Do/did non-dictatorial Communist societies exist?

Question

I've often heard the following two points of view:

• Communism is a failed philosophy, and it has always failed (e.g. USSR, China, Cuba etc...). Therefore it's simply wrong.

• Communism has never been applied correctly, but that's for historical reasons and not intrinsic to communism. Therefore it's basically misunderstood.

Are there examples of societies adopting Communism (or Marxism) and thriving without degenerating in dictatorial Soviet-style societies?

As a side note: are there good treaties on the subject which are not partisan but strive to give an objective overview of the matter?

Answer 1

Both of your bullet points are correct, and both are wrong.

• Yes, communism was actually successfully applied. The caveats are that it was only successful under the following limitations:

  1. in an extremely small scale (either geographically - think a single village - e.g. Kibbutzes in Israel are, for all intents and purposes, an example of Communism in action; or professionally - think FOSS and/or FSF as contained systems). Some less "standard" examples would be theology-based communes, from early Christians to late new-age hippies.

  2. in an society which is a part of a larger society - by which I mean that said communist small scale implementation has access to larger demographics (allowing them to draw in fresh members who aren't yet disenchanted with the idea/practice AND to outplace those in the community who are disenchanted; as well as shed excess children so you don't have to grow significantly if your birth/survival rate exceeds 2.1).

  3. In an open economic system. For example, Kibbutzes or hippie communies in California don't need to spend money on R&D in agriculture, or defense, or large scale law enforcement (again, you may have the luxury to exclude 1-3% of psychopaths/sociopaths from a small community, and not worry about said excluded psychopaths attacking you for your communal material possessions from outside since they are dealt with by outside society), or on disaster preparedness, or on medical R&D, or pretty much any other economic overhead of modern civilization.

  4. Possessed economy and quality of life above subsistence-level farming, and did not depend on unusually rich natural resources.

     For example, presumably, you could have a communist community in an area with unlimited energy-rich wild life and vegetation, warm, stable climate and natural places to live such as caves. Basically, where you don't actually need industry or production to live reasonably well).

     It's an open question (there is not enough data) as to how "communist" actual pre-historical societies were - they clearly had less inequality based on material culture remains, but that's not proof.

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• No, there was never a successful attempt to implement communism on large scale (a country with 10+ million population, modern infrastructure, and not dependent in large part on external aid in variety of forms).

  Every time it was attempted, it failed to get to the communist stage, because communism as an idea is very attractive in theory yet in practice incompatible with actual human nature. The main problems of communism without an accompanying authoritarian political regime include:

  • Lack of incentives. For all the noise about intrinsic motivation being better than extrinsic - that may be true for select white collar workers, but how many people would be intrinsically motivated to do hard farm work in agriculture, or to spend 100-hour weeks making their IT startup successful, or to be a plumber fixing other people's toilets? Even SO rewards people with reputation points, with original (never materialized) implied promise that higher SO rep would translate to being more hirable as a programmer.

  • Human greed and jealousy. We evolved this way, so no amount of education will drive it out. Even monkeys do this.

    • In general, Maslow's hierarchy of needs leads to inherent inequalities because different people's satisfaction isn't always possible without conflict. Yes you can give everyone shelter, presumably. But not everyone gets a "dacha" on a warm seashore or a wonderful lakeside - some people get to either "compete" for those scarce resources (bye-bye communism), OR live worse quality of life.

  • The fact that a fraction of society are always sociopaths/psychopaths; and many of them are smart enough to be able to channel their character "legally", within the system (or around it without being caught).

  • Lack of competitiveness related to other states around you. The only way you can not lag long term and be a communist regime is to not have a competing free system with higher productivity driven by better incentive structures. The only way you can avoid a lot of your own high producers draining to a more competitive system is by threat of force. Welcome to dictatorship (anytime you prevent your citizens who wish to leave for greener pastures from doing so by threat of force, you are a closer to authorian than free state).

Answer 2

tl;dr: If non-dictatorial communist societies existed, then not for long. But what is communist anyway?

There's a lot of confusion concerning the term communism. There have been many movements that called themselves communist, and more often than not they have denounced each other as wrong or traitors. Let's try to get a definition from the horse's mouth:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.
-- Karl Marx, The German Ideology (1845)

Marx puts the emphasis on the movement here, instead of dreaming up an abstract utopia. He denounces the idea of saying the world has to be such-and-such, and then implementing it. In fact, he went on to say "je ne suis pas Marxiste" - I am not a Marxist.

