Communism: The Idea, the States, and What Happened

Follows: The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented and Socialism: The Many Kinds, From Utopians to Social Democracy

In this deep dive
1. The idea, and the first state built in its name: Lenin, War Communism and the NEP
2. Stalin's revolution from above: the plans and collectivisation
3. How central planning actually worked
4. Mao's China, and the road Deng took instead
5. Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and North Korea
6. 1989–91, and the great argument: why it failed, and what its defenders say

In 1875 a German exile living in London scribbled angry notes in the margin of a party programme. Buried in them is a sentence that would be painted on banners for a century: society would one day inscribe on its flags, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

Within fifty years of Karl Marx's death, a state claiming to follow him was requisitioning grain from starving villages in Ukraine and Kazakhstan. A century after the Manifesto, states calling themselves communist ruled more than a billion people; then, between 1989 and 1991, most of them collapsed.

How did a vision of a society with no state at all become the most powerful states of the twentieth century? That is the question of this deep dive. Socialism: The Many Kinds set out Marx's economics and the family tree of socialism; this piece follows the branch that took power by revolution and tried to replace markets with a plan. The Great Political Traditions (Politics 15) covers communism's place among the political families; here the subject is the economic system: how it said goods should be produced, owned and allocated, and what happened when states tried it.

A note on approach: this piece deals with famines and political killings. Where death tolls are disputed, it gives the range of serious scholarly estimates and names who estimated what, rather than picking a single number. Where a question is a live disagreement among historians, such as whether the Ukrainian famine was genocide, it sets out each position in its defenders' own terms.

Part 1 — The idea, and the first state built in its name

It helps to separate two things that share one word.

No ruling communist party ever claimed to have reached the first column. They said they were building it, which is why they officially called their countries "socialist". Keeping the two columns apart is the first step to arguing about communism clearly.

What Marx and Engels actually said

The Communist Manifesto (1848) put the programme bluntly: "the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property." It meant property in the means of production, the factories, land and machines that produce wealth, not your shirt. Its goal was not a giant state but "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."

Marx said surprisingly little about how such a society would run. The longest passage is in those 1875 margin notes, published later as the Critique of the Gotha Programme. He described two stages:

1. A first phase, "just as it emerges from capitalist society", still "stamped with the birthmarks of the old society". Workers receive a certificate for the hours they have worked and draw that much from the common store of goods. This is fairer than capitalism, but it still rewards the strong and skilled over the weak, and a single worker over one with children to feed.
2. A higher phase, after the division of labour has lost its grip, after work has become "life's prime want", and after "all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly". Only then would society inscribe on its banners: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!"

The famous slogan was not Marx's invention; versions of it circulated among earlier French socialists such as Louis Blanc. What Marx added was the claim that it could only work after capitalism had created enormous abundance.

Between capitalism and communism, Marx wrote in the same text, would lie a transition whose state "can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." Then the state would disappear. Friedrich Engels put it most memorably in Anti-Dühring (1878): state interference "dies out of itself; the government of persons is replaced by the administration of things." And: "The state is not 'abolished'. It dies out."

Marx gave his followers a destination, a slogan and a warning that it required abundance. He did not give them a map, so the people who took power in his name drew one in the middle of wars.

Lenin's vanguard

Marx expected revolution in the most advanced industrial countries, such as Britain and Germany. It came instead in Russia, a mostly peasant empire where, at the 1897 census, most adults could not read. The man who made it happen had a theory of why workers needed leading.

In What Is to Be Done? (1902), Vladimir Lenin argued that "the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness": the belief that workers should form unions and press for better laws. Socialist consciousness would have to be brought to them from outside, by a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries. This vanguard party is Lenin's most important addition to Marxism, and it is the hinge on which everything after turns.

