One of the problems with this argument is that the murderous Cambodian oligarchy consisted of graduates of Western universities.

Intellectuals in general have espoused a lot of inhuman political ideologies.

But would academic wisdom have avoided the rise of Pol Pot? The German people were pretty well educated and recently had been reminded of the cost of letting political forces spin out of control given the debacle and horrors of of WWI, yet they made the same mistakes as Cambodia in 1932 in allowing the rise of Hitler (whose Mein Kamph provided plenty of forewarning of an incoming regime based in hate).

I don't see education as the solution to despotism. That requires a fair mind and rationality — neither of which has roots in book learning.

I don't think 1920s-1930s Germany and 1970s Cambodia are comparable. By the 1970s there was a significant amount of hindsight available for any country that was aspiring to either ultra-nationalism or communism, not so much in the late 1920s when Russia was still in significant flux after Lenin's death. What would the Germans have compared the Nazi regime to?

Communism does not lead to deaths and genocide. Concentrated, uncontested power does.

And communism leads to concentrated, uncontested power. The dictatorship of the proletariat will never dissolve itself once it gets absolute power.

Or at least it requires it in order to function. Not sure which comes first.

It is possible to have communism without concentrated, uncontested power. We have seen no such implementation as of yet but it can happen. As with most revolutions there is a period of absolutism that follows its success.

I agree that you could have communism without concentrated power but the key there would be that all governance and choice of governance would be rescinded to the smallest possible communities. That means, absolutely and without debate, that those communities could choose whatever form of economic organization that they wanted to, so you would wind up with a heterogenous mixture of every kind of economic theory, communism, capitalism, socialism, mercantilism, and probably a dozen other variations. That would be great if you could ensure that certain rights were broadly respected such as freedom of movement so that people could leave a system they disliked and join one they preferred.

I don't necessarily see communism working over a long period even at that scale though. I think attrition would be too high. The chance of some whacko gaining too much power would be too high. Moral would degrade over time when people were able to compare their own situation with that of their neighbours under other systems.

Honestly, I think we'd be better off making room for small communes and giving them legal protections similar to corporations. Establish some decent laws that allow people to organize and live that way for as long as they want to but also ensure that such systems aren't abused and are held to account when they do wrong. There's a time and place for them in many people's lives but it isn't something we should try to impose on a broad, unwilling populace.

Wow - so you can make it happen, but not Mao, Trotsky, Stalin, Tito, Deng, Ho Chi Minh, Mengistu, Castro, Sankara, etc.?

I did not claim that I could make it happen. I claimed that it was possible.

Note that Deng changed PRC from personalist dictatorship to an autocracy that had much more decentralization. He wanted one party rule but not all power in the hands of one person. His liberalization of the Chinese economy lifted millions out of poverty. China ignored Western economist advice and did much better than former Soviet republics as a result.

The mass killings and terror stopped with Deng. They are back with Xi who has re-established a personalist dictatorship. Instead of a blanket knee-jerk reaction to the word “communism” one should analyze each situation on its merits. There is nuance at play. Tito was no Stalin, for instance.

Communism aims to reorganize human interactions down to the tiny details. But, given the option, the average human is individualist, especially in a large society. So, practical communism inevitably requires violence to get people to go along with it!

Since execution squads, and genocide have occurred in economic systems that aren’t self described as communist it’s worthwhile to inquire about what is typical about such occurrences. Generally, it is too much power in too few hands. This oversimplification is much more accurate and useful than, “communism leads to genocide or mass murder”.