Did Communism Really Fall?

Whenever the foreign news is especially depressing, I like to reminisce about the halcyon days of 1989, when the fall of the Berlin wall so memorably illustrated the collapse of Communist tyranny in eastern Europe, or 1991, when a still relatively sober Boris Yeltsin stared down an “anti-democratic” coup mounted by stodgy Soviet bureaucrats and then grandly outlawed the Russian Communist Party, perpetrator of so many crimes in the USSR, Europe, and Asia. If domestic affairs get me down, I recall fondly the atmosphere of 1994 and 1995 when, as a wide-eyed Stanford undergraduate in the heart of Silicon Valley, I witnessed the exciting launch of the World Wide Web, with its heady promise of new liberties dawning in cyberspace.

The reverie does not last long. Even in 1989, I have to remind myself, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), demonstrating ruthlessness that the last Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev fortunately lacked, had placed a giant asterisk on the “fall of Communism” narrative by slaughtering hundreds of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Since the West followed China down the Covid path of forcible quarantine, Orwellian “contact tracing” and online surveillance and censorship in 2020—enabled, to my shame, by Stanford University’s now-disbanded “Internet Observatory”—the failure of Communist-style statist tyranny to die off is hard to ignore. We should not forget that President Yeltsin lost in court when the Communist Party sued to be reinstated in 1992; it is still the second-largest political party in Russia. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the aggressive western sanctions (and Russian counter-measures) that followed it, relations between Moscow and the West are now colder, by many measures, than at the height of the Cold War. As for the vaunted World Wide Web, compare a typical headline from its muse, Wired magazine, in 1995 (“Save Free Speech in Cyberspace!”) to today (August 19, 2024): “The Pentagon is Planning a ‘Drone Hellscape’ to Defend Taiwan.” 

Something has clearly gone badly awry in the post–Cold War world. In that ARPANET, the precursor to today’s heavily-controlled internet, was originally designed by the U.S. military as a failsafe against Soviet nuclear attack, it is perhaps not entirely surprising that the internet search and social media behemoths of Silicon Valley became heavily intertwined with U.S. intelligence agencies, or that Wired now does PR for the Pentagon. But were not the U.S. defense and spy agencies supposed to be tasked with defending American and western freedoms against the Communist threat, rather than imposing Communist-style controls on the population? Did the U.S. and its Allies, despite appearances in 1989 and 1991, actually lose the Cold War?

From the earliest days of the Cold War, certain ironies were manifest. The Manhattan Project which bought the U.S. a short-lived nuclear monopoly from 1945–1949 was a top-down government planning project par excellence, “more Soviet than the Soviets”—it was even honeycombed with Soviet agents (seven, as we now know, or roughly six more than were implied in the recent blockbuster film Oppenheimer). The CIA was largely modeled on, and designed to defeat, the Soviet KGB (and its predecessors), which it came uncannily to resemble. In the nuclear arms race, the space race, in higher education policy, and in international sports, the U.S. government often closely mirrored the Soviet statist approach, sometimes winning by outspending Moscow (as with the Manhattan Project and the Apollo program and moon landings), and sometimes losing by not cheating as egregiously (as with Soviet Olympic success enabled by flouting rules on “amateurism” and aggressive state doping). 

The collapse of the USSR in 1991 should have prompted a rethink, with an American “peace dividend” allowing the metastasizing U.S. security state to scale back down to human size. Washington, DC, a city then suffering through a crack-era crime wave that caused much of the real estate around Congress to plunge in value, might have reverted to its roots as a swampy backwater as older American patterns re-asserted themselves, with New York dominating finance, fashion, and advertising, Chicago mercantile trade, Los Angeles entertainment, while Silicon Valley surged ahead in IT while severing its slightly embarrassing ties to the Pentagon and the CIA. The migration of millions of people from crowded eastern cities such as Washington and nearby Baltimore to the “Sun Belt,” a process well underway by the 1980s, could and should have brought about a long-overdue rebalancing between the imperial capital and the American periphery. The statist excesses of the Cold War, perhaps justifiable as temporary expedients to see off a determined global threat, could have served as a warning. 

Instead, Washington has doubled and tripled down on statism, in everything from NATO expansion to foreign “forever war” military interventions to an almost parabolic expansion of the federal bureaucracy. Rather than a peace dividend, the U.S. government now runs nine-figure deficits annually as a matter of course, and meddles in citizens’ lives in everything from vaccine mandates and (corporate lobbying–distorted) nutrition guidelines, to who is allowed to use boys’ and girls’ bathrooms in public institutions, to the water pressure of showers and toilets at home, to Title IX policing of speech and behavior in workplaces and on college campuses—and then spends still more taxpayer money promoting similarly questionable policies around the world. The U.S. capital is more imperial than ever before, its obscenely expensive suburbs occupied by unaccountable employees of the 429 federal agencies of the permanent administrative state, who vote lockstep in numbers approaching 100 percent for the “party of government”—America’s undeclared version of a ruling Communist party – while blithely ignoring the social pathologies and miseries affecting the provincial peons whose taxes pay their generous six-figure salaries.