In State and Revolution, written in 1917 months before he took power, Lenin was strikingly optimistic about running an economy. Capitalism, he wrote, had already simplified the necessary "accounting and control" into operations "which any literate person can perform": supervising, recording, "knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic, and issuing appropriate receipts."

The Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917. In January 1918 they dissolved the freely elected Constituent Assembly, in which they did not hold a majority. Lenin's decree argued that the soviets (councils) were a higher form of democracy. Other socialists saw the start of one-party rule.

War Communism (1918–21)

During the civil war that followed, the Bolsheviks tried something close to abolishing the market overnight. Industry was nationalised. Private trade was banned. The state took grain from peasants by force under a system of requisitioning (prodrazvyorstka) to feed the cities and the Red Army. Money lost almost all its value.

The results were catastrophic. Production collapsed, peasants hid grain or stopped planting, and a famine in 1921–22, worsened by drought and requisitioning, killed an estimated five million people.

The breaking point came from the revolution's own heroes. In late February 1921 the sailors of the Kronstadt naval base, once praised as the pride of the revolution, passed a resolution demanding new elections to the soviets "by secret ballot", freedom of speech and press "to anarchist and left socialist parties", the release of socialist political prisoners, and "full freedom of action" for peasants on their land. In March the Red Army crushed the rising.

The New Economic Policy (1921–28)

That same March, at the Tenth Party Congress, Lenin reversed course. On 15 March 1921 the congress replaced requisitioning with a tax in kind: peasants paid a fixed share and could sell the rest on the market. Small private trade and industry returned; the state kept large industry, banking and foreign trade. This was the New Economic Policy.

The economy recovered. By Maddison Project estimates, Soviet output per person in 1928 was back to about 97% of its 1913 level.

But on 16 March 1921, the day after legalising markets, the same congress banned organised factions inside the party. Economic loosening and political tightening arrived together, a pairing that would recur in China sixty years later.

Part 2 — Stalin's revolution from above: the plans and collectivisation

The NEP left the party with a dilemma. The peasants who grew the food were mostly small private farmers, and when grain prices were low they sold less. Industrialising a huge country required feeding growing cities and earning foreign currency with grain exports. After Lenin's death in 1924, Joseph Stalin won the struggle to succeed him and resolved the dilemma by force.

In a speech of 4 February 1931 he gave the reason in words his audience would not forget:

"We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or we shall go under." — Joseph Stalin, 1931

The five-year plans

The First Five-Year Plan began in 1928. It set enormous targets for steel, coal, electricity and machinery, and in January 1933 Stalin announced it had been fulfilled "in four years and three months". Whole cities and steelworks rose on empty steppe. By the Maddison Project's estimates, Soviet output per person grew by about 3.8% a year between 1928 and 1940, much faster than the depression-hit West.

Collectivisation

In the countryside, the plan meant herding the peasantry into collective farms (kolkhozy) controlled by the state. On 27 December 1929 Stalin announced that the party would "eliminate [the kulaks] as a class". Kulaks were supposedly rich peasants; in practice the label fell on anyone who resisted. Whole families were deported to Siberia and Central Asia; Soviet archives record some 390,000 deaths during these forced resettlements. In March 1930 Stalin briefly blamed local officials for being "Dizzy with Success" and allowed some to leave the collectives; the drive then resumed.

The economic historian Robert C. Allen, who argues that the USSR was one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century, concludes that Stalin's harshest measures, including violent collectivisation, "did little to spur growth." The industrial take-off happened anyway; the collective farms were a disaster in their own right.

The famines of 1930–33

The worst consequence was famine across the grain regions of the USSR. In Kazakhstan, where nomadic herders were forced to settle and their herds were seized, more than 1.5 million people died, about a quarter of the republic's population, according to the historian Sarah Cameron.

In Ukraine the famine is known as the Holodomor, "death by hunger". The Holodomor Research and Education Consortium at the University of Alberta summarises what the opened archives show: in 1932 the party set impossibly high grain quotas for Ukrainian villages; when they were not met, brigades searched homes and seized even seed grain; villages were fined in meat and potatoes; a law made the theft of a few stalks of grain punishable by execution; and starving peasants were forbidden to leave to look for food, while grain was still sold abroad.

