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Note that communism is a branch of socialism. This article only discusses criticisms that are specific to communism and not other forms of socialism. See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general. Note also that when referring to a ideology or a proponent of that ideology, the terms communism and communist take an initial lowercase letter. When they refer explicitly to a Communist Party or to a member of that party, the terms are capitalized.

Criticisms of communism can be divided in two broad categories: One is those concerning themselves with the real-world results of the 20th century Communist states. Such critics include both pro and anti communists. Another is those concerning themselves with Marxism, the claimed political ideology of the Communist states. A central question is the implications of the real-world results of the Communist states for Marxist theory.

Criticisms of 20th century Communist states

Human rights violations

Extensive historical research, especially after the fall of Communism opened the archives of many of the former Communist states, has documented the large scale human rights violations that occurred in these states. Several of the most prominent researchers are former communists who become disillusioned with the Communist system they had powerful positions in, like Alexander Nikolaevich Yakovlev and Dmitri Volkogonov, or after they started their research, like several of the authors of The Black Book of Communism. Robert Conquest, another former communist, was one of the first to document the Great Purge in his book The Great Terror and was vehemently criticized for this by many Western intellectuals. He was vindicated when the achieves were opened. Jung Chang, one of the authors of Mao: The Unknown Story, was a Red Guard in her youth. See the end of the article for an extensive reference list.

Numbers killed by Communist states according to the Black Book of Communism^[2]

Soviet Union	20 million
China	65 million
Vietnam	1 million
North Korea	2 million
Cambodia	2 million
Eastern Europe	1 million
Latin America	150,000
Africa	1.7 million
Afghanistan	1.5 million

The human rights violations were particularly intensive during the regimes of Stalin and Mao, but started immediately after the Russian revolution during the regime of Lenin. Most prominent are deaths due to executions, forced labor camps, genocides of certain ethnic minorities, and mass starvations caused by either government mismanagement or deliberately. The exact number of deaths caused by these regimes is somewhat disputed, but the historical research shows at least tens of millions and several overviews give a number close to one hundred million deaths.^[3] Yakovlev, the researcher with the best access to the Soviet achieves, have recently stated that in the Soviet Union alone 20-25 millions were killed for political motives or in prisons and camps. In addition, more than 10.5 million died from famine.^[4] Some particularly brutal episodes were the Holodomor, the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward, and The Killing Fields.

Yakovlev is especially critical of the treatment of millions of children of claimed political opponents. Children of former Imperial officers and peasants were held as hostages and sometimes shot during the Russian Civil War. The children of soldiers who surrendered during WWII could be punished. Some children followed their parents to the Gulags, where their mortality rate was especially high. In 1954 there were 884,057 "specially resettled" children under the age of sixteen. Others were placed in special orphanages run by the secret police in order to be reeducated, often losing even their names, and were considered socially dangerous also as adults.^[5]

Other criticisms concern lack of freedom of speech^[6] and religious and ethnic persecutions.^[7] The use of an extensive network of civilian informants, sometimes including family members, created a society where no one could trust other citizens.^[8] In some Communist states it was common practice to classify internal critics of the system as having a mental disease, like sluggishly progressing schizophrenia - which was only recognized in Communist states - and incarcerate them in mental hospitals.^[9] Workers were not allowed to join free trade unions.^[10] Several internal uprisings were suppressed by military force, like the Tambov rebellion, the Kronstadt rebellion, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Some Communist states directly supported claimed terrorist groups. Examples include the PFLP, the Red Army Fraction, and the Japanese Red Army.^[11]

Another criticism is imperialism. Lenin in 1917 declared the unconditional right of self-determination and separation for the national minorities. Despite this, when the Russian Civil War was won he used military force to conquer the newly independent nations Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan.^[12] Stalin conquered the Baltic states and created satellite states in Eastern Europe. China conquered Tibet. Soviet forces intervened against anti-Communist uprisings during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the Prague Spring, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

The leaders of the Communist states themselves frequently announced their support for democracy, held regular elections and sometimes even gave their countries names such as the "German Democratic Republic" or the "Democratic People's Republic of Korea". Some supporters of the Communist states have argued that those states were democratic. However, critics point out that, in practice, one political party held an absolute monopoly on power, dissent was banned, and the elections usually featured a single candidate and were ripe with fraud (often producing implausible results of 99% in favor of the candidate). Many of the leaders of Communist states cultivated an extensive personality cult. In some cases the leadership of the state became inherited.