Still, we are interested in societies that have claimed to be communist, or Marxist, etc.. I like the following definition, with which Marx and many Commies hopefully would have agreed:

A communist society is one where the means of production are collectively owned.

I'll assume that at least on paper there is some kind of democracy, otherwise the whole phrase 'collectively owned' is silly. That means you and I can - in principle - decide what to produce though some kind of democratic progress, rather than leaving that to the market.

There have been several societies I would call communist in the past. Most were either in a religious context, or rather short lived. A few that come to mind:

• Early christian communites. People shared their wealth and put their possessions together, in expectation of the end times. It's a bit hard though to define what 'means of production' means in this context, as this was in pre-modern times. Also, I can't vouch for how democratic things were.
• Kibbutzim. In Zionism, prior to the founding of the state Israel, there was much discussion about what character the new jewish state should have. Secular vs. religious, socialist vs. capitalist, etc.. In the end, one settled on a capitalist state modeled after modern western countries. Many of those who had preferred a more communist direction went on and founded Kibbuzim to live their ideas.
• The early workers' soviets (= councils) in Russia. These were quickly deprived of their power by Stalin and the Bolchewists.
• The Paris Commune, which was tending between social democracy and more radical communism. I can't say in which direction it would have developed hadn't it been beaten down after a few weeks.
• Anarchism during the spanish civil war, particularly around Barcelona. Sadly and ironically, the actual communists (Stalin) did not support the elected Spanish republic against the fascists (Franco and Hitler), but fought against them as well.

Ok, but what about the big communist or socialist states (USSR, China, ...)?

Going back to the quotable guy with the beard. He begins the Kapital with:

The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as "an immense accumulation of commodities," its unit being a single commodity.
-- Karl Marx, Das Kapital (1867)

So, it's the mark of a capitalist society that things are produced not just in any random fashion, but as commodities. That means they are made primarily to be sold on some kind of market. The laborers who produce them get paid a wage, with which they can buy those commodities.

The funny thing is that - according to that definition - most large scale communist societies were actually badly run capitalist societies! Badly run in the sense that instead of competition, you had one big monopoly, which was identical with the state. It has been pointed out many times that this is a bad idea:

But when economic power is centralized as an instrument of political power it creates a degree of dependence scarcely distinguishable from slavery. It has been well said that, in a country where the sole employer is the state, opposition means death by slow starvation.
-- Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (1944, freely quoting Leo Trotzki)

So, summarizing I'd say two your two bullet points:

• Communism in the vein of the Soviet Union is certainly a failed idea. Communism in general however is too broad a term to prove 'failed' or 'neccessarily leading to dictatorship'.
• The idea that communism is an ideal that 'just has to be applied correctly' would have Marx rotating in his grave. If you just have an abstact idea, instead of a solid analysis of the society you criticize, you might just end up making the same mistakes. In fact, I believe this is one reason why the USSR turned out to be as terrible as it was.

Answer 3

Note No country has ever claimed to be communist. They've claimed to be Socialist. Communism is a classless, stateless society.

Some ones that may have become democratic socialist societies had they survived are Anarchist Catalonia, the Paris Commune, and the Bavarian Soviet Republic. All of these were destroyed by outside forces before we could see how they would have developed.

Communism has also existed on extremely small scales. Most tribal societies operate on communistic principles, because they are the most efficient economy for a small group. Some societies, like the Kibbutz are also communist.

I'm not sure if there are more socialist states that weren't dictatorships. If you know of any more, please comment.

Answer 4

Communism is a failed philosophy, and it has always failed (e.g. USSR, China, Cuba etc...). Therefore it's simply wrong.

Communism, philosophically, is what comes after Capitalism if one is going along with Marxs thesis on the law of motion for economies; he gave no time-table, nor no indication of what this future form of the economy would be like - it could be sometime in the middle of this century, or it could be a millenia away; in his thesis, it is almost tautologically true; until then Marx expected Capitalism to succeed as a global force - this was an earlier observation of Hegel that foresaw that 'trade' would become 'world-historical' in its European form.

What is taken for Communism is a political form - State Capitalism, and needs to be understood geopolitically. Political communism failed due to the policy of encirclement by the Western powers, a war of attrition fought through proxy wars - otherwise known as the Cold War - a hot war between the two main powers would have been simply too dangerous given the preponderance of nuclear weapon technology on both sides. It 'failed' not essentially because it was 'wrong' but essentially because of this war of attrition. The cold war was not called a war for nothing.

