I wrote this entry in September of 2006 from Helsinki, Finland just after arriving there from the Trans-Siberian Railway and a month in China.  For a while I was consumed by learning about Communism and needed to get it on paper, so to speak.

This post is a bit of a departure from the usual travel topics and I hope you’ll pardon its serious and dark nature. Having been to Cambodia, Vietnam, China, Russia, Germany and the Czech Republic, Communism seems to be a recurring theme and something to which I’ve devoted a lot of time reading and learning. I’ve developed a fascination for the subject, likely more than any other subject on the trip.

I figure that the root of my fascination is related to the fact that so many smart people believed in it so fervently and killed so many in an attempt to make it work – and the work continues to this day.  To me as an American entrepreneur, Communism is endlessly fascinating because it diverges so greatly from my world view.  The more I learn about it, the more baffled I become that so many could believe that it is a perfectly reasonable way to run a country.

I started the trip knowing very little about the Communist ideology, Marxism, Leninism or the history of the peoples’ revolution.  After reading a number of books, visiting museums, etc., I think I have a handle on some of the basics.  To test myself, I’d like to try to describe my layman's version for you as briefly and simply as possible.

Karl Marx was known as the father of Communism and the author of the Communist Manifesto – the first declaration of his theory in late 19^th century. To Marx, capitalism (free markets, supply and demand, etc.) was evil and would eventually cause great misery to the people of the world. His goal was to stop it. 

To understand why he thought this, we must consider the lives of workers in the Industrial Revolution of the 1800s.  At the time he saw a world where people were either rich owners or exploited and unhappy workers.  Marx saw this as a great injustice that was getting worse through the growth of Capitalism.  He foresaw a future where Capitalism would create a small handful of rich people and a world of miserable people that would get more miserable over time. This would even be extended to a worldwide scale with the world eventually being run by a few rich industrialists. This was what some called Imperialism and it was the end game of Capitalism.

Marx was successful in convincing a lot of very smart and powerful people that his was the true vision of the world and his Communist ideology its savior.  He promoted the idea that the true power of a civilization lies within the working class and if properly motivated, the working class can rise up in revolution against the rich land owners. This was revolution and it was the first stage of building a Communist system which would be fair to everyone – a single class society that worked to provide what it needed for the whole society. The government owned everything and everyone worked toward a common goal of self-sufficiency.  In fact, according to the theory, there would be no need for government in the future – it would “whither away” as the Communist utopia was achieved. Everyone would be well fed, protected and happy as they worked together as one.

Of course, history shows that this is not the case.  Two contributing factors:

• Marx got it wrong.  He did not predict the rapid rise of the middle class.  Before he died, he saw Capitalism creating opportunities for a new class that were neither the rich owner nor the exploited worker.

• Marxism was just a theory:  It described how things should work and what should happen, but it never described *how* Communism or revolution should actually be managed.  It was a theory with no doctrine.

Of course in the 20^th century there would be no shortage of world leaders to test the Marxist theory in the form of prompting a revolution and establishing a Communist government – supposedly freeing the working classes from Capitalist oppression.

The first serious revolutionary was Lenin in Russia. He put Marxist theory into practice and established the first Communist government in 1917 and in doing so created Leninism – the way a person goes about revolution and enacting Marxist principles.  This created what is known as Marxism/Leninism and became a complete package for people like Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot in Asia.  They now had the idea (Marxism) and the practice (Leninism) for Communist Revolution.

What has happened since then is the subject of great debate. Most would agree that if there is a winner in the Cold War, it is Capitalism. Many questions remain about what went wrong with Communism.  I’ll let you research the myriad perspectives on what happened and leave you with my own admittedly half-baked answer.

I think there are two main reasons Communism failed.  The first is human nature.  Communism underestimated the human need for achievement, competition and recognition.  Making everyone the same reduced everyone to the lowest common denominator and bred more misery and frustration than it prevented.  The second reason is leadership.  Have you ever heard of the founder of a company having to hire a CEO?  It happens often because the people that start things are not often the best people to manage them.  Revolutionaries are great at revolution, but can be poor at administration and management.  The history of Communism is rife with stories of Mao, Stalin and Pol Pot making ludicrous decisions that caused the deaths of millions of their people.  They grew omnipotent through revolution but lacked the skills to use that power in any responsible manner.

My guess is that human history will show Communism as a destructive and deadly force in the world, not because of the idea or theory, but its implementation.  It enabled the centralization of absolute power that bred mass corruption and quickly became unmanageable.  To give you an idea of the level of destruction, consider the number of deaths in these countries in the Communist era:

• China and Mao’s Great Leap Forward (1950’s)  - 30 million dead from starvation
• Cambodia and Pol Pot’s Communist Revolution (1970’s) 7 million dead from starvation and executions (1 in 7 Cambodians)
• Russia and Stalin’s Iron Rule (1920-50s) – 40 million dead from starvation and executions

… and this is not counting the unquantifiable misery wrought on families and individuals in these countries as secret police, hidden agendas and propaganda were a fact of life.  

Could a system of government that produced numbers like this be considered a positive force in the world?  I think not. Yet, the Communist Party is still a major player in world politics.  In Vietnam and Russia it has considerable power and of course in China, Cuba and North Korea it is the dominant force. How could this be? How could there still be demand for such a system?  The answer lies somewhere in the real world security and equality that Communism provides the working class.  Despite the horrific past, some people still yearn for a system where they can depend on the government for everything – they are ready to trade freedom for security.

Maybe the real root of my fascination with Communism is related to how it helps me to understand all the things I take for granted.  The more I learn, the more I wonder what my life would be like if I was a child of Communism.  With an entrepreneurial American worldview, I find it nearly unfathomable.

For more reading, check out the Wikipedia entries on:  Communism, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Karl Marx, Marxism, Capitalism, Dictatorship of the Proleteriat, Imperialism.