Why did communism always turn into a kind of dictatorship?
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?
Attempts to implement communism at the scale of a nation state have always involved significant concentration of power. It may be impossible to do otherwise.
Power corrupts, and concentrations of power attract the corrupt.
So you're saying with enough checks and balances that distribute power widely enough through legal offices and separations of power, some sort of democratic socialism would in theory be possible (assuming a peaceful transition via pre-deternend legislative changes were in place and ready to be followed)?
For a real Marxist revolution to take place, the entire populace has to stand up at once and decide to make this change. This requires humanity to do some pretty broad and general evolution before we, as a race, are nearly ready. Checks and balances won't fix the fundamental problem that humans are selfish and want more for themselves at the expense of others.
If you do the thing and you do it right and you don't fuck it up. Then it might work.
Marx opined that certain material conditions had to be achieved before a socialist state could be successfully made. These material conditions include bourgeois capitalist democracy. Marx explicitly said that capitalism forges the tools with which it will be destroyed.
A certain subset of communists known as Marxist-Leninists decided that bourgeois capitalist democracy wasn't necessary if you just oppressed people REALLY hard, you could skip straight to a socialist state. And because they 'succeeded' in overthrowing traditional Marxists in 1917 Russia and getting the full power of a massive country to spread their ideology, they've had bootlickers calling their particular brand of insanity the only 'real' form of communism ever since.
When we think of 'communist' countries, we think of Marxist-Leninist countries which tried to jump from feudal societies to socialist societies, which, quite obviously from the results, doesn't work. Doesn't stop the cultists from licking boots, of course.
There's also a story in the hammer and sickle itself. It was spun as a symbol of 'all workers' but its original purpose was to depict an alliance between farmers (who owned the land they worked) and the tiny population of wage earners in Russia's largest cities (who didn't even own their homes). The farmers saw no reason for the new policies so concessions had to be made.
Lenin's Russia had to leverage the state apparatus to fiercely industrialize and capitalize, effectively creating an enormous business conglomerate with a company store that encompassed nearly every product in the nation outside the black market. But with all the complacency of abject monopoly. They couldn't skip generalized capitalism, and so they created it in a way that seriously disadvantaged workers as capitalism does.
In other words: state monopoly capitalism. Wrong direction from marxist withering of state: instead seeks to establish a permanent totalizing state, oppressing all, including the vanguard. Stalin's paranoia metastasized and now oligarchs pick over the bones.
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.
Centralization of decision-making. It's ironic actually. One of the main problems of capitalism that Marx described is the separation between labor and ownership. All the talk about "means of production".
Communism actually makes it worse. In capitalism yes you have the owners who have all the control and reap all the benefits, but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class. The way communism was always implemented is through a communist party and state control of the economy.
You get an even smaller group of people controlling the means of production. It amplifies exactly the main problem of capitalism by creating a very hierarchical class society where the party leadership takes a role of what is almost "nobility".
There's also just a fundamental problem with planned economies from a purely economic standpoint: they are much less efficient at actually providing the minimum set of goods and services required by a population, and they're worse at achieving growth. See the most recent Nobel Prize in economics for a citation. Funnily enough, the same paper's arguments apply equally to oligarchic economies and crony capitalist economies, which are semi-planned economies by a small group of the ultra wealthy.
More specifically to the OP, communist countries have planned economies, which by nature requires a strong authority to tightly control production. Hence why communist states always have very consolidated political power structures. And once the power is consolidated, all it takes is one bad actor to get that power and ruin everything.
Géza Hofi was one of the greatest comedians in Hungarian history. He was active under and very outspoken about the failures of the ruling communist party. One of his most memorable performances was "How many pigs will be born?" (video, unfortunately without subtitles).
Party officials, wearing nice brown trench coats, visit old man Joe's farm.
"Comrade Joseph, how many pigs will be born?"
"I don't know."
"Shut your mouth, peasant, and give me the number."
"What's the plan?"
"14."
"Then it'll be 14. Have you told the swine? Better that you talk to her, since you're both on the same level."
(the story goes on, but I don't want to translate the entire thing)
but you have many capitalists competing, so the power is kinda distributed inside the capitalist class.
This isn't always true, and is arguably not the natural state of capitalism. Capitalism, without state intervention, will tend towards monopoly as economies of scale and market power push out any competition.
Iirc this is what Trade Syndicalism was meant to solve. After all the talk about the people's rebellion it gets into balancing power by keeping it distributed among unions. So your political career would be to get elected in your union and then serve on the councils at different levels.
Because most real-world implementations of communism was the idea that a "vanguard party" would excercise total control over the country. The idea is eventually the state would "wither away" after communism is acheived.
Yea imagine how that goes. Once a party gets total power, they ain't giving it up, that's the problem.
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 peace, 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.
Ideologically, Leninism supported vanguardism, a variation on Marxism that said that the Communist party was supposed to drag the early-20th-century proletariat into the revolution, instead of waiting for late capitalism where the proletariat would (according to Marx) naturally become revolutionary. This, and the notion of "false consciousness", authorized Communist parties to go against the expressed (democratic) will of the proletariat, on the theory that the proletariat's judgment was clouded by false consciousness, while still claiming to act in the interests of the proletariat.
Basically, "we (the party) know better than you (the people)" was ingrained into Leninism from the beginning, and the major communist revolutions either were or became Leninist. Maoism was a branch off of Leninism as well.
Keep in mind that it wasn't even the proletariat that accomplished the Revolutions, it was the peasantry. Marx wasn't against the idea but he would have been surprised.
Marx wasn’t against the idea but he would have been surprised
Towards the end, Marx actually expected Russia to go through a communist revolution, and that it may even be the start of the revolutionary wave in Europe. See the preface for the 1882 Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto for reference.
