The natural results of evil theory
This short tribute for communism clip, which I originally saw here, reminded me a conversation I had a while ago with a friend that claimed the communism was never tried. Her logic was simple, and I heard it in other places. She argued that non of the regimes called communist was actually one, and therefore cannot be used to demonstrate the failure or success of the theory.
But can we really argue that the theory of communism cannot be judged by the constant failures of many attempts to implement it? Can we blame the human nature and keep the theory blameless? I doubt.
Can the Russian attempt of collectivization describe as anything but a massive effort to implement communism? and can’t we deny that the artificial famine in Ukraine at 1932-1933 is anything but the natural, horrifying, results of such implementation? Did Stalin, Mao and Castro betray the revolutionary ideas, or were they actually the final step in the logic derive from it?
One could have argued about how evil communism is before it was tried, since it was only theoretical. It is sad, however, to see that many people failed to see how evil communism is after all the horrors its implementation attempts created.
Tags: Communism Stalin Ukraine Famine Collectivization Stalin Mao Castro
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Rogel @ May 14, 2007
Well, if communism (as some claim) has never been tried, you might want to consider changing your use of the word “theory” in this debate. Perhaps, next time someone tries to convince you that communism (or any other notion) is a good theory, despite no empirical evidence you should simply point out that that if that is the case, communism (or any other notion under debate) is not a theory – but simply a “thought”. Theories, in the sense we have come to think of them following their usage in scientific lingo can not stand alone without empirics (let’s leave out mathematical examples at this stage. Surely, communism does not fit that particular discipline…).
Perhaps then you can discuss the logic of exchanging a fairly decent regime type (what we call democracy) for a simple “thought”. Sounds like quite a gamble to me…
This is one of the rare moment that we are in agreement, although I argued that communism was tried - more than once.
I’m going to cherish this moment
We are in agreement many more times than this. Do I seem so (!) pig headed?
The question of whether communism was, or was not, implemented in real life seems a little odd to me. Perhaps that is why I commented on a side issue. The reason for this feeling of oddness is this… The way I understand it, your argument wasn’t whether communism was tried or not, but whether the actual regimes presenting themselves as such were in fact loyal enough to the “pure” ideal called “communism”. Now, that’s kind of a strange discussion to me, because NO regime what-so-ever is really identical to any ideal. Are real life democracies identical (!) to the academic (or philosophic) notion of democracy? I think not. If you turn to political science (one academic discipline highly engaged in this question matter) you’ll find that most political scientists (at least the responsible ones) talk about a multi axes continuum, in which countries differ not only from one another, but also across time. In fact, either way you turn it about, you see that every democracy is in-fact a slightly different kind of regime – but they do have common denominators which allow us to relate to them all as democracies. But NONE are even close to the philosophical ideal.
So, back to the issue of communism… Your friend is correct that all of the regimes mentioned to exemplify communism are not “pure” examples of the ideal. No country was, or is. Yet, she must be incredibly naive to expect that any country can be… Real life examples just don’t act like that. Ideals are no more than a mental exercise in logic (and wishful thinking). Governments, on the other hand, have countries to run…
The argument was can you fault the theory by its implementation’s attempt. Her argument was that the attempts were not close enough, and did not represent the theory and therefore we can not learn from them about future implementation of communism.
Not surprisingly, I disagree. I argue that the utopian’s nature of the communism, the end of history in a sense, is bound to end up with the kind of totalitarian regime and the atrocities we saw during the 20th century.
My point is… No regime is close enough to its (so called*) theoretical origin. Why get locked up on communism?
Also came to my mind that the globally renowned political thinker from Johns Hopkins, Francis Fukuyama, has clamed that democracy (not any sort of totalitarian regime) will prevail as the ultimate (and thus final) master-type of political thought. His book, The End of History and the Last Man, is not without critique – but it is rare to hear someone in the (western, moderately sane, although overly politically-correct) academia today talk about totalitarianism as the world’s final destiny.
In some sense, Fukuyama’s thoughts are the obvious continuation of Karl Popper’s “The Open Society and its Enemies”, in which he (Popper) claimed (among other things) that the notion that Authoritarianism is historically unavoidable is the result of poor historical observation and a basic misunderstanding of scientific enquiry.
* As said, these origins should not be considered theoretical at all, as there is no sort of empirics that might confirm (or refute) them. In that sense, they are political thought – not theory.
They might not be theories, but they are not theoretical.Not only they have been tried and had a real, empirical effects. In a different exchange, by e-mail, another online friend argued that Zimbabwe’s regime is not socialist and justifying the appointment of Zimbabwe as the new chair of the UN commission on sustainable development - as their “right” mostly because of past colonialism.
One cannot ignore that longing for communist ideas is still effecting the world view of many people (see this post in Hebrew for example )- hence the post. (And I really liked the clip… :))
I have no idea why you’re trying to convince the convinced. All I said was that I see no reason to look for the purism of abstract ideas in real life states. They obviously differ, to some extent (but always and consistently) from the noble thoughts they are architected from.