Ask Lemmy

Thats like asking why North Korea became a dictatorship when it is a people's democracy.

Power gaps get filled, small states get conquered.

Lea Ypi's book Free is a phenomenal book describing the albanian communist period. Can't recommend it enough.

I grew up in DDR. It fails because it doesn't reflect reality. People are different, can do different things, and want different things. An ideology that simplifies people into classes, stands between people and their dreams. And will always need an ever increasing police force to force reality to look like the ideology.

3 explanations, in order from what I believe most likely to least:

1. It could be selection bias. All communist nations originated from dictatorships, and as democracy isn't a key part of communism, any democratic ideas get kicked to the side. It may require a dictatorship in the first place for a communist revolution to occur, as democracy may lead to people feeling content enough with the system that they may not feel it needs fundamental change.

2. The inevitable need for concentration of power in the hands of a few. Assume that the powerful will always try to concentrate power in their own hands one way or another. Capitalist societies use wealth (a.k.a. purchasing power) to replace the concentration of political power that a dictator would enjoy. As communist societies lack such a mechanism, the powers-that-be can only use political power to force their own superiority.

3. The centralization of economics leads to concentration of economic power that can be used effectively to buy loyalty from would-be challengers to a dictator's power.

In Russia it's because of the cult of personality, or populism, that developed around Lenin and Stalin. Mao in China, pretty similar. You should appreciate how a country falls into chaos and madness when a populist takes power and ignores all legal and cultural norms and gets away with doing whatever they want.

Ultimately, it's because the foundational ideas of communism don't scale.

in theory communism makes resources the property of everyone. In practice, somebody has to manage the resources, and in doing so controls them. if you control the resources, and especially if you have the power to defend that control, you effectively own them. this means that while in theory the people own everything, the truth is that the government owns everything. by similar logic to the first bit, if they own everything then they have control of everything, meaning that they are authoritarian. that being one of the major defining characteristics of a dictator its not far from there to become one even if you aren't trying to. ironically, this is all how it's intended to work save for the dictator part. this is the apple mouse charging port of communism, an intentional thing with a bad result that can't be given up without invalidateing things you have said or done.

also, communism tends to be brought about by coups and coups tend to lead to authoritarian leaders, compounding the above issue.

Lots of good answers here - it's the kind of question where lots of explanations are partly correct. For me, the decision by early communists to advocate for violent revolution as the only or main way of bringing about communism is a key factor.

It's pretty common for revolutions to produce dictators, going right back to the fall of the Roman Republic. Ironically, the Roman Civil War that preceded the fall was won by the populares - the people's movement, as opposed to the optimates, the aristocracy. And yet, the end result was the abolition of the tribunes, which had been the people's branch of the legislature, and the establishment of the Dictatorship of Julius Caesar, then the Principate of his nephew, Augustus, who we now regard as having been the first Roman Emperor. It wouldn't be accurate to project back our exact ideas of democracy or class politics to the Romans, but it's pretty telling that one of the first explicitly 'class-based' civil wars in history turned out this way.

Many centuries later, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the British Isles had a similar outcome: the royalists were defeated by the parliamentarians, only for the victorious generals to set up one of their own as what we would now call a dictator (Oliver Cromwell as 'Lord Protector'), who was virtually a king himself.

(Worth noting here that many people assumed George Washington would turn out to be another Cromwell. The fact that he didn't and the question of why he didn't, is not something I know enough to even begin to speculate about, but is definitely something to look into when trying to understand this topic.)

Most relevant for the early communists was the French Revolution, which led to the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte who, more or less explicitly imitating Caesar and Augustus, made himself sole ruler of France, first as 'Consul' (a title also borrowed from Classical Rome), then Emperor. He was also followed, a little later, by his nephew doing a very similar thing, again explicitly imitating the Romans.

Ironically, Marx himself wrote about this exact tendency, even calling it 'Bonapartism', to warn revolutionaries to try and avoid it. I don't know how exactly he missed the point that the very thing he elsewhere advocated for - violent revolution - was itself the cause of Bonapartism but it seems he did. Plainly, the early Marxists didn't sufficiently heed this warning, for whatever reason (and see other replies in this thread for many good suggestions!).

Basically, if you're going to advocate for the violent destruction of a system of government, you are running a major risk that in the ensuing chaos, someone very good at being violent and decisive will end with far too much power.