Communism & Totalitarianism

©2003 by Dale Franks

Communist governments the world over have, without exception, been totalitarian states. The worldwide death toll of communist states in the 20th century is estimated to be close to 200 million people. In the USSR, 20 million people were intentionally starved in the 1920s and 1930's as the Soviet government forcibly imposed the collectivization of agriculture on the populace. Mao's Great Leap Forward similarly caused the death of approximately 50 million people, and millions more were killed during the Cultural Revolution. Untold millions perished in the wastes of the Siberian gulag, or the "re-education" camps of Asia.

Why is it that Communism, with its calls for universal brotherhood and equality, has invariably ended up creating the most repressive, brutal regimes in modern history?

Some would answer that true Communism has never been implemented, and that the so-called "communist" states were perversions of the communist idea, not representative examples of it. But if Communism is so prone to such abuse, that seems to indicate a fundamental weakness of communism as a scientific system, in that it contains too few safeguards for the rights of the people to prevent it from assuming a totalitarian character. Moreover, such an excuse fails to explain why, in direct contrast to communism, states with free-market economies have tended towards ever-greater political freedom and liberalization along with hugely higher standards of living or the populace as a whole.

It is, in fact, the very nature of the communist system itself that leads directly to totalitarianism, and the free-market system that leads to liberalization.

The system of free markets, or Capitalism, is based on the premise that mutually agreed transactions between a willing buyer and willing seller are the only reasonable basis for economic organization. It presupposes a rule of law that prohibits forced or involuntary transactions, and that recognizes that the owner of a thing has the right to dispose of it without hindrance from others. Capitalism therefore operates under three premises:

1) Voluntary exchange of goods and services,
2) The right to property,
3) The rule of law.

Capitalism is not a managed system. It is, rather, a framework under which a self-governing system operates. There is no Central Committee of Capitalists that determines what goods should be produced, or who should receive X amount of income. Instead, the end result of the free market is determined by millions of people, each of whom make voluntary exchanges of goods and services. The only way to profit in the free market is to provide a good or service others are willing to buy.

The key mechanism in the free market is the price mechanism. Prices perform extremely important functions for the market economy:

1) They deliver information about the underlying realties of the current state of supply and demand.
2) They direct scarce resources into their most valued uses.
3) They provide incentives for producers.
4) They ration scarce resources.

Because the price mechanism performs all of these functions, it is possible to make rational economic calculations. If we see that the public has a demand for some good or service that is not being fulfilled, we can go into business to provide the good or service. We can calculate how many people we need to hire, how much an office space would cost, and how many units we have to sell to make a profit.

The price system only works, however, because of the ownership of private property. Every exchange of goods and services is an exchange of property. Because we use money as a proxy for property, we do not, say, have to pay a baker with a bushel of grain in order to obtain a loaf of bread. But the money itself is not a thing of value in and of itself. It is merely a medium of exchange that substitutes for bartering real property to obtain the things we need. If I own a quantity of land, and wish to sell it, it is not because I wish to obtain green bits of paper, but rather because I wish to obtain some other type of property, perhaps a jazzy new sports car.

Under Communism, however, there is no private property. This has enormous political and economic consequences, which create a "feedback loop", with each reinforcing the other.

As a political matter, "the people" own all property. Herein lies the first step towards totalitarianism. In anything other than the very smallest community, how can "the people" exercise the rights of ownership to anything? One cannot, after all, hold an election every time one wishes to find out whether half of the 280 million people in the country agree that 2 acres of land should be set aside for a tractor factory in Topeka, Kansas. As a practical matter, therefore, the ownership of all property is exercised by the State, rather than by the people.

This provides the state with control over nearly every aspect of the citizen's life. The state can dispossess you from your home, since it is, after all, not your home to begin with, but merely the place the State allows you to live. The state can dismiss you from your job and, since the state must control all enterprises, can affectively prevent you from obtaining any employment at all. Indeed, if your job is no longer needed, the state can force you to do any job it requires, whether you wish to do so or not. The state can determine where—or if—you can go to school.

The central political problem in such a system then becomes how one restrains the state from usurping all of the people's political rights. Obviously, some democratic system must be used for selecting the government if one wishes to make the government responsive to the people and subject to civil audit. But if there are no rights to private property, then there is a huge swathe of political ideas that automatically have to be removed from the judgment of the people. The people cannot be allowed to vote on whether they wish to have private property, for instance. Candidates that counsel a return to Capitalism cannot be allowed to run for office. In practice, this means that at the very least, political freedom and democratic practice must be rigidly proscribed to a small range of acceptable political thought. At the very start, a freely democratic government is impossible in the Communist state.

