Communist state

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  A communist state has never officially called itself a communist state. This is one of the first and most disorienting facts about a form of government that shaped the 20th century more than almost any other. The nations the world calls communist states have typically described themselves as socialist states, on the grounds that communism as Marx envisioned it -- a stateless, classless, moneyless society -- had not yet been reached. They were, in their own telling, still on the way.

  The Russian Revolution of 1917 produced the world's first constitutionally communist state in Soviet Russia. From that single origin point, the model spread across Eastern Europe after World War II, took root in China after 1949, and established itself in Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, North Korea, and Cambodia. By the late 20th century, a wave of mostly non-violent revolutions in 1989 brought down the communist states of Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union itself dissolved in 1991.

  What remains today is a reduced group: China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Vietnam. With the notable exception of North Korea, each has moved toward some form of market economy in the decades since. Yet each retains the single-party political structure that defines the model.

  How does a system grounded in the theory that the state should wither away end up building some of the most powerful state apparatuses in history? What does it actually mean to live under unified state power? And why did the concept of socialist law become one of the most contested ideas in 20th-century jurisprudence? Those are the questions this documentary will work through.

• 2. The Naming Problem

  ›

  David Ramsay Steele put the core paradox plainly: among Western journalists, the term communist came to refer exclusively to regimes that insisted they were not communist but socialist. The label was applied from the outside. The governed themselves rejected it.

  Raymond Williams traced the modern divide back to 1918, when the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party reconstituted itself as the All-Russian Communist Party. From that moment, the word communist became attached to a specific institutional tradition, even as every party in that tradition continued to describe its goal as socialism. The economist Jozef Wilczynski explained the distinction this way: communism, in Marxist theory, is the higher phase -- an age of plenty, distribution according to needs rather than work, the disappearance of money and the market, and the ultimate withering away of the state. Socialism is the transitional stage before that.

  John Barkley Rosser Jr. and Marina Rosser noted that Soviet communists were well aware of this. They never claimed to have achieved communism. Karl Marx himself had envisioned communism as entailing the eventual withering away of the state. A communist state, in strict Marxist terms, is an oxymoron: communism has no state.

  Western political science set that philosophical objection aside on practical grounds. Scholars Stephen White, John Gardner, and George Schopflin identified four features that define the model analytically: adoption of Marxism-Leninism as official ideology; predominance of state ownership and centralized planning; a one-party system dominated by a highly centralized communist party; and the party's constitutionally enshrined leading role in both state and society. Those four features are what make the term analytically useful, whatever the states in question chose to call themselves.

• 3. Unified Power

  ›

  Both Marx and Lenin rejected the parliamentary systems of bourgeois democracy, but neither sought to abolish representative institutions. Lenin wrote that proletarian democracy would be impossible without them. What they rejected was the separation of powers. The governing model they admired was the Paris Commune of 1871, in which executive and legislative functions were combined in a single body.

  In communist states, that principle became the Supreme State Organ of Power, or SSOP. The SSOP holds unlimited state power. It can interfere in the work of the executive, judicial, and procuratorial organs as it sees fit. What would be separate branches in a liberal democratic system are, in communist states, subordinate arms of the single supreme organ.

  The Soviet Union's SSOP was the Supreme Soviet, which convened twice a year, usually for two or three days each session. China's equivalent, the National People's Congress, follows the same pattern. In between sessions, a smaller permanent organ takes over: the Soviets called it the Presidium; China calls it the Standing Committee. The ruling party in all cases held either a clear majority or every seat in the SSOP.

  Scholar Daniel Nelson compared the function of these bodies to the British parliament before the 17th century, when it served primarily to represent the realm to the king rather than to make independent decisions. Members of communist SSOPs did not represent particular constituencies in the Western sense. They represented, in theory, the long-term interests of the people as a whole. As a result, communist states never developed the concepts of delegate or trustee that would give representatives the authority to vote according to their own judgment.

