There also needs to be something that allows scarce resources to be allocated. The historical solutions to these have been:. The first is pretty stable. But it also puts limits on division of labour, and thus individual productivity. The second can only be stable with routine use of violence or threat of violence.
The third is pretty stable as well, and encourages division of labour to the extent we're familiar with, where there isn't even one person in the whole world who understands everything about making something as deceptively simple as a pencil : The fourth may be possible to do, but would be horribly unstable - you get a runaway positive feedback loop, where every "mutant" gets advantage that makes the mutation more frequent in the population over time. To be practical, you would need some authority to enforce genetic or cultural purity, to weed out the mutant, the heretic, the unclean.
A God Emperor might work :. No, I don't think so. This is analogous to asking things like "Does Islam automatically lead to terrorism? In each case the answer is "No, of course not" - it is not the ideology, life philosophy or religion that forces people to choose evil over good; people choose to be that way and then they use whichever philosophical framework to justify their choices. The other angle on this question is whether it is possible in reality to build a successful, Communist state - ie.
I don't think we have seen any political system that has delivered on that, so far. I think perhaps we need to be more flexible in our definitions, whatever we call our political system - as soon as we put down an immutable definition of what is Communism or Capitalism, Christianism, Islamism, Just take 'freedom': many in the West think this is the most important aspect of life, but there are societies in which people in general think this is stupid or even dangerous.
So to get back to the question, "Does Communism lead to Authoritarianism? I would think so - if we choose a more flexible, pragmatic ideology - a sort of "Whatever works for the benefit of all, starting from common ownership of means of production etc Say, the state initially owns everything: land, housing, infrastructure, etc, but we allow everybody to start building their own fortunes, probably with some restrictions, so that nobody becomes so powerful that they can work against 'the common good' whatever that means - this is a tricky one.
I think it is possible that this could work. The accepted answer and several others provide a definitive answer to the original question. However, it's useful to add another perspective. This is about the plan adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks that followed him for achieving a communist society.
It can be summarized thus:. The theory is that you can't build a communist society using people who have grown up in an environment where people compete for resources. They will put in less than they are able to and they will take out more than they need. There are plenty of examples to support this. The early experiences in Plymouth and in Jamestown in America are examples. So you need an environment where competition has been rendered unnecessary before you can have people suitable for communism.
You can't build a socialist economy without a despotic state. I've used the word "despotic" rather than authoritarian" because it corresponds with the literature at the time.
If you try, you will find that people create a large underground economy and propagate ideas that threaten the stability of the regime. You can't build a despotic state without a revolution, unless you use the existing state as a base.
The rule of the Romanoff dynasty had been nearly despotic, but it wasn't egalitarian at all. And the interim government that had been set up after the czar abdicated was not conducive to socialism. Hence the program outlined above. Some of this was known at the outset, and some of it evolved as time went on.
In reality, the society that emerged in the USSR in the years from to was not the kind of society you could build into a communist one. The people were sullen and cynical rather than idealistic and collectivist. There were other factors that led to this outcome, such as the arms race with the USA and the war in Afghanistan. But fundamentally, it was the failure of the socialist economy that resulted in people unsuited to communism. I would offer the suggestion that this is not something that went strangely wrong, but what you can expect if you implement the Bolshevik plan outlined above.
China has gone in a different direction. The Communist party and the Red army maintain a monopoly of power. And threats to stability are dealt with harshly in Hong Kong, in western China, and elsewhere. But the socialist economy has been largely replaced by state capitalism. What kind of people grow up in such an environment remains to be seen. I predict that it won't be the kind of people you need to build a communist society. Every economic system is fundamentally an allocation algorithm.
If you specify such an algorithm, you can make statements about the result. You can then show, that the result of this algorithm is pareto optimal. The problem with Communism is, that it is an under-specified algorithm. You only state that everyone owns everything. So this "planning" has to be done somehow. And since there is no mechanism which would do this decentrally like in Capitalism, it usually ends up being a centrally planned economy.
And that requires a planner. The issue here is, that a group of people will never agree on what is best to do for the group. Even if the entire group is completely altruistic. The reason for this is, that no-one knows how other people feel about certain things. Example: Consider a post-scarcity society of Alice, Bob and Charlie.
They have housing, food and all the basic necessities. Now they have to decide what to do with their time. So what should the group do? The issue is, that they simply do not want the same things. But if one of them would be the planner, then they would simply decide to do whatever they want to do and impose it on everyone else. You could of course vote on this issue, but if you even manage to get a majority for something, it would still result in the majority imposing their will on a minority.
