonimatu]

It's striking that even the authors of the Catholic Encyclopaedia considered the "Thirty Missions" to have been essentially a successful communist society, although they are at pains to distance it from modern materialist communism.

Well, they had something akin to modern communist parties in the sense that they had a directing class (the Jesuits) that in practice stood above the mass of individuals in those missions. Which detracts a little from the image of "perfect utopia" often associated with the Missions.

 

[sydhe]

Summer olympics, 1948-80 and 1988.

Edit: Also World Chess Championships, 1948 - 1991. (Except for Bobby Fischer years.)

 

[History_Buff]

Red Vienna. A number of very good things were achieved, but prevailing economic winds and increasing radicalism eventually ripped it apart.

 

[Plotinus]

Well, they had something akin to modern communist parties in the sense that they had a directing class (the Jesuits) that in practice stood above the mass of individuals in those missions. Which detracts a little from the image of "perfect utopia" often associated with the Missions.

I suppose it detracts only if you assume that that is intrinsically a bad thing; even if it is intrinsically a bad thing, no-one in the seventeenth century would have thought so. Besides, any society with a government has a directing class who in practice stand above everyone else to some degree. It doesn't make the Thrity Missions either less communist or less successful, which is what the OP was seeking.

 

[Naskra]

I see no reason to describe the Jesuists in Paraguay as standing "above" the Indians. This is a case where the ruling class (if so few can even be called a class) is not a privileged class. There was a privileged class within the Reductions -- it was the military. As a communist state, the Reductions can only be called quite impure. They qualify better as a good example of hierocracy.

 

[Plotinus]

They did exemplify the key elements of communism, though: communal ownership with, effectively, no private property, and centralised distribution, which meant that no-one went without.

 

[Yoda Power]

But communism did work well. Atleast if you measure power

The Soviet Union was a super power comparable to the United States, so by that definition it worked quite well. YES it did end, but doesn't everything at one point?

I'm no advocate of communism, but you can't just deny that from 1945-1989 it was a one of the most dominating political ideologies on earth.

 

[Plotinus]

Yes, but you can't measure the success of a political or economic system solely by the global or international power of the country in question - that may be one criterion, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all, unless you're playing Civ. There are far more important criteria, such as what living standards are like for people living under that system or how fair and equitable the society is, and the USSR didn't exactly do well by those.

 

[Yoda Power]

Yes, but you can't measure the success of a political or economic system solely by the global or international power of the country in question - that may be one criterion, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all, unless you're playing Civ. There are far more important criteria, such as what living standards are like for people living under that system or how fair and equitable the society is, and the USSR didn't exactly do well by those.

Aha! But isn't the whole point of this discussion that the kvalification for succes is subjective? In the eyes of the leaders (read: Kim Jung Il) the criterion certainly isn't all those things you consider important.

In some extreme (and absurd) cases the criteria for succes of an ideology can even be the ability to spread this ideology, and in that case communism did succeed.

This is why people will always be able to claim that the doctrine they follow works well.

 

[ArneHD]

Yoguslavia under Tito worked fairly well, cirkoumstances considerd.

 

[Naskra]

Seizure of property by an autocratic state is not communism. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, etc. have as much to do with communism as the Republic of Turkey does with birds. To think they do is to swallow the lies of Lenin, Mao and all the other dictators who practice "scientific socialism".

 

[Dachs]

The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, etc. have as much to do with communism as the Republic of Turkey does with birds.

Rather, about as much as the Republic of Turkey does with secularism.

 

[Vrylakas]

Aha! But isn't the whole point of this discussion that the kvalification for succes is subjective? In the eyes of the leaders (read: Kim Jung Il) the criterion certainly isn't all those things you consider important.

In some extreme (and absurd) cases the criteria for succes of an ideology can even be the ability to spread this ideology, and in that case communism did succeed.

This is why people will always be able to claim that the doctrine they follow works well.

This is a good point, that in the very least, we need to define "success". One of the reasons so many Russians today are willing to overlook the atrocities committed against them by the Soviet government -- and indeed, are still quite tolerant of an increasingly authoritarian and Soviet-nostalgic Putin -- is exactly because they see the Soviet Union as having been successful. Just as Weimar Germans groped for excuses, myths and conspiracy theories to explain away the defeat of 1918, many Russians today look for CIA bogeymen and internal defeatists to explain 1991.