The escape valve of last resort from repressive regimes is emigration or allowing people to "vote with their feet". The Communist states strictly prohibited this, the most famous example being the Berlin Wall. During the Wall's existence 60,000 people were sentenced for attempting to "flee the Republic"; there were around 5,000 successful escapes into West Berlin; and at least 239 people were killed trying to cross.^[13]

Comparison with human rights violations in other political systems

Some supporters of communism find this approach simplistic, noting that humans rights violations such as executions, forced labor camps, the repression of ethnic minorities, and mass starvation were patterns in both non-democratic Russian and Chinese history before their respective Communist takeovers, and that later the opposing capitalist states also committed some human rights violations, like state terrorism. However, evils in other regimes can hardly be used to justify new ones. Advocates reply that they only seek to put the events into perspective, not justify them. Also this defense can be criticized. Any attempt similarly to similarly relativize Nazi and fascist crimes would be widely seen as obnoxious. Moreover, Alexander Solzhenitsyn argues in his book Gulag Archipelago that the living conditions and death rates of the inmates in the Soviet era Gulags were much worse than those of the Czarist era Katorgas. The worst crop failure of late Czarist Russia, in 1892, caused 375,000 to 400,000 deaths, while famines under both Lenin and Stalin caused many millions of deaths.^[14][15] The Czarist regime executed 3,932 persons for political crimes between 1825 and 1910. 681,692 persons were executed between 1937 and 1938 during the Great Purge.^[16]

Another comparison may be to the deaths caused by capitalism during several centuries, a number claimed by some (for example, the French book Le Livre Noir du capitalisme - "The Black Book of capitalism") to be far greater. However, this was achieved by counting the crimes of colonialism or imperialism, where defenders of capitalism would argue that the deaths were caused by anti-capitalism, i.e. by reducing the economic freedom of people. But this defense of capitalism may be similar to the defense of communism that the Communist states were not "real" communist societies. A better comparison may be to liberal democracies. According to the research supporting the democratic peace theory, they have very low levels of systematic violence.

According to the historian Richard Pipes, the Communist states share some responsibility for WWII. Both Hitler and Mussolini used the Soviet Union as a model for their own totalitarian states and Hitler privately expressed that Stalin was a "genius". In turn, Stalin expressed desire for another great war that would leave his enemies weakened. He allowed the testing and production of German weapons that were forbidden by the Versailles Treaty to occur on Soviet territory. During the critical 1932 German elections, he forbid the German Communists from collaborating with the Social Democrats. These parties together gained more votes than Hitler and could have prevented him from becoming Chancellor.^[17]

Economic and social development

Advocates of central economic planning claim that it has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, including rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, especially during the 1930s. Another example is the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba. New research shows that the Soviet figures were largely fabricated, especially those from the Stalin era. Growth was more impressive in 1950s and 1960s but later declined and according to some estimates became negative in the late eighties.^[18][19] Before the collectivization, Russia had been the "breadbasket of Europe," supplying 40% of the world’s wheat exports in the bumper years 1909 and 1910. The Soviet Union became a net importer of grain, unable to produce enough food to feed its own population.^[20]

China and Vietnam achieved much higher rates of growth after introducing capitalist economic reforms and the higher growth rates was accompanied by declining poverty.^[21][22] The Communist states do not compare favorable when looking at divided nations with similar culture before the Communist takeovers: North Korea vs. South Korea; China vs. Hong Kong and Taiwan; and East Germany vs. West Germany. East vs. West German productivity was around 90% in 1936^[23] and around 60-65% in 1954.^[24] When compared to the EU, the East German productivity declined from 67% in 1950 to 50% before the unification in 1989. All the Eastern European nations had productivity far below the EU average.^[25] Unlike the slow transition in China and Vietnam, the abrupt end to central planning was followed by a depression in many of the states of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. As of 2003, all of them have positive economic growth and almost all have a higher GDP/capita than before the transition.^[26]

The Communist states used their energy inefficiently, getting much less economic growth from the same amount of energy than the Western nations and the Third World. However, it can be argued that there was little need for energy efficiency since the Soviet Union was a net exporter of oil and gas and China has large coal reserves.

