Totalitarian Regimes and Economic Systems

After Russia’s Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, totalitarian regimes became a trend that eliminated democratic political processes and civil liberties, persecuted religious beliefs, and destroyed all kinds of private organizations.

Democratic countries may incorporate elements of a command economy; however, despite incorporating these elements, people are still permitted to make their own economic decisions. This way of governance is called a “mixed” economy.

The economies found in Germany under Hitler or in Argentina under Perón are far more regulated. In this type of governance, the government permits the means of production to remain under private ownership but strictly controls how those means of production are used.

The former communist countries' totalitarian command economies, in which the political state owns all significant means of production, are at the other extreme of the spectrum.

Capitalism and Communism stand at opposite poles. Their essential difference is this: The Communist, seeing the rich man and his fine home, says: “No man should have so much.” The capitalist, seeing the same thing, says: “All men should have as much.”

Communism is an economic system based on public ownership and governmental control of the production and distribution of nearly all national resources.

Karl Marx (1818–1883) is often treated as a revolutionary, an activist rather than a philosopher, whose works inspired the foundation of many communist regimes in the twentieth century.

According to Karl Marx, in order for Communism to be maintained, violence must be utilized in the revolution.

The goal of Communism was to eliminate the bourgeoisie and give power to the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the first stage of the revolution. All property would be confiscated by this dictatorship, and the old ruling and propertied classes would be eliminated.

In the theory of Marx, the proletariat is the class made up of workers who work in the industry and are those who do not possess capital or property and must sell their labor to those who are wealthy in order to survive. On the other hand, the powerful capitalist class that owns and is concerned with property, as contrasted with the wage-earning class, which must concern itself with survival, is the bourgeoisie.