  Soviet legal theorists went further. They denounced judicial review and extra-parliamentary review as bourgeois institutions -- limitations on the people's supreme power. Since the SSOP was the supreme judge of constitutionality, its own acts could not, by definition, be unconstitutional.

• 4. The Party's Architecture

  ›

  Vladimir Lenin's concept of the vanguard party held that the working class could not reach class consciousness on its own. It needed a party of professional revolutionaries to lead it. In Foundations of Leninism, published in 1924, Joseph Stalin described the party as the proletariat's General Staff -- necessary not only to seize power but to maintain it afterward.

  Ruling communist parties organize themselves through democratic centralism: all directing organs from top to bottom are elected, party organs give periodic accounts of their activities, strict discipline is maintained, and all decisions of higher organs are absolutely binding on lower ones. The supreme organ is the party congress. Between congresses, the central committee acts as the highest decision-making body. When the central committee is not in session, the politburo takes over, while a secretariat handles administration. In some parties, a standing committee of the politburo functions as the highest organ between politburo sessions.

  The party leader is usually called general secretary, though the power of that office varies considerably. Some communist states have been characterized by one-man dominance and the cult of personality. Others operate through collective leadership, where power is distributed more evenly among leading officials and decision-making organs are more institutionalized.

  The party maintains contact with the broader population through what is called the transmission belt principle. Mass organizations -- associations of journalists, teachers, writers, trade unions, youth organizations, women's organizations, sports clubs -- encompass everyone, not only committed communists. Through these bodies, the party attempts to mobilize public participation in state affairs. Critics have described these methods as dictatorial. Others have pointed to them as examples of functioning political participation, including direct democratic participation and factory committees.

• 5. Constitutions as Tools

  ›

  Andrey Vyshinsky, who served as Procurator General of the Soviet Union during the 1930s, described Soviet constitutions as representing the total of the historical path along which the Soviet state had travelled. A constitution, in Marxist-Leninist theory, is not a framework to limit state power. It is an instrument to empower the state, to document what has been won, and to lay out what remains to be conquered.

  The 1954 Chinese constitution's preamble stated the historical tasks plainly: to bring about the socialist industrialization of the country step by step, and to accomplish the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicraft, and capitalist industry and commerce, step by step. Article 6 of the 1977 Soviet constitution described the Communist Party, armed with Marxism-Leninism, as determining the general perspective of the development of society. The 1976 Albanian constitution went further, stating in Article 3 that Marxism-Leninism was the dominant ideology and that the entire social order was developing on its principles.

  This means constitutions in communist states are not meant to be stable. Major societal changes require not amendments but entirely new constitutions, each corresponding to a new stage in the development of the class structure. After Nikita Khrushchev's repudiation of Stalin's practices and the Chinese Communist Party's repudiation of certain Maoist policies, Marxist-Leninist legal theorists began placing greater emphasis on the formal constitutional order. Deng Xiaoping, not long after Chairman Mao Zedong's death, observed that democracy had to be institutionalized and written into law, so that institutions would not change whenever the leadership changed.

  Romania was the first communist state to experiment with constitutional supervision when it established a Constitutional Committee in 1965. Hungary and Poland followed in the early 1980s. In 1989, the Soviet Union established a Constitutional Supervision Committee that was, by its own terms, subordinate only to the USSR constitution. It lacked enforcement powers and was ultimately unable to defend the constitution during the coup against Mikhail Gorbachev. China argued against any similar body, citing the failed communist states of Europe. The exception came in 2018, when the Constitution and Law Committee of the National People's Congress was given the right of constitutional review.

• 6. Socialist Law

  ›

  East Germany retained the 1896 German civil code until 1976. Poland used existing Austrian, French, German, and Russian civil codes until it adopted its own in 1964. Cuba had civil law imposed by Spain. Vietnam used French law. China introduced civil law overlaid with Confucian elements. Every communist state was established in a country with a civil law heritage.

