Communist Systems

Communist systems were historically shaped in the 20th century and based on oppressive centralized political power aiming at control over a usually nationalized economy, culture, and society. Such systems appeal to a communist ideology according to which a fully communist system ensures the liquidation of exploitation and equality in a classless society. Because this ideology remained an unfulfilled utopia, the term communist systems refers to existing systems based on the characteristics mentioned above: oppressiveness and striving for control over a nationalized reality. According to communist ideology, such systems are supposed to be only transitional forms on the path to full communism, while in reality they are the only form of communism in existence. Although this entry discusses communism considered as a system rather than an ideology, it should be remembered that the communist ideology caused the deaths of tens of millions of victims of communist repression. This ideology was responsible for economic waste and the stifling of human energy that led to the collapse of the system in Europe in 1989 and the fall of the Soviet Union, leaving only a few communist countries on the map of the world.

Communism was a peculiar system in which formal solutions generated their opposites, as many researchers noted (e.g., Alain Besançon, Elemer Hankiss, Robert Sharlet, Jadwiga Staniszkis). Centralization gave rise to spontaneous decentralization, formal regulation resulted in informality, and ideologically based unity brought a diversity that could not be coped with. This is an example of the dynamic of this system. What created communism as a system was an ability to generate and absorb these contradictions in a single whole. A system driven by contradictions was integrated by the relations between particular poles of opposition, with the result that both opposing poles were in need of each other and were strengthened. This created communism as a system and allowed it to reproduce itself. At the same time, however, these contradictions were also a factor for change and adaptation of the system. The informal economy and its relation to the official economy can serve as an example here. The informal economy made it possible to function and somehow also changed the system but, by consuming resources, also contributed to its erosion. These contradictions of the official form of communism were the result of its inability to adapt to social needs and aspirations, and as a result, the contradictions were tolerated by the official system—a mechanism of adaptation extending the life of the system and enabling reproductions.

This entry presents three basic areas of function of communist systems: politics, the economy, and society. Making a precise separation of the three areas is difficult because the specificity of communist systems lay in the powerful tangle of political economic and social structures. At the same time, there was a hierarchy: Politics was the prime cause overriding the other areas.