Human beings can be remarkably stupid. The practice of blood-letting as a medical treatment persisted despite centuries of clear evidence that it did more harm than good. The practice of communism, whose centenary in the Bolshevik revolution was reached this year, also needs no tests. Marxism belongs in the dustbin of history after 100 years of abject failure. Communism wherever it has been introduced has done more harm than good. Nationalised, planned one-party rule has benefitted nobody, let alone the poor.
The diseases that Marxism-Leninism was intended to treat – poverty and inequality – were ancient scourges just beginning to fade, even in Russia in 1917. Higher living standards were starting to reach ordinary people, rather than just the feudal elite, for the first time. Radicals had long seen government as the problem, not the solution. They had realised that to enrich the masses required liberating people from kings and priests.
Karl Marx’s arrival ushered in the opposite view. A powerful state, he asserted, creating wealth, distributed from each according to his ability to each according to his need, would result in social classes disappearing and with them, eventually, the state itself.
The progressive Left suddenly fell in love with the idea of expanding, rather than limiting, state power. Unfortunately, the wealth never materialised and the state, far from withering away, became tyrannical.
Russia’s Bolsheviks, seizing power in a coup after the fall of the Tsar, set a pattern that would be repeated again and again during the following 100 years. A communist party takes power on behalf of the people, outlaws all other parties, holds no elections and after a bloody power struggle is soon dominated by one man.
Famine results from the destruction of incentives inherent in the collectivisation of agriculture. Millions die. The nationalisation of all commerce and the cessation of most foreign trade result in shortages of consumer goods (as some may remember in Malta in the 1980s).
The leader becomes paranoid and kills a lot of people, especially independent-minded ones, in purges. More are imprisoned without trial or charge. A secret police grows powerful. The regime destroys free speech, but is excused and praised by Left-leaning sympathisers in Western democracies. Living standards stagnate or fall, except for those of the elite, who live in a privileged existence. Many people try to flee or emigrate.
Communism was not unique in ruling through violence. Fascism – for which there were many admirers in Malta in the 1930s – founded by an ardent socialist, Benito Mussolini, and German National Socialism (the Nazi Party), pursuing racial rather than class-based collectivism, were at least as bad, though they ended up killing fewer – not for lack of trying. From this distance in time they are all manifestations of the same phenomenon. Centrally planned dictatorship justified as popular rule. Communism today is every bit as evil as fascism.
In 1949, China repeated the Russian experiment with the same result. Mao Zedong managed to kill even more people, probably 45 million in the four years of the Great Leap Forward, through forced collectivisation and selling food to Russia in exchange for nuclear technology.
Like blood-letting, doctors elevated a principle into a dogma with no regard to human suffering in spite of the overwhelming evidence presented to them
When that did not work and he began to lose his grip on power, he embarked on a purge of the entire country called the Cultural Revolution, plunging his people into appalling poverty while he himself lived like an emperor. In 1959, Cuba tried Marxism-Leninism with a similar outcome. Five thousand people executed, an unknown number imprisoned for dissent and tens of thousands dead after trying to escape on makeshift rafts. Cuba’s wealth, as measured by GDP per capita, was about the same as South Korea’s in 1959. Today, South Korea’s is five times higher.
In 1962, Burma (today’s Myanmar) followed suit when Ne Win seized power and set out to create a “socialist state”. He impoverished the country while his neighbours prospered. In Africa, the Republic of Congo and Zimbabwe also tried communism. The recently deposed Robert Mugabe destroyed Zimbabwe’s economy.
East Germany had to build a wall to stop people escaping. Vietnam, like Cuba, sent thousands to sea in leaky boats. Cambodia deserves special mention for the thoroughness with which it stuck to Marx’s plan of “sweeping aside” the “bourgeoisie”. As head of the Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot enslaved the entire population on collective farms, his thugs clubbing or starving any who showed less than total obedience, so that from 1975 to 1979 about 1.7 million people were killed.
North Korea managed to turn communism into a feudal dynasty of unparalleled paranoia, which not only executes supposed dissidents in the most gruesome ways (machine-gunned by firing squads or blown up by anti-aircraft guns), but managed to starve millions of its citizens during the 1990s at a time when the rest of the world was feeding itself ever more abundantly.
Oil-rich Venezuela has ruined itself through socialism, creating shortages of toilet paper and soap. It has been said that if they tried communism in the Sahara, there would soon be a shortage of sand.
Those communist countries that discovered economic growth, notably Vietnam and China after Mao, have done so by abandoning nationalisation of the means of production, the very core of the Marxist prescription. They were the exceptions that proved the rule.
It is estimated that communism has killed on average a million people a year for a century, far more than any other ‘ism’, let alone what Marxists call “capitalism” and the rest of us call liberty and freedom.
The first communists meant well. Their crime was to focus on an untried idea and then, when it failed, to be pig-headedly stubborn and insensitive to the negative evidence and empirical data coming back from the experiment.
Like blood-letting, doctors elevated a principle into a dogma with no regard to human suffering in spite of the overwhelming evidence presented to them. When this “sad, bizarre chapter in human history” (as President Reagan called it) drew to a close after 1989, Marx’s vision of revolutionary struggle culminating in a classless socialist society was as bankrupt as the broken-down states that had usurped the name of communism in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.