Communism has never been applied correctly, but that's for historical reasons and not intrinsic to communism. Therefore it's basically misunderstood.

See the first point above.

Answer 5

If you are interested in the question about personal dictatorship, arguably there was no personal dictatorship in the USSR after Stalin dead.

But the communist revolutionaries themselves described their state as "dictatorship of proletariat" which they considered the highest form of democracy. They also considered the Western bourgeois democracies to be dictatorships of the bourgeoisie.

The USSR officially remained dictatorship of proletariat (Preamble of the Constitution of 1924 and Article 2 of the constitution of 1936) until 1977.

In the constitution of 1977 it was declared that the state was not dictatorship of proletariat any more because there was no bourgeoisie remaining and became the state of the whole people.

So the USSR was not self-declared dictatorship after 1977.

Answer 6

The democratic election of Communist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 represented an "experiment" in democratic Communism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

It didn't last very long, until a violent overthrow by a military coup in 1973. Allende's government and society was never truly "Communist," but just "socialist" enough to inflame his enemies.

Answer 7

Apart from the Paris Commune and kibbutzes, you can regard the Rojava Regional Government as an example. It is built based on the Marxist-Leninist ideology, and specifically Abdullah Ocalan's interpretation of it. Ocalan was the founder of Kurdish Worker's Party (PKK, which is still active in Southeastern Turkey and Norther Iraq's Sinjar area), and the spiritual leader of the Rojava Government. Similar to kibbutzes, the Rojava advocates a "Democratic Confederalism" governing ideology.

Answer 8

TL;DR Yes, see "primitive communism".

There is no NPOV answer to your questions, it all depends on your definitions and judgment of evidence. My answer is an attempt to explain things according to the point of view of Marx & Engels.

Full disclosure: I consider myself a communist.

According to Marx, the answer to the question is Yes.

To be communist, a society MUST be non-dictatorial - as dictatorship necessarily requires a state to control the means of production. If you do not have a means of coercion to control the means of production (army, police, etc.) - then you do not have a state.

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class; if, by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class, and, as such, sweeps away by force the old conditions of production, then it will, along with these conditions, have swept away the conditions for the existence of class antagonisms and of classes generally, and will thereby have abolished its own supremacy as a class. In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.", Communist Manifesto, Chapter 2

Therefore it is a logical impossibility that there should be communist society that is dictatorial. Rather, the question is then: Has there ever been a communist society? If there has not been, then the answer to your question is No, otherwise Yes.

Communist societies have existed before the state ever existed, in the form that Marx refers to as "primitive communism"

Adding to the requirement of a stateless and classless society - in order to have communism, you must also abolish value itself. In Marxist theory, value is not the same as prince, and value is not the same as exchange value or use value. In Marx terms, value is the 'socially necessary abstract labor' embodied in a commodity. A commodity is any good or service produced by human labor and offered as a product for general sale on the market. To abolish value, you must abolish commodities and therefore markets.

@DVK is mostly incorrect, but @jvm is incorrect in other aspects too:

@jvm: Marx was certainly a Marxist, but said he was not as a way of saying, "if this is Marxism, then I'm not a Marxist" against the French communists & Paul Lafargue. Discussion on: I'm not a Marxist

Now to the few examples pointed out: Early christian communites, Kibbutzim, early workers' soviets (= councils) in Russia, The Paris Commune, Anarchism during the spanish civil war, particularly around Barcelona.

In none of these examples can we reasonably expect that the market or state was abolished as these societies either operated within a bigger picture where it was not abolished. In early Soviet Russia just after the revolution the market was certainly not dissolved. The Paris Commune was attacked and had armed forces. If you trade with places where the market still exists then commodities still exist. Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War was during a civil war - therefore they were fighting to uphold a means of production - therefore not communism.

The claim that @DVK makes that communism would somehow be an impossibility due to genes and how we evolved, i.e: "greed is in human nature" would require some scientific claims in the field of neuroscience and evolutionary biology. When it comes to biology, we are as genetically close to the violent chimpanzees as to the sharing bonobos that are the only other species except for us that uses sex for pleasure. One thing is for certain: cooperation is what made us the #1 apex predator species of the world. One human vs. one tiger is one well fed tiger. A few humans with tools against a tiger is a dead tiger.

One needs to remember that Capitalism had centuries to mature into the state it is in now - it had bloody revolutions, dictatorships, etc. One can't expect that the communist movement needs to honor "three strikes & you are out".