How many died is still debated, partly because Soviet statistics were falsified and many deaths went unregistered.

Most specialist estimates therefore fall between about 2.5 and 5 million deaths in Ukraine, with the most detailed recent demographic work at the upper middle of that range. The same research found that the highest losses were not in the southern grain belt but in the north-central Kyiv and Kharkiv regions. Across the whole USSR, the famine of 1930–33 killed somewhere between about 5.5 and 8.7 million people.

Was it genocide?

Here the disagreement is real, and it is about intent rather than about whether the famine happened or whether Stalin's government caused it. Almost no serious historian disputes that the famine was man-made.

• The genocide case. Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) argued that the famine was deliberately inflicted on Ukraine. The Italian historian Andrea Graziosi argues that a famine which began as a by-product of collectivisation was then deliberately "instrumentalised" against Ukrainians, through measures that applied only or mostly to Ukraine and the ethnically Ukrainian Kuban region, alongside an attack on Ukrainian cultural and political life. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word "genocide", called it "a classic example of Soviet genocide" in 1953. This is the view of most Ukrainian historians and of Ukraine's government.
• The case against calling it genocide. R. W. Davies and Stephen Wheatcroft, after years in the archives, conclude that the famine was the result of brutal, reckless policy combined with two bad harvests, and that they found no evidence of a programme to destroy Ukrainians as such. They do not excuse Stalin: Wheatcroft has called the regime's conduct criminal. Their point is that genocide, in its legal sense, requires proven intent to destroy a group, and that intent has not been shown. Most Russian historians also reject the genocide label.

Ukraine's parliament declared the Holodomor a genocide in 2006, and the European Parliament did the same in 2022; by the mid-2020s more than thirty countries had followed. Whatever word one uses, the facts underneath are not in dispute: a government seized food from people it knew were starving, and stopped them from leaving.

The Terror

Economic revolution came with political terror. In 1937–38, during the Great Terror, the secret police shot about 680,000 people according to its own records, which became available after 1991. Those archives record about 800,000 executions in all between 1921 and 1953, and roughly 1.5 to 1.7 million deaths among the 18 million people who passed through the Gulag labour camps and colonies between 1930 and 1953. Some historians who rely on memoirs argue that the true figures were higher.

Part 3 — How central planning actually worked

Lenin had imagined running an economy as simple bookkeeping. In reality the Soviet system had to decide, for tens of thousands of products, how much to make, where, with what and for whom, without market prices. Here is how it tried.

The machinery

Gosplan, the State Planning Committee, was set up in 1921 and lasted until 1991. It drew up the five-year plans and, more importantly, the yearly plans that actually ran the economy.

Its core tool was the material balance. For each major product, say steel, planners drew up a ledger:

The two sides had to balance. But every use of steel was itself a production target with its own inputs. More tractors meant more steel, which meant more coal and iron ore, which meant more railway wagons, which meant more steel. Change one number and dozens of ledgers had to change with it. Planners coped by balancing only the most important products centrally, leaving the rest to ministries, and by using last year's plan as the starting point for this year's.

Each enterprise received targets and allocations of inputs. Fulfilling the plan was a legal duty; bonuses depended on it.

What went wrong

The problems were not mainly about stupidity or laziness. They came from the incentives the system created.