Supporters of the Communist states note the social and cultural programs, sometimes administered by labor organizations. They included in theory guaranteed employment, subsidized food and clothing, free health care, free child care, and free education. Early advances in the status of women were also notable, especially in Islamic areas of the Soviet Union.^[27] They point out to the claimed high levels of literacy enjoyed by Eastern Europeans (in comparison, for instance, with Southern Europe), Cubans or Chinese.

However, again the Communist parts of the divided nations do not compare favorably. Millions died in famines in Communist China and North Korea.^[28][29] East Germans were shorter than West Germans and this difference increased with time, probably due to differences in factors such as nutrition and medical services.^[30] Life satisfaction increased in East Germany after the reunification.^[31] The Soviet education system was full of propaganda and of low quality. The Soviet Union spent far less on health care than the Western nations and in the 1970s and 1980s the quality was deteriorating. The pension and welfare programs failed to provide adequate protection.^[32]

In the Soviet Union in 1989 there was rationing of meat and sugar. The average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the Czar in 1913. Blacks in apartheid South Africa owned more cars per capita. The only area of consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion of hard liquor. Two-thirds of the households had no hot water, and a third had no running water at all. According to the government paper, Izvestia, a typical working class family of four was forced to live for 8 years in a single 8x8 foot room, before marginally better accommodation became available. The housing shortage was so acute that at all times 17% of Soviet families had to be physically separated for want of adequate space. A third of the hospitals had no running water and the bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent medical attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not only common, but routine. Only 15 percent of Soviet youth were able to attend institutions of higher learning compared to 34 percent in the U.S. The average welfare mother in the United States received more income in a month, than the average Soviet worker could earn in a year.^[33]

After 1965, life expectancy began to plateau or even decreased, especially for males, in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe while it continued to increase in Western Europe. This divergence between two parts of Europe went on during three decades leading to a profound gap in the mid 90s. The life expectancy sharply declined after the change to market economy in several of the states of the former Soviet Union but may now have started to increase in the Baltic states. In several Eastern European nations life expectancy started to increase immediately after the fall of Communism. The previous decline for males continued for a time in some, like Romania, before starting to increase.^[34]

Milovan Djilas, once one of the most powerful leaders in Communist Yugoslavia, in his book New Class argued that a new powerful class of party bureaucrats emerged which exploited the rest of the population. In the Soviet Union this group was known as the Nomenklatura.

Cuba is often cited as a successful example by communists. However, Cuba was one of most developed nations in Latin America before Castro. Other Latin American nations have seen greater increases in literacy than Cuba. Calories per person have declined in Cuba while it has increased in most other Latin American nations. Cubans eat less cereals and meat than before Castro.^[35] On the other hand, there is a United States embargo against Cuba.

Arts, science, technology, and environment

The Communist states censored the arts, usually only allowing socialist realism. Some Communist states have been involved in the destruction of cultural heritage: the historical center of Bucharest, hundreds of churches in the Soviet Union, and the Cultural Revolution are some examples.^[36]

Certain sciences were suppressed. One example is censorship and revisionism of history. Research was suppressed in biology and genetics (see Lysenkoism), linguistics (see Japhetic theory), cybernetics, psychology and psychiatry, and even organic chemistry.(See suppressed research in the Soviet Union) The emphasis on the "hard sciences" produced mixed results.^[37] There were very few Nobel Prize winners from Communist states.^[38]

