Essay: Creativity and innovation cannot flourish under a communist society

According to history, both the USSR and PRC where communist and totalitarian states. Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong adopted Karl Marx’s theory (Marxism) and implemented them with minor changes into their countries making them communist countries. As well as being Communists, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong where totalitarians, they changed and regulated a lot of their people’s life styles. This essay will argue whether communism has failed/evolved in the USSR and PRC.
Creativity and innovation cannot flourish under a communist society lead by a dictator. Dictatorships create a culture of fear by punishing the people who disagree with the leader or his ideology. As a result, standing out by either publicly expressing your opinion or by creating art would be extremely risky to the individual involved. This lead people to follow orders and obey their leader to ensure their safety and wellbeing. In addition to being in a communist society where whether a person works hard or not will be rewarded with the same reward everybody gets, people were being forced into working in a work field they hated and being discouraged from thinking creatively and outside the box resulted in lacking the incentive to perform well. As a consequence, people did the bear minimum in their jobs which effected the country’s production negatively. Leon Trotsky supports this theory by saying “Not only a Marxist, but any realistic political thinker, ought to understand that the very necessity of “reinforcing” the dictatorship – that is, governmental repression – testifies not to the triumph of a classless harmony, but to the growth of new social antagonisms. What lies at the bottom of all this? Lack of the means of subsistence from the low productivity of labor.” Trotsky argues that even realistic political thinkers will understand that having a dictator govern a communist state will end up in the people providing low productivity.
Markets cannot flourish under a communist system. In a communist state goods are shared instead of being paid for by individuals since everything is state owned, this meant that there was no way of finding out whether a product is doing well or not based on the profits. As a result, factories did not work on improving their quality since the risk of bankruptcy was eliminated. As well as not having the risk of bankruptcy, factories where established and payed for by the government. Being owned by the government meant that the government payed for the resources they used in the creation of their product, which resulted in factories not caring about efficiency. This ended up in factories not caring about the threat of being bankrupt since bankruptcy was non-existent. As well as having their expenses covered by the government, factories had their competitive spirit removed, since prices were fixed at zero. This meant that the race of being the best manufacturer was abolished since being number one was meaningless, which ended up in all factories producing the exact same product with the exact same resources and quality.
1912 was the year that Vladimir Lenin sparked the fire that lead the Bolsheviks to overthrow the imperial government of the Russian empire in 1917, and became the ruling party in 1918 naming themselves the All-Russian Communist Party. In 1925 the All-Russian Communist Party changed their name to the All-Union Communist Party following the creating of the USSR. After the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, Joseph Stalin and his group took over the leadership of the All-Union Communist Party. In 1934 Stalin launched the Great Purge which killed thousands and imprisoned millions of those who Stalin thought where his opponents. Stalin’s death in 1953 started the downfall of communism in the USSR. When Nikita Khrushchev took over after Stalin, he started the De-Stalinization process which lead to establishing conflicts with the People’s Republic of China later causing the Sino-Soviet split. This marked the end of both Khrushchev’s reign and the end of communism in the USSR.
Nikita Khrushchev is thought to have had a major role in the downfall of communism in the USSR. Khrushchev started the De-Stalinization process in February 1956. He started with delivering a speech called “Secret Speech” in which he denounced Stalin’ s methods of ruling. Khrushchev’s speech shocked communists from all around the world damaging the USSR’s legitimacy in their eyes, which contributed to the riots that occurred in Hungary and Poland. His speech also angered Mao Zedong who believed that the De-Stalinization process was a possible threat to his authority, as a result Mao refused Khrushchev’s proposals for a military cooperation. In his De-Stalinization process, Khrushchev also changed the names of the cities that were named after Stalin back to their original names, as well as releasing the ‘gulag’ inmates. Khrushchev did not stop there, he reduced both the power of the secret police and the artistic censorship. In addition to that, Khrushchev angered Mao even more by starting a peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries, which made Mao believe that Khrushchev was a traitor to the communist belief. Khrushchev’s actions made his communist counterpart Mao believe that the USSR was straying away from true communism, which contributed to the Sino-Soviet split.