• Targets measured the wrong thing. If a factory's target was in tonnes, it made heavy goods; if in units, it made many small ones. Soviet cartoonists mocked a nail factory that met its tonnage target with one giant nail. The joke may be apocryphal, but the problem was real: what was measured got made, whether or not anyone wanted it.
• Managers hid their capacity. Because next year's target was usually based on this year's result, a manager who over-fulfilled the plan was punished with a harder plan. The rational move was to ask for more inputs than needed, promise less output than possible, and hoard.
• Losses did not matter. The Hungarian economist János Kornai called this the soft budget constraint. A capitalist firm that keeps losing money goes bankrupt. A socialist firm that lost money was bailed out with subsidies, credit or higher prices, because closing it would mean unemployment and a failed plan. Firms therefore had little reason to control costs and a strong reason to demand ever more investment.
• Shortage was normal. Kornai's name for the result was the shortage economy: chronic queues for consumer goods, factories hoarding scarce parts, and a vast informal economy of favours and connections to get what the plan failed to deliver.
• Innovation was risky. Retooling for a new product threatened this month's plan, and a Soviet enterprise could not get rich by inventing something.

Socialism: The Many Kinds covers the theoretical argument behind this, the calculation debate in which Ludwig von Mises (1920) and Friedrich Hayek argued that without market prices planners could not know what things were worth, and Oskar Lange replied that planners could imitate a market. The Soviet record suggests both camps had a point. The planners did get information; what was missing was any reason for managers to use it well.

The growth record

For all that, the system grew, at first fast. The numbers below are from the Maddison Project Database (2023), in dollars of constant purchasing power.

The USSR grew by about 3.4% per person per year between 1950 and 1970, and then by only about 1.3% a year from 1970 to 1989. Robert Allen's verdict: growth was fast from 1928 into the 1970s, then "economic development stagnated after 1970", as resources went to the military and leaders poured money into wasteful investments. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy gives a similar summary: the model industrialised the country and made it capable of defeating Nazi Germany, but "failed to generate sufficient technical innovation and intensive growth."

Central planning was good at one thing: moving people from farms into factories and building steel mills. That gives very fast growth for a few decades. It was bad at the next stage, where growth comes from doing things better rather than doing more of them.

Part 4 — Mao's China, and the road Deng took instead

The Chinese Communist Party took power in 1949 after a long civil war. It first copied the Soviet model, with land reform followed by a Soviet-style five-year plan. Then Mao Zedong tried to go faster than the Soviets ever had.

The Great Leap Forward (1958–62)

The Great Leap Forward set out to surpass Britain's industrial output within fifteen years. Peasants were organised into giant people's communes, often with communal kitchens. Millions were sent from the fields to smelt iron in backyard furnaces, much of it useless. Local officials, under pressure to report miracles, announced impossible harvests, and the state took its grain quota based on the invented figures.

At the Lushan conference in July 1959, the defence minister Peng Dehuai criticised the policies. Mao purged him and launched a party-wide campaign against "Right opportunism". The Communist Party's own 1981 resolution on its history admits that this "cut short the process of the rectification of 'Left' errors" and that, together with natural disasters and the Soviet withdrawal of aid, it brought "serious losses to our country and people" between 1959 and 1961. Officials who reported hunger could now be denounced as rightists, so the bad news stopped travelling upward.

The result is widely regarded as the deadliest famine in human history. China's life expectancy, according to UN estimates, fell from about 44 years in 1950 to about 33 in 1960.

Many of the demographic studies cluster between about 23 and 36 million deaths. Dikötter's figure, which includes people beaten to death or worked to death, is the highest widely cited; some scholars have criticised his methods. A few writers argue for figures under five million, attributing the gap to unregistered migration; these remain outliers.

The Cultural Revolution (1966–76)

In 1966 Mao, sidelined after the famine, called on students to attack "bourgeois" elements in the party. Red Guards humiliated, beat and sometimes killed teachers, officials and anyone with the wrong family background. Factions fought with weapons seized from army depots. Millions of urban young people were sent to the countryside. Estimates of the death toll vary widely, mostly between several hundred thousand and two million.

The party's 1981 verdict on its own history is unusually blunt: the Cultural Revolution, "which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People's Republic." The same resolution concludes that Mao's "merits are primary and his errors secondary", which is still the official line.