Essentially forcing them to work on something they are not interested in. So you might think, that everyone should just work on their own project. But this is a very capitalistic outlook on things already. Since you essentially say: Everyone owns their time and they can do whatever they want to do with it.
If you then introduce different skill sets, then it might stop making sense, that people work on their own projects. And suddenly you would have to introduce some form of "exchange system". So you would likely end up with the second part of capitalism as well. So I wouldn't necessarily say, that Communism is authoritarian, but that Communism isn't actually an economic system.
And this vacuum is usually filled with a planned economy which is inherently authoritarian, since the priority list of the planner will never coincide with the priority list of every individual. So it imposes priorities on other people. In some cases this imposing of priorities might be acceptable. Most people would probably agree, that enough food and housing for everyone should be top priority.
So you can artificially move these things up the priority list generated decentrally by the capitalism algorithm , by guaranteeing them with unemployment help or universal basic income. China ultimately decided to use the "Capitalism Algorithm" for most of its economy, letting it deal with the details. But they then modify the result by heavily subsidizing certain sectors. So they essentially plan certain things centrally, while leaving the details to the capitalism algorithm.
We don't know what is intrinsic to communism since communism has never been achieved. At least not the way I understand it, which is why user's comment got so many upvotes. This is also an answer to MSalters'comment. Not even close. Socialism has not been achieved either; not even close, at least not on a more than local level. Obviously, mere labeling does not make anything real.
East Germany, the GDR, labeled itself "democratic", the main party was labeled "socialist", they performed "elections" and had a "parliament"; all this make-believe was a mixture of cargo cult and a conscious smoke screen. Of course this applies to all the "socialist" countries. You cannot draw conclusions about socialism from this "socialism" any more than you can draw conclusions about parliaments from their "parliaments".
The theory of communism, is that the state owns and runs everything. Planned economy, planned growth. Theoretically, none of the abuses of capitalism and personal greed, as Marx and Engels were likely motivated by the excess greed of the industrialists prevalent in the 's. The flaw in this logic is that it depends on the people in power having and maintaining an altruistic nature.
As we've seen with every nation that adopted some form of communism, that doesn't happen. The people in power end up serving their own needs, especially the need to remain in power, so the theory didn't stop that particular form of personal greed. So while communism itself doesn't have authoritarianism as a goal, it makes an authoritarian state very easy to establish, what with the state being in control of the land, the economy, and whatever communications media may exist. Basic human nature does the rest.
Ironically, the capitalist states that have been the most successful, also have mechanisms to facilitate dissent, and to prevent the people in power from getting too much power: independent judiciary, separation of executive and legislative branches, frequent elections, and a strong constitution clearly stating citizen rights and limitations on government authority. Between Marx and Engels there was a certain division of labor: While Marx laid the theoretical foundations, Engels was more concerned with organizing the labor movement and fending off competitive ideological currents, especially anarchists.
In doing this he focused on organization and doctrine. In the essay On Authority which svenper already quoted, Engels on one hand claims that. All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution [ But in the same essay he was very adamant in stressing that authority will still be needed, even after the revolution.
What would happen to the first train dispatched if the authority of the railway employees over the Hon. He then expands the argument more theoretically. He argues that the state of production means, namely large industry, required an interlocking division of labor, and that this necessarily required a substantial authority over the individual.
His pessimistic conclusion is a textbook example of Hegelian dialectic emphasis by me :. If man, by dint of his knowledge and inventive genius, has subdued the forces of nature, the latter avenge themselves upon him by subjecting him, in so far as he employs them, to a veritable despotism independent of all social organisation. Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself [ A brief argument in the affirmative, which I believe I first encountered in the Wall Street Journal, is that it's very difficult to imagine a state that could confiscate private property without due process or abolish private property in principle , which would nevertheless leave other liberties intact.
That's a property-centric perspective from an avowedly capitalistic source, but I think the argument has merit. I am very interested in this topic and actually asked a related question last year on how China managed to modify state communism in ways that allowed it to survive the global communist crisis of and actually become a major economic power while remaining a communist state -- less authoritarian, in effect, or just much better at concealing its authoritarianism from even its own people?
Communism is essentially authoritarian in both theory and practice through most of the stages leading up to the establishment of a perfect "classless society", which end product of the revolutionary struggle can however be construed as no longer necessarily authoritarian, in that no more coercion shall be required to maintain socialist order and the people shall voluntarily dedicate themselves to working for the common good, creating a utopian society.