I love learning new things that had just never occurred to me before. It happens a lot more here than it ever did back on Reddit.
Equating all socialism with the authoritarian regimes of the 20th century oversimplifies a complex political tradition.
Dictatorial tendencies are not intrinsic to socialism but are contingent on specific historical and political contexts.
Russia: The Bolsheviks' turn to authoritarianism was partly due to the civil war, external invasions, and a lack of democratic traditions. These circumstances led to the consolidation of power to preserve the revolution, not as an inevitable feature of socialist theory.
In other contexts, socialist movements (e.g., in Scandinavia) have successfully implemented social democratic policies without authoritarianism.
The role of individual leaders and political choices in shaping socialist experiments. Figures like Lenin and Stalin made decisions that prioritized centralized control, which deviated from the principles of worker self-management and democratic participation.
These deviations were not a necessary outcome of socialism but reflected the particular decisions and dynamics of those historical moments. So a small sample size of major socialist states and people cloud judgement.
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures. For example, the USSR faced significant opposition from capitalist countries, which influenced its militarization and political centralization. This external pressure created a siege mentality that undermined the potential for democratic governance.
Democratic socialism has thrived in various countries, showing that socialism can coexist with democratic principles. Examples include the welfare states of Scandinavia, where socialism has enhanced equality and social welfare without undermining political freedoms.
GREAT answer!
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures.
THIS. This is THE reason most Marxists give for the necessity of authoritarianism in the first stages of transition to a Communist society.
There is some truth to this but it overlooks the fact that the Bolsheviks were distinct from other socialist parties from the very beginning by their top-down, authoritarian party structure, with Lenin in control. As soon as they gained power, they immediately worked to impose this type of management on the entirety of Russian society by crushing first the Duma, then the Soviets, and finally eliminating any autonomy exercised by their own supporters, the labor unions. They also immediately began engaging in electoral chicanery and postponing or rigging elections in their favor. By destroying or subsuming every other institution in society, the party structure became the primary structure of governance, and Russia became a totalitarian state. Most of this took place even before the civil war and was arguably a major contributor to it.
So why did Russia become a dictatorship? Because the Bolsheviks decided it was desirable based on their understanding and development of socialist theory, and other forces failed to stop them for various reasons. It’s pretty much that simple. The civil war and foreign pressures probably strengthened this tendency but I don’t believe it was the primary cause.
And of course, almost every other socialist revolution since that time was inspired by the Bolsheviks since they “succeeded”. So they largely sought to impose dictatorships as well.
Ultimately it all goes back to Marx and his idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat which is one of the crucial flaws of Marxism in my view.
The dictatorship of the proletariat was supposed to describe the will of a fully conscious proletariat majority being executed by and with the consent of that class. In other words a democracy unclouded by bourgeois interest and false consciousness.
The problem was that at the time of the Russian revolution the proletariat weren't the majority, the peasants were, and what proletariat there were lacked full class consciousness. So Lenin used the vanguard party to emulate what a dictatorship of the proletariat would do, but that wasn't an actual one as Marxist would've described.
External hostility often pushed socialist regimes toward authoritarian measures. For example, the USSR faced significant opposition from capitalist countries, which influenced its militarization and political centralization. This external pressure created a siege mentality that undermined the potential for democratic governance.
This is something that I wish more people who talked about this would acknowledge and engage with. I get it, authoritarianism isn't good. It's not like we want that. It's not the goal. But it's really easy to sit on the sidelines from a relatively cushy life in the imperial core and judge all the people out there who are dealing with the historical reality of colonialism and feudalism and the current reality of imperialism. They are actively engaged in the practical task of liberating themselves from forces, both external and internal (old power structures/privileges) that seek to violently return them to a condition of servitude. The decisions they made have to be viewed through the lens of that context.
That doesn't mean we can't discuss and criticize them, but it's worth engaging in the nuance of the history rather than out of hand dismissing their attempts as inherently illegitimate, evil, and/or misguided. What were the conditions they were operating under? What dangers did they face? Were their actions the best strategy for achieving the future they wanted? Was what they gave up too great? Did they have the capability to take a more open path? Have/had their decisions irreparably led them astray or were/are they still on the path to that eventual communist society on some time scale?
If you think they're wrong for what they did, you still have to be able to answer the question of how you protect your revolution from forces that will spy on you, sabotage your industry, fund right wing militias to terrorize people, sanction and blockade you, or even invade you? Or if you think the path wasn't even violent revolution in the first place, what is your answer to how you get to where you want to be when the power structure that would need to allow this is also invested in not allowing this? It's a bit harder to see how this is made difficult or even impossible in liberal "democracies," but it should be uncontroversial to acknowledge that some kind of force was necessary to escape from illiberal systems like Feudalism in Russia/China or from colonial regimes like in Vietnam.
The one thing I'd push back on from your comment is about the welfare states of Europe. That's not really what socialism is about. They've made life better for people in their own country, yes, but it's on the backs of those exploited in the third world. That's why communism is inherently internationalist. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." You need to be able to build a movement that can work to lift everyone up with you, or at least not drag them down for your own benefit. I'd be interested to have more of a discussion on this, but that's the standpoint I'd start from.
democratic socialism has thrived in in imperial states
Most universal answer I can give is:
Every country that has attempted communism has been desperate and vulnerable.
Desperate to find a strongman to save their crumbling old government, and vulnerable to having the CIA appoint their own strongman in turn.
That's a dumb take, given that the two largest communist countries so far were both founded before the CIA ever existed. Lenin started the authoritarianism of the USSR by 1923 (not terribly long after WWI, although the Bolshevik coup took a while to consolidate power), and the revolution in China that put Mao Zedong in power in 1945, shortly after the end of Japanese occupation. But, as with the Russian revolution, the Chinese revolution had been going on for some time prior to WWII.
