My hypothesis is that the conditions imposed in the name of communism, and not communism itself, destroyed the USSR.
In particular, success - especially political or military success, became more dangerous to achieve than failure.
Not even Georgy Zhukov was spared a certain level of wrath, which was probably more of a warning to potential coup plotters than anything to do with Zhukov himself.
There's a sense in which that is true. The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are. So the imposition of massive amount of force, and the subsequent second- and third- and so-on-order effects that come with that might as well be accounted as part of Communism, because otherwise people don't conform to Communism.
I can imagine hypothetical intelligent species for which Communism might work fairly well, based on looking at social structures seen on Earth and extrapolating to what they may look like if the species in question were human-level intelligent. But it would be something like bees or ants, writ large. Trying to impose a bee or ant system on humans is utterly doomed to failure. That's not a value judgment. Maybe it's a terrible thing. It's just a true statement; humans, fundamentally, aren't bees or ants. You need that aspect of direct relationship for this to be stable.
Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily. It's pretty easy to see why it would fail if you try to imagine some animal species working that way; even if you somehow imposed that system onto a population of bacteria or something, I absolutely guarantee it would evolve away in a handful of generations. It's beyond unstable into the actively self-sabotaging. Adding lots of human intelligence doesn't really change that characteristic of communism.
(Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
> The problem is, "the conditions imposed in the name of communism" are intrinsic to communism itself, because it is not a political system that works for human beings as they are.
And what would that be? The following?
>Fundamentally, a political system based on "you'll do this work happily, and you'll voluntarily send all these resources to people you are not particularly related to, and hopefully they'll be good enough to supply you in return" is just doomed, evolutionarily.
The short historical period where this could be somewhat true would be first few years after the Russian revolution and during the civil war where the Bolshevik government had nothing to give the farmers for their produce. They did however get rather useless money notes IIRC. The use of force that followed by the bolsheviks was in no way universally accepted among communists & socialist at that time or since.
> (Now, when it gets really scary is when people start deciding they just need to remake people then. Getting people to conform to political systems rather than getting political systems to conform to people is one of the greatest evils of our time.)
While I agree with this in some sense, I also think it's quite obvious that what's sometimes called human nature varies drastically, and are in fact nurture rather than nature. Some societies have no concept of money, some no concept of marriage, no concept of a nuclear family, some despise competitiveness, and so on.
Another point a Trotskyst might make is that Communism can only succeed if adopted all over the world. I don't think that a country like Cuba makes for a good data point on anything except embargoes.
> if adopted all over the world
Not a chance.
Neither is Norway a good data point from which we can extrapolate the viability of Communism. Norway has a population of 5.5 million - smaller than the San Francisco Bay Area. It's also swimming in oil money.
It's probably easier to motivate people to work for the benefit of the whole community if the community is defined as a small number of people with whom you share a culture and background and live close to you.
Maybe that's why communism works occasionally on communes, but anything more expansive requires the brutal application of force to keep people in line.
The hypocrisy he mentions in his work in Russia seems to be observed because he grew under communism. If he'd grown up in America, he might have written about some other injustices.
...for starters, all family members other than the father would be locked at home 24/7, forbidden from speaking to people outside the family, and sometimes even from looking out of the window. They would be randomly abused for no reason. Every day they would have to sing a song about how their family is the best in the world... and because they would have no information about what happens outside the house, half of them would actually believe it.
People, please read The Gulag Archipelago and stop making such absurd analogies! Yeah, the book has many pages, but it explains a system that tortured millions of people to death, and has many sympathizers worldwide even today, so it's not like your time will be wasted on something irrelevant.