Soviet technology in many sectors lagged Western technology. Exceptions include areas like the Soviet space program and military technology where occasionally the Communist technology was more advanced due to a massive concentration of research resources. According to the CIA, much of the technology in the Communist states consisted simply of copies of Western products that had been legally purchased or gained through a massive espionage program. Stricter Western control of the export of technology through COCOM and providing defective technology to Communist agents after the discovery of the Farewell Dossier contributed to the fall of Communism.^[39][40][41]

Also pointed out is the environmental disasters. One is the gradual disappearance of the Aral Sea and a similar diminishing of the Caspian Sea because of the diversion of the rivers that fed them. Another the pollution of the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and the unique freshwater environment of Lake Baikal. Many of the rivers were polluted; several, like the Vistula and Oder rivers in Poland, were virtually ecologically dead. Over 70% of the surface water in the Soviet Union was polluted. In 1988 only 30% of the sewage in the Soviet Union was treated properly. Established health standards for air pollution was exceeded by ten times or more in 103 cities in the Soviet Union in 1988. The air pollution problem was even more severe in Eastern Europe. It caused a rapid growth in lung cancer, forest die-back, and damage to buildings and cultural heritages. According to official sources, 58 percent of total agricultural land of the former Soviet Union was affected by salinization, erosion, acidity, or waterlogging. Nuclear waste was dumped in the Sea of Japan, the Arctic Ocean, and in locations in the Far East. It was revealed in 1992 that in the city of Moscow there were 636 radioactive toxic waste sites and 1,500 in St. Petersburg.^[42][43] The environmental situation has improved in every studied former Communist state.^{[44][45][46][47]}

Socialist criticisms of the Communist states

There were early Marxist critics of the first Communist states, like Mensheviks and Trotskyites. The revisionist Marxists, such as Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky denied the necessity of a revolution. However, most foreign communists and Communist parties at first supported the Communist states and accepted the leadership of the Soviet Union (see Comintern). Criticisms gradually increased, especially after Stalin was denounced in the 1956 speech On the Personality Cult and its Consequences, after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, and after the fall of Communism in 1989-91.

There were also early criticisms from non-Marxist socialists, like Bertrand Russell and Emma Goldman. Some, like H G Wells, were initially supportive but gradually became more disillusioned as more details were revealed. Members of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and the fraction the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries sometimes fought the Bolsheviks before and in the Russian Civil War. Fanya Kaplan tried to assassinate Lenin. The anarchists have differed from Marx since Bakunin.

Criticisms of Marxist theory

See criticisms of socialism for a discussion of objections to socialism in general. There are also specific criticisms of Marxist theory.

Relevance of the Communist states for Marxist theory

Marxist critics of the Communist states argue that the problems in the Communist states cannot be used to criticize Marxist theory and the communist society. One argument is that a "Communist state" is an impossibility according to Marxist theory. The communist society itself is stateless in theory and thus cannot be judged by the 20th century states. However, Marx and Engel's theory includes a transitory state phase known as the dictatorship of the proletariat.^[48] Later, the state will "whither away" and the dictatorship of the proletariat will be replaced by the communist society. The Communist states claimed to be this dictatorship of the proletariat. If they did follow Marxist theory, then the theory failed to work in the real world.

Trotskyites and other Leninists explain this by arguing that all Communist states after Lenin's death did not actually adhere to Marxism but rather were perversions heavily influenced by Stalinism.^[49] However, it has been argued that it was Lenin who created the repressive institutions that Stalin later used. Lenin had analyzed the Paris Commune and had concluded that it failed due to "excessive generosity-it should have exterminated its enemies".^[50] His regime summarily executed hundreds of thousands of "class enemies", created the Cheka, created the system that later become the Gulags, and was responsible for a policy of food requisitioning during the Russian Civil War that was partially responsible for a famine causing 3-10 million deaths.^{[51][52][53][54]}

Some Marxist supporters instead argue that no Communist state was Marxist since no Communist state was democratic. However, Marx and Engels gave few hints regarding how the dictatorship of the proletariat or the later communist society should be implemented. They rejected the concept of liberal democracy, arguing that it could not represent the interest of the proletariat. It is often argued that Marx and Engels supported the claimed direct democracy of the Paris Commune as a model.^[55] However, this is disputed^[56] and there were human rights violations even during the few months the Commune existed.^[57]

Marx: ...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...

