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Criticisms of Communism can be divided in two broad categories: Those concerning themselves with the practical aspects of 20th century Communist states, and those concerning themselves with communist theory.

Real-world failures

Criticism of science, arts, and environmental protection in the Communist states

The Communist states censored the arts, usually only allowing Socialist realism. Some Communist states have been involved in the destruction of cultural heritage: Romania (planned destruction of historical centers of most towns — partially achieved in Bucharest), China (repression of Tibetan culture, destructions during the Cultural Revolution) and the Soviet Union (destruction, abandon or reconversion of religious buildings) are the most cited examples

The Communist states also censored science. One example is censorship and revisionism of history. Research was suppressed in biology and genetics (Lysenkoism), linguistics (Japhetic theory), cybernetics, psychology and psychiatry, and even organic chemistry. In some Communist states it was common practice to classify internal critics of the system as having a mental disease, like sluggishly progressing schizophrenia - which was only recognized in Communist states - and incarcerating them in mental hospitals. See also Suppressed research in the Soviet Union.

Also pointed out is environmental disasters. The most cited example is the disappearance of the Aral Sea in today's Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, which is believed to have been caused by the diversion of the waters of its two affluent rivers for cotton production.

Human rights violations

(See references below)

Many of the Communist states used an extensive network of civilian informants to spy on their own population. This created a society where no one could trust other citizens, who might report real or fabricated criticism of the Communist system to the secret police.

Many of the leaders of Communist states cultivated an extensive personality cult. In some cases the leadership of the state has become inherited. Critics have also argued that a new powerful class of party bureaucrats emerged which exploited the rest of the population. This new ruling class is usually called the nomenklatura.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Prague spring, and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution can be seen as imperialistic wars where military force crushed popular uprisings against the Communist system. There were also many internal uprisings suppressed by military force, like the Kronstadt rebellion and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

The Communist states had strict restrictions on emigration, the most prominent example being the Berlin Wall.

Extensive historical research has documented large scale human rights violations that occurred in these states, particularly during the regimes of Stalin and Mao, but shown to have started immediately after the Russian revolution during the regime of Lenin and to have continued to occur in all communist states during their existence. Most prominent being deaths due to executions, forced labor camps, genocides of certain ethnic minorities, and mass starvations caused by either government mismanagement or deliberately. The exact number of deaths caused by these regimes is somewhat disputed, but extensive historical research shows at least tens of millions (see, e.g., the estimates reached in The Black Book of Communism and the references below). Other widespread criticism concern the documented lack of freedom of speech in Communist Party regimes, religious and ethnic persecutions, lack of democracy and systematic use of torture.

Some supporters of communism find this approach simplistic, noting that executions, forced labor camps, the repression of ethnic minorities, and mass starvation were patterns in both Russian and Chinese history before their respective Communist takeovers. However, past evils in an old regime can hardly be used to justify new ones; otherwise supporters of Hitler could justify his deeds by pointing to past human rights crimes by the German Empire in Africa.

See also: The Black Book of Communism

Economic and social development

Advocates of communism praise Communist parties for running countries that have sometimes leapt ahead of contemporary "capitalist" countries, offering guaranteed employment, health care and housing to their citizens. Critics of communism typically condemn Communist states by the same criteria, claiming that all lag far behind the industrialized West in terms of economic development and living standards.

Supporters of the Communist states note the social and cultural programs, sometimes administered by labor organizations. Universal education programs have been a strong point, as has the generous provision of universal health care. They point out to the high levels of literacy enjoyed by Eastern Europeans (in comparison, for instance, with Southern Europe), Cubans or Chinese. However, Communist compulsory education was replete with pro-Communist propaganda and censored opposing views. The Communist states do not compare favorable when comparing states with similar culture and economic development before the Communist takeover. Examples include North Korea vs. South Korea; China vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan; and East Germany vs. West Germany.

After 1965, life expectancy began to decline in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while it continued to increases in Western Europe. This decline accelerated after the change to market economy in the states of the former Soviet Union but has now started to increase in the Baltic states. In Eastern Europe, life expectancy has increased significantly after the fall of Communism. The continued poor situation in Russia and Ukraine has been strongly linked to alcoholism.

Central economic planning has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including rapid development of heavy industry during the 1930s in the Soviet Union and later in their Soviet space program. Another example touted by Communists is the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba. Early advances in the status of women were also notable, especially in Islamic areas of the Soviet Union.. However, these examples are anecdotical and there are counter-examples: the failure of the Soviet Union to achieve the same kind of development in agriculture (forcing the Soviet Union to become a net importer of cereals after the Second World War), as well as the continued poverty of other Communist states such as Laos, Vietnam or Maoist China. China only achieved high rates of growth after introducing Capitalist economic reforms. Another example is Czechoslovakia, which was among world's most developed industrial countries prior to World War II, but fell far behind the Western nations under the Communist rule.

