Communism

Communism enters the framework as half of a pair rather than as a system described on its own terms. It is analysed alongside representative democracy because Marsh reads both as defeated by the same flaw, which is the refusal to recognize and control the causes of oligarchy. Democracy fails because representatives are elected by land mass and time span rather than by system and chosen for charisma rather than expertise. The experts they then appoint owe their positions to cronyism with a politician rather than to recognition by the population affected. Communist states failed by denying and pretending to eradicate elitism instead of acknowledging it and putting it to use. In both cases elites form anyway, and pretending otherwise removes the only means of controlling them. Advocates of both hold that the idea has never been properly tried, and Marsh has no patience for that defence. When a round peg does not fit a square hole after numerous attempts, she wrote, we do not say it has not been tried, we say it does not work. The human cost is part of her assessment rather than an aside, since both democracy and communism have produced human rights horrors on the scale of fascist states, which is the reasoning behind her insistence that individual rights sit above all other authority. The objection is not to shared ownership. It is to any system that hands power to groups while denying that it has done so, and the remedy she proposes is not a better ideology but transparency, autonomy and expertise acknowledged by the people affected.

Communism in ordinary use means a classless society with common ownership of the means of production, and in practice the party states of the 1900s that claimed the name. The critical literature is enormous and mostly divides along familiar lines: Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek attacked central planning as an information problem, Milovan Djilas identified a new class of party administrators, and defenders have long held that the states in question were distortions rather than realizations of the theory. Marsh's angle cuts across that argument. She is not weighing planning against markets or theory against practice, and she declines the distortion defence for communism and democracy alike. Her question is only whether a system admits that elites will form and builds a way to control them, which is a test both fail before any question of ownership arises.