Engels: ...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...

Engels: As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....

Lenin quoted these^[58] and other^[59] statements by Marx and Engels as support for using the authoritarian principles of vanguard party and democratic centralism during the dictatorship of the proletariat in Communist states. This excluded democracy even in theory outside the ruling Communist party. Lenin's regime also banned fractions within the party. This made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality.^[60] When the Marxists only gained a minority vote in the democratic Russian Constituent Assembly election, 1917, Lenin dissolved the Constituent Assembly after its first session and overturned the election.^[61] All the later Communist states became and remained totalitarian as long as the Communists remained in power, justifying this by referring to Lenin's interpretation of Marxism, Marxism-Leninism.^[62]

On the other hand, some democratic states have been ruled by parties calling themselves Communist without becoming totalitarian. One example is Moldova. Whether these parties and similar parties without power are Marxist is disputed, because, while they aim for a socialist society, they reject Marxist cornerstones like a proletarian revolution and at least for now accept a market economy.(see Eurocommunism and Definition of a Communist state)

Another argument is that true communism can only develop as a response to the contradictions of bourgeois capitalism; therefore, the failure of those experiments in communism to date can be attributed to the fact they did not emerge in this manner. The Soviet Union is a case in point - Tsarist Russia was quasi-feudal, not capitalist. So it is argued by that the failure of Soviet socialism to sustain itself is actually an affirmation of Marxist theory. The historian Orlando Figes has criticized this by pointing out that many different forms of Marxism have been tried in many different societies with varying degree of development.^[63] Examples include Lenin's War communism and New Economic Policy, Stalinism and post-Stalinism in the industrialized Central Eastern European nations and the Soviet Union, profit-sharing and decentralized workers' councils under Tito, extreme self-reliance under Juche, and reforms under Perestroika and Glasnost. Maoism is a broad concept that includes episodes such as self-sufficient communes during the Great Leap Forward, anti-intellectualism during the Cultural Revolution, and the almost primitivist Red Khmers.

General criticisms

Eric Hoffer has communism as one of the chief examples of the mass movement which offers The True Believer a glorious, if imaginary, future to compensate for the frustrations of his present. Such movements need people to be willing to sacrifice all for that future, including themselves and others. To do that, they need to devalue the past and present. This is not a criticism of Communist tenets specifically; Hoffer's other chief examples are Fascists, Nationalists, and the founding stages of religions.

Arthur Koestler describes Marxism as a closed system, like Catholicism or orthodox Freudianism. This has three peculiarities: It claims to represent a universal truth, which explains everything, and can cure every ill. It can automatically process and reinterpret all potentially damaging data by methods of casuistry, emotionally appealing and beyond common logic. It invalidates criticism by deducing what the subjective motivation of the critic must be, and by arguing about that.

Marxists respond to such allegations by arguing that they are straw men (deliberate misrepresentations of Marxist theory) or ad hominem attacks. For example, they may hold that Marxism does not, in fact, claim to "explain everything and cure every ill"; that it merely recommends certain political and social policies, just as all other ideologies do. On the issue of the True Believer, Marxists may concede the point that some "True Believers" exist in their midst, but argue that not all of them are "True Believers", and that, in any case, the behaviour of individual Marxists says nothing about the validity of Marxism itself.

Historical materialism

Historical materialism is normally considered the intellectual basis of Marxism. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human history in economic, technological, and more broadly, material factors, as well as the clashes of material interests among tribes, social classes and nations. However, it ignores other causes of historical and social change, like biology, genetics, philosophy, art, religion, or other causes that are not "materialist" according to Marxists.

In turn, the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel can be considered the basis of Historical materialism. Max Stirner has argued that this philosophy leads to nihilism and not to historical materialism.

