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1. Communism as an Economic and Societal System in the Twentieth Century 1.1. The theoretical model of the command economy and society It is extremely hard to describe a non-market economy in positive terms. Contemporary analyses highlighted that in a non-market system there was no freedom of contract, entrepreneurial autonomy, consumer choice, money and profit. All true in negative terms. But it does not make up for an eloquent and suggestive description of what exactly a command economy is.1 The command economy is embedded in an absolutely hierarchical society where human beings matter—value themselves and each other— only as a function of a superstructure encompassing the whole society. The economy and the individuals have no separate, autonomous standing in societal life. People play inseparable economic and societal roles determined by either tradition in subsistence societies not striving for material abundance or by ideology in self-styled growth-oriented post-capitalist formations claiming superiority to capitalism and thus competing for surpassing it.2 1 Unfortunately, we are captive to our narrow mindset formulated by market theory. The powerful stream of classical theories depicting the market as a largely self-regulating entity and backbone of all economies we know have distorted our thinking considerably. We lack plausible notions describing non-market systems. That is a huge impediment when trying to understand economic and societal systems not based on self-regulating markets. By the same token, it is a big mistake to consider the first ten thousand years of human history as a mere introduction to capitalism and the market economy. [See Karl Polanyi (1946).] 2 That is why command economy is an imprecise term; it would be better to talk about a command society. 10 Accidental Occidental As a result, the command economy (and society) is always totalitarian .3 It cannot be otherwise. Mobilizing society for increasing production, for supporting military efforts with increased production, for symbolic acts in culture (praising the party, the leading person, the ideology, etc.) requires total control on most if not all aspects of human life.4 In negative terms, a command system is completely alien to any kind of individualism , does not allow the development and flourishing of any personal want or desire which is not part of the officially sanctioned set of collective wants and desires.5 Command economies, therefore, can be referred to as state collectivism . State is key, indeed, although it is hardly separable from society as a whole. All members of society are important insofar as they perform duties defined by the collective as represented by the state and perform them well to the benefit of the collective as defined by the state. It is not only the economy which has no autonomous standing and separate meaning in societal life but within the economy there is little or no distinctive functioning of production, distribution and consumption (negative description, once again). Likewise, the legal and judiciary system, church and religion, education and science, arts and culture, or any other sphere of societal life have no autonomous existence either. In this respect , totalitarian regimes constitute a fallback to premodern societies no matter how much they claim to represent modernity, or even more, ultra-modernity. 3 Totalitarian societies are always despotic and dictatorial and never democratic. In fact they openly and publicly despise Western democracy. In the twentieth century many societies were labelled as totalitarian: Italian fascism, German nazism, Soviet Stalinism, Chinese Maoism and even some Latin-American military regimes driven by ideology. [See Hannah Arendt (1958)] At the same time the “notion of totalitarianism denotes a system of political domination and this is why it defines the socio-economic structure from only one aspect. Quite different socio-economic structures can be totalitarian in the same way.” Fehér–Heller–Márkus (1983) 147. 4 Another way of calling this type of society is political society. “Political society means the primacy of the state over the whole societal life; society is an annex to the omnipotent political state rather than a relatively independent entity.” Fehér–Heller–Márkus (1983) 253. “...totalitarianism is identical with political society (submission and liquidation of civil society), with the elimination of any recognized pluralism.” Ibid., 147. 5 “…the substitution of central planning for competition would require central direction of a much greater part of our lives than was ever attempted before. It could not stop at what we regard as our economic activities… It is no accident that in the totalitarian countries, be it...

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