Communism Future

Communism Future

Communism: The Future of Communism:

In the classic writings of Marx and Engels, capitalism was a dark presence and communism a thinly sketched picture of a radiant future. The intellectual forefathers of the communist regimes of the 20th century purported to study and criticize capitalism by means of rigorous science; communism they approached through a form of prophecy. There is no denying the appeal that both sides of their vision were to exert over the years. The revolutions made in its name were watersheds of modern history. But there is no denying, either, the illusory nature of many of the propositions they put into circulation. Time has not been kind to Marxism-Leninism or the communist ideal.

The ideology’s fatal oversights partly have to do with capitalism, the economic order communists despise and seek to obliterate. Experience has shown privately owned, market-coordinated economies to be incomparably more robust and dynamic than Marx and his contemporaries dreamt possible. Over much of the globe, free enterprise has achieved steady rates of increase in productivity, output, and the standard of living. The perturbations of the business cycle, which at their most destructive gave rise to the Great Depression of the 1930s, have in recent decades eased. International flows of goods, capital, and information have burgeoned. In the most technologically sophisticated countries, service industries have displaced manufacturing as the hub of the market economy, meaning that unskilled manual workers, the proletariat in its original guise, are less and less of a factor. Through mass access to credit, stock exchanges, and mutual funds, ownership of economic assets has become more widely dispersed. Perhaps most important, political realities-democracy, the welfare state, policies for prudent monetary management-have shielded capitalism from its own worst excesses.

Where communist parties did make it to power, it was, in Marxist terms, in the wrong places-that is, in relatively poor countries where industrial capitalism was just beginning to develop. The dismal performance of the regimes they created constitutes another unfortunate consequence of Marxist-Leninist thought. These regimes, couched in the original theory as short-term improvisations that would tide people over until the promised era of plenty and classless harmony, in practice turned out to be long-term tyrannies that transformed society from above, sheltered themselves from public accountability, and did everything they could to perpetuate their hold on power. Until the 1970s, analysts of communist states, and apologists for them, could point to some evidence of economic accomplishment, albeit at grave political and social cost. From then on, however, economic ills beset all the communist governments, necessitating hard choices about reform.

As change accelerated in the 1980s, political forces long held in check by communist rulers-in particular, nationalism-came to the fore. In stunning sequence, the reforms attempted by the prototypical communist regime, that of the Soviet Union, led to the system’s collapse and to the emergence of the Russian Federation and 14 other postcommunist states. Soviet events undermined communist systems in Eastern Europe and, in most parts of the world, accentuated the loss of credibility of the nonruling communist parties and put an end to the instruction, aid, and encouragement they had long received from Moscow. In China and several other countries, communist leaders introduced economic reforms so serious that they altered the party’s self-image almost beyond recognition. Only in a few idiosyncratic locations-Cuba and North Korea, strikingly-did orthodox communists manage to stifle the pressures for root-and-branch change. In the first of these countries, the charismatic leader of the communist revolution, Fidel Castro, was still in power; in the second, the man at the helm, Kim Jong Il, was the son of the founder of the North Korean regime.

Communism as a coherent, centrally directed international movement is dead. There is no realistic chance that it will be resurrected. There has not been, and presumably there never will be, a proletarian revolution in any of the leading capitalist societies. Communist factions in virtually all of these places have either been reduced to esoteric left-wing sects or have reinvented themselves as reformist socialists content to live by the democratic rules of the game. Anti-government rebels in scattered Asian, African, and Latin American nations brandish some Marxist-Leninist slogans, but they indulge in this rhetoric indiscriminately and are bound to no common movement.

The prospects for communism are more complex in countries where communists have at one time or another governed. Local circumstances may permit diehards to prop up unreformed communist regimes. In Cuba and North Korea, the two places where this has happened so far, the equation could change instantly with a shift in circumstances, such as the death of Castro or an economic catastrophe in North Korea. In Eastern Europe, the formerly ruling communist parties have, by and large, transmuted into democracy-abiding postcommunist parties. Nothing will shake them from this mold short of a disavowal of the westernizing path taken by the countries of the region in 1989. In the biggest of the successor states to the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation, the communist party seems doomed to permanent minority status. Elsewhere in the former USSR, the mix of influential and marginal communist parties is likely to continue for some time.

The future of communism is hardest to predict in China, Vietnam, and Laos, where communist bosses have held out against political reform but welcomed economic reform. Of the three, China faces the most serious choices. Appalled by the chaotic crumbling of the Soviet system, China’s leaders are determined not to repeat what they view as Mikhail Gorbachev’s mistakes. Plunging full speed ahead with economic modernization and liberalization, they have at the same time carried on with venerating Mao Zedong, barring opposition parties, and censoring the mass media. This dual strategy should be sustainable for some time, and it will draw sustenance, as the Chinese communists did before 1949, from Chinese patriotism. Ironically, the best hope for the survival of communism in some form well into the 21st century lies with the leaders of a relatively backward country whose priorities are to foster, not the emancipation of the international working class, but capitalism and the dignity of the nation. (1)

In this Section about Features of Comunist States: Comunist States, Marxist-Leninist States, Centrally Planned Economy, Single-Party and Freedom Restriction.

Resources

Notes and References

  1. Encarta Online Encyclopedia

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