Afaik this happened with every single instance of a communist country. Communism seems like a pretty good idea on the surface, but then why does it always become autocratic?
Thats like asking why North Korea became a dictatorship when it is a people’s democracy.
Power gaps get filled, small states get conquered.
Short answer: Power abhors a vacuum. Natural hierarchies develop out of good old tribalism rather fast even with frameworks in place to avoid them.
The vanguard party is essentially an oligarchy. It chooses its own successors, and we’re supposed to trust that they are too smart and on the lookout for the populace to not abuse power selfishly. A core tenet of anarchism is that while people may hold authority, nobody should hold positions of power.
Though I would say that while quite corrupt, one-party, and authoritarian, Cuba is a lot more democratic than people think
“Why do tadpoles always turn into frogs?”
Most countries we would label as communist didn’t form as Marx expected. Marx expected relatively advanced nations to revolt and claim control over capital. Instead, most Communist revolutions occurred in generally despotic and less developed countries.
When times are good, the government can use the material improvement of people’s lives as a reason to be in power. However, if times stop being good, the government becomes more overtly autocratic to maintain control.
in theory communism makes resources the property of everyone. In practice, somebody has to manage the resources, and in doing so controls them. if you control the resources, and especially if you have the power to defend that control, you effectively own them. this means that while in theory the people own everything, the truth is that the government owns everything. by similar logic to the first bit, if they own everything then they have control of everything, meaning that they are authoritarian. that being one of the major defining characteristics of a dictator its not far from there to become one even if you aren’t trying to. ironically, this is all how it’s intended to work save for the dictator part. this is the apple mouse charging port of communism, an intentional thing with a bad result that can’t be given up without invalidateing things you have said or done.
also, communism tends to be brought about by coups and coups tend to lead to authoritarian leaders, compounding the above issue.
Any system that gives a relative few authority over everyone else will sooner or later become autocratic, simply because that power inevitably comes to be held by those who desire it the most and are most willing to do whatever it takes to gain and hold it, and they tend to be greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes.
As far as that goes, the only real differences between systems are the specific hoops the assholes have to jump through.
Broadly, in a capitalist system, political power is awarded to the wealthy, while in a communist system, wealth is awarded to the politically powerful.
So the greedy, power-hungry, dishonest, amoral assholes follow different paths in different cases - accumulating wealth with which to buy access to political power in one or climbing the ranks of the ruling party in order to gain wealth in another - but the overall dynamic is always the same.
And that’s a large part of the reason that I’m an anarchist.
Chile was a communist country and didnt become autocratic because of it, the US murdered their democratically elected president then planted a dictator in his place. So my guess is it doesn’t always end that way on it’s own. Russia speedran the capitalism to fascim transition to, it’s been capitalist since 1991, sham elections since 2005, so they’re not a good example of any kind of economic or government system. China has a tight grip on their popilation but don’t let the propaganda distract you from the fact that the US is just as much a surveillance state as China with the one exception being how much China micromanages it’s people when they leave the country, but I wouldn’t bet against America keeping tabs on expats the same way it was found out that America was spying on its allies in the EU.
I think this question ignores mountains of contexts in an attemtp at reducing a problem into one facet.
The US may collect as much or more information as China but their enforcement actions taken based on this information are far far more limited.
Not always. The US bombed striking workers on Blair mountain, and bombed a Philly neighborhood in the 80s to target activists. A portland protestor who shot a fascist demonstrator in self defence was summarily murdered by the cops days later before they even announced their presence. An unarmed cop city protestor was shot dead after one cop pretended a gunshot behind him was from the protestors. And god help you if youre a Boeing whistleblower or sex trafficker to the politicians. Even if China does this more often its hard to ascribe that to communism if the most anti communist nation in history does the same thing but just less often. These targeted things hide in the statistics for killings by cops because cops in the US kill more people annualy than mass shooters do.
The US has many flaws and these incidents were terrible. But these largely didn’t involve the modern intelligence apparatus we are discussing. We have large numbers of people here on Lemmy actively calling for a socialist revolution but they’re completely safe as long as they follow the law.
Try calling for revolution in China and see how it goes. Leaders of even relatively non-political protest movements or advocates for minority rights are frequently disappeared or executed. In the US, there may be isolated incidents of this nature (typically by local law enforcement) but largely social critics are free to organize legal resistance to the state without repression.