Labor theory of value

Fundamental to Marxist theory is the labor theory of value, adapted by Marx from earlier developments by David Ricardo and Adam Smith. It claims that the value (or, to be more exact, use-value) of an item is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. In other words, the greater the amount of work necessary to produce an object, the greater the value of that object. This implies that value is objective, and that it may not be reflected by the price of the object in question (since price is determined by supply and demand, and is not linked to the amount of necessary work that must be expended to produce the object). By contrast, most capitalist economists now use the subjective theory of value, which implies that the only value of an object on which different observers can agree is its price on the market (which is based on the subjective utilities of the participants). Robert Nozick has criticized the qualifier "socially necessary" in the labor theory of value as not well-defined and concealing a subjective judgment of necessity.^[64]

Marx also stated that only labor could cause an increase in value. This suggests that labour intensive industries ought to have a higher rate of profit than those which use less labour which is empirically false. Marx explained this by that in real economic life prices vary in a systematic way from values. Providing the mathematics to explain this is known as the transformation problem. Critics respond that this make the once intuitively appealing theory very complicated and that there is still no justification for stating that only labor and not for example corn can increase value.^[65]

Tabula Rasa

East German border guard Conrad Schumann leaps into West Berlin. 35 million people fled from the Communist states.^[1]

Marxism views human nature as completely determined by the environment, a Tabula rasa. The historian Richard Pipes describes how this led to a belief in a coming new man without vices, in essence a new superior species (although one caused by the environment, not genetics). Trotsky thought that this new man would be able to control all unconscious processes, including those controlling bodily functions like digestion, and have the intellect of Aristotle. In order to reach this stage it was necessary and right to completely destroy the existing institutions that had formed the current wretched humans. This will make it possible to dispense with the state. This also explains the little value the Communists placed on the lives and rights of the current humans.^[66] In reality self-interest could not be destroyed and the new ruling class, the nomenklatura, quickly replaced the old aristocracy. Periodic attempts to destroy it, such as the Cultural Revolution during Mao's regime, failed.^[67]

Human rights

Bryan Caplan has criticized Marx's rejection of human rights. Marx:

"None of the supposed rights of man, therefore, go beyond the egoistic man, man as he is, as a member of civil society; that is, an individual separated from the community, withdrawn into himself, wholly preoccupied with his private interest and acting in accordance with his private caprice"

"Liberty is, therefore, the right to do everything which does not harm others... It is a question of the liberty of man regarded as an isolated monad, withdrawn into himself."

"The right of property, is, therefore, the right to enjoy one's fortunes and dispose of it as he will; without regard for other men and independently of society... It leads every man to see in other men, not the realization, but rather the limitation of his own liberty."

"[B]ourgeois 'freedom of conscience' is nothing but the toleration of all possible kinds of religious freedom of conscience, and that for its part [socialism] endeavors rather to liberate the conscience from the witchery of religion."

"political emancipation itself is not human emancipation."

Instead the utopian communist society will lead to "the positive transcendence of private property, or human self-estrangement, and therefore the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man... the complete return of man to himself as a social being..." Caplan argues that this rejection of human rights leads to tyranny and oppression of dissidents.^[68]

Historical analysis

The Marxist stages of history and the Marxist class analysis have been criticized. The historian Robert Conquest argues that detailed analyses of many historical periods fails to find support for these theories. Marx himself admitted that his theory could not explain the internal development of the "Asiatic" social system, where most of the world's population lived for thousands of years.^[69]

Marx's predictions

Marx made numerous predictions. He thought that the workers would become poorer and poorer as the capitalists exploited them more and more; that differences between the members within each class would become smaller and smaller and the classes would thus become more homogeneous; that the skilled workers would be replaced by unskilled workers doing assembly line work; that relations between the working class and the capitalists would get worse and worse; that the capitalists would become fewer and fewer due to an increasing number of monopolies; and that the proletarian revolution would occur first in the most industrialized nations.^[70][71]

Some of these are debatable, while others have been clearly proven wrong. This has been cited by critics as evidence that historical materialism is a flawed theory.^[72] Communists reply with two arguments: The first is that there were a number of major events and trends over the past century and a half which Marx could not have predicted: imperialism, World War I, the rise of social democracy and Keynesian economics in the West (that introduced the concept of redistribution of wealth, thereby narrowing the gap between rich and poor), World War II and finally the Cold War. In response, critics maintain that if so many unpredictable events have happened in the past, then an equal number could happen in the future, and therefore Marxist theory is not a reliable method of making predictions.