Cuba is often cited as a successful example of by communists. However, Cuba was one of most developed nations in Latin America before Castro. Other Latin American nations have seen greater increases in literacy than Cuba. Calories per person has declined in Cuba while it has increased in most other Latin American nations. Cubans eat less cereals and meat than before Castro .

Were the Communist states communist?

Some supporters of communism argue that a "Communist state" is an impossibility according to communist theory. They claim that communism itself is stateless in theory and thus cannot be related to the actions of 20th century states. However, Marx’s dream of a socialist revolution involved a transitory phase known as the dictatorship of the proletariat. Later, Marx reasoned, the state would "whither away". The Communist states claimed to be in this transitory phase and to be "working towards communism". It can thus be argued that the Communist states followed Marx's theory and that it failed to work in the real world.

Trotskyites argue that the bureaucratic and repressive nature of Communist states differs from Lenin's vision of the socialist state. However, the large scale humans rights violations started immediately after the Communist takeover during the regime of Lenin.

Many Marxists and some Marxist-Leninists argue that most Communist states do not actually adhere to Marxism-Leninism but rather to a perversion heavily influenced by Stalinism. But many of the Communist states were often critical of Stalin and tried many variants of communism beside Stalinism, with little success. Those variants that were more successful resembled capitalism, like Lenin's New Economic Policy.

Some communist supporters argue that the Communist states were not communist since they were not democratic. However, Marx never insisted on this and he rejected the concept of liberal democracy. That all the Communist states became and remained totalitarian as long as the Communists remained in power can be seen as an argument against communism.

Thus, as a defense of communism, it is claimed that so-called "Communist states" are unrelated (or only distantly related) to an ideal communist society. Therefore, it is argued, the failings of these states should not be taken as failings of communism per se. Critics of communism find fault with this reasoning, noting that this argument cannot be falsified and is therefore not scientific. Were it valid, they argue, it could similarly be applied to capitalism, fascism or other ideologies.

Marx's predictions

Marx made numerous predictions. He thought that the workers would become poorer and poorer as the capitalists exploited them more and more; that differences between the members within each class would become smaller and smaller and the classes would thus become more homogeneous; that the skilled workers would be replaced by unskilled workers doing assembly line work; that relations between the working class and the capitalists would get worse and worse; and that the capitalists would become fewer and fewer due to an increasing number of monopolies.

Some of these are debatable, while others have been clearly proven wrong. This is often cited by critics as evidence that historical materialism is a flawed theory. Communists reply with two arguments: The first is that there were a number of major events and trends over the past century and a half which Marx could not have predicted: imperialism, World War I, the rise of social democracy and Keynesian economics in the West (that introduced the concept of redistribution of wealth, thereby narrowing the gap between rich and poor), World War II and finally the Cold War. In response, critics maintain that if so many unpredictable events have happened in the past, then an equal number could happen in the future, and therefore Marxist theory is not a reliable method of making predictions.

Lenin noted that the predicted increasing class polarization and Communist revolution had failed to occur in the developed world. He then attempted to explain this by stating that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that developed countries had created a labor aristocracy content with capitalism by exploiting the developing world.

After the Western nations voluntarily gave up their colonies, supporters of communism had to invent still another stage, sometimes called neoimperialism, arguing that the Third World is exploited even without formal empires. For criticism of this, see Anti-globalization#Criticisms.

Theoretical criticisms

See Criticisms of socialism for a general critique of socialism. There are also some specific criticisms of Marxist theory and and use in academia.

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is normally considered the intellectual basis of Marxism. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological, and more broadly, material factors, as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes and nations.

However, it ignores other causes of historical and social change, like biology, genetics, philosophy, art, religion, or other causes that are not "materialist" according to Marxists.

Labor theory of value

Fundamental to Marxist theory is the labor theory of value. It claims that the value (or, to be more exact, use-value) of an item is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. In other words, the greater the amount of work necessary to produce an object, the greater the value of that object. This implies that value is objective, and that it may not be reflected by the price of the object in question (since price is determined by supply and demand, and is not linked to the amount of necessary work that must be expended to produce the object). The labor theory of value was first put forward by Adam Smith, and later adopted by Karl Marx.

By contrast, most capitalist economists now use the subjective theory of value, which states that the value of an object is always identical to its price on the market (and is therefore subjective).

