“Communism” is the only system in this series that promised to abolish the state, class, and money all at once - and the only one whose believers spent a century explaining that the destination had not been reached yet. The regimes that ran the experiment did not fail to arrive at communism. They could not arrive, because the arrival was always defined as the stage after the one they happened to be in. That is the most useful thing the word has ever told us about them.
This is the third article in this act of the series. So far we have watched the market being born: exchange before money, money before the state, credit before the license, trade before the tariff, and The Name Is the First Argument showed how the word “capitalism” was invented by its critics. Then we turned to the imposed alternatives - the systems that were built rather than grown.
The first was feudalism, which needed castles, oaths, and a blessing to fix a person’s place at birth. The second was socialism, which began as a voluntary dream and ended by building a wall to keep its people inside. Now comes the third, and the hardest: the system that did not promise to improve the world but to end history, and that produced, in the course of trying, the largest body of evidence we have about what happens when a plan is given a country and a police force.
The Word That Promised the End of the State
Let us start with the name again, because the name is where this story always starts.
The word arrived in the 1840s. “Communism” comes into English from the French communisme, in use by about 1840, and “communist” appears in English in 1841 - used, as it happens, by a British follower of Robert Owen named John Goodwyn Barmby, who founded a “London Communist Propaganda Society” in the same year, as etymologists record. In France, the reformer Étienne Cabet and his Icarian movement had made the word their own by 1840, to the point that, as Marx himself put it, Cabet’s name had become synonymous with communism.
Notice the sequence, because it is the same sequence as last time, with one difference. “Capitalism” was a word its enemies gave it. “Feudalism” was named by people who hated it, centuries later. “Socialism” was the first name the believers chose for themselves. “Communism” was the second - and it was the bolder claim of the two.
In 1848, Marx and Engels gave the word its platform. The Manifesto of the Communist Party opens with the sentence that made the word a threat: a specter is haunting Europe. But read the rest of it and you find something that is easy to miss through the smoke. The Manifesto is not a complaint. It is a promise about a destination: a society of common ownership, without classes, without exploitation, and - this is the part that matters most - without a state. The workers of the world have nothing to lose but their chains.
That was the offer. It deserves to be examined on its own terms, because the case for it was not stupid.
The Promise, Stated Fairly
The grievance was real, and the last article laid it out: children working in mills, towns built faster than the sewers, the poor without rights and without much hope. Out of that misery came two promises.
The first was socialism - the patient version. Join the community, share the work, show by example that people can live better together. You could leave at any time, and when the experiments failed, everyone walked away poorer but alive.
The second was the harder claim. Why wait for the slow, ugly, uneven process of markets lifting people a few pence at a time? Why leave the ownership of the land, the mills, and the mines in the hands of the men who had taken them? Take the means of production into common ownership, run the economy by plan instead of by price, and poverty would not be reduced. It would be ended, deliberately, by people who intended it.
The moral core of that case is not a trick. If a small class owns the capital, that class writes the rules - that is not a conspiracy theory, it is a description of what happens. The plan’s elegance was that it needed no charity and no thousands of years of accumulation. It needed a decision.
And the theory had an answer for the obvious objection. It never claimed the transition would be gentle. It said plainly that the class losing its property would resist, and that the state would have to be used against it: first to take the means of production, then to run them, and then - in the final stage - the state itself would no longer be needed and would wither away. Marx’s description of that final stage is the most quoted sentence in the literature: from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, set out in his Critique of the Gotha Programme.
Lenin added the missing piece: the instrument. His answer, in What Is to Be Done?, was a party of professional revolutionaries - a vanguard that would take the state on the workers’ behalf, because the workers on their own would never get there. That addition changed the arithmetic of the whole idea. A community you can join is a community you can leave. A vanguard that has taken the state is not.
The Destination That Moves
Now look at the design itself, because here is where the thing was lost - not in the cruelty that came later, but in the architecture.
The final stage is defined by absences. No classes. No state. No scarcity. You cannot photograph an absence, and you cannot audit one. So the arrival cannot be observed. It can only be declared - which means a regime can never be caught failing to reach it, because the standard of arrival is whatever the regime is not yet doing.