Lenin noted that the predicted increasing class polarization and communist revolution had failed to occur in the developed world. He then attempted to explain this by stating that imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism, and that developed countries had created a labor aristocracy content with capitalism by exploiting the developing world.

After the Western nations voluntarily gave up their colonies, supporters of communism have attempted to explain this with still another stage, sometimes called Neocolonialism, arguing that the Third World is exploited also without formal empires.^[73] For criticism of this, see Anti-globalization#Criticisms.

Pseudoscience

Marxism does not claim be to a science. However, historical materialism does. Karl Popper, another former Marxist, and others have argued that historical materialism is a pseudoscience because it is not falsifiable. Marxists respond that some social sciences are not falsifiable, since it is often difficult or outright impossible to test them via experiments (in the way hard science can be tested). This is especially true when many people and a long time is involved. Popper agreed on this, but instead used it as an argument against central planning and all ideologies that claim to know the future.^[74]

See also

• Criticisms of socialism
• The Black Book of Communism
• The Great Terror
• Democide

References and further reading

References

1. ^ Rummel, R.J. "How many did the Communist regimes murder?". Freedom, Democracy, Peace; Power, Democide, and War. Retrieved October 2, 2005.
2. ^ Bibliography: Courtois, 1999. Introduction
3. ^ "Deaths by Mass Unpleasantness: Estimated Totals for the Entire 20th Century". Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. Retrieved October 2, 2005.
4. ^ Bibliography: Yakovlev, 2004. p. 234
5. ^ Bibliography: Yakovlev, 2004. p. 29-47
6. ^ "A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Chapter 9 - Mass Media and the Arts". The Library of Congress. Country Studies. Retrieved October 3, 2005.
7. ^ Bibliography: Yakovlev, 2004. p. 153-169, 181-213.
8. ^ Koehler, John O. (2000). Stasi: The Untold Story of the East German Secret Police. Westview Press. ISBN 0813337445.
9. ^ "The Soviet Case: Prelude to a Global Consensus on Psychiatry and Human Rights". Human Rights Watch. Retrieved October 3, 2005.
10. ^ "A Country Study: Soviet Union (Former). Chapter 5. Trade Unions". The Library of Congress. Country Studies. Retrieved October 4, 2005.
11. ^ Courtois, 1999. Chapter 18
12. ^ Bibliography: Pipes, 1994. p. 141-166
13. ^ "A Concrete Curtain: The Life and Death of the Berlin Wall". Retrieved October 25, 2005.
14. ^ Bibliography: Pipes, 1994. p. 412-413, 419
15. ^ Bibliography: Conquest, 1986. p. 306
16. ^ Bibliography: Pipes, 2001. p. 66-67
17. ^ Bibliography: Pipes, 2001. p. 74-76, 96, 103-109
18. ^ Steele, Charles N (2002). "The Soviet Experiment: Lessons for Development" (PDF). in Morris, J.(ed.), Sustainable Development. Promoting Progress or Perpetuating Poverty? (London, Profile Book.
19. ^ Brainerd, Elizabeth (2002). "Reassessing The standard of living in the Soviet Union: an analysis using archival and anthropometric data" (PDF). Abram Bergson Memorial Conference, Harvard University, Davis Center, November 23–24.
20. ^ Horowitz, David (2000). The Politics of Bad Faith. Touchstone Books. ISBN 0684850230.
21. ^ Wand, Xiaolu, and Lian Meng (2001). "A Reevaluation of China's Economic Growth" (PDF). China Economic Review. 12 (4): 338–346. doi:10.1016/S1043-951X(01)00072-4.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
22. ^ Dollar, David (2002). "Reform, growth, and poverty in Vietnam, Volume 1". Policy, Research working paper series ; no. WPS 2837. Development Research Group, World Bank.
23. ^ Sleifer, Japp (1999). "Separated Unity: The East and West German Industrial Sector in 1936" (PDF). Research Memorandum GD-46. Groningen Growth and Development Centre.
24. ^ Sleifer, Japp (2002). "A Benchmark Comparison of East and West German Industrial Labour Productivity in 1954" (PDF). Research Memorandum GD-57. Groningen Growth and Development Centre.
25. ^ Ark, Bart van (1999). "Economic Growth and Labour Productivity In Europe: Half a Century of East-West Comparisons" (PDF). Research Memorandum GD-41. Groningen Growth and Development Centre.
26. ^ "2004. World Development Indicators 2004 online". Development Data Group, The World Bank. From the World Resources Institute. Retrieved October 7, 2005.
27. ^ Massell, Gregory J. (1974). The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919-1929. Princeton University Press. ISBN 069107562X.
28. ^ Bibliography: Chang, 2005
29. ^ Bibliography: Natsios, 2002
30. ^ Komlos, John, and Peter Kriwy (2001). "The Biological Standard of Living in the Two Germanies" (Document). Center for Economic Studies and Ifo Institute for Economic Research. {{cite document}}: Unknown parameter |ssrn= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |url= ignored (help); Unknown parameter |version= ignored (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
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Bibliography: Communist human rights violations

