I'm not versed enough in political theory to know myself, but why have seemingly all communist movements and governments been so riddled with purges, paranoia, and violence?
But the political theory question might be: Why have seemingly all communist movements and governments been authoritarian?
All communist governments (not all communist movements, and this is actually the source of many breaches between communist movements that aren't governments, particularly in the West, and communist governments and the movements aligned with them) are rooted in Leninist vanguardism, a specific and particularly authoritarian rewriting of Marxist theory to avoid the dependence on developed democratic capitalist society with broad proletarian class consciousness and grassroots leadership as prerequisite to communism.
But the French Revolution, which was ideologically far from authoritarian, had a lot of the same practical problems; trying to run a state with active counterrevolutionary forces tends to make people authoritarians for what they see as temporary and pragmatic necessity as a means to achieving a more free end-state (and defenders of Leninist vanguardism would probably see it as just that!)
Americans sometimes forget that what we call our “revolution” was not an anti-elite revolution but an elite-led regional separatist movement coordinated by the local governments acting in concert, and so avoided many of the challenges found in genuine revolutions.
That said, it's still a far cry from the scale and severity of violence seen in various later revolutions.
One nit: The American Revolution was led by elites, if by "elite" you mean "wealthy and influential". But it was not led by elites, if by "elite" you mean "nobility". In that sense, it was quite anti-elite.
To me that would qualify as elite. Not sure how much local nobility there was in the area, but certainly the folks leading were the local elites IMO.
It was led by the landed elites, which didn't happen to generally have titles of nobility in the colonies, because the evolution from a feudal to a capitalist property structure had progressed pretty far before the US was colonized.
OTOH, the difference between a slave estate and an English feudal estate is mainly that the master of the former has even greater power over and less obligation to the subjects, so the difference between the elites you are distinguishing may be even less substantive than it seems at first glance.
Stalin got there by being a violent thug, he would stay there by being a violent thug. Ditto Franco in Spain, for at least a decade or so after the end of the civil war.
Repression of scientists, and minorities of all kinds? Difference of any kind from the party/dictator's view is to be mistrusted, thus purged, or at the very least repressed. See Saudi Arabia - which Franco's Spain resembled in its later years, with extreme repression of women and religious dogma.
I don’t think it’s odd at all. The murderous revolutionaries I can think of (Bolsheviks, Mao, Mugabe...) were won against regimes just as bloodthirsty as they were. The peaceful revolutions I can think of eg South Africa happened because both sides were willing to negotiate fairly.
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
> It seems to me that socialism has a 100% failure rate
Adopting socialist policies while keeping a market economy has worked out ok for most developed nations.
Communist USSR was able to educate its population and rapidly industrialize while fighting off two invasions by forces that, on paper, should have been able to beat them without much trouble, and emerge as one of the most powerful nations in the world. I’d consider that a success
Now imagine how much harder they would fight if the tax man wanted 100% of their income and wealth.
Now imagine what it takes for the tax man to overcome that resistance.
Purges, paranoia, and violence sounds like just the start.
When the rich and powerful unite against the tax man and the "proletariat", they always win.
So, when you say "people fight against taxes", we should clarify what people we are talking about. Plenty of people supported the collectivist movements of the era, and they are also people.
Characteristic of the paranoia is that the worst purges after all were against party members and top party elites themselves.
Not because any of them resisted the "tax man" (heck, they had wealth and preferential treatment), but because they could threaten Stalin or limit his control.
Similar with Mao in China. The bloody cultural revolution wasn't some mass murder of people resisting the party rule or the "taxman", but party elites splitting the people into factions and using them as proxies to fight internal party power struggles.
Compare and contrast with a parlimentary democracy running a heavily capitalist economic system. While it gives plenty of reason for dissent it also provides little opportunity to purge. This give and take leads to less extremes and more stability in general.
In other words, AFAIK (which isn't far), it's a trait of revolutions, not of communist movements.
From 1789 to the first Empire was only 15 years; to the Thermidorean Reaction even shorter.
