> Yet his philosophy changed it largely for the worst: the 40% of humanity who lived under Marxist regimes for much of the 20th century endured famines, gulags and party dictatorships.
"Marxist" is not the same as "Communist." A subtle distinction, perhaps, but one would think it would be an important one in an article like this.
It is not strictly the same, but Marx enabled the tragedies of the 20th century with his philosophy. Crucial points are vague (he, for example, said almost nothing relevant about socialism) and the teleological force of his assumptions created a kind of infallibility framework exploited by the dictatorships to justify their deeds. The communism practiced behind the iron curtain was a perfect valid interpretation of his work.
I recommend a really big book called 'Main Currents of Marxism' by the late ex-communist polish philosopher Leszek Kołakowski.
What's the difference? To me Communism is just the practical implementation of Marxism. Marx makes it pretty clear Manifesto of the Communist Party what policies he thinks should be implemented. And in practice those policies haven't worked out well (not that his criticisms don't have some merit).
> What's the difference [between Marxism and Communism]?
You're unlikely to get a good answer to that here. HN is a site with heavy entrepreneurial/libertarian bent. Most of the people here (myself included) are chiefly going to be familiar with Marxism through the lens of mid-century libertarian polemics against central planning and histories of various brutal dictatorships that wrapped themselves in the "flag" of Marxism.
For my part, I think we're going to have to distinguish, at least, between Marx's ideas, Soviet Leninist ideas, and generic anti-market central planning. For instance, I think Marx envisioned Communism emerging from an advanced industrialized capitalist society, while all historical "Communist" countries emerged from feudal unindustrialized ones. I think some "communist" thinkers envisioned an end-state that was something like a market economy, except the workers would own the factories in which they worked rather than some remote "capitalist."
I would be extremely surprised (though grateful!) if many on HN had made a serious study of Marxism and could explain it, without succumbing to the biases I outlined above.
Fun story: In history class, we used a text book that showed an election poster by the CDU, Germany's conservative party, from the late 1940s that advocated central planning.
The class was kind of shocked, one student even claimed that it must be a hoax. Our teacher - by German standards a conservative - calmly explained that the conservative party did indeed advocate central planning for the limited objective of rebuilding the German economy - and German cities - after the war.
(I am not sure if that was actually implemented, though. But given the amount of destruction in some German cities, I suppose some amount of planning was required to rebuild them.)
Well, it depends which “Communism” you are talking about.
If you are talking about the broad set of political theories going by the name “Communism”, then the difference is that Communism is a broad set of theories of which Marxism is one specific theory (or, depending on how broadly you use the term “Marxism”, a distinct set of closely related theories within the broader universe of Communism.)
If, OTOH, you mean “the set of regimes which established control of various states starting with the Soviet Union and including a large number of others throughout the 20th century, with somemretaining power into the 21st”, then the difference is that “Communism” is really Leninism and it's derivatives, which (again depending on how broadly you see Marxism) is either a radical departure from key premises of Marxism that has an affectation of rhetorically labelling itself a subset of Marxism despite that radical departure, or a particular distinct subset of Marxism characterized most importantly by adaptation to the conditions in much of the world outside of North America and Western Europe in the 20th Century by abandoning the precondition of development of a broad proletarian class consciousness under developed capitalism in favor of the leadership of a narrow activist elite to shepherd the revolution (vanguardism).
> Marx makes it pretty clear Manifesto of the Communist Party what policies he thinks should be implemented.
Marx and Engels make pretty clear in the Manifesto what they thought should be the next policy steps taken given prevailing conditions in developed capitalist states in Western Europe at the time.
To the limited extent that those recommendations have subsequently been adopted in developed capitalist states, they've worked out pretty well; the developed world has pretty much abandoned the system 19th Century critics named “capitalism” in the course of criticizing it for the hybrid modern “mixed economy”, and while there are certainly people—especially those at, or who dream they would be at, the top of the pile of capitalist heap—who’d like to go back, that doesn't seem to be a big mass movement.
If I tell you a course you should take to get from point A to point B and you start out at point C but try to follow it's sequence of headings and distances, with some invented alterations of your own, and end up falling into a volcano instead of getting to point B, it may not be my directions that are at fault.
Have there been any true communist implementations at a national level? My understanding is that countries like the USSR and PRC are communist on paper, but are more totalitarian than communist in how they were (are) actually governed.
Yes. Although the some people would disagree. I think if every time you try something it doesn't work and then people justify that by saying, "you didn't do it right", it probably tells you more about the quality of the idea than the abilities of the implementors.
Here are some of the things communists advocate for:
1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.
Most communist countries actually followed these, at least at the start. (There are some countries, particularly in Africa, that claimed to be communist to get aid from the USSR, but didn't actually implement communism). The problem in practice is that this is liable to be taken over by totalitarians, as you noted.
It's funny how here we tend advocate for decentralized systems, as more robust and resilient than centralized ones, yet have no problem concentrating political or economical power on a single point of failure.
Communism is not compatible with an open society. It is entirely coercive and necessarily totalitarian as shown in detail by Karl Popper in The Open Society. You're pretty much free to form a local (voluntary) commune within a free society but don't try it the other way round.
Neither is capitalism as implemented today, as people with power either control capital and thus workers indirectly and are entirely above any important personal repercussions.
The main difference is that communism is bottom up pyramid of societies, while capitalism is a top down pyramid of companies.
If you think capitalism is not coercive, why do you go to work every day for less value than you produce?
Contracts are based on enforcement too. The root word in there is force.
That's kind of the point though isn't it? Communism necessitates "seizing the means of production" and collectivizing it into the central bureaucracy. If you squint your eyes a bit it would be difficult to even tell the difference between that and when a dictator is consolidating power.
So the results of a communist takeover and a dictator rising to power are almost indistinguishable aside from one glaring difference. Communism lacks the autocrat. Should it even be a shock to us at this point that one always seems to come along and fill those shoes?
> That's kind of the point though isn't it? Communism necessitates "seizing the means of production" and collectivizing it into the central bureaucracy.
No, it doesn't.
There are subsets of Communist thought that require centralism, but they aren't all of Communism.
> Marx literally calls for centralization in his writings.
Marxism isn't all of Communism.
> And in practice there is always centralization in Communist regimes.
All actual Communist regimes have been based in Leninism and it's derivatives, which are a small subset (in terms of schools of theory) of derivatives of Marxism, which themselves, again, don't constitute all of Communism.
"Marxist" is not the same as "Communist." A subtle distinction, perhaps, but one would think it would be an important one in an article like this.