Meanwhile, the CIA didn't even exist until 1946. The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS (Office for Strategic Services) was founded in 1942, specifically as part of the wartime effort.
Moreover, the US fought in two wars to prevent communists from taking over, since the communist governments were unfriendly to US interests, notably Kim Il-Sun in North Korea (took power in '48), and Ho Chi Min in Vietnam (took over part of Vietnam in '45). Additionally, Fidel Castro overthrew the Cuban gov't led by Fulgencio Batista; Batista had the support of the US, and was friendly to US interests in the region, while Castro was decidedly not. The US attempted multiple time to overthrow Castro, and failed each time.
So the idea that the CIA is appointing the heads of communist countries is simply not supported by facts.
Lenin started the authoritarianism of the USSR by 1923
Lenin started earlier than that... It started almost right after the Black Army aided the Red Army to defeat the White Army... The Red Army turned around, and murdered workers in the Black Army, because "They didn't do socialism, and went right to implementing full communism"...
There's a lot of confusion in these comments regarding Marxist theory, presumably from people who haven't actually engaged with the source material, so I want to clarify something I see repeated frequently in this thread with little pushback. The Marxist theory of the State is not the same as the Anarchist, nor the liberal. Marx defined the State as a tool of class oppression.
The reason I state this is because there's a confused notion that Marxists think there should be
I'll address these in order. First, the Vanguard is in no-way meant to be unaccountable, nor a small group of elites, but the most politically active, practiced, and experienced among the proletariat elected by the rest of the proletariat. The concept of the "Mass Line" is crucial to Marxist theory, that is, the insepperability of the Vanguard from the masses. If this line is broken, the Vanguard loses legitimacy and ceases to be effective, whether it falls into Tailism or Commandism. These tendencies must be fought daily, and don't simply vanish by decree.
Secondly, the basis for Marxian Communism is the developmental trends of Capitalism. Markets start highly decentralized, but gradually the better Capitalists outcompete and grow, and as they grow they must develop new methods of accounting and planning. Capital concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, yet socialization increases as these conglomerations begin to reach monstrous heights and require incredibly complex planning. The development of such methods and tools is the real, scientific foundation of Public Ownership and Central Planning.
Continuing, once the Proletariat takes control and creates a Proletarian State, the Proletariat, the more experienced among them the Vanguard, gradually wrests from the bourgeoisie their Capital with respect to that industries and sectors that have sufficiently developed. This process continues until all Capital has been folded into the Public Sector, at which point laws meant for restraining the bourgeoisie begin to become superfluous and "die out." The Vanguard doesn't "dissolve" or "cede power," but itself as a concept also dies out, as over time new methods of planning and infrastructure make its role more superfluous. Classes in general are abolished once all property is in the Public Sector, and as such the State no longer exists either, as there isn't a class to oppress.
This is why Marxists say the State "withers away." It isn't about demolishing itself, but that Marx and Engels had a particular vision of what the State even is, and why they said it could not be abolished overnight.
Hope that helped! As a side note, asking this on Lemmy.world, an anti-Marxist instance, is only ever going to get you answers biased in that direction. I suggest asking on other instances as well to get a more complete view.
Lemmy.world, an anti-Marxist instance
I wouldn’t call Lemmy.world anti-Marxist. I would say there has definitely been some knee-jerk to the heavy-handed moderation of Lemmy.ml, but being opposed to the more extreme methods of Lemmy.ml doesn’t mean opposition to Marxism in concept. It means you’ll get a broader set of responses since criticism won’t get deleted by the mods/admins, but there are still plenty of leftists on Lemmy.world.
Similar to how opposing Stalinism doesn’t mean one opposes Marxism, you know?
Lemmy.world defederated from the largest explicitly Marxist aligned instances, their thread going over why spells out pretty clearly that opposition to liberalism was the key determining factor in doing so. Lemmy.ml isn't even a Marxist instance, only admin'd and moderated by Marxists, yet is the instance with undeniably the most conflict with Lemmy.world currently among their federated instances. Moreover, many lemmy.world mods have expressed negative opinions towards Marxism directly, here's an example.
Lemmy.world is a liberal instance, is admin'd and moderated largely as such, and has taken deliberate measures against Marxism and Marxists. I believe it's fair to consider Lemmy.world to overall be anti-Marxist. Does that mean no users share Marxist sympathies? No, of course not, but overall the bias is clear. Similarly, by defederating from the larger Marxist-aligned instances, a thread on Lemmy.world is shutting out the viewpoints of most of the Marxists, rather than having a "broad" view, this minimizes the variance in responses.
Just my 2 cents.
Sounds sensible from an economics perspective but what about violence? How can state wither away when there needs to be control of violence?
From what I understand the people individually would be responsible for helping each other which is why there's a strong emphasis on an "armed proletariat." An example, I believe from State and Revolution, was that of a common person helping someone who was being mugged. We'd all have a responsibility to help each other.
Not entirely sure on their concept of military protection though. Except for lenin they didn't really live in an age of crazy military capabilities so it was always man vs man not man vs b52 bombers.
It's the opportunist problem. We see this throughout rebellions in history, not just when communist countries are made. Basically, anytime conditions are bad enough for the people to demand change it's really easy for someone to trade on their ignorance. They can push policies that sound like they'll help but really consolidate power. And if anyone speaks up, they're an enemy of the people.
For a non Communist example of this in modern history check out the French Revolution.
Check USA right now.
Yup. And I've spent the last decade and a half telling people the working class isn't going to take it anymore.
The Paris Commune is a great example of the class war being brutally engaged by the bourgeois.
