Socialism: Government ownership of means of production.
Communism: From each according to his abilities, and to each according to his needs.
I have lived under Socialist rule, so, perhaps unsurprisingly, I have observed the leftward drift in American politics with some discomfort for years. The Republican Party today resembles the Democratic Party of a couple of decades ago. The alignment of the mainstream media with the political left resembles the Communist Party propaganda in my home country. The majority of young Americans prefer Socialism to Capitalism, and so-called democratic Socialists are gaining acceptance. Clearly, there is some confusion.
Interestingly, if the question is posed as a free market economy versus socialism, the survey participants prefer the free market. So when it comes to thoughts about capitalism/free market economy and socialism, there seems to be a gap between the perception of the meaning of the terms and reality.
I am writing this to address all fellow Americans, but especially to those who tend to vote for Democratic candidates. I am not trying to persuade anyone not to be a Democrat, but I hope to illuminate what Socialism and Communism bring when implemented, and to alert everyone to pay more attention to politicians' actions than to their campaign promises.
In this first blog, I want to summarize the results of socialist regimes throughout the world, so the reader has a better idea of what to expect if socialism takes hold in the U.S. I will follow up with more detailed assessments of the major countries that tried socialism, and the last part will be the analysis of the Democratic Socialists of America platform.
The economic record of communist and state-socialist regimes varied, but several patterns recur.
Initially, some regimes achieved rapid gains from a low starting point in:
Heavy industry
Literacy
Basic health campaigns
Electrification
Military production
Female education and employment
Infrastructure.
This was especially visible in the USSR, China after 1949, some Eastern European countries, Cuba, and Vietnam. However, these gains were short-lived.
Centrally planned economies commonly suffered from:
Chronic shortages (This is due to incoherent central planning, leading to shortages in some sectors and over-production in others. Even in the best-case scenario, if a socialist government is not corrupt, a few people in government can never figure out what should be produced and in what quantities better than the free market, which self-regulates)
Low productivity (This is due to lack of incentives to work hard/innovate)
Poor quality goods (This is due to lack of incentives to work hard/innovate)
Lack of innovation (The system valued/promoted party loyalists over innovators, who were viewed with suspicion)
Wasteful investment (Due to central planning, corruption, and no accountability in government)
Agricultural inefficiency (Same reason for all sectors - due to central planning and no accountability in government)
Corruption and black markets (Corruption is inevitable in a system dominated by a small government elite. The black market developed to compensate for the economy not working.)
Environmental damage
Suppression of price signals (This is due to incoherent central planning, leading to shortages in some sectors and over-production in others.)
Incentives to meet centrally dictated quotas rather than consumer needs
Political interference in economic decisions
Some countries improved significantly after market reforms that abandoned the core command economy mechanisms. China after 1978 and Vietnam after 1986 are the clearest examples, though both countries retained one-party communist political rule, so income inequality and abuse of human rights continued or increased.
The contrast between divided societies is historically significant.
West Germany vastly outperformed East Germany
South Korea vastly outperformed North Korea
Taiwan became far richer than Mao-era mainland China before China’s market reforms
Market-oriented postwar Western Europe grew faster and provided greater consumer abundance than Eastern Europe (My native Czechoslovakia had the 10th most productive economy in the world with just about 14 million people, but it became an economic basket-case within a decade of implementing Socialism.)
Sure, these comparisons are not perfect because geography, institutions, war damage, foreign aid, and starting conditions varied, but they strongly illustrate the long-term weakness of rigid command economies - and there is no example of a command economy outperforming a free market economy.
When Americans talk about Socialism, they often bring up concerns about human rights. The one-party socialist and communist regimes generally restricted or abolished:
Free elections (I remember my parents going to a voting station, where, under the watchful eye of minders, they put a checkmark next to a single name for a Communist candidate printed on the voting card. You could write in a candidate, but the rules were very specific, and if someone did not follow them exactly, their vote was interpreted as voting for the Communist.)
Independent courts
Free press
Independent unions
Freedom of religion
Freedom of association
Freedom to emigrate (Yes, that is emigrate, as in freedom to leave, as opposed to immigrate. Question is, if everything is so great, why would people want to leave and had to be prevented from doing so?)