Perhaps most shocking of all has been the embrace of Communist-style censorship policies by the U.S. and other Western governments once pledged to uphold freedom of speech and the press. To sample news headlines from August 2024 alone, a ranking member of the European Commission threatened the owner of Twitter (now “X”), Elon Musk, over Musk’s decision to interview a U.S. presidential candidate on his own platform; an “Online Harms Bill” was introduced in Canada’s parliament proposing to amend the country’s criminal code to “increase the maximum sentences for hate propaganda offenses”; France arrested the owner of the messaging platform Telegram not for anything he said or did, but for not suppressing alleged criminal activities by users of the platform; Robert Reich, a former U.S. Secretary of Labor, demanded in the Guardian that “regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest”; taking Reich’s advice, Brazil banned Musk’s X outright, with draconian fines for citizens who simply access it; Britain’s new government proudly announced it was expanding space in its prisons for protestors and citizens who make offensive social media posts (presumably, although this was not stated directly, by letting actual criminals go) and duly arrested hundreds of protestors and speech “offenders”; and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of social media giant Facebook, confessed in a public letter to Congress that “in 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humor and satire.”

In many ways, the self-reinforcing panopticon of surveillance and social media controls which has spread across the western world in the past decade would have been the envy of Soviet dictators, who had to blanket the USSR with hundreds of thousands of paid KGB censors and spies, buttressed in the Brezhnev era (c. 1964–1982) by expensive pin-sized listening devices, to achieve similar reach into people’s private thoughts. Today’s Western “cancel culture” controls more closely resemble the bright red “denunciation boxes” introduced by Mao in China in the early 1950s, which outsourced spying to volunteer snitches rather than to paid spies, or the notorious inoffizielle Mitarbeiter (unofficial collaborators) of the East German Stasi, who by the Stasi’s peak in 1975 numbered 180,000 in a country of less than 17 million. Why hire spies and heavies to pry information out of dissidents, after all, when their friends and neighbors—or in today’s online world, random strangers—will turn them in for free? 

Then there is Wikipedia, which increasingly resembles the old Great Soviet Encyclopedia in its enforcement of the party line on controversial subjects or the ostracization of dissidents via crowd-sourced character assassination—except that it costs Western governments nothing. Trying to figure out who owns, edits, or stealth-edits Wikipedia entries is a revealing exercise in plausible deniability. The “Wikimedia Foundation,” which is said to “own” Wikipedia, is registered as a “non-profit organization” in San Francisco, California, allowing it to evade taxes or transparency-enhancing buyouts of the kind Elon Musk performed with Twitter—even though it is financed by the heaviest hitters of Big Tech, including Google, Apple, and Microsoft. 

If volunteer snitches and scolds prove unobliging, media or government surveillance teams can cheaply and quietly acquire personal data hoovered up by search engines and social media companies, with none of the fuss the KGB or Stasi had to make coercing or bribing informants and victims. Indeed, volunteer online doxxers and lazy “journalists” now do this for free, alerting employers, colleagues, or angry online mobs whom it would behoove them to slander, censor, fire, prosecute, or perhaps to picket, harass, threaten, and even assault if a particularly famous victim’s home address is discovered.

Of course, American citizens (if not Canadians, Britons, or west Europeans) still enjoy some First-Amendment protections, and few if any of us have suffered horrors like those endured routinely by Soviet and Chinese class enemies and dissidents, from “expropriation” of their homes, belongings, and bank accounts to forced labor camps, executions, and mass starvation. Since the Deng Xiaoping reforms in China, even avowedly Communist governments (with the partial exception of North Korea’s) now accept some level of private ownership and economic activity, and it is unlikely that any government, Communist or not, will again attempt anything on the scale of Stalin’s murderous forced-collectivization drive or Mao’s genocidal Great Leap Forward. 

The grotesque abuses and disappointing economic results of these infamous episodes in central economic planning helped discredit the “maximalist” (or we might say “literal-minded”) version of Communism, which now has almost no purchase in Russia or China, and appeals in the West only to those deeply ignorant of history. But to assume that Communism in practice has always required strict state ownership of the “means of production” is erroneous. The outsized role of U.S. corporations and Western capitalist investors in the Chinese Communist “economic miracle” of the past few decades is broadly familiar, but even in the heyday of Stalinist Five-Year Plans in the 1930s, the Soviet economy depended heavily on imported Western technology and the hiring of foreign firms, engineers, managers, and even agronomists (Thomas Campbell, the “Wheat King” of Montana, helped design the first Soviet collective farm, or kolkhoz). 

A close study of the history of Communism suggests that economic policy was rarely consistent or doctrinaire, and anyhow explains little about the success or longevity of Communist governments. The USSR fell whereas Communist China endured not because of differences in macroeconomic policy—both governments were in the midst of parallel economic reform programs in 1989, and enduring similar bouts of runaway inflation—but because Chinese leaders were much more ruthless in suppressing opposition than a hesitant and ineffectual Gorbachev. Maybe it really was the Stasi-style spies, volunteer informants, show trials, banishments and crackdowns that made it all go, rather than bland policy apparatchiks with their Five-Year Plans. 

The essence of Communism, Karl Marx’s longtime colleague and later critic Bakunin noticed, was not this or that economic policy but an authoritarian “statism” that “concentrates the reins of government in a strong hand [controlled by] a privileged scientific and political class,” “because the ignorant people require strong supervision.” It is the desire to control and dominate others which motivates revolutionaries and thought commissars, whether or not they understand the recondite subtleties of ever-changing doctrine. The USSR and its planned economy may be defunct, but the creed of the commissar lives on. We underestimate its appeal at our peril.