In Marxist, Leninist and Marxist-Leninist theory, the most important feature that makes communism inherently authoritarian is the concept of "dictatorship of the proletariat" which is covered in this Wikipedia article:.
In Marxist philosophy, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a state of affairs in which the working class hold political power. Proletarian dictatorship is the intermediate stage between a capitalist economy and a communist economy, whereby the government nationalises ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership [ It seeks to organise a vanguard party, as advocated by Marx, and to lead a proletarian uprising, to assume state power on behalf of the proletariat and to construct a single-party "socialist state" representing a dictatorship of the proletariat, governed through the process of democratic centralism, which Lenin described as "diversity in discussion, unity in action".
Marxism—Leninism forms the official ideology of the ruling parties of China, Cuba, Laos and Vietnam, and was the official ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from the late s, and later of the other ruling parties making up the Eastern Bloc [ Lenin argued that in an underdeveloped country such as Russia the capitalist class would remain a threat even after a successful socialist revolution.
As a result, he advocated the repression of those elements of the capitalist class that took up arms against the new soviet government, writing that as long as classes existed a state would need to exist to exercise the democratic rule of one class in his view, the working class over the other the capitalist class. He said:. Dictatorship of some kind is thus necessary in theory to maintain the balance of power in favor of the proletarian class. However, in practice, looking at how communist states have tended to operate, a high degree of authoritarianism has also proved necessary to "keep the people on the right track", both because not all sections of society have subscribed equally to the communist ideology, and because State Communism has tended to mistrust political pluralism and maintain a high level of paranoia about counter-revolutionary tendencies that can weaken and defeat the revolution from without and even from within, seeking to regress society towards pre-socialist social systems, so that a high index of both suspicion and state control is necessary to sustain the revolution.
In theory an altruistic one-party rule led by the "vanguard party" was considered necessary to consolidate the dictatorship of the proletariat and forcefully lead the drive towards a classless society, because communism did not trust the common people to initially possess the political consciousness required to voluntarily make the concessions and sacrifices necessary to achieve the revolution's stated societal goals.
In practice, however, the vanguard often became more concerned with using authoritarianism to maintain Party power, so that the revolution could survive in some form and remain temporarily and indefinitely dominant, even if it did not enjoy the voluntary support of the majority of the people, and was not really achieving its principal aims. The same Wikipedia article observes that. Despite the principle of democratic centralism in the Bolshevik Party, internal factions were banned.
Hence, opposition parties could not be permitted to exist. From onward, Stalinist-inspired state constitutions enshrined this concept by giving the various communist parties a "leading role" in society—a provision that was interpreted to either ban other parties altogether or force them to accept the Stalinists' guaranteed right to rule as a condition of being allowed to exist.
This justification was adopted by subsequent communist parties that built upon the Stalinist model, such as the ones in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba initially the 26th of July Movement. Such discourse in effect accuses the "common people" of lacking the political consciousness possessed by the "vanguard" read Communist Party which therefore needs to "guide" the people with an iron hand in order to "protect the revolution", at least until the common people develop an acceptably high political consciousness and begin to voluntarily strive towards realising that perfect, utopian "classless society" -- in short, the Party will need to impose its will upon the people in one way or another, overt or subtle and with varying degrees of coercion, for quite possibly a long evolutionary period, even in modern day China, and that's authoritarianism.
Fundamentally, it doesn't have to be, but it seems like it always will. At the core, Communism is Messianic, like religions can be be when left to their own devices. In many developed countries, the notion of religious leaders deciding for everyone what to do, how to behave and what to say are alien concepts.
But it's not always been that way - many wars and much political jousting were waged to put the Churches in their place, they did not go willingly. When you just know you're right, it becomes tempting to just impose your point of view on others, just for their own good. This is where Communism often seems to be stuck at. Radical disruption and uprooting is deemed necessary to achieve its Nirvana.
If the people can't see that, they have to coerced. And by understanding economics, the electorate can avoid bamboozlement by specious advertising and talking points, and vote for politicians that would better serve the people instead of themselves.
During the 20th century, the word socialism often meant a system of government akin to communism. Nowadays, people use the word mostly to mean a redistribution of wealth, viewed by many as unfair. However, it is a common tacit assumption that the initial distribution of newly created wealth was fair.
