So informing was a useful tool to knock down your potential rivals or those whose faces did not fit.
I despair at Human Nature sometimes...
I despair at Human Nature sometimes...
In a one-party state your position in the hierarchy forms a total ordering. The only way to get ahead is through the party. This is far more brutal than the capitalist "rat race", where there are lots of different company fiefdoms (each of which is internally a command economy, of course) and you can just quit and try to climb the ladder somewhere else. In a Communist rat-race, it may be necessary to denounce your enemies to the extent of getting them killed, in order to advance your career.
Note that an environment with no "Exit" and no "Voice" (in the exit/voice/loyalty model) results in lots of "Loyalty" ritual. This is also very conducive to demonstrating your loyalty by condemning other people's lack of loyalty.
Given how extraordinarily dangerous that all attempts to produce Communism to date have been to all involved, even the Communists(! you remember "Stalin" and the other big names, you forget how many of their own he purged to get there), the rational answer is to stop trying. Communism is a great deal more likely to kill you than save you... and by you, I even mean its advocates in particular, which are really prone to getting purged, and in those cases where they don't get purged, only at the cost of continuously looking over their shoulders and living in a high-grade police state. Advocating Communism in practice comes perilously close to advocating for a government that will kill you, personally, not "generic you".
There has been one famous example, the USSR and its friends. It's arguable as to whether communism was even really the goal (Soviet politicians famously promised constantly "communism in 10 years" and everyone knew that was a lie). Certainly what they had was not communism, because communism is stateless, classless and, as my fellow commenter points out, lacks money.
Considering that communism requires the simultaneous abolition of the state, money/credit in favor of pure production-for-use and all class distinctions, it is dubious whether this can even be done at all, and certainly most countries are in no position to come close.
Edit: Link to the interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3MzPzfEVjNE
Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be effected except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property, and on the conditions of bourgeois production; by means of measures, therefore, which appear economically insufficient and untenable, but which, in the course of the movement, outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order, and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionising the mode of production.
These measures will, of course, be different in different countries.
Nevertheless, in most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. EDITORIAL: I presume rebels means anyone who isn't a communist
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.
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 organised power of one class for oppressing another. If the proletariat during its contest with the bourgeoisie is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organise 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.
You should do some reading on the condition of the ordinary worker at the time Marx was writing. This would give you a more balanced perspective. By and large, communist movements were successful in countries where a small amount of people exploited the rest.
> One in which each man exists only to serve the ends of society, another where each man is an end in himself.
Except for part where Western governments have no issues with regimes where each man exists only to serve the ends of a few (most of Cold War South America, for instance).
Not that I'm defending communism, which everywhere resulted in oppressive, inefficient and ultimately conservative bureaucracies, but there are good reasons while it was attempted in so many different places, and this wasn't solely due to USSR/Chinese/Cuban influence.
You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite.
I'm not disputing that (well, unless you mean that the main point of the Iraq war was to bring Coca-Cola and democracy to the oppressed Iraqi masses). It's just that IMHO, most of each block's policy was about protecting their own political and economic interests, camouflaging such unpalatable truths under the guise of "freeing people from oppression". You certainly had people who believed in what they were doing, but IMHO, for most of the people pulling the levers, that was about knowing on which side the bread was buttered.
> You can draw analogies to the Spanish Civil War. Both sides sucked. Orwell went to fight for the Republicans, but came back completely disillusioned because the Republicans were totally dominated by the Soviet Union. He writes about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia, which I strongly recommend. The Nationalists were not good people either, but Spain would have been much worse off if the Republicans won and turned it into a Soviet satellite.
It's ironic you write about the Spanish Civil War, considering that the main reason Stalin-backed communists got so much power was that the Republic was entirely dependent on them for weapons, largely in part due to the passive British support for Franco.
The inherent problem with framing everything in terms of class struggle is there's no room for human rights, which leaves the individual vulnerable to being crushed by the system. The few remaining people on the left who really do derive ideologically from Marxism-Leninism really need to notice this and advance their thinking a bit.
Yeah, but "advancing one's career" is something that you didn't have to do at all in eastern bloc countries. Yes, if you wanted to get out of the country, or get rich, or own a car, or own a TV you really had to have friends in the right places. But an overwhelming majority of people didn't even know they should want things like this. Instead, they were happy to be alive and to have shelter and food, even if they had to wait in queues for hours to get that food.
Personally, I'm not old enough to remember much, but I do talk with older people - of the age of my parents and grandparents - and many of them have nothing but praise for the communist period. For example, I'm being told that year after year all the school children were able to go on summer vacation free of charge. They say all the textbooks, even at the university level, were either completely free or cost less than a pack of matches. Literacy and higher-education rates skyrocketed. Some remember even earlier times, when there was no electricity in most villages and they feel grateful for all the infrastructure work that was done then.
The more I hear and know about the era, the less I understand how it was really like. It seems so alien, so impossible, and it did fail in the end, but it somehow worked for nearly 50 years before that! How was that possible?