The only possible way that such a system can work is to ensure that elected officials are people of such outstanding moral capacity that they would never think of using the vast control wielded by the state for personal gain. Such politicians are not especially easy to find even in openly democratic societies where the government exercises far less control over property rights. Moreover, it is not possible to elect the vast majority of people who work directly for the State. A system of bureaucracy is required to carry out the day-to-day operations of the government. Even in the US, bureaucrats are regularly decried as the perpetrators of all sorts of outrages. Remember the controversy over the high-handed actions of the IRS a few years ago? Are we to assume that the bureaucratic system in a state with such enormous power over everyday life, and where political dialogue is severely circumscribed, would be less oppressive?

Imagine a society where the State awards all jobs, and you are applying for a manager's position at the Glorious October Revolution Ball Bearing Factory #37. Your competition for the job is the wastrel son of a junior undersecretary at the Ministry for Ball Bearing Production. Will the factory manager choose you, the more qualified candidate, or will he choose the son of the person who determines whether or not he keeps his job as factory manager?

The key political weakness of Communism is that it devolves vast powers upon the state, then limits the democratic audit that the people can exercise, which leaves the people to depend upon the state itself to curb its own power.

The first economic problem that follows from the abolition of private property is the lack of a realistic price system that can be relied upon to make rational economic calculation. If the ownership of private property is not allowed, then the range of voluntary economic transactions the citizen can make are severely circumscribed. One can purchase food, clothes, and other consumables, but no real property.

Prices in a Communist system cannot be set through the operation of supply and demand, because the state is the sole owner of all property, which leaves the State with a quandary about how to set prices. To understand the State's difficulty, let's say that you own three parcels of land. How do you sell parcel A to yourself? If you do manage to sell parcel A to yourself, what price do you charge for it in the absence of any real estate market? No matter what price you choose, it is an arbitrary price, as well as an artificial one.

The State's problem with this is multiplied manifold. Prices in a free market economy work two ways in delivering information to buyers and sellers. First, they aggregate information in the economy by reflecting the level of demand. Second, they funnel goods and services to their most high-valued uses. This is important because, quite often, consumers demand different goods that use many of the same components, and because prices reflect demand, producers can see at any given time what products the people most desire to buy, increasing production of that item, while reducing production for others.

Under the Communist system, however, prices are fixed by the state, rather than moving freely back and forth to reflect the changing nature of supply and demand. This means that the use of goods or services cannot flow to their higher valued use, because the price system does not reflect reality. As a result, it is impossible to determine whether or not people need hammers or steel desks at any given time.

This means that rational economic calculation is impossible under communism. There is no way to determine at any particular point in time what goods should be produced, and where they should be delivered. The Soviet answer to this quandary was the "Five-Year plans" in which all economic production was centrally planned every five years. But such plans don't actually reflect current economic reality. At best, they approximate past conditions, since the planning for each Five Year Plan was based on the data gathered during the previous one.

As a result, products are delivered to the public with no real relationship to what the public wants or needs. Hence, the USSR's record of delivering things like 5 reams of writing paper for every person per year, and 1 roll of toilet paper.

The second economic effect is the effect Communism has on labor. Ask yourself this question: Why do you work? In general people work in order to acquire property. Most people, if given a choice, would prefer not to work, or at any rate to work far less, or in a much less structured environment. People work, in short, in order to consume. It is not enough merely to have enough food on which to subsist, and enough shelter to escape intemperate weather. Humans have goals, a primary one of which is the acquisition of property. We enjoy having nice things. We save up money to buy houses, or boats or cars. We work to provide things for ourselves and our families that we might not otherwise have. We work only because we derive benefits from doing so. Without those benefits, why would we work any more than was strictly necessary to eat and obtain shelter?

Under Communism, however, you are forbidden to own real property. You cannot start your own business. You cannot buy a house. You can't even redecorate your home, because it isn't yours. It belongs to "the people". In addition, wages are controlled under Communism, since equality of condition is Communism's primary goal. How much work would you be interested in doing under such a system? Probably, the minimum necessary. And what kind of work would you do? If security guards and brain surgeons both get paid $500 a month, which job would you prefer? The one you can start now with no training, and no great responsibility, or the one that takes 8 years of college?

Under communism, workers don't receive commensurate rewards for working longer, harder, or more productively. That has devastating effects on worker productivity. Since tall wealth creation is based on productivity, that means societies ability to create wealth is hindered as well, which translates into poorer living standards for the population as a whole.

As the old Soviet joke goes, "They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work."

In the end, these economic problems feedback into the political system.

The results of an irrational system of production means that at any given time, people suffer a shortage of a range of desired goods, and glut of undesired goods. Their work allows little room for self-improvement or advancement. In a democratic system, this naturally translates into a political demand for change.

In a Communist system, with a narrow limit on acceptable political thought, and hence few institutional limits on government power, any political call for change is necessarily limited to "reform" of the communist system. But in a system where rational economic planning is impossible, so is reform. The only realistic reform is the abandonment of communism, either partially or in substantial measure, of the communist system itself.

If the system cannot be reformed to any useful degree, and the abandonment of the communist ideal—and the concomitant loss of its authority—is unacceptable to the State, then as the demand for change on the part of the public increases, then the only response remaining to the State is the repression of dissent.

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