China's other road

After Mao died in 1976, China took a different path. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping began dismantling the communes and letting farmers sell their surplus, then opened special economic zones to foreign investment. He gave the result a name in 1982, calling on the party to "build a socialism with Chinese characteristics". On his southern tour in 1992 he argued that "a planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too."

The results were extraordinary. China's output per person rose about elevenfold between 1978 and 2022 (Maddison Project), and the World Bank reports that the number of Chinese living below its $1.90-a-day extreme poverty line fell by close to 800 million over forty years, close to three-quarters of the world's reduction. The Mixed Economy (Political Economy 5) looks at what kind of system China now has and why economists argue over whether its state or its markets deserve the credit.

What China did not do was loosen political control. The Communist Party kept its monopoly, and in June 1989 used the army to end the Tiananmen Square protests. China, Vietnam and Laos today combine Communist Party rule with largely market economies. Cuba and North Korea keep more of the old planned model.

Part 5 — Cuba, Vietnam, Cambodia and North Korea

Communism spread far beyond Russia and China, and the results varied enormously. Four cases show the range.

Cuba: the case defenders cite most

Fidel Castro's guerrillas overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista on 1 January 1959. Within two years Cuba was aligned with the USSR, and in 1961 it ran a famous literacy campaign, sending young volunteers into the countryside to teach.

The social record is the strongest card in the communist hand. Cuba was already more literate than most of Latin America before the revolution, at about 78% in 1950, but literacy reached about 98% by 1981. Life expectancy rose from 59 in 1950 to 72 by the late 1970s and about 78 today, close to the United States' 79, on a fraction of its income.

The economic record is weaker. Cuba depended on Soviet subsidies, and when they vanished the economy fell off a cliff: output per person dropped by about 43% between 1989 and 1995 (Maddison Project), a time Cubans call the Special Period. Limited reforms followed: a 2019 constitution recognising private property, and in 2021 permission for small private companies.

As of 2026 the island is in its worst crisis since the 1990s. Human Rights Watch's report on 2025 describes prolonged blackouts, shortages of food and medicine, continuing protests, and hundreds of critics and protesters still arbitrarily detained, many from the July 2021 demonstrations. Cuba's own statistics office reported in 2024 that the resident population had fallen below 10 million, and Human Rights Watch says government figures show a loss of around 10% of the population in recent years. Defenders of the revolution point to the decades-long US embargo as a major cause; critics point to the one-party state and the planned economy. Both have real weight, and economists disagree about how to divide the blame.

Vietnam: communism by name, markets in practice

After reunification in 1975, Vietnam extended the north's planned economy to the south, and the economy stagnated. In December 1986 the Communist Party launched Đổi Mới ("renovation"), legalising private business and opening to trade and investment while keeping one-party rule. The World Bank reports that GDP per person rose from under $500 in 1986 to $5,066 in 2025, and life expectancy from 70.5 in 1990 to 75 in 2024. Vietnam is now a market economy run by a communist party, like China.

Cambodia: the most extreme experiment

The Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh in April 1975 and tried to build a purely agrarian communist society almost overnight. They emptied the cities, abolished money, markets and schools, and drove the population into rural labour camps. Anyone suspected of being educated, foreign-connected or disloyal could be killed. When Vietnam's army overthrew the regime in January 1979, somewhere between 1.5 and 2 million people had died from execution, starvation, overwork and disease, about a fifth to a quarter of the population. The Documentation Center of Cambodia uses the figure of two million. UN estimates put life expectancy in 1976–78 at about 12 years.

On 16 November 2018 the UN-backed tribunal in Cambodia sentenced the regime's two most senior surviving leaders, Nuon Chea and Khieu Samphan, to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide, the genocide convictions concerning the Vietnamese minority and, for Nuon Chea, the Muslim Cham.