There is a core theoretical problem with communist (in the widest possible definition) societies, which is that all labor is not equal. Every human civilization, from the moment they settled permanently and adapted to some form of agriculture, developed economic (and therefore social) stratifications. Ours is no exception, though ironically, in this post-Marxist world, the modern West is probably the most egalitarian society to have ever existed. But the fully communist society envisioned by Marx requires complete dedication from all members, and only works in very small groups where the labors are relatively equal and therefore equally divided. Think Charles Fourier, the Robert Owens experiment, the Peruvian Indians example. Civilizations spawn classes, and while Marx tended to look upon classes as evil, in reality these divisions played a role in crucial resource management and distribution -- making sure everyone got a slice of the pie. Some definitely get more than others, but classes were a sort of unionized approach to primitive societies that needed to ensure a whole slue of different kinds of jobs got done, and in reverse, were a way for individuals to be relatively sure to get fed on a regular basis.

I think a successful social paradigm can best be described as a one that is indefinitely sustainable. No human civ lasts forever; we all know that, but one that makes at least two centuries is probably doing something right.

Seizure of property by an autocratic state is not communism. The Soviet Union, the People's Republic of China, etc. have as much to do with communism as the Republic of Turkey does with birds.

I disagree. First, Turkey actually has a lovely array of birds for enthusiasts to watch. See for yourself: http://www.camacdonald.com/birding/meturkey.htm. Secondly, the Soviet Union and PRC are the quite natural outcomes of communist ideology. It could not be otherwise. Marx was a theoretician, one living for the most part in the mid-19th century when scientists talked about things like "natural laws", which was a product of their Newtonian view of the world: the universe was just a machine, and all scientists had to do was discover its working parts and they could understand the machine -- they could know the mind of God, who built the machine! Also, machines can only do what they're built to do, so if you study a machine and understand its functions, you then can also predict how it will act and what it will do. That's how Marx saw history, like a machine that he only needed to understand. Indeed, his descriptions of classes and the "dialectic" are very mechanical and one-dimensional. Das Kapital is a wonderful piece of English social history, but useless as a predictor of what would come in the next decades of British history.

That left Lenin a problem when he found himself in control of a decaying empire in 1917, because much of Marx's predictions about the future or the present, for that matter, were just not applicable. It wasn't just that he ruled Russia, a backward, primitive feudal empire still stuck socially in the 17th century, but other European communists like Luxemburg and Liebknecht also wrestled with the same problems: Marx's ideas just didn't work well in practice. Luckily for the latter two they were hacked to pieces before they had to really find a solution, but Lenin seized upon an obvious answer: we'll pound that square peg into the round hole through sheer force! He decided that since the proletariat seemed too ignorant to build its own paradise, he would do so for them, like a good parent, through means of a small, elite vanguard party that would rule ruthlessly over an over-arching totalitarian state that would shape and mold society to fit Lenin's communist mold. In this experiment, Lenin jettisoned all morality as outdated, and happily applied mass-murder as a tool in re-shaping Russian society into homo sovieticus. In the great famine of 1921-23, for instance, which was caused by Lenin's agents (mostly the VChK) seizing huge amounts of grain from Russian villages already on the brink of starvation after years of war and civil war, leaving almost none for villagers to survive on themselves, it is estimated that some 5 million Russians died -- with not a single sniff from Lenin or Moscow. Lenin allowed international relief organizations to operate in Russia, but only to try to develop opportunities for growing the Soviet foreign currency (waluta) reserves, which Lenin's Russia desperately needed for foreign purchases at that time. As soon as the foreign relief agencies wrapped up, Lenin had their Russian helpers (distributors, rationers, etc.) executed. This was typical, and shows how Lenin believed communism could only be achieved through an all-powerful terroristic state.

