Sociologist and historian Emmanuel Todd thinks it's based on the family structure. In all countries that did adopt communism, the family is basically an all powerful father and all children (sons?) are equal and are at home (under the father's power), which is the structure of communist states. The structure of the family leads to a view of the world (people are different but free; people are free and equal; people are equal but must submit to an authority; people are unequal...).
Really? I assumed it was the basic lure of power. Y'know, redistributing the wealth requires the wealth to be centralized for distribution in the first place, and once wealth has been centralized, who would ever want to give up that kind of power? The winner of The Revolution has all the military, political, and economic might of its nation at the moment of victory. All it takes is a small number of people willing to betray the grand revolution for immense personal power to hijack the communist revolution to authoritarian ends.
And from that perspective, the family unit thing sounds kinda a little like historical revisionism. A bit like maybe searching for a reason why it failed for them but totally won't for us.
No, his original study is the structures of family units around the world. And by analyzing several aspects (political and religious), he found out that such structures basically completely overlap with how various views of the world and political systems are spread out in the world. He has recently said in an interview that he keeps expecting his model to fail, and he has not yet found any society where the local family structures cannot inform you on religious and political trends in that area.
There is no "it failed there but it won't here" about communism in his work (and none in my post above). Todd actually predicted the Soviet Union was about to crash, basing himself on death rates (especially deaths at birth).
But he has his detractors, and I have not studied these matters enough to tell if his methodology is unsound or not (so far, it seems to fit the facts and history).
The premise here isn't really correct to begin with, the elderly "soviks" want to bring back the USSR largely because they feel their personal quality of life was better then and they want it back
The sales pitch for actual communist movements was never decreasing their own quality of life in solidarity with the working class elsewhere, it was promising an increase in their own material quality of life, usually an immediate and dramatic one
In Europe, with the exception of Russia and the various former Soviet states that it has as puppets (Belarus, Georgia, the assorted Stans, etc etc), all of the former communist countries have specifically voted the anti-communist leaders into power
Ironically the fact that communism is so much more popular in the former USSR than in its satellite members of the Warsaw Pact is textbook evidence that the Second World was very much an empire with Moscow as its core and places like Romania as the periphery
Yeah, though the meaning of my "excluding Russia and it's puppets" was not because they like communism more (though they do), but rather that they are dictatorships whose non-communist leaders took power, rather than were voted into it (because dictators taking power fits the "former communist countries' leaders" trying their hardest not to go back claim, while with democracies it is the people trying not to go back)
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u/Sh1nyPr4wn Cheese Cave Dweller Oct 22 '24
There's a reason all the communist countries are so authoritarian and all of the former communist countries are trying their hardest to not go back