Is Communism a Form of Government?
A Socratic dialogue.
Is communism a form of government?
Not exactly. It’s more accurately an ideology — a set of ideas about collective ownership, abolition of private property, and a classless society. The actual governmental structures of communist states have been one-party rule. So communism is the ideology; one-party authoritarianism is the governmental form.
But isn’t all government formed according to some ideology? Monarchy rests on divine right and hereditary legitimacy. Liberal democracy rests on popular sovereignty and individual rights. Theocracy rests on religious doctrine. Why is communism different?
Fair point. If we’re comfortable calling monarchy a “form of government” despite its ideological underpinnings, there’s a case for treating communism the same way. Communist states do have consistent structural features: single-party rule, central planning, party-state fusion.
Consider this: monarchy also has an ideal form — a godly king who acts wisely in his people’s interest. But no king has ever perfectly embodied that. So have we never tried real monarchy?
…No, we wouldn’t say that. We judge monarchy by its implementations, not its aspirations.
So why should communism be different? Why does “real communism has never been tried” get treated as a serious defence?
It shouldn’t. By the same standard we apply to every other system, the Soviet Union, Maoist China, Cambodia, Cuba — these are communism, just as the often brutal reigns of actual kings are monarchy. If we’re empiricists about monarchy and democracy, we should be empiricists about communism too.
Right. Remember Moltke: “No plan survives contact with the enemy.” The plan and execution always differ. But that’s precisely why ideologies need implementation — to reveal which assumptions were untested.
And communism’s implementations revealed several faulty assumptions:
- That central planners can aggregate distributed information effectively (the calculation problem Hayek and Mises identified)
- That removing material incentives won’t affect productivity
- That concentrated power won’t corrupt or attract the corruptible
- That people will work for collective benefit as readily as personal gain
- That a “transitional” dictatorship will voluntarily dissolve itself
These weren’t obvious in theory. They became visible through contact with reality. That’s not failed implementation — that’s a hypothesis being tested.
So: is communism a form of government?
Yes. It’s an ideology that, when implemented, produces recognizable and consistent governmental structures — just like monarchy, democracy, or theocracy. The fact that it never achieved its theoretical ideal doesn’t disqualify it, because no system fully achieves its ideal.
We judge systems by their implementations.
The honest response to communism’s failures isn’t “real communism hasn’t been tried.” It’s “communism was tried, and it taught us something about where the theory was wrong.”