Because communism is the end goal, but one of the transitionary phases is the dictatorship of the proletariat , where a representative of the people is given sweeping power to prevent a counterrevolution from the bourgeoisie.
But that kind of power is hard to give up; foreign powers are trying to sew discord, and it's really convenient to get stuff done. It's ok, you're one of the good guys anyways, right?
\
So communism never really makes it past that stage
Imagine asking a question to a less qualified, more ideologically antagonistic group of people than you just have.
That's fair, but frankly, in my experience, the average American's idea of communism is "evil bad oppression big gubmint dictatorship". I was never taught in school about the theory behind communism or the practical government of the USSR (regardless of how close they may or may not have been), so I have little understanding into how these systems actually work and whether it's actually beneficial for those under them. I'm trying to rectify that on my own time but there's many people who don't care enough to do so and just parrot the same thought terminating cliches like "human nature".
Since you said you're trying to rectify that, allow me to hijack and recommend my introductory Marxist reading list. Section 1 is all you need to get the basics and a decent contextualization of AES states, but you can feel free to continue onward. Nearly every work has an audiobook and a text format linked, and the 2 works without an audiobook are short (and there are hopes of getting an audiobook for them, fingers crossed!).
I'm almost finished listening to Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti, one of the books in the list that @Cowbee@lemmy.ml posted as a reply to your message. I think it's been a great introductory book - brief and easy to understand.
It's wide-ranging book even though it's brief, and one of the things I found interesting about it was that he not only gave credit where it was due (ex: producing vastly more egalitarian society with all the benefits that come with that) but he also pointed out some shortcomings, such as the failure of centrally planning national economies, like someone else has pointed out in another comment here. I highly recommend the book.
Edit: I also wanted to say props to you for being open-minded and trying to learn and understand instead of just swallowing the narrative we've been fed our whole lives.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely
Those who seek power least deserve it
I think those quotes answer your question well enough
Lots of reasons, but here's one:
Because one of, if not the main purpose of money is to provide a decentralized way of transferring information about economic needs and capabilities. Without that mechanism in place, the only way of determining where goods can be created and where they need to go (a massive problem that it is a daily miracle we don't generally have to deal with) is by an overbearing authoritarian state.
Spoken like someone that hasn't paid attention to the supply chains of places like Walmart.
We already have command economies. They exist and are functional. The owners are simply siphoning away the surplus value.
So you're saying you agree?
Walmart is absolutely a result of capitalism, those intricate supply chains are in place to make money. Maybe we could do it without a common way to track needs for a while, but would it adapt? Would the alternative resist corruption better? The invention of Money almost seems an inevitable consequence from one perspective.
I don't think this answers the original question, but it's an interesting side topic.
As large as Walmart is, it is still absolute peanuts compared to the scale and (especially) dynamism of global production and consumption as a whole. Global supply chains have to change much faster and in arbitrary ways, compared to the centralized chains of something like Walmart, which in turn is also still subject to the external pressures of competition -- even just hypothetical competition based on some hypothetical course of action is a powerful constraint.
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.
Eventually, "our" pretty much always becomes "my".
Why? I'm not clear, but power corrupts regardless of the political system surrounding it (e.g. look at pretty much any HOA).
Hate to break the news, but it appears capitalism is also heading in that direction.
The myth that Capitalism is immune to dictatorships was Cold War propaganda. Capitalism actually shows just how good a well established Democracy works to prevent Dictatorship. Because the defining trait of Capitalism is to concentrate wealth in the most efficient manner and money often equals political power.
There were plenty of Capitalist dictators during the Cold War and off the top of my head there's still Saudi Arabia with a Monarchy.
I'm sure you know this, but for others that don't: That monarchy in Saudi Arabia didn't exist in 1916
The greater the income disparity, the stronger authoritarianism becomes, the more fascistic it becomes. It's always the same, which is why it has to be held in check, something the USA outspokenly do not want to do. Communism, Maoism, Xiism etc. are just taking a shorter route to authoritarianism.
Always has been…
Because there was never anything communist about these states in any way whatsoever.
Communism is a state (as in a social, political and economic condition, not a government). None of these states ever reached this condition, and, therefore, was never communist. And, one could argue, that their development literally went the opposite way to what could be called communist with a straight face. As the anarchist Bakunin famously said, "the people's boot is still a boot."
This is why the Maoist-types call this shit "democratic centralism," which is essentially just double-speak for "what the party says goes."
This does not make the idea of communism invalid - but it's still as perfectly vague as ever, unfortunately.
slight correction, you have state and government backwards.
Communism is a stateless, classless, currencyless society in which the workers own the means of production.
This isn't communism it's every government type
If it's not from the Communist region of China it's just sparkling socialism.
My take on it from the theory is that most advocates say that you have to go through a period of single party socialism before the state somewhat fades away and it becomes communism.
I don't think it's actually possible in reality for a single party state to cede the power back to the people afterwards.
Yea its called vanguardism, where a "vanguard party" takes total control and then tries to estsblish communism, and once that is acheived, the state "withers away".
Yea thats not gonna work in real life. Why ever give up power once you have it?
This is what actually got me banned from lemmy.ml. I said that although Communism can be done in a ML way, it has never actually happened because it has never actually be a revolution by the people. In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.
In the case of Russia and the places they influenced, it was a group of self-appointed elites that did the actual revolting, and then they imposed a new system on the populace.
What on earth are you talking about? How would "a group of self-appointed elites" even be enough to overthrow the government? That fundamentally doesn't make any sense.
It's also whitewashing the Tsar. As if the Russian people were happy and content while they were starving and subject to serfdom and being fed into the meat grinder of WWI.
Hell, Lenin is even on record saying that Russia wasn't going to have a revolution, before it did, and by the time he arrived in Russia, the Tsar had already been forced to abdicate!