Of course, there are reasons to worry we might be headed in that direction. All the more reason to organize and resist while you still can.
To be clear, I don’t ascribe these actions to communism. China is not communist by any reasonable definition. I ascribe these actions to authoritarianism. While the US is somewhat authoritarian, it is less so than China (at least within its borders—foreign policy is a different can of worms).
I’d ended up having a conversation with an archivist about the somewhat related question of “What was the Soviet Union’s history of itself, absent the editorializing that the rest of the world has been doing?”
For example, Tamim Ansary wrote Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World through Islamic Eyes that explained a lot of things about the middle east through that sort of lens, so I was hoping that someone would write a history of the USSR in a similar fashion, which I didn’t find.
One of the problems we have when approaching the more successful world governments is understanding … well, I guess good intentions? There’s kinda two sides to the story of Dear Leader. On one side, the self-aggrandizement as the father of the country, on the other side the act of actually trying to be the father of the country. Obviously a strongman today is mostly running the show almost entirely for selfish reasons but what you kinda see in the USSR and modern day China is at the same time an attempt to make the state better off. Which, of course, falls prey to effective use of power. “Do this or you will be executed” doesn’t work very well… not with the US approach to the death penalty, not to the totalitarianism of the attempted Communist state.
But, even today, there’s tons of “Good idea, bad implementation” things that the Chinese government does where the rest of the world governments just let things get worse.
The vibes I was getting in the days of Lenin from my reading was interesting. Lenin was the leader of the USSR but not in the way that Stalin was. The Bolsheviks of the time insisted that things be discussed and debated and worked through and not even Lenin was above that. And there was a very forward-looking idealistic sort of viewpoint. They could reject everything and do things right for once and many of them were new to power so they were freed of that worldview. And a lot of those things didn’t pan out as well as they wanted it to and people started to need to be “convinced” to do the new thing. First the “useless” hereditary upper-class, but then everybody else. And then eventually Lenin died and Stalin didn’t have that much patience for the Bolshevik old-guard and took over.
tl;dr: In a sense, it’s as if a bunch of Star Trek fans had toppled a government and were trying to build the best government ever for the future, using whatever means necessary.
Lea Ypi’s book Free is a phenomenal book describing the albanian communist period. Can’t recommend it enough.
I grew up in DDR. It fails because it doesn’t reflect reality. People are different, can do different things, and want different things. An ideology that simplifies people into classes, stands between people and their dreams. And will always need an ever increasing police force to force reality to look like the ideology.
Because you concentrate all resources into the government and not distabute it with money. Communism = work for the government and hope they give you hand outs; Capitalism = work for enough money to buy anything you want, the better your skill the more money you make. The best system is obv social-democracy.
‘the better your skill the more money you make’ and other myths capitalists sell you
Well it didn’t happen in every case. In the UK socialists became a big faction within the post war labour party and created the NHS. Almost every other country in Europe has a similar story with the creation of their own healthcare systems. Russia and China have never been democracies at any point in their history so maybe that has more to do with it than socialist and communist ideas.
This isn’t communism it’s every government type
If it’s not from the Communist region of China it’s just sparkling socialism.
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To play devil’s advocate, none of those vanguard parties were ever allowed to exist peacefully. They were always attacked, from the inside and out, by capitalist and fascistic powers. It’s kind of hard to get rid of the state when it is needed to defend from other nations and groups looking to destroy it.
I’m not saying that a Vanguard party would necessarily ever voluntarily give up it’s powers and disintegrate into pure communism without a large part of the world struggling against it, but it would be more likely to.
That is just pure speculation, though, because we live in a world that has shown that it will struggle against communism until the end. The Vanguard Party idea is flawed, because it fails to account for this indefinitely long struggle, and fails time and time again to offer a valid exit strategy into the next stage of Socialism/Communism.
Arguably defense will always be necessary until we actually achieve world piece, you can’t just unilaterally start acting as if you won’t get attacked. So the vanguard party thing is pretty fundamentally at odds with how the world works, if relinquishing control is actually the goal.
It’s crazy how far down one has to go for the right answer. MLs are by definiton highly authoritarian.
It’s like asking why successful fascist always creat dictatorships… Like that’s their plan.
On Authority by Engels, question answered almost 200 years ago
