Evolutionary Stages of Communism: Revolution, Politics, Corruption
Posted in Evolution, Health, Policy on December 12th, 2007 by leodirac – 2 CommentsRevolutionaries are idealists. They have to be. They risk their lives to fight for what they believe in. Lenin, Mao, Castro — they all truly and deeply believed that they were fighting for a better way of life for their people. And to a varying degrees, they accomplished that. In fact in all three of these cases — Russia, China and Cuba, the early years after the revolution were relatively good for the people. Wealth was redistributed and poverty decreased. The second world is generally better than the third world. When I was living in communist China, I found it to be a lot like camping — everything worked and was possible, but nothing was quite as convenient or comfortable as I would have liked.
But as communist governments age they tend to become corrupt and dictatorial. Why? Unchecked power. Without elections or a free press, there is essentially no way to remove a bad leader. Highly secretive control structures like the politburo tend to select for leaders that can amass and wield power by any means possible. These traits tend to become much more concentrated than any traits related to good governance. This was the undoing of the Soviet block and hopefully soon will dismantle North Korea. How China managed to avoid this state I won’t ponder here.
Despite what the US State Department would like you to believe, Cuba’s government has not (yet) devolved to this state. Cuba is still highly egalitarian where top government officials only earn twice what a factory worker might make — not the wretched excess of a corrupt system. They probably get to drive cars, but are required to pick up all hitchhikers since really it’s the people’s car. For the most part Cubans trust their government and with good reason. Cuba is not corrupt. Of course if you’re smart and ambitious you have much more to gain in a capitalist system which leads to justifiably frustrated opponents. While their lifestyles are anything but luxurious, Cubans are generally fairly happy, healthy and well educated. Happiness is subjective, but statistics clearly show Cuba to be on par if not better than the US for healthcare and education in most measures. It’s not a bad place to live.
The success of Cuban communism should not come as much of a surprise considering what we’ve discussed so far. Castro was idealistic when he led the revolution, and he’s still on power. Corrupt leaders have not been able to take control yet. A problem with communism is that what happens next will depend very strongly on one individual. Will they be more like Fidel or Kim Jong-Il. We’ll have to wait to see.