  The debate over whether socialist law constitutes a separate legal system or a branch of the civil law tradition ran through the 20th century without resolution. Legal scholar Rene David argued that the socialist legal system possessed, in relation to French law, features that gave it a complete originality, to the extent that it could no longer be connected to the system of Roman law. Christopher Osakwe concluded that socialist law was an autonomous legal system essentially distinct from other contemporary families of law.

  Hungarian legal theorist Imre Szabo acknowledged similarities with civil law but drew on Marxist historical materialism to argue that law is always a tool of the ruling class. Since the material structure of socialist societies differed from capitalist ones, their law had to reflect those differences. Socialist law could not belong to the same family as capitalist law because its foundation was different.

  Romanian jurist Victor Zlatescu offered a more measured view: the distinction between socialist and capitalist law was not of the same nature as the difference between Roman-German law and common law. Socialist law was civil law -- but a different type, for a different society. Scholar John Quigley noted what the two traditions shared in practice: socialist law retained the inquisitorial style of trial, law-creation predominantly by SSOPs rather than courts, and a significant role for legal scholarship in construing codes. The Soviet model coined the term socialist law in the 1930s, as the command economy was introduced, to reflect the change in the legal system's underlying purpose.

• 7. Performance and Criticism

  ›

  Heinz Kessler, the former East German Minister of National Defence, was once asked about the claim that former citizens of communist states now enjoyed increased freedoms. His reply was pointed: millions of people in Eastern Europe were now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security.

  The debate over the record of communist party rule has never been settled, and the range of scholarship reflects that. A 1986 study in the American Journal of Public Health found that, between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable physical quality of life outcomes. A 1992 study in the International Journal of Health Services found socialism to be, for the most part, more successful than capitalism in improving the health conditions of the world's populations. Economist Michael Ellman of the University of Amsterdam found that Marxist-Leninist states compared favorably with Western states in some health indicators such as infant mortality and life expectancy. Amartya Sen, analyzing international comparisons of life expectancy, noted that several Marxist-Leninist states made significant gains and observed that communism appeared to be good for poverty removal.

  Researchers Dylan Sullivan, Michael Moatsos, and Jason Hickel argued in 2022 that a dollar of income is likely to have a stronger welfare purchasing power in socialist states than in capitalist states, because such states invest in public provisioning systems that lower the cost of meeting basic needs.

  The counterweight to those findings is substantial. Communist party rule has been criticized as authoritarian or totalitarian for suppressing political dissidents, religious persecution, ethnic cleansing, forced collectivization, and the use of forced labour in concentration camps. Communist party rule has been accused of genocidal acts in Cambodia, China, Poland, and Ukraine, with scholarly dispute centering on the classification of the Holodomor. Economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman argued that state ownership and centralized planning were responsible for economic stagnation and shortage economies. From the anti-Stalinist left, critics have described it as state capitalism and red fascism. Raya Dunayevskaya argued that state ownership of the means of production represents state capitalism rather than socialism, and that Marxism-Leninism is neither Marxism nor Leninism but a composite ideology Stalin used to determine which countries counted as communist on an expedient basis.

• 8. Memory and Monuments

  ›

  Monuments to the victims of communist states exist in almost all capitals of Eastern Europe. Three museums stand out: the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights in Lithuania, the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia in Riga, and the House of Terror in Budapest -- each of which also documents Nazi rule.

  In Washington, a bronze statue modelled on the 1989 Tiananmen Square Goddess of Democracy sculpture was dedicated as the Victims of Communism Memorial in 2007. The United States Congress had authorized it in 1993. The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has plans to build an International Museum on Communism in Washington.

  As of 2008, Russia contained 627 memorials and memorial plaques dedicated to victims of communist rule, most created by private citizens. The country had no national monument and no national museum on the subject. The Wall of Grief in Moscow, inaugurated in October 2017, became Russia's first monument for victims of political persecution by Stalin during the Soviet era. That it took until 2017 for Russia to erect such a monument says something about how contested the memory of those decades remains, even within the states that lived under the system longest.