North Korea: self-reliance as a trap

North Korea built the most closed planned economy of all, under the official ideology of Juche (self-reliance) and a ruling family now in its third generation. When Soviet aid ended, the economy collapsed, and in the mid-1990s famine struck. Estimates of the deaths range from about 240,000 to 3.5 million; the most careful studies cluster below about one million. Stephan Haggard and Marcus Noland, in the standard account, write that "as many as one million" died, and that the food system collapsed mainly "because of a misguided push for self-reliance", made worse by the regime blocking aid.

In 2014 a UN Commission of Inquiry estimated that 80,000 to 120,000 political prisoners were held in four large prison camps, and concluded that "the gravity, scale and nature of these violations reveal a State that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world."

The two Koreas are close to a natural experiment: one people, one peninsula, two systems. By Maddison Project estimates, South Korea's output per person in 2022 was about $41,000; North Korea's was about $1,600. (Figures for the North are rough estimates. The last deep dive in this series looks at such natural experiments more closely.)

Part 6 — 1989–91, and the great argument

The collapse

By the 1980s the Soviet economy had stopped catching up with the West. Mikhail Gorbachev, leader from 1985, tried to revive it with perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Openness let people say what they thought, and many thought the system had failed.

In 1989 the communist governments of Eastern Europe fell one after another, mostly peacefully. The Berlin Wall opened on 9 November 1989. Gorbachev resigned on 25 December 1991, and the Soviet Union formally ceased to exist the next day.

What followed was not an easy recovery. The former Soviet economy shrank by about 38% per person between 1989 and 1998, by the Maddison Project's estimates, and Russian life expectancy fell from about 69 in 1990 to 65 in 2000. Defenders of the old system cite this as evidence of what was lost; critics blame the old system's hidden decay and a badly handled transition. (Russia: A Condensed History covers the 1990s.)

The argument over why

Almost everyone agrees that the Soviet-type economies did not reach the goal Marx described, and that most of them ended in collapse or in a turn to markets. The argument is over why, and over what, if anything, should be salvaged.

Why it failed: the critics' case

1. The knowledge problem. Hayek's point, set out in Capitalism in this series, is that the information needed to run an economy is scattered among millions of people and changes daily. Prices pull it together; a planning office cannot. The Soviet experience bears this out: Gosplan could balance only the most important products; a modern economy makes millions.

2. The incentive problem. Even with good information, the system gave managers reasons to hide capacity, hoard inputs, ignore costs and avoid innovation. Kornai's soft budget constraint explains why loss-making firms never died and why shortage was permanent rather than a planning error.

3. Power without checks. Abolishing private ownership of the means of production put almost all economic power in the hands of the state, and therefore of the party running it. Critics from Hayek (The Road to Serfdom, 1944) onward argue that this concentration makes political repression close to unavoidable: if the state is your only employer and landlord, dissent is dangerous. Rosa Luxemburg, a revolutionary Marxist, saw the danger in 1918, writing of the Bolsheviks: "Freedom only for the supporters of the government, only for the members of one party... is no freedom at all. Freedom is always and exclusively freedom for the one who thinks differently."

4. No way to stop a catastrophe. The great famines happened where officials who reported bad news were punished, as at Lushan in 1959. The economist Amartya Sen, whose Nobel Prize recognised in part his work on famines, argued that famine has never occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press. Whatever one thinks of the universal claim, the communist famines fit the pattern: the information that would have stopped them existed, and the system suppressed it.

What its defenders say

1. It industrialised poor countries fast. The USSR went from a peasant empire to an industrial superpower in two generations and was the main force that defeated Nazi Germany. Allen calls it one of the most successful developing economies of the twentieth century.

2. It delivered literacy and health. Soviet literacy was about 92% by 1950. In 1978, China and India were both very poor, with China's output per person only slightly higher, yet Chinese life expectancy was about 63 years and India's about 52. Cuba matches rich countries on life expectancy at a fraction of their income. Defenders argue that these gains came from deliberate public investment in schools, clinics and women's work, not from growth alone.

