Basic Principles and Evaluation of Communism

A theory that promised the end of exploitation and the eventual disappearance of the State produced, in several twentieth-century states that tried to implement it, some of the most powerful and coercive states in history. This gap between communism's stated principles and its actual historical record is exactly what an 'evaluation' of the ideology has to confront.

In two minutes

Evaluated on its own terms, communism's principles — common ownership, abolition of class, an eventual stateless society — promise to remove exploitation at its economic root, but critics point to serious practical failures wherever it has been attempted: concentrated political power, suppressed dissent, and economic inefficiency without the promised withering away of the State.

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