This book investigates whether communism as an economic system was bound to fail, and in particular whether it was bound to fail for psychological reasons.
The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and then in the USSR itself over the period 1989–1991 was sudden, dramatic, and largely unforeseen. When the state of the communist economies before the collapse became widely known, many people concluded that the system itself had been doomed and that communism was simply unviable in the long run. This conclusion led naturally to another question. The communist systems of the USSR and Eastern Europe were different to those of the Western world in a large number of ways. Which difference or differences were responsible for the collapse?
If you search the Internet, it is easy to find many answers to the question of why communism failed. Here are a few that were generated in September 2013 by putting the simple question “Why did communism fail?” to the web.
The most common and simple explanation for why communism failed is that people are greedy. This is a gross simplification but does contain some truth. Communism failed to provide incentives for workers and citizens to work hard and be productive. While there are many benefits from equality, if pushed to an extreme it robs people of an incentive to make an effort.1The fundamental error of communism was that it failed to recognise exactly what the human person is; any reorganisation of human society is bound to fail if there are errors in its most basic premise.2The first and most obvious (though not always discussed) reason was that Communist regimes were dictatorships. This meant there was a repressive environment, large military expenditure, misallocation of resources, and the heavy burden of a totalitarian regime and the absence of procedures to remove incompetent decision makers.3[C]ommunism cannot work. The premise of communism is that power and resources are shared. An inherent assumption here is that either all of the producers will have equal status, or that those who have superior positions will not abuse their power. … [H]ow can we ensure that those in power will never abuse their privileges? … [T]he second requirement of communism is that resources are shared, that there is no ownership. Forget about owning land, or factories or companies. … This goes completely against human nature. We humans have evolved from beasts: we are built to have the desire to own our niche, to control and amass resources be it land or wealth. … A system that is based on principles that go against our nature is bound to fail.4
A few minutes on the Internet turns up many such arguments, some similar to those quoted above, some not. At this point, we are not concerned with whether the statements are true or not, but simply to note that many of the arguments raise issues of psychology, and that people often claim that communism failed because it rested on faulty psychology. Indeed, it is often claimed that, because of its flaws, communism was effectively doomed from the start. For example, towards the end of his Communism: A brief history, Richard Pipes remarks that “[i]f it [communism] is ever revived, it will be in defiance of history and with the certainty of yet another costly failure.”5
Is another costly failure really predictable from our present-day knowledge of psychology? I should be clear what I mean by this. This book is not primarily concerned with the end of most of the world’s communist governments in 1989–1991. There are already a number of excellent political and historical analyses of these events, and some of them are reviewed in Chap. 4. The book is partly concerned with ways in which communist governments, both deliberately and unintentionally, failed to encourage human development in the twentieth century. These failures are reviewed, and they are enlightening. However, the book’s main purpose is to search for necessary failures, failures that came about in the past and would come about in the future because of the nature of communism, rather than failures that came about because the past communist (like other!) governments simply got it wrong for other reasons.
Structure of the Book
The rest of the book falls into three unequal parts. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 cover preliminary issues to investigating possible psychological flaws in communism. Chapter 2 is concerned with what communism was supposed to be like, what problems it was supposed to solve, and how it was supposed to enable people to develop. This chapter focuses on communist ideology, but definitions of communism are considered, and a definition that is used in the rest of the book is put forward. The chapter also briefly considers Marxist and Soviet psychology. Although there was a great deal of overlap between the scientific psychology researched and taught in communist countries and that in the West, there were also some differences. One important emphasis of Marxist and Soviet psychology was a belief that human nature was heavily dependent on the environment, particularly the social environment, and was at least to some extent changeable. This issue is introduced in Chap. 2 and developed in Chap. 3.
Chapter 3 asks what initially might appear to be a very simple question: How would we know if a communist government or state was successful? It turns out that there are a number of ways to answer this question and that none of them, for rather different reasons, are completely satisfactory. This chapter also considers a psychological issue: Can human nature be changed?
A brief history of communism in the twentieth century is outlined in Chap. 4. This chapter makes use of work by historians, political scientists, and economists that gives us a picture of how communism worked in practice, particularly in the economic sphere, and why it later fell apart in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The primary focus is on the Soviet Union. This is because that was the first state to attempt to build a communist command economy and the one that persisted longest with it.
Chapters 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10, which make up the bulk of the book, deal with possible psychological flaws in communism. Chapter 5 outlines some general considerations in choosing and examining the possible flaws, and then five different specific possibilities are examined in Chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10. In each of these chapters two questions are asked: Firstly, to what extent did this flaw—if it was one—affect communism in practice? Secondly, to what extent is the flaw inevitable in a communist state?
Finally, conclusions are reached in Chap. 11.
References
Catsambas, A. (2011). Why communism has, and always will, fail. Enginomics: Economics through an engineer’s perspective. Downloaded from http://enginomics.blogspot.co.nz/2011/01/why-communism-has-and-always-will-fail.html on 22 September 2013.
Nielsen, R. (2013a). Why did communism fail? #1 Dictatorship. Whistling in the wind. Downloaded from http://robertnielsen21.wordpress.com/tag/why-did-communism-fail/ on 22 September 2013.
Nielsen, R. (2013b). Why did communism fail? #3 Incentives. Whistling in the wind. Downloaded from http://robertnielsen21.wor...