Similarities&differences - Communism&ideology

Differences and Similarities between Communist Ideology and Communism on the Ground.

Ryan Wulpi Y340 Professor Toole February 11, 2005

One major difference between communist ideology and communism on the ground is that the state never withers away, as it says that the state should eventually do. It starts as a transitional period, a period that is necessary to ensure that all policies are implemented in favor of the revolution. However, to employ this ideology on a people, centralization becomes the key, the centralization of power and property, all to the state. The state in turn controls everything - economic, social, and political. This remains a backbone of communism, consolidation of power to one person, where every decision comes from the top. After a certain amount of time, when the state can run itself, the constraints are let go, thereby creating a utopian society. The problem in Eastern and Central Europe is that this “withering” away never comes to pass. The brutality and oppression in these countries after WWII and the implementation of communism was horrific. What kind of utopian society can come from this kind of tyranny? The people at the beginning were probably grateful. Grateful to be liberated from fascism, grateful to be out from under the boot of Hitler, but little did they know that they soon would be faced with the incredible tyranny of Joseph Stalin. The people slowly figured out that they were not much better under communism as they were under fascism. As Milosz puts it, “he finds he acquires new habits quickly. Once, had he stumbled upon a corpse on the street, he would have called the police. A crowd would have gathered, and much talk and comment would have ensued. Now he knows he must avoid the dark body lying in the gutter, and refrain from asking unnecessary questions. The man who fired the gun must have had his reasons; he might well have been executing an Underground sentence (Milosz p. 27).” He goes on to talk about how the man from the East starts to lose all recollection of what it was like before the “Party” rule, where dealing with someone who

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displeases the administration becomes as easy as snatching a man off the street and sending him off to a labor camp (Milosz p. 32). From the late 1940’s until the early 1990’s, people lived with these appalling conditions, although some leaders throughout this era did relax some of the restrictions of communism so long as the Soviet Union did not disapprove. The Soviet Union created a modern day empire within Eastern and Central Europe. The rest of the world even had a name for this region – the Soviet bloc. As I stated earlier, the people of this region were happy that communism liberated them from fascism, but apart from Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union installed puppets to rule these newly communist states, veterans of the ‘party’ so to speak. This stemmed as much from security concerns as it did from the need to spread communism further West, “to account for the methods that Stalin and his heirs selected to operationalize Soviet hegemony over the area requires the introduction of ideological, systemic, contingent, and even idiosyncratic explanatory variables, in addition to postulating “objective” security concerns (Rothschild and Wingfield p. 75).” The logic from this remains quite obvious, Stalin could not afford to lose this area to Germany or any other potential enemy and simply denying this area to them would not be sufficient, as he viewed the area too weak to resist any future pressure from such an inimical power (Rothschild and Wingfield p. 77)” What does all of this mean? That Stalin had to, for the survival of the Soviet communist system, make sure that all the “satellite” states would be subordinate to the Soviet Union. He postulated that “the institutional form of these structural transformations would be people’s democracy, a social form transitional between bourgeois democracy (the West) and mature Socialism (the Soviet Union); (Rothschild

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and Wingfield p. 77).” All of this goes along with the state supposedly withering away, but instead of that we find the Soviets building an empire. These people’s democracies were used primarily to supply the capital necessary to rebuild the Soviets war-torn economy. This implementation in East Central Europe required very harsh methods that damaged the appeal of Communism elsewhere and provoked a deep resentment from the people that inhabited these states (Rothschild and Wingfield p. 77). Because the state never withers away, the question of the promised democracy by the people never comes to fruition. Part of the blame for this has to include the power-hungry and greedy dictators that were installed. These men silenced or executed the opposition, all under the auspices of party ‘purging,’ to rid the party of unhealthy elements. This seemed to just be an excuse for getting rid of someone who did not agree with you. Before the revolutions, it was “workers of all countries, unite!” However, it seems after the revolutions, it had changed. The Communist Manifesto talks about the oppression of the workers by the upper-class, however as history has shown us, communism chose the opposite, to repress the workers, violently. The oppression in capitalist democracy occurs in a non-violent form, in a socialist tyranny, it takes a more violent tone.

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