This is kinda off topic so I'm putting it in a reply to myself like a weirdo, but despite being something of an anarchist / left-libertarian in mindset... I don't actually think most people are capable of living in a world where someone isn't ordering them around. Many people need and crave a power hierarchy, and if they were ever gifted some kind of anarchist utopia by way of magic they'd likely form up another hierarchy based system all over again from scratch.
The Marxist theory of the State is as an instrument of class oppression, not all forms of government. The idea is that the Proletariat, after destroying the Capitalist State and replacing it with a Proletarian State, this "dictatorship of the proletariat" will gradually fold Private Property into the Public Sector after markets cease to be an effective tool for developing and Public Ownership and Central Planning becomes more effective.
This happens unevenly, and there are different points where some sectors can be publicly owned much earlier than others, so this doesn't happen overnight. Once all property is in the Public Sector, there are no more classes, and thus all instruments that protected against the bourgeoisie become superfluous and "dies out," leaving a stateless, classless society with central planning. Engels calls this the "administration of things."
That's a type. It's what Russian Communism developed into. Not all Communist theory says you need to get rid of the state either, that's Chinese Communism.
There's even Communist theory that includes a thriving democracy.
The same threat that democracy faces, it's vulnerable to charismatic people who become entrenched and draconian. I'm not convinced it can ever work without some competing force that resists the consolidation of power, such as highly educated and politically involved populace.
Communism probably works at smaller scales but for larger populations it would only be feasible when the leadership is benevolent. A robot administrator would be an interesting experiment.
This is strongly supported by Wengrow and Graeber's "The Dawn Of Everything", though I think they would say that in the case of state communism, it's bureaucratic power/control of information, rather than charismatic power. I think charisma is more relevant in fascist dictatorships (which I guess some communist systems evolve into).
I don't think that is exclusive to communism. I rather assume that this has more to do with how the government is structured. Long-running politicians tend to being more open to corruption.
I can easily see Trump going the same way. He has assembled enough power within the system to break it from within like most dictators did.
Where was communism adopted?
Countries with a strong history of authoritarian leadership, which continued under communism but with a fig leaf of public support. Kind of like how the US was formed as a democracy, but only for male white land owners who were already the ruling class.
The governmental structure has an impact on culture, but it doesn't magically override existing social connections and norms. The people really did elect Putin before he consolidated power and turned it into completely sham elections. The communist party in China was originally what the people wanted before being turned into an authoritarian regime.
It isn't like this is that unique to the countries that adopted communism. Many large countries, including western democracies, end up leaning into authoritarian tendencies over time because central leadership structures tend to encourage the leadership styles of 'strong men'. If the culture isn't there to hold those that abuse their power accountable, that country will slide into authoritarianism over time.
Personally, I don't see communism ever scaling well above maybe a few hundred people because the more people that someone doesn't know is involved the harder it is for the whole to feel like a community. Democracy has a similar scaling problem, but it doesn't lean into authoritarianism as fast. yeah,
From my limited understanding (because enthusiastic support for mass executions of anti-communists caused me to totally abandon it as a viable ideology) Lenin posited that it was necessary to violently rid the world of capitalist tendencies by force in order to protect the slow transition to the collectivist utopia he envisioned. This is my biggest problem with Marxism....or perhaps the brand of Marxism that has been adopted.
My background: I consider myself a libertarian socialist at the moment. I wholeheartedly agree that capitalism will kill our planet but I am not willing to support an autoritarian regime that promises to execute or imprison its critics for life. From my limited understanding, Marx didn't start there but was "radicalized" into firmly believing that the only way to get capitalists to go along with his plan is to eliminate them from society. The authoritarian behaviour reportedly came about from a very real need to prevent capitalists from meddling in order to protect their consumer ideology throughout the world.
If I am wrong, the people on hexbear have also misunderstood it. They believe that the only way to the utopia they want is through China's authoritarian methods. Their support for China is about as pervasive there as lemmy.world's support for DLC style neoliberal globalism.
I consider myself a libertarian socialist at the moment.
I believe you mean anarchist when you say “libertarian socialist.”
There are some important distinctions in my own ideology that prevent me from characterizing myself as an outright anarchist. For one, I do believe in the rule of law (to a certain extent in that I can scarcely imagine a fully anarchist society where murder and robberies are not rampant).
I also believe in state-funded fire departments, educational systems (with controls built in to prevent ideological brainwashing), roads, utilities, etc. So, I stop short of calling myself a Democratic Socialist because I think that that ideology is fraught with capitalist apologia (and actual sheepdogging for the capitalist class as perpetrated by AOC and Bernie as of late). But I am certainly not an Anarchist in the traditional sense of that word.
They had no communist intentions to begin with. The benefits of communism are just an easy way to market any nefarious movement with anticommunist intentions
The core principles of communism are basically an antithesis of these authoritarian/totalitarian/autocratic/oligarchic how ever you want to describe them. Such a shift isn't accidental
They had no communist intentions to begin with.
All (>30 countries) of them (1)?
Which ones aligned with the principles?
watch the video on the rules for rulers by the youtube channel cgpgrey for one explanation.
OP how much of today's markets and politics are definited by Oligarchs and the rich? Can you really say that a plutocracy isn't it's own kind of dictatorship?
Even more so, many westerners have been fooled by culture to think this is natural, inevitable, and good.
In terms of per capita rates, the Irish Catholic Church was incarcerating more of Irelands population than Stalin did to Russia during his reign.
Just two companies; The British East India company and the Belgian Rubber plantations of the Congo killed more people than Stalin or Mao (especially if you factor out the deaths from Lysenkoism, which wasn't a part of communism).
So early Capitalism and Colonialism killed far more than Communist dictatorships have....