Think about what that does to feedback. A market that is wrong has three correction mechanisms that operate whether or not anyone admits error: prices move, losses appear, businesses close. A plan that is wrong has its own reports. When the reports are the only evidence, the reports become the thing that must be protected.
So the deferral became permanent. Every country in the bloc called itself a socialist state building communism: the name of the present stage was always one rung below the promise, and always would be. In the Soviet Union the promise was even written into the map - republics called socialist, a party called communist, a future always five-year plans away. And when the East Germans were walled in during that lower stage, the wall was presented as a temporary measure.
Temporary became twenty-eight years.
The Apparatus: One Party, One Truth
To run prices by plan, you need to replace the price. The price is a signal that millions of people produce without permission. The target is a decision that one office makes, and once the target is set, the argument is over - not because it has been won, but because there is no longer any mechanism through which a wrong target can be corrected.
Which means disagreement has to be reclassified. In a market, someone who ignores the price goes out of business. In a plan, someone who ignores the target is a saboteur. That single shift explains almost everything that followed.
The apparatus came in order. One party, because a second party is an alternative plan and the plan cannot have competitors. No factions within that party - in 1921, at its Tenth Congress, the Bolsheviks ordered the immediate dissolution of every organized faction, on pain of expulsion, so that even inside the party the argument ended. No independent press, because the press reports prices and failures. And a political police, because someone has to make the reclassification stick.
The Soviet archives, opened near the end of the system, give the scale without any need for an enemy’s estimate. The state’s own records show 681,692 executions in 1937 and 1938, the years of the Great Terror; historians who work from those files put total repression deaths for those two years somewhere around 950,000 to 1.2 million, since the execution records do not count everyone who died in custody. About 18 million people passed through the camps and colonies between 1929 and 1953, by the reckoning the archives support, and between 1.5 and 1.7 million died inside them. The famine that collectivization produced, and the wall that came after, were the last article’s subject. The point here is only the mechanism: each step was presented as necessary to defend the plan against the people the plan was supposed to be for.
The Plan Needs Enemies
This is the part that separates communism’s record from a merely inefficient plan, and it is the part few admit and most never quite absorb.
The plan cannot fail. Therefore failure has an owner. The harvest was short, so someone hoarded; the factory missed its target, so someone sabotaged; the food disappeared, so someone speculated. In the Soviet Union the names came and went - kulaks, wreckers, saboteurs, right deviationists, cosmopolitans - and each round of failure produced a new list, and each new list produced a new round of failures, because arresting the people who know how to grow food does not make more food appear.
Cambodia is the cleanest demonstration in the twentieth century. On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. Within days they emptied it: the city’s roughly two million residents were ordered into the countryside, hospitals included, with patients pushed along in their beds, as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s account of the first days records. The regime declared a “year zero.” Money was abolished; markets were abolished; the cities were treated as an error to be corrected.
And then came the list. To run an economy that has no prices and no arguments, you must decide who is a peasant and who is not - and the regime’s answer was that anyone carrying the marks of the old order was an enemy of the new one. Speaking a foreign language. Having worked for the previous government. Wearing glasses, which meant reading, which meant privilege. The plan did not merely fail in Cambodia. It went looking for the people to blame, and it found them by the million.
The Record
Here is the ledger. Every figure below uses the lower estimate first, because the lower estimates are bad enough.
China. The Great Leap Forward, launched in 1958, herded the countryside into communes and set impossible targets for grain and steel. The famine that followed is estimated to have killed at least 15 million people by the lowest credible demographic work, with most studies landing between 20 and 45 million, and one historian’s archive-based estimate at the top of that range. Britannica puts the toll at about 20 million; the survey of the demographic studies runs from 15 to 45 million or more. It was the deadliest famine ever recorded by most reckonings, and it was not caused by the weather.
Cambodia. At least 1.5 million dead out of a population under eight million, with most estimates clustering between 1.5 and 2 million - roughly one person in four. The most careful work on the uncertainty, by the demographer Patrick Heuveline, puts a 95 percent chance on the toll falling somewhere between 1.2 million and 2.8 million.