Opposition parties
Academic freedom
Private civic organizations
Political prisons
Internal exile
Censorship
Party control of employment and education
Propaganda in schools and media
Collective punishment
Confiscation of property
Show trials
Ideological campaigns
The severity differed between the states, but all used the same instruments of oppression. Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, North Korea, and Mengistu’s Ethiopia were among the most extreme. Hungary after 1960, Yugoslavia after the Stalin split, and Tanzania under Nyerere were comparatively less murderous but still politically restrictive.
Communist and socialist regimes usually claimed to abolish class privilege. In practice, they created a new ruling class: party officials, security chiefs, military leaders, managers of state enterprises, and their families.
Special housing
Country villas or dachas
Chauffeurs and official cars
Better hospitals
Special stores with imported goods
Access to foreign currency
Better schools for children
Travel rights denied to ordinary people
Protection from ordinary law
Control over appointments, jobs, and housing
In some countries, direct corruption and hidden fortunes.
In the Soviet Bloc, privilege was often bureaucratic rather than openly capitalist. Elites controlled access rather than formally owning assets. In places such as Angola, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and post-Mao China, political connections also enabled enormous personal enrichment.
The gap between leaders and citizens was especially stark during famines or shortages. Stalin’s inner circle, Mao’s leadership, the Kim dynasty, Ceaușescu’s family, Castro’s elite, Mengistu’s regime, and Maduro-era officials had privileged access while ordinary people faced rationing, hunger, poverty, or repression.
Famine caused or worsened by state policy
Forced collectivization
Mass executions
Forced labor camps
Deportations
Political purges
Civil wars linked to revolutionary seizures of power or ideological conflict
State terror
Suppression of uprisings
Preventable deprivation caused by policy failure.
Soviet famine of 1921–1922
Soviet collectivization famine of 1932–1933, including Ukraine and Kazakhstan
Stalin’s Great Terror and Gulag system
Mao’s Great Leap Forward famine
Mao’s Cultural Revolution
Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge
North Korean famine of the 1990s
Ethiopia’s Red Terror and famine under the Derg
Repression in Eastern Europe, including Hungary 1956 and Czechoslovakia 1968
Cuban political imprisonment and exile
Venezuelan state repression and humanitarian collapse
Civil wars in Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and elsewhere
Exact death totals are debated because archives are incomplete, governments concealed evidence, and scholars use different methods. But the total number of deaths caused or worsened by these regimes’ policies in the last century is in the tens of millions.
When Americans speak favorably about socialism, they often imagine a society that provides “free” goods and greater income equality: free health care, free education, perhaps even free housing. But in practice, socialism has never delivered that promised panacea. It always makes people worse off, and the poor usually suffer the most.
There may be less income inequality between, say, a doctor and a laborer—but only because both are made poorer. Meanwhile, the gap between the ruling class and everyone else is enormous.
If you believe that power corrupts—and that absolute power corrupts absolutely—then socialism should be a non-starter for you. Under socialism, a small government elite has the authority to decide nearly everything. That is an extraordinary amount of concentrated power.
Historically, communist and one-party socialist regimes did sometimes achieve rapid modernization from poor starting points, especially in basic literacy, industrial capacity, public health campaigns, and military power. But these gains came with severe costs (political dictatorship, censorship, forced labor, mass surveillance, coercive economic controls, restricted movement, and recurring humanitarian disasters), and they never lasted.
Economically, command systems could mobilize resources for state priorities but performed poorly at producing consumer abundance, innovation, agricultural efficiency, and long-term productivity. The most successful surviving communist-led states, especially China and Vietnam, improved economically only after introducing major market mechanisms and reducing central planning.
Politically, these regimes almost always concentrated power in a ruling party and its security apparatus. Human rights were subordinated to party control. Leaders and party elites commonly enjoyed privileges far above those of ordinary citizens, despite official claims of equality.
The historical record shows that when socialism or communism was implemented, with state ownership, central planning, and coercive class politics, the results were authoritarian government, economic inefficiency, elite privilege, and mass suffering.