And finally there is this to say - Communism is an economic system designed to interrupt plutocratic rule. It's not a governmental system of elections and checls and balances....
...and if we are to be the most up to date with this: China and Vietnam have Socialist Oriented Market Economies. The one in Vietnam, has almost eliminated homelessness entirely. Is that a dictatorship compared to the woes of the west's housing crisises?
Early systems from both economic models - Capitalism/Colonialism and Communism - both had events of mass killings. Both have seen dictatorships... You only focus on these things in the Communist model, because of your background. Likewise, someone from China pr North Korea might hear more about the famines, deaths and genocides of the Capitalist and Colonial corporations I've mentioned above.
P.S. Are Cancer deaths from chemicals Capitalists kept on the "safe" list indicative of a dictatorship by the wealthy? What about the deaths and famines from weather disturbances in the climate? If we're counting the famines under Communism, then why not these things to? It's because of a hidden Western ideology/indoctrination culture.
Authoritarians everywhere: “You need my boot on your neck, because the other guy’s boot will be even worse!”
True, but when one system becomes sufficiently crushing, it's best to popularize an alternative so the guy in the boot has to focus on other things for a moment.
If the boot changes colour and doctrine, and becomes crushing again, I'll happily advocate for a free market system to distract him again...
Or perhaps some third system such as a mix of communitarianism, distributism, and Georgism. I'm not going to be particularly ideological in this.
...and the Truth is we're speeding towards a techno-feudalism (it's no longer Capitalism when places like Amazon dictate prices and promotions to both producers/sellers and consumers/buyers, that's not Capitalism anymore), so unless you like licking that particular boot, your noted point may not actually serve anything than a heavier foot.
The road to autocracy is paved with people who meet every criticism of the system with, "But look at how bad this other system is!"
It's really not. It's mostly nepotism and reproducing the an untouchable ruling class that creates an autocracy. Put simply; when one system goes too far into autocracy, you should entertain the values of another system.
Condemning that is approving of the current autocrats. But perhaps you're a particular fan of Trump/Musk.
Lysenkoism, which wasn't a part of communism
How so? Lysenkoism was wholely a result of the political ideology (environment determines wholely a crops' yield), supressing scientific results (genetic differences exist).
No where in Communism does it say to fake one's scientific results in order to simulate higher crop yields. That's not part of the doctrine. That's why it became known as Lysenkoism, because it came down to one con man.
Had the same man been born into the position under a different system, a similar result could emerge. If he were a UN director for farming undee Capitalism a similar result could occur.
Was it an inevitable byproduct of Communist doctrine that would have occurred no matter who Stalin picked? No. Did it happen in Vietnam and Cuba because of the doctrines there? No. So whilst Stalin chose him because he was told he was a good working class lad, doesn't make Lysenko's deceptions part of communism. They're not written into it anywhere.
One thing I'll add that I haven't seen mentioned is communisms relative weakness in the propaganda department. If you look at democracy as a bunch of competing interest groups i.e. parties trying to win the masses over to there side to win, then there main tool / weapon is information that will make the opposition look bad and your side look good, i.e. propaganda. Good propaganda requires intimate knowledge of people's desires and a knowledge of how to shape those desires to the benefit of your program. Capitalism is very good at this due to competition forcing them to better understand there customer so they can sell them more. Capitalism creates great salesman which is fundamentally what you need to create good propaganda. You can see this expertise most plainly in advertising pushing the message that consumption is good, fulfilling and will make you happy.
This expertise combined with the large amount of resources capital can Marshall to push there message makes electoral politics extremely difficult for communism or any program that goes against consumption like environmentalism. Even if you completely eliminate capital and it's control over media in one nation foreign actors will still come in using the same expertise and resources to try and bring back capitalism. So since communists can't compete electorally with a free press they go towards autocracy to keep power.
Many informed responses already so I'll add my uninformed opinion.
Political change has never occurred in a vacuum. Communism is a direct threat to capitalism. So the US capitalists will do everything in their power to undermine and disrupt communism.
It's a bit cheap to just try and blame all the problems on the opposition with no evidence though.
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.
What hierarchical structure exists in any type of system that doesn't breed corruption?
"Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely."
Greed. The Achilles heel of humans since the beginning of time. Greed breeds hate, hate breeds fear, and fear breeds violence.
No, fear is the mind killer dumdum
Or as seth from street fighter 4 said it so well :
"... The poor seek riches, the ugly; beauty, we compare ourselves to others and seek to cover our own inadequacies to find peace of mind. The mere existence of those who are better than us becomes intolerable. We fight in retaliation! if beauty is not enough, we use money. If money does not work, we resort to voilence! This energy is what powers our world! It is essential! All i seek is to help this natural process along! This destructive force begotten from confect! This power that everyone lusts for, i will spread it over the world in but a touch! It is like a well that can never run dry! A precious mineral flowing from an inexhaustable mine! This power will be mine!"
... Followed by ryu's stupid "no you" response
Because, at a high level, communism requires that a leader or group of leaders get things on track and then give up all of their power over time. Instead, the type of people who tend to lead revolutions are the same type of people who are unlikely to want to give up power and instead end up wanting more power. So no true communism has ever existed because it never gets to that phase.
That's Leninist "Communism".
As a reminder, Lenin lost the 1917 election and then seized power to make himself a dictator, then wrote about how dictators are essential to communism.
The Truth is that Dictators are anathema to communism. A dictator who seizes the means of production is called a king, and the people are then called serfs. It's a full step backwards in the pursuit of the communist dream.
In 1917, there were 2 governments, the Worker and Peasant supported Soviet Government, and the Bourgeoisie and Petite Bourgeoisie supported liberal Provisional Government. Lenin was elected via the Soviet system, and the Socialist Revolutionaries were elected in the bourgeois controlled Provisional Government. After the election, the Soviet Government disbanded the Provisional Government via revolution, the same measures proposed by Marx the entire time.
