Why does communism always get a bad rap?

I will not pretend to be much of a student of the history of the Soviet Union. I’m not going to be an apologist for repression in the name of Revolution.

But I will staunchly maintain that I think communism has been given the short shrift in history. The latest is in a book (which otherwise sounds interesting) by Archie Brown. It’s intelligently reviewed in Salon, here:

For Brown, a Communist system had three pairs of identifying characteristics, all of which have their origins in Lenin’s ideology and philosophy. In the political realm, a monopoly of power was held by one party, with most of the power concentrated at the top, and that party operated through the process Lenin called “democratic centralism.” That was supposed to mean that open discussion could precede decision-making, which was then administered with unanimity and iron discipline. It usually meant, of course, that decisions were handed down from a dictator or a small circle of oligarchs, and were neither discussed nor questioned. In the economic realm, the state controlled the means of production, and a command economy, rather than a market economy, predominated. In the ideological realm, the declared aim of building communism — for Marx, the classless, stateless final stage of human development — was the state’s “ultimate, legitimizing goal,” and the state belonged to an international Communist movement aimed at moving the whole world toward that future society.

And there’s the one thing that I disagree with: communism does not always have to be Communism. The fact is that communism, as I see it, is primarily an economic system — unfortunately, it’s always been hitched to a political system that is totalitarian in nature.

I’m not sure that it has to be — there are things about communism that would work really well under a democracy, I should think.

And no, I’m not an anti-capitalist. The genius of capitalism is that it manages to harness individual human greed, and through a market, turn that into a group benefit for consumers. I don’t necessarily think that communism is better than capitalism. But I do think that democracy is, by and large, better than the inevitable corruption that comes with a dictatorship. And I just wish that a communist economic system had been tried without the handicap of a totalitarian political system.

I know, communism tends to require a command economy, which tends to require commands. But even in the blockquote above, those commands are supposed to be debated democratically. Look at Canada — we have, if we ever get back to a majority government, essentially a totalitarian government that we elect every four years.

Of course, could a command economy every be as efficient as a market economy? Everyone says no, but they didn’t exactly rely on a free market to provide all the tanks in WW2, did they?

Anyway, the book sounds interesting: “The Rise and Fall of Communism.”