A lot of people seize upon Lenin's letter to the Supreme Soviet about Stalin in 1924, when he was dying, and tried to dissuade his comrades from allowing Stalin to achieve high office, calling him crude, etc. Ha! Be still your tears. This myth of an ideologically pure Soviet Union under Lenin later betrayed by the egotist thug Stalin is laughable. Lenin's conception of a communist-state-in-construction had the exact same fatal flaw that monarchies do; namely, by putting such absolute power in one person's or a tiny minority's hands, what do you do if a megalomaniac thug or just a plain incompetent leader comes along? The answer in both cases: you die. Lenin used Stalin while alive, and paved the road to his ascension to power, last minute regrets notwithstanding. Lenin invented the show trials, Lenin invented the mass terror in which thousands were rounded up for no reason than to terrorize, Lenin signed warrants commanding the deaths of millions, and it was Lenin who had trusted comrades shot to keep the surviving ones on their toes at all times. Stalin just took all this to a new level, that's all.

Leninism was just one answer to the many theoretical problems Marx left his followers, it is true, but Lenin's outcome was believed and praised by communists all across the modern world, in Western Europe, in North America, and elsewhere. When Stalin died in 1953, Le Monde ran an issue dedicated to praising this monster with such Western communists as Picasso and Tagliotti leaving weepy eulogies. But for all the fuss, Lenin's experiment was doomed. Economics is a messy field and it is fraught with ideologues of both left and right, but it is in essence a social science that examines a form of human behavior, and of all the social sciences, economics examines humanity's behavior in the most organic way. Nice pretty ideologies like communism, which try to reduce 10,000 years of human development and experimentation to a few pithy slogans, fail to understand that economics -- in terms of understanding how people anywhere get the food, water and shelter they need -- works sort of like water, and is not so easily controlled. The Marxist-Leninist belief that economics (like history) was just a machine of sorts that could be manipulated and controlled was simply said, wrong. That reality made the Soviet economy, which was the economy of an empire, unsustainable. It lasted nearly as long as it did merely on the backs of everyday Russians (and later, others as well), but it was doomed in 1920 or so when Lenin first conceived it.

 

[luiz]

Unfortunately, the dream was shattered in 1750 when the Spanish handed much of the area over to the Portuguese, who tried to take direct control. The Guaraní rebelled with the aid of the Jesuits, but lost, and the Jesuits were expelled for helping them.

Maybe you are only trying to present a simplified account, but the portuguese destruction of the Missions had more to do with Pombal's struggle for power with the Jesuits in Portugal than with a particular concern of micro-managing the Missions (though Pombal also wanted to keep a closer watch on the colonies).

 

[Alpha Killer II]

I'm still trying to understand how people can still believe communism is an exceptional system when there hasn't been a single point in history I can think of where it has been.

Eugene V Debs, Not really Communism, More Socialism
But it amazes me how America is tryin to make people forget him becuz he is a example of Socialism working, so they dont put him in the history books, AT ALL
here is a wikipedia entry about him....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_v_debs

Edit: Also, Fidel Castro, it amazes me on how much he is loved by his people

 

[Plotinus]

Well, socialism is hardly the same thing as communism. Otherwise we'd be citing Attlee.

 

[ParkCungHee]

How is he an example of communism, or even socialism, working? He never held office. Thats like saying that Charles Coughlin is an example of corporatism working
Hes in history books, just not many because hes an insignificant figure in American politics.

 

[St Exupère]

Marxism, socialism, communism - all are materialistic and egalitarian ideologies. They attempted to (and are still working at it):

a/ replacing God, or any idol - with Humanity itself that becomes the absolute against which everything else should be measured

b/ extirping human socities from History (tabula rasa), ie destroying any form of culture that does not submit to the dogma of a/

Such a society cannot work, since I believe it is a fundamental and absolute need of humanity to seek justification of its existence from outside if itself. Or in other words, without an external form of absolutism (=idol, or god) no human society can exist.

Worse: these materialistic and egalitarian ideals are the direct consequences of the "Enlightenment". Until we denounce and refuse humanism, as defined by the European thinkers of the XVIIIth, communism/socialism under one form or another will still be a force to be reckoned with.

Today, totalitarian communism seems to be dead; however, materialist relativism has never been as powerful. It is basically the same threat to humanity, maybe even more lethal because it provokes less frontal reaction that the former. If pushed to the extreme it will seek to eradicate all differences between humans, which in the end will obliterate the principle of reproduction itself and lead to the extension of our species. In absolutizing Humanity, materialists are denying our us our human conditions - which is mortal, and hence not absolute at all.

Other societies in History have also been egalitarian but all of them did it in the name of an idol, a god, or a myth. Which is entirely different and in a way, much more realistic and solid.