> The French revolution was attempting to terrorise a political ellite.
That's a very generous interpretation. It's certainly what Robespierre would say, sure, but it's just as much what Lenin would say.
I am not trying to defend the French revolution, which actions were the antithesis of the values it pretended to promote. But for all its horrors, the french revolution wasn’t in the business of mass slaughtering its own population.
The French Revolution was strangled in its crib while it's mass killing was still accelerating, and it's leaders themselves killed en massé by counterrevolutionaries; it wasn't in business very long for that reason, a fact that future revolutionaries were keenly aware of and eager to avoid.
The stated ideology of the 1790s Paris Commune might be more attractive to modern democratic capitalists than that of the Bolsheviks, et al.,, but the main reason that the former has less of a history of violence than the latter is that they lost very early on in their program of exterminating an ever-expanding list of perceived enemies of the revolution, not some greater humanitarianism.
> Americans sometimes forget that what we call our “revolution” was not an anti-elite revolution but an elite-led regional separatist movement coordinated by the local governments acting in concert, and so avoided many of the challenges found in genuine revolutions.
After the war, Americans ended up with a government and distribution of material wealth very similar to what they had before.
The modern revolution in Czechoslovakia turned out fairly free of violence, at it was not communist.
Oh, that's neat about the Czech revolution. I know, oh hmm, literally nothing about it. <looks it up> - The "Velvet" revolution? This is super cool, had no idea something like this happened, thanks!
Maybe it's that cultural revolutions are like this, and there's very, very few non-cultural revolutions - maybe only independence revolutions? I literally do not know so like if you know one, put forth the Wikipedia link?
If you consider any wealth redistribution communism then you would have to consider most or all industrial states in part communist and the premise of the question itself becomes dubious.
If you consider any kind of far left redistributive movement communist then again the merit of the question is dubious because there have been many such movements that remained peaceful.
If you restrict the definition to only actors that call themselves communist even then the question is complicated by the fact that there have been many such actors that call themselves communist yet do not adhere to any communist doctrine. Just as there are many "Republics" which are not at all republics in reality.
Not only that, but he construed a framework in which anything opposing the proletariat, including "class antagonisms" that could be literally anything, should be opposed with force or the threat of force. Things like religion, private property, or anything that is not for the revolution is necessarily considered against the revolution.
When the foundation of a worldview is steeped in violence and using violence to get your political way, it's no surprise that the implementation of that worldview results in bloodshed and power vacuums.
Makes me think there’s something very lasting about his ideas, moral interpretations aside.
It's fairly easy to sense problems. Harder to identify and analyze the nature of a problem. Yet harder to come up with practical solutions that aren't worse.
But it was the Bolsheviks with their plan of communism immediately, not in 20 years, who won. They treated their political philosophy as a millenarian sect with "the dictatorship of the proletariat" substituting for the kingdom of God. When the eschaton fails to properly immanentize it can only be due to the opposition of sin and the Devil, by which we mean kulaks, wreckers, and traitors.
The problem isn't communism per say but a belief in having absolute truth and a vision of a perfect good that can justify any means.
Authoritarian communism (marxism) is a historically very tiny branch of socialism/communism, with anarchists being an overwhelming majority.
This tiny marxist/bolshevik minority killed its way to the top, and was used by capitalist empires as a strawman example of what would happen with "communism". Both sides find advantages in confusing communism with marxism, while in practice, dictatorship of the proletariat has nothing to do with communism at all.
Someone claiming one of the three labels without the two others, either has no clue about the history of communism, or just wants to avoid being assimilated with genocidal authoritarian communists.
It does stick with you.
> But it was the Bolsheviks with their plan of communism immediately, not in 20 years, who won.
The Bolsheviks won in no small part because they were a particularly violent, insular faction. Revolutionary situations don't really reward being accommodating and adverse to violence, even though that might be very desirable post-revolutionary condition.
It's something of a problem with revolutions that the people you want running the show afterwards aren't the kind of people that revolutions inherently favor.