North Korea. The famine of the 1990s killed between 600,000 and one million people on the most plausible estimates, about 3 to 5 percent of the population, with the government’s own figure at the bottom of a range that runs up to the millions. The regime’s name for that period is the “Arduous March.”
Cuba. The ration book, the libreta, has been the spine of the household economy since 1963. In 2022 and 2023, more than a million Cubans left the island - about a tenth of the country in two years, the largest migration wave in its history. Beef production fell from 289,100 tons in 1989 to 15,200 tons in the first half of 2024. The government’s response was to announce new restrictions on the private sector and to state that it would not deviate from a centrally planned economy.
Venezuela. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth. Real GDP fell by more than 75 percent between 2013 and 2021, the largest contraction for a country not at war in almost half a century, and 7.7 million people have left since 2013. It is worth thinking about the fact that the collapse happened in a country whose government controlled the price of nearly everything.
Zimbabwe. In mid-November 2008, prices were doubling every 24.7 hours, with a monthly inflation rate estimated at 79.6 billion percent and a 100 trillion dollar note that would not buy a bus fare, as the record of the hyperinflation shows. It ended not with a reform of the plan but with the abandonment of the country’s own currency in 2009.
Six countries, six different histories, one apparatus. And behind all of them, the same absence: no mechanism by which a wrong decision could be discovered, priced, and reversed. That is what The Information Problem - Why Central Planning Fails described, and what Creative Destruction - Why Lost Jobs Make Us Richer explains: the market’s ruthlessness - closing the failing factory, letting the bad idea die - is precisely the thing a plan cannot do, because a plan that closed its own factory would have to admit it was wrong.
The Number That Was Never a Number
If you want one exhibit that carries the whole argument, it is not a famine. It is a piece of bookkeeping.
On October 9, 1930, the Soviet government stopped paying unemployment benefits. That act abolished registered unemployment. The Commissar of Labor explained the decree to the world in terms worth reading twice: “There is really no unemployment in the Soviet Union today,” he said, at a moment when the state’s own figures counted more than 400,000 people idle, and Moscow had begun removing those without jobs from the city. The decree ordered people to take whatever work was offered, wherever it was offered, in whatever specialty was not theirs. From that day forward, unemployment officially did not exist in the Soviet Union.
Everything in this article is in that paragraph. The measurement was the promise. When the measurement disagreed with the promise, the measurement was replaced - and the people who no longer fit the measurement were moved. A market tells you what you do not want to hear, and prices it. A plan tells you what it decided, and anything that contradicts it becomes someone’s fault.
The Lens
So let us answer the question in the title. What is communism?
It is the third imposed alternative, and the one that shows the pattern with the least ambiguity. Abolish private property and you must seize the state, because someone has to decide what the property is for. Seize the state and you must have one party, because a second party is a second plan. Have one party and it must own the truth, because the plan has no other test. Own the truth and every failure needs an enemy. And the enemies, in the end, are the people who can count - the ones whose knowledge is evidence against the plan, and who therefore cannot be allowed to keep it.
Feudalism needed castles. Socialism needed walls. Communism needed a list, and a police force to work it.
That is the difference between a state that is wrong and a state that cannot be wrong, and it is why the twentieth century’s most generous promise is remembered by the graves it dug.
Next time someone tells you the problem is the class enemy - the hoarders, the profiteers, the rich, the people whose education is a form of theft - ask who writes the list. Ask who decides who is surplus. Ask what happens when the plan fails again and there is no one left to blame. Every one of these systems promised a world of abundance with no rulers. The record is the famines, the camps, the firing lists, and the queues - and behind them, a wall built to keep the verdict in. The market needed nothing but permission, which is why it is still here, and the walls are gone.
This is the ninth article in the series, ‘The Natural Condition of Mankind.’ Start here: The Name Is the First Argument. Previous: What Is Socialism?. Also in the series: What Is Feudalism?, Before Money: Where Exchange Comes From, The Invention of Money, Banking and Credit, Trade and the Merchants: The Road Nobody Built, and The Great Escape: How Nine in Ten Humans Left Extreme Poverty