• Applebaum, Anne (2003) Gulag: A History. Broadway Books. ISBN 0767900561
• Chang, Jung & Halliday, Jon (2005) Mao: The Unknown Story. Knopf. ISBN 0679422714
• Conquest, Robert (1991) The Great Terror: A Reassessment. Oxford University Press ISBN 0195071328.
• Conquest, Robert (1986) The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195051807.
• Conquest, Robert (2000) Reflections on a Ravaged Century. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0393048187
• Courtois, Stephane; Werth, Nicolas; Panne, Jean-Louis; Paczkowski, Andrzej; Bartosek, Karel; Margolin, Jean-Louis & Kramer, Mark (1999). The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Harvard University Press. ISBN 0674076087.
• Hamilton-Merritt, Jane (1999) Tragic Mountains: The Hmong, the Americans, and the Secret Wars for Laos, 1942-1992 Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253207568.
• Jackson, Karl D. (1992) Cambodia, 1975–1978 Princeton University Press ISBN 069102541X.
• Kakar, M. Hassan (1997) Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion and the Afghan Response, 1979-1982 University of California Press. ISBN 0520208935.
• Khlevniuk, Oleg & Kozlov, Vladimir (2004) The History of the Gulag : From Collectivization to the Great Terror (Annals of Communism Series) Yale University Pres. ISBN 0300092849.
• Natsios, Andrew S. (2002) The Great North Korean Famine. Institute of Peace Press. ISBN 1929223331.
• Nghia M. Vo (2004) The Bamboo Gulag: Political Imprisonment in Communist Vietnam McFarland & Company. ISBN 0786417145.
• Pipes, Richard (2001) Communism Weidenfled and Nicoloson. ISBN 0297646885
• Pipes, Richard (1994) Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. ISBN 0679761845.
• Pipes, Richard (1990) The Russian Revolution 1899-1919. Collins Harvill. ISBN 0679400745.
• Rummel, R.J. (1996). Lethal Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917. Transaction Publishers ISBN 1560008873.
• Todorov, Tzvetan & Zaretsky, Robert (1999). Voices from the Gulag: Life and Death in Communist Bulgaria. Pennsylvania State University Press. ISBN 0271019611.
• Van Canh, Nyuyen (1985) Vietnam Under Communism, 1975-1982. Hoover Institution Press. ISBN 0817978526.
• Yakovlev, Alexander (2004). A Century of Violence in Soviet Russia. Yale University Press. ISBN 0300103220.

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