But an inquiry into capitalism shows that this is probably not the case. As Adam Smith noted long ago, people act in their own interest. This simple observation lays at the foundation of capitalism. It is the invisible hand. But if people act in their own interest, then is it not reasonable to suppose that the people who distribute the wealth will try to keep more of it for themselves, by sharing it less?
The growth of inequality is firm evidence for this. Inequality is growing because most of the economies of the world are creating more and more wealth, but the people who decide how that wealth is distributed have decided to keep more of it themselves. This is easier to see by looking at businesses. CEOs are paying themselves more and more money, sometimes, more than times what their average workers make.
And yet, are they times better? We know from statistics that the abilities of most people lie within 2 standard deviations of the mean. While the ability of some people may be more than twice the ability of average people in some regards, abilities do not deviate much more than that. While a professional baseball pitcher may be able to pitch a baseball more than twice as fast as most people, no baseball pitcher can pitch more than 3 times faster than most people.
Certainly, no one is times better than the average person. That CEOs are paying themselves much more than what they are worth can easily be seen in companies going bankrupt, because even those CEOs still receive millions of dollars in compensation. Even when the board of directors decides to get rid of a bad CEO, many of those CEOs walk away with millions of dollars of severance pay. How do CEOs accomplish this? They decide or significantly influence how the business revenue is distributed. And when they distribute more to themselves, that leaves less for everyone else in the company.
When a company is going bankrupt, the CEO chooses the bankruptcy firm, so naturally they will choose a firm that will allow them to walk away with significant compensation — often millions of dollars — even when they were largely responsible for bankrupting the firm. Moreover, CEOs are often compensated with employee stock options , which further saves them taxes, because the money earned from these options are exempt from employment taxes and are subject to the lower long-term capital gains rate rather than the hefty marginal rate that applies to most income earned from work.
The unfair distribution of wealth can also be seen in some countries with rich natural resources, such as Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela. These countries have natural-resource wealth great enough to make everyone there rich, and even though no person was responsible for those resources, political leaders keep most of the money and wealth to themselves, which is why many political leaders and their cronies are willing to kill so many people or commit other atrocities to maximize their wealth.
Greed has been the main cause of wars and slavery throughout the ages and across all cultures sophisticated enough to have a hierarchy. The wealthy also benefit from the tax code. The tax code in most countries favors the wealthy by taxing income earned from work the most, while taxing investment income and gratuitous transfers less , money that accrues mostly to the wealthy.
The wealthy have significant influence over the writing of the tax code, so it is no surprise why so many parts of the tax code favor the wealthy.
Many people consider government handouts to be a form of socialism, but tax breaks and tax loopholes are, likewise, government handouts. Because the wealthy receive most of the tax breaks, it could be said that the wealthy receive most of the socialism.
For instance, in the United States, the wealthy receive a unified tax credi t worth more than 4. But because the government is not collecting this money from the wealthy, then it must collect the money from someone else, usually from the lower classes, for which money has a much higher utility, since they need the money to live. Or the government borrows the money, to be paid later, with interest. But if the wealthy have so little need for more money, then why do they want more money?
Because wealth is how the wealthy measure themselves among themselves. Thus, the wealthy want more money to increase their status, the middle class want more money so that they can live better, and the poor want more money simply to live. So, not only do the wealthy benefit by keeping more of the created wealth to themselves while sharing it less, but they also benefit from an unfair tax code that places the heaviest tax burden on income earned from work, taking money from people who need it the most so that more can be given, or less taken away, from those who need it the least.
When the wealthy award themselves most of the wealth and do not pay their fair share of taxes, then the lower classes will have less money. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification.
I Accept Show Purposes. Your Money. Personal Finance. Your Practice. Popular Courses. Part Of. Introduction to Economics. Economic Concepts and Theories. Economic Indicators. Real World Economies.
What Is a Command Economy? Key Takeaways In a command economy, the central government dictates the level of production of goods and controls their distribution and prices.
Proponents of command economies argue government control rather than private enterprise can ensure the fair distribution of goods and services. In a free market system, private enterprises set production and price levels based on demand. What Are the Characteristics of a Command Economy? Command economies are controlled from the top by government planners. In general, this includes: Public ownership of major industries. Government control of production levels and distribution quotas.
Government control of prices and salaries. In a command economy, the decision is dictated by government.
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Answer Communist countries use authoritarian governments because it requires the absolute obedience to authority figures. View Answer. Section 2 Command Economies. Discussion You must be signed in to discuss. Top Educators. Recommended Videos Problem 2. Problem 3.
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