An Evaluation of Communism

In one line

Communism produced the most powerful analysis of how economic power shapes politics that anybody has written, and the states built on it destroyed the liberty it promised and failed at the economics it claimed to have solved.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: communism is to be evaluated on two levels, as an analysis and as a programme; as an analysis it made permanent contributions in showing that economic structure shapes law, politics and ideas, that formal equality can coexist with substantive domination, and that class is a real determinant of political outcomes; as a programme it failed, because the abolition of markets in the means of production destroyed the information the economy required, because the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of a party, and because the state did not wither but grew.

What is right in it

1. The relation between economic structure and politics. That who owns and who works shapes the law, the political arrangements and the prevailing ideas of a society is now so widely accepted that its origin is forgotten. Every study of the influence of money on legislation, of who is prosecuted, of whose interests are consulted, is doing work Marx made available.

2. Formal equality can coexist with substantive domination. Chapter 530's structural argument about punishment, and chapter 600's socialist criticism of liberalism, are both Marxist in ancestry.

3. Class is real. Whatever else determines political behaviour, the position a person occupies in the production of goods affects their interests and their opportunities, and a political science that ignores it explains less.

4. Alienation. The account of work under industrial conditions, that a worker may be estranged from the product, from the act of working and from their own capacities, describes something that other traditions did not describe at all.

5. Ideology. The claim that prevailing ideas serve the interests of those who prevail is now a standard tool of analysis, and Gramsci's hegemony is its most useful form.

6. It compelled the reform of its opponent. Much of the twentieth century's labour legislation, social insurance and public provision was enacted by liberal and conservative governments who preferred reform to the alternative, and this is a real effect that an evaluation should count.

7. And in India, a specific achievement. Land reform in Kerala and West Bengal is the most substantial redistribution of land carried out anywhere in India, done by communist State governments through legislation within a constitutional democracy.

What is wrong in it

As economics

The calculation problem, from chapter 700. The abolition of markets in the means of production destroys the mechanism that generates the information about scarcity, want and cost, and no planner can collect it because it does not exist in collectible form. This is the decisive economic objection and it applies to honest and benevolent planners.