3. It faced a hostile world. Communist states were born in civil war, invasion and blockade, and spent heavily on defence against capitalist powers that wanted them gone. The US embargo on Cuba has lasted for decades.

4. "It was never really tried." This argument has several serious forms:
- Marx's own conditions were never met. He said communism required the abundance of advanced capitalism; it was attempted instead in poor, agrarian countries, exactly where he thought it could not work.
- The revolution was betrayed. Leon Trotsky argued in The Revolution Betrayed (1936) that Stalin's bureaucracy had hijacked a workers' state. Luxemburg and later the anarchists (see the next deep dive) argued that the vanguard party itself was the mistake.
- Ownership by the state is not ownership by society. Workers in the USSR had no more control over their factories than workers under capitalism, and arguably less. On this view, state socialism was really "state capitalism" with one giant boss.

How the critics answer back

Critics accept that Soviet growth and social gains were real, but point out that capitalist countries starting from similar positions often did as well or better without the famines. Finland, which had been part of the Russian Empire, had an output per person of about $6,800 in 1950 and $27,000 by 1989; the USSR went from about $4,500 to $11,300. Spain, poorer than the USSR in 1950, was far richer by 1989. China's largest gains in income and poverty came after it brought back markets.

To "never really tried", they reply that every attempt to abolish markets and private ownership, in very different countries and cultures, led to a one-party state and a planned economy with the same problems. If the outcome is that consistent, they argue, the problem is likely in the design, not just in bad luck or bad leaders. Defenders answer that the designs were similar because the later revolutions copied the Soviet model, so they are not independent tests.

The live question is not whether Stalin's or Mao's system worked. Almost nobody now defends it as it was. The live question is whether any society can own the means of production in common without concentrating power in a state, and that question leads straight to anarchism.

What is still open

Could a planned economy work with modern computing? Some writers argue that today's data and algorithms answer Hayek; critics reply that the hard part was always incentives and the knowledge people never write down, not arithmetic. And how much responsibility for the famines rests with the ideology rather than with particular leaders? Both questions are still argued.

The takeaway

Communism as Marx imagined it, a classless, stateless society of abundance where goods are shared "according to needs", has never existed. What existed were states run by a single party that abolished most private property and replaced markets with central plans. Those states industrialised poor countries quickly and made real gains in literacy and health, and the USSR did much to defeat Nazi Germany. They also produced the deadliest famines in modern history, in Ukraine and Kazakhstan (1930–33) and in China (1959–61), mass political killing, and economies that stagnated once the easy gains were made. Their failures came from three linked problems: planners couldn't gather the knowledge prices carry, managers had every reason to waste and hide, and a state with all the economic power and no opposition could neither stop a catastrophe nor admit one. Defenders argue that the true idea was never tried; critics answer that every attempt went the same way.

Try this: pick one ordinary item in your home, such as a toothbrush, and try to write its "material balance": every input it needs, every input those inputs need, and where each would come from. Stop after ten minutes and count how many ledgers you would need. Then ask the defenders' question: what would you want a society to guarantee everyone, whatever its system, and who would decide?