Pseudoscience

Karl Popper and others have argued that Marxism and Historical materialism are a pseudosciences because they are not falsifiable. Marxists respond that social sciences in general are largely not falsifiable, since it is often difficult or outright impossible to test them via experiments (in the way hard science can be tested). One response is that many social sciences like psychology, economics, and political science are increasingly being tested, for example by statistical methods.

Useful idiots

The phrase useful idiot is claimed to have been coined by Vladimir Lenin to describe western reporters and travelers who would endorse the Soviet Union and its policies in the West. However, Lenin never wrote it in any published document.

Lenin did state the following:

"The so-called cultural element of Western Europe and America are incapable of comprehending the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes and treated accordingly....

"A revolution never develops along a direct line, by continuous expansion, but from a chain of outbursts and withdrawals, attacks and lulls, during which the revolutionary forces gain strength in preparation for their final victory....

"We must:

"(a) In order to placate the deaf-mutes, proclaim the fictional separation of our government ... from the Comintern, declaring this agency to be an independent political group. The deaf- mutes will believe it.

"(b) Express a desire for the immediate resumption of diplomatic relations with capitalist countries on the basis of complete non-interference in their internal affairs. Again, the deaf- mutes will believe it. They will even be delighted and fling wide-open their doors through which the emissaries of the Comintern and Party Intelligence agencies will quickly infiltrate into these countries disguised as our diplomatic, cultural, and trade representatives.

"Capitalists the world over and their governments will, in their desire to win Soviet market, shut their eyes to the above- mentioned activities and thus be turned into blind deaf-mutes. They will furnish credits, which will serve as a means of supporting the Communist parties in their countries, and, by supplying us, will rebuild our war industry, which is essential for our future attacks on our suppliers. In other words, they will be laboring to prepare their own suicide."(Stalin : The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives, 1997, Edvard Radzinsky)(The Lufkin News, King Featurers Syndicate, Inc., 31 July 1962, p. 4, as quoted by the Freeman Report, 30 Sept. 1973, p. 8). &s=books&n=507846.

In political jargon, the term "useful idiot" is also used to describe communists in western countries (particularly in the United States). The implication of this is that the communist in question was naive, and that he or she was being cynically used by the Communist states.

According to John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, writing in their book In Denial: Historians, Communism & Espionage, many academic studies in the field of Soviet and Communist studies, especially in the area of History of the Soviet Union have generally taken a benign view of the Party while minimizing Soviet atrocities and the totalitarian nature of the movement. Haynes and Klehr attribute the biased stance of these historians, many of whom entered academia during the Vietnam War era, to anti-American and anti-capitalist sentiments. Haynes and Klehr characterize them as historical revisionists. There have also been similar criticisms of other fields in academia .

See also

• Criticisms of socialism
• The Black Book of Communism
• Democide

References and further reading

References on human rights violations by Communist states

• Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History, Broadway Books, 2003, hardcover, 720 pages, ISBN 0767900561
• Becker, Jasper (1998) Hungry Ghosts : Mao's Secret Famine. Owl Books. ISBN 0805056688.
• Conquest, Robert (1991) The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press ISBN 0195071328.
• Conquest, Robert (1987) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195051807.
• Courtois,Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674076087.
• Hamilton-Merritt, Jane (1999) Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253207568.
• Jackson, Karl D. (1992) Cambodia, 1975–1978 Princeton University Press ISBN 069102541X.
• Kakar, M. Hassan (1997)Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 University of California Press. ISBN 0520208935.
• Khlevniuk, Oleg & Kozlov, Vladimir (2004) The History of the Gulag : From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) Yale University Pres. ISBN 0300092849.
• Natsios, Andrew S. (2002) The Great North Korean Famine. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 1929223331.
• Nghia M. Vo (2004) The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam McFarland & Company ISBN 0786417145.
• Pipes, Richard (1995) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. ISBN 0679761845.
• Rummel, R.J. (1997). Death by Government. Transaction Publishers. ISBN 1560009276.
• Rummel, R.J. (1996). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers ISBN 1560008873.
• Rummel, R.J. & Rummel, Rudolph J. (1999). Statistics of Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900. Lit Verlag ISBN 3825840107.
• Todorov, Tzvetan & Zaretsky, Robert (1999). Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271019611
• Yakovlev, Alexander (2004). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300103220.

External links

• Google Directory
• Capitalism and Human Nature A Cato institute article, from a Capitalist point of view.
• The Epoch Times | Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party Chinese and general communism analysis
• Museum of Communism
• The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation
• Communism

Online estimates of how many the Communist states killed

• Matthew White summary of different estimates
• How many did the Communist regimes murder?
  • Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917

Biographies

• Lenin: A New Biography
• Lenin: A Biography
• Stalin : The First In-depth Biography Based on Explosive New Documents from Russia's Secret Archives

• Communism
• Marxism
• Soviet Union