Joseph Stalin was a communist leader inspired by Leon Trotsky
Trotsky was a communist revolutionary and intellectual. He once wrote “In politics, obtaining power and maintaining power justifies anything” in his book “Leur morale et la nôtre”*
In this book, Trotsky justifies the use of lies, infiltration of other political parties, smearing, even hostage taking. He says absolute ruthlesness is necessary to overthrow a hostile system and wield power. He concludes "We are acting for the greater good. We can’t be restrained by normal morality".
Joseph Stalin took Trotsky’s advice literally. So he murdered Trotsky because he saw him as rival. Stalin also started killing people because he believed they could be sympathetic to capitalism or opponents to his power.
Matvei Bronstein: Theorical physicist. Pioneer of quantum gravity. Arrested, accused of fictional “terroristic” activity and shot in 1938
Lev Shubnikov: Experimental physicist. Accused on false charges. Executed
Adrian Piotrovsky: Russian dramaturge. Accused on false charges of treason. Executed.
Nikolai Bukharin: Leader of the Communist revolution. Member of the Politburo. Falsely accused of treason. Executed.
General Alexander Egorov: Marshal of the Soviet Union. Commander of the Red Army Southern Front. Member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Arrested, accused on false charges, executed.
General Mikhail Tukhachevsky: Supreme Marshal of the Soviet Union. Nicknamed the Red Napoleon. Arrested, accused on fake charges. Executed.
Grigory Zinoviev:: Communist intellectual. Chairman of the Communist International Movement. Member of the Soviet Politburo. Accused of treason and executed.
Even the secret police themselves were not safe:
Genrikh Yagoda : Right-hand of Joseph Stalin. Head of the NKD Secret Police. He spied on everyone and jailed thousands of innocents. Arrested and executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrikh_Yagoda
Nikolai Yezhov : Appointed head of the NKD Secret Police after the killing of Yagoda. Arrested on fake charges. Also executed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Yezhov
Everybody was absolutely terrified during this period. At least 500 000 people were murdered. Over 1 million people were deported to Gulags, secret prisons in Siberia, where they worked 12 hours a day.
Joseph Stalin decided to crush Ukraine for resisting communism and supporting independance. In 1933, he seized all Ukraine’s food. In the next months, 5 million Ukrainians were starved to death. The situation was so bad that thousands of Ukrainians turned to cannibalism. When Nazis invaded Ukraine, some Ukrainians thought they were saviors
https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/holodomor
https://www.history.com/articles/ukrainian-famine-stalin
Hitler was a monster, but we really don’t talk enough about how bad Stalin was.
The main issue I’m seeing is that the success stories are from relatively small groups.
Many systems, like communism, work fine in small scale applications, but scaling them up to the size of a country or continent doesn’t tend to work because there’re too many moving parts to not have inherent vertical hierarchies and multiple failure points where bad actors can corrupt the system.
It’s not the system of government that’s the ultimate issue, it’s the people who are the problem. Unless we start talking about using eugenics to address the cluster B personality disorder issue, I don’t really see this changing. I think it’s humanity’s Great Filter.
There were roughly 1.6 million participants in Anarchist Catalonia. More recently, Rojava (Kurdish Syria) has successfully operated on a decentralized/federated system heavily inspired by Anarchist theory, and that had a population of 4.6 million, with no major internal issues or strife.
Anarchist theory is, in my opinion, one of the best defenses against Cluster B people getting in positions of power. Under a centralized government, a bad actor has tremendous power, and there is often limited options for a population to counter that corruption, since it is often self-reinforcing by the system itself. As an example, to corrupt the US, corporations need only bribe a few hundred senators, and then can effectively implement self-serving laws that reinforce monopolies of power.
In a system with decentralized power where the community itself is the bedrock of power, how does an outside force effectively corrupt it? They can bribe a community’s delegates, but those can be immediately removed if corruption is perceived by the community. To make any headway, they would effectively need to bribe an entire community, which could be thousands of people, and those people would have no incentive to take those bribes if the bribe was to prop-up something detrimental to that community.
Because every position of power has so little power in a decentralized community, a Cluster B personality would have very little ability to cause damage compared to a centralized system.
Also, bear in mind that according to studies, only about 1.6% of the population has a Cluster B personality. The reason they are able to wreak so much havoc is pretty much entirely due to having centralized governments, as well as an economic system that rewards and empowers cluster B behavior, both of which work synergistically to result in the worst possible outcome for the majority.
For an Anarchist society to flurish long-term, it would also need to eliminate capitalism almost immediately, and instead replace it with universal basic rights to food, housing, healthcare, and public transportation, alongside a library and gift economy, reinforcing a society built on mutual aid.
If you’d like to see how that sort of world would look like for an average person, I’d highly suggest reading The Dispossessed.
1.6 and 4.6 million people is an extremely small population when you’re discussing applying it to a population of 8 billion. As the population scales up a centralized government is inevitable because the system has too many moving parts.
To make any of this happen globally, or even just a country, you have to rely on all people behaving differently than they have for the past several thousand years. Human tribalism, selfishness, and greed were a problem way before capitalism was a thing.
Respectfully I have to disagree there.
I haven’t found that to be the case in my research. Decentralized modes of society appear to scale very well as long as it is combined with federation.
While hierarchical oppressive societies have been prevalent for the past 8,000 years, new evidence shows that before that, the norm for humans were egalitarian societies, so our current path is quite an aberration from that norm. If you’d like to delve into that research yourself, you can read it for free here.
1930’s Catalonia and Rojava are very solid evidence that with the right societal structure, we can actually bring out that latent egalitarian ability of humans. People who lived through what happened in Catalonia described there being a period of acclimation to the concept of things being free, yet only taking what you need, but that once people understood that there would be more waiting for them later, they quickly adapted to living in a post-scarcity fashion. There’s a good documentary on that topic here, if you’re interested.
The highest population number that you provided is in the neighborhood of 1800x less than the global population. That’s, relatively, an extremely small sample.
I’m not saying it can’t work at all, but a handful of examples of it working with populations smaller than a large metropolitan area isn’t proof it can be scaled.
The more cells you have, the more vertical hierarchy is necessary to coordinate things between the groups to make sure everyone is represented fairly.