Sources & Further Reading

Sources
- Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), ch. 2; Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875), parts I and IV; Engels, Anti-Dühring (1878), part III ch. 2 (all at marxists.org).
- V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), ch. 2; The State and Revolution (1917), ch. 5; Draft Decree on the Dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (6 January 1918); Tenth Party Congress report on the tax in kind (15 March 1921) and Resolution on Party Unity (16 March 1921); the Petropavlovsk (Kronstadt) resolution, 28 February 1921 (all at marxists.org).
- J. V. Stalin, speech of 27 December 1929 on the kulaks; "Dizzy with Success", Pravda, 2 March 1930; "The Tasks of Business Executives", 4 February 1931; report on the First Five-Year Plan, January 1933 (marxists.org).
- Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution (1918), ch. 6; Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936) (marxists.org).
- O. Rudnytskyi, N. Levchuk, O. Wolowyna, P. Shevchuk and A. Kovbasiuk, "Demography of a man-made human catastrophe: the case of massive famine in Ukraine 1932–1933", Canadian Studies in Population 42 (2015); O. Wolowyna et al., "Regional variations of 1932–34 famine losses in Ukraine", Canadian Studies in Population (2016).
- Holodomor Research and Education Consortium (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta), "Holodomor Basic Facts".
- Other Holodomor estimates, the scholars' positions on genocide, the USSR-wide range and national recognitions, as summarised in the Wikipedia articles "Holodomor" and "Holodomor genocide question" (leads to the named works).
- Wilson Center, event summary for Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe (Cornell University Press, 2018).
- Soviet archival repression figures (executions 1921–53 and 1937–38; Gulag deaths), as summarised in the Wikipedia articles "Excess mortality in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin" and "Gulag" (leads).
- Maddison Project Database 2023 (University of Groningen), GDP per capita in 2011 international dollars; all ratios and growth rates in this piece computed from it.
- Our World in Data, life expectancy (UN World Population Prospects) and long-run literacy rates.
- Robert C. Allen, Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2003), publisher's summary.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Socialism" (central planning and the Soviet model).
- J. Kornai, E. Maskin and G. Roland, "Understanding the Soft Budget Constraint", Journal of Economic Literature 41(4), 2003; F. A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society" (1945, Econlib).
- Communist Party of China, Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China (27 June 1981), marxists.org.
- Great Leap famine estimates as tabulated in the Wikipedia article "Great Chinese Famine" (lead to the named studies); Frank Dikötter's own summary of Mao's Great Famine (frankdikotter.com).
- Deng Xiaoping, opening speech to the 12th National Congress (1 September 1982) and talks in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (January–February 1992), marxists.org.
- World Bank press release, "Lifting 800 Million People Out of Poverty" (1 April 2022); World Bank, Viet Nam overview (2026).
- Human Rights Watch, World Report 2025 and World Report 2026, Cuba chapters; Cubadebate, "Hoy somos menos de 10 millones de cubanos residentes" (19 July 2024, ONEI data).
- Documentation Center of Cambodia (dccam.org); Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, timeline (Case 002/02 judgment, 16 November 2018).
- Peterson Institute for International Economics, summary of S. Haggard and M. Noland, Famine in North Korea (2007); UN Human Rights Council, Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the DPRK, A/HRC/25/63 (7 February 2014).

Go deeper
- 🌐 Critique of the Gotha Programme — Karl Marx. Short, and the only place Marx describes the two phases of communism. Read part I before reading anyone who claims to know what Marx "really" wanted.
- 📘 Farm to Factory — Robert C. Allen. The strongest scholarly case that Soviet planning produced real, fast growth, and an honest account of where it went wrong.
- 📘 The Socialist System — János Kornai. The insider's anatomy of how Soviet-type economies worked and why they produced shortage, by the economist who named the soft budget constraint.
- 📘 Mao's Great Famine — Frank Dikötter. A harrowing archival account of the Great Leap; read it alongside the demographers' lower estimates in Part 4.
- 📘 The Hungry Steppe — Sarah Cameron. The overlooked Kazakh famine, which killed a larger share of its people than any other Soviet famine.
- 🌐 SEP: Socialism — the clearest even-handed map of the arguments over planning, markets and what socialists might still want.
- 🌐 Maddison Project Database — download the data and compare any communist country with its neighbours yourself.
- 🌐 Companion pieces in this library: The Political Spectrum, Fairly Presented and The Great Political Traditions (Politics); Russia and China in Condensed History of Nations; and in this series Capitalism, Socialism: The Many Kinds, Anarchism: Order Without Rulers and The Mixed Economy.