Secondly, Lenin never once wrote about how dictators are essential to Communism. Lenin fully believed in Soviet Democracy, ie workers councils, and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, a term coined by Karl Marx to describe a Socialist State that had not fully absorbed all Capital into the Public Sector, and thus had to suppress the still existing Bourgeoisie. The reason for this is that Capital can only be wrested by the degree to which it develops! Per Engels:
Question 17 : Will it be possible to abolish private property at one stroke?
Answer : No, no more than the existing productive forces can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. Hence, the proletarian revolution, which in all probability is approaching, will be able gradually to transform existing society and abolish private property only when the necessary means of production have been created in sufficient quantity.
Dictators are indeed antithetical to Communism, but you've entirely misframed Marx, Lenin, the USSR, and the October Revolution. The Soviet Republic in control of a largely Publicly Owned, Centrally Planned economy is in no way comparable to feudalism, but is actually existing Socialism.
Funilly enough, Lenin described exactly what you're now doing in The State and Revolution:
What is now happening to Marx's teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the "consolation" of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this "doctoring" of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now "Marxists" (don't laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the "national-German" Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers' unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!
It's funny that you describe Communism as a "dream," it accurately depicts your idealistic understanding of it, along with your "reminder."
Theoretically, one could spontaneously be created from scratch starting with a small group of people on a new world who have never experienced a centralized form of government. Formal governing is not required if the society is small enough and there are no outside forces at work to create a threat. But once governing is required, there will generally be forces at work that will centralize it. The only exception might be in a society with very limited need for cooperation due to plentiful resources available to all, such as a utopia like Star Trek's Earth.
In all other, realistic scenarios, there will need to be a revolution. That will always be led by a person or group of people to organize the overthrow and coordinate the changes. This group will inevitably be in search of power themselves, corrupted by the power they are given, or infiltrated by those in search of such power and are unlikely to give up that power.
This is an incorrect interpretation of the phrase "withering away of the state," which I elaborated on here.
I'm not really talking about Marxist communism. See my other comment, but in any realistic scenarios, communism is unlikely to form spontaneously as the first form of government in a new society.
And since revolution on a large scale requires centralized coordination and leadership, there will always be someone or some group given centralized power that is unlikely to allow for decentralization to happen on a large scale and is actually more likely to grab the power of the previous government system and keep it centralized, "for the good of the people" or "to defend the people" or whatever. Even well meaning revolutionaries are highly likely to crave control and be unlikely to want to allow "someone else" to change what they put in place. This then leaves in place the centralization indefinitely and never leads to communism.
Because it is a dictatorship.
A dictatorship of the proletariat.
For real though we've not seen communism yet.
Because some people are more equal than others
So to begin with all communism so far has never been democratically voted in as far as I know and pretty much starts with an ideological military government that then needs to transition back to democracy.
Many do transition to a one party system where all democracy is contained within the party and essentially becomes a "primaries only" type.
Then slowly over time power consolidations and purges bring it towards a dictatorship because there are no checks and balances against it.
So it seems to me that the only way to get to the ideological communism is through democracy and constitutional changes, proportional representation and coalition governments that don't allow any one toxic pernon to consolidate power.
Well communism has never been achieved, so the name is always aspirational.
But aside from that split hair, you might be interested in reading about communism in India:
"The Communist Party in Kerala has functioned under the conditions of a liberal democracy, relying on success in multi-party elections to remain in power. CPI's 1957 constitution stated it would allow the existence of opposing parties after it had a parliamentary majority."
I stand corrected, that's an excellent case of socialism working that was democratically elected in a multi party system. I didn't know one existed! Thanks for sharing. It also has some really good numbers for a state in India.
Here's a paragraph from Wikipedia page on Kerala for everyone else that didn't know about it.
Kerala has the lowest positive population growth rate in India, 3.44%; the highest Human Development Index (HDI), 0.784 in 2018 (0.712 in 2015); the highest literacy rate, 96.2% in the 2018 literacy survey conducted by the National Statistical Office, India;[11] the highest life expectancy, 77.3 years; and the highest sex ratio, 1,084 women per 1,000 men. Kerala is the least impoverished state in India according to NITI Aayog's Sustainable Development Goals dashboard and Reserve Bank of India's Handbook of Statistics on Indian Economy.[22][23] Kerala is the second-most urbanised major state in the country with 47.7% urban population according to the 2011 Census of India.[24] The state topped in the country to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals according to the annual report of NITI Aayog published in 2019.[25] The state has the highest media exposure in India with newspapers publishing in nine languages, mainly Malayalam and sometimes English. Hinduism is practised by more than half of the population, followed by Islam and Christianity.
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
Because people suck ass, and to successfully go from capitalism to socialism and then to communism, you need a whole population that puts the needs of the many above their own selfish desires. It's not impossible, but it's gonna be hard to truly accomplish.
Realistically anybody who can take control of a country is a bit of a ruthless cunt, and ones that take over in an armed uprising especially so.
It's not a massive shock that some of them don't want to give up the crown once they've got it.
Even in so called democracies, we basically get to choose our "king" from a heavily vetted list. It ain't going to be people like me and you rising to the top.
The main reason is the Monroe Doctrine. The United States literally made it its business to terrorize any "communist" state, even if it's democratically elected. That breeds the conditions for paranoia, the desire for increased protection, etc.
But, in the context of endgame scenarios against dictators, the main factor usually is how the military responds, especially when asked to brutalize the population. If the military parts ways, they may start a coup of their own or they may (rarely) defer to the population.
