"Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly" is a very rich genre. It is also disingenuous in failing to consider the single most likely (by way of Occam's razor) cause of communism's failure, which is the ideology itself.
But to apply some historical facts to the theory:
From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps; ran the Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.
The Cheka existed from 1917 to 1922. Even if the US was scared of communism, nothing like the CIA existed to undermine the revolution in Soviet Russia. And yet, violently putting down riots by workers and peasants was necessary. It takes a special kind of ideological arrogance to blame the USA for that.
"Explaining why communism always fail without faulting communism even slightly" is a very rich genre.
Please be clear on what you mean by "failure".
For Russia itself, communism was actually very successful economically speaking: Their economy grew more quickly than the average for other, non-communist countries that were at Russia's level of development.
With this aside, and going back to what we were talking about (i.e. state violence and repression), your point is a rather weak one. During and in the aftermath of revolutionary phases, there tends to be violence. You yourself conceded that these measures were eliminated and/or scaled down in Russia without outside intervention once things had settled down.
This kind of thing has nothing to do with economic organization and can be found in capitalism as well. Just look at what's been going on in the Middle East and Egypt in particular. Those are far from being communists, and yet the cleaning-up after a coup d'etat was quite brutal.
Communism fails when it needs to imprison its own citizens on a massive scale for dissent. It fails when it needs to build walls to keep people in.
> You yourself conceded that these measures were eliminated and/or scaled down in Russia without outside intervention once things had settled down.
Oh, I conceded no such thing. The Cheka existed until 1922, but it didn't disappear, it was reorganised into the NKVD which later became the KGB. Both changes represented a step up, not down, in ruthlessness and brutality.
> During and in the aftermath of revolutionary phases, there tends to be violence.
You have to break some eggs to make an omelette. This is not something you shrug off as a regrettable but necessary fact of life, it's a huge and important argument against revolutions.
> This kind of thing has nothing to do with economic organization
Yes, it has everything to do with economic organisation, because the evidence strongly suggests that you need to violently force people to live under such organisation.
I was thinking in terms of subversive behind-the-lines campaigning that it might make sense to counter by policing what people read and talk about - but this was a "proper" military intervention with soldiers in uniform. It doesn't justify running a Gulag system.
Also, the internal oppression didn't exactly peter out after the intervention was over in 1920. The OSS (predecessor to the CIA) wasn't formed until WWII.
Also instructive is the history of the French Revolution itself (including the "Reign of Terror"), where you can see the idea of "the government is the people" writ large, but with only the political side beginning to be fleshed out, not the economic side.
For that to fit occam's razor I think you need to demonstrate that communist societies actually suffer a higher rate of failure than any other -ism. Most nation states fail. You might even be right to say that most of them fail in short order. The French alone have been through 5 republics in the last couple of centuries.
The simplest explanation, imo, is that power accretes in all civilizations, perhaps moreso in ones that face internal strife or hardship, and that power structures eventually collapse. Regardless of economic or political system.
And from another angle, if a capitalist society fails, is the most likely explanation also the ideology itself? And if both ideologies are to blame for their failure, what's left?
In France, the third republic began with the fall of Napoleon and ended with WWII. The fourth republic was ended by a perfectly peaceful and democratic constitutional reform and that brings us to the fifth. If that's your benchmark for a failing capitalist state, then yes, those fail all the time.
Does anyone see them as really being communist? Some are a smidge closer than others I suppose. By the same measure, those that are labeled democracy have failed fairly often as well. And those that succeed are often just as far off the label as China is off its. How many democracies have a large turn out with anything even approaching 50% of the population voting for the winning group?
The opposite of communist is capitalist, just because it hasn't happened doesn't mean you can't have a democracy that is communist. But your point still rings true, how many capitalist societies have private police/fire dept/sewer/ health care ect ect.
Great point. Here in New Zealand we are moving towards private water/sewer and healthcare. But there is a long way to go before police and fire departments are privatized. Has anywhere privatized fire departments and police?
You can see an extremely sharp bend in pretty much all economic indicators in China when they reformed away from marxism and adopted capitalist policies under Deng Xiaoping.
To claim that Cuba isn't a failure is just silly, and Venezuela (which isn't labelled communist, by the way) is failing very fast.
How on earth is Cuba a failure in any metric except GDP and nice cars? Seriously. People are well educated, they have more doctors per capita than any country on earth. It's certainly doing a lot better than the Capitalist haven of Haiti. Venezuela, okay, not communist, socialist, still the bogeyman in the US.
But to apply some historical facts to the theory:
From its founding, the Cheka was an important military and security arm of the Bolshevik communist government. In 1921 the Troops for the Internal Defense of the Republic (a branch of the Cheka) numbered 200,000. These troops policed labor camps; ran the Gulag system; conducted requisitions of food; subjected political opponents to torture and summary execution; and put down rebellions and riots by workers or peasants, and mutinies in the desertion-plagued Red Army.
The Cheka existed from 1917 to 1922. Even if the US was scared of communism, nothing like the CIA existed to undermine the revolution in Soviet Russia. And yet, violently putting down riots by workers and peasants was necessary. It takes a special kind of ideological arrogance to blame the USA for that.