So, by extrapolation, I imagine it's also true here: other powerful factions allow it because it opens opportunities for them to garner more power too. Business execs, politicians, and military officials alike are duking it out for influence amongst themselves as well.
Mao? Stalin? No need to make everything about the US.
Even popular egalitarian movements face significant resistance to social and economic change. This will not only come from elites who stand to loose from social change, but also from common people who for one reason or another oppose that which benefits themselves. Beyond the social and economic connections to the elite, the social inertia to change is on the side of capital.
The solution, from Bolivar to Lenin to Castro has been to force the people to be free because you can't have socialist democracy if people would vote to return to capitalism or colonialism.
Leftists have long talked about "educating" the populace, but this is another tempting avenue for creeping totalitarianism. It's not like capital is innocent of coercion, but so long as it accommodates the ignorant, it has an overwhelming advantage over a system that requires an improved humanity.
I suppose we'll iron this out. Remember that the social anchors for capital are hundreds of years old and have their roots in feudalism and aristocracy. Socialism is young and her sins are close in our minds not because their failures are extraordinary but because they're recent.
Simple. Power corrupts. Even with a socialist government there is always gonna be power hungry people seeking authority over their constituents. Think of the majority as sheep, comfortable with being herded and the power hungerers as the wolves slavering to enslave them.
Because at its very base it’s conceived in violation of consent.
“From each according to his capacity” is the absolute essence of exploitation. Like, there’s no more straightforward way of saying “You look like resources and we’re gonna take everything you have”.
It’s only a “good idea” if you don’t think of people as having free will and the ability to consent. Communism is a great idea if you’re playing Command & Conquer and all your little units exist only to act as pawns in your game.
"From each according to his capacity” is the absolute essence of exploitation.
...This is bait, right? It has to be, right? It's such a profoundly ridiculous statement that it can't possibly be anything else.
is that not what taxes are? not being facetious, just genuinely trying to understand the difference
I don't think there is a more straightforward way of saying you believe some people deserve more than others.
The pawn analogy is a little misplaced.
Capitalism is effectively the bishops, rook, and knight exploiting profit from the pawns. The king and queen exploiting everyone in the pyramid beneath them.
Because nobody’s claiming all this stuff that’s now just freely lying around. Someone better claim it before it gets gone.
Bureaucratic systems world based on control of information and decision making. If there are insufficient mechanisms for maintaining checks on power accumulation, those systems can be abused by psychopaths and used to accumulate power. The same applies to capitalist structures.
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.
ITT
My bro your lucky you didn't ask this in lemmy.ml,hexbears and lemmygrad.
Why? Wouldn't it make more sense to ask in a community Marxists regularly participate in, to get multiple perspectives? By asking on Lemmy.world, the answers are going to skew Liberal heavily. The impact of that is that there are numerous takes that heavily misinterpret and misframe Marxism, particularly with refetence to the State, which I outlined in my top level comment here.
It just seems to me that if you want to understand something, you must investigate it from every direction to find a correct answer. This doesn't mean the answer is a mix of everything, or a balance of it all, but that by shutting out the instances with the highest concentrations of Marxists on Lemmy, you end up with constant errors from liberals trying to interpret history based on views of Marxism gathered from Wikipedia articles.
On Authority by Engels, question answered almost 200 years ago
Let's look at it this way - they were already going to be dictatorships, the dictator picked what he told the people they'd get. Most of the big ones all say Power To The People as they're pushing their way to the top, but as soon as they get there they make themselves permanent. Some of them took a pretty good stab at it like Mao or Stalin, but they killed their people in droves to make it happen. Once that happens you gotta stay in power or they're going to kill you. And of course, with themselves at the top of the heap, they took everything for themselves and The Party, and The Party became the end all and be all instead of actually advancing the country.
Thats like asking why North Korea became a dictatorship when it is a people's democracy.
Power gaps get filled, small states get conquered.
First, and above all else, there are assholes (US) who will prevent you from having nice things. Democracy is the easiest vector to let CIA/money get a corrupt asshole into power. Democracy tends to be a fiction anyway. Money/CIA/Media control is just part of the reason. Should you let corrupt assholes vote or run for power?
A country that has an army has dictatorial power, whether there is a theater of elections or not. An autocratic chain of command controls it, and if you don't behave, regardless of your constitution, you get smacked by the army.
In the US, there is communism for the corporatist oligarchy. Government they own will protect them from competition and bail them out when they fail. The CIA/media defines the communists as anyone who is not as pro business as the most pro business corporatist oligarch. US is a pure dictatorship in that Israel first corporatist oligarchy is guaranteed to win every seat/election, or 95%+ of the seats anyway. Every NATO country has a CIA allegiant party leader is also guaranteed to produce a CIA allegiant government. CIA vets all appointments to EU government to be pro US dictatorial NATO. IMF has 50%+ of votes all from US colonies.
Celebrating media simplifications of Democracy vs. non-US-compliant is the wrong metric to apply to nations. Industrial policy meant to promote equitable prosperity or defense from Imperialist forces determined to subjugate them are more important to a nation than what US media describes them as. "Everyone" loved Russia when they had Yeltsin as a puppet privatizing everything cheaply to US interests, just as they love Zelensky for the same. Ukraine, since US coup, is an apartheid ethnostate, which cannot qualify for any objective definition of democracy (we praise it for it anyway), and recently has suspended all elections.
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.
What tends to emerge from the ashes of war and empire.
Regimes tend to change with violent revolution, as it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power. Revolutions have leaders, and those leaders are the ones responsible for distributing the power to the masses. But it's rare for a person to willingly give up their own power.
Even in the rare instance where a person does give up their power, all you need is for one person to take advantage of the system. Communism rewards people for their labours, but someone will need to judge how much people should be rewarded. One corrupt judge slips in, and the system corrupts with them.