Debunking 3 Common Myths About Communism

There are countless lies about communism and socialist states repeated so often they’re treated as “common sense” by anti-communists.

Trying to debunk all of them would be a huge task. But here I’m going to tackle three of the most common claims I keep hearing in conversations about communism.

These claims are:

Communism doesn't work and can't provide a good quality of life for people.
The famine of 1932 was a genocide & people who live in socialist states are starving.
The Gulag system is comparable to Nazi concentration camps and death camps.

I’ll probably go into more detail on some of these myths in separate articles later, but for now, I hope this helps some comrades get to the bottom of some accusations often thrown at us.

Myth 1: Communism doesn't work and can't provide a good quality of life for people.

We’ve all heard it before: “Communism sounds great on paper, but it doesn’t work.” Unfortunately, the people who say this think they’ve come to that conclusion by their own critical thinking but in reality they’re just repeating the same Cold War propaganda that’s been spoon-fed to us for decades.

So, what does the evidence actually say? In 1986 two doctors named Shirley Cereseto and Howard Waitzkin published a study in the International Journal of Health Services called Capitalism, Socialism, and the Physical Quality of Life.¹

This research compared capitalist and socialist countries at an equivalent level of economic development, looking at indicators of health and nutrition (like life expectancy, infant and child mortality, and daily calorie supply), measures of education (literacy and school enrollment), and an overall composite physical quality of life (PQL) index.

The research found that socialist states generally provide a better physical quality of life:

In 30 of 36 comparisons between countries at similar levels of economic development, socialist countries showed more favorable PQL outcomes.

These findings are reinforced by more recent research. In 2024, Matthew Hill’s Under the Red Banner, Socialism, Physical Quality of Life, and Development ², concluded that the healthcare and education policies implemented by socialist states have been successful at improving their population's living standards:

...it seems as though the policies employed by the socialist nations in regards to health care and education have been successful at improving overall living standards among their people.

China provides a clear example of this. Between 1950 and 1980 China experienced one of the most rapid increases of life expectancy in history.³ This is attributed to health campaigns and expansion of education. In this period, life expectancy grew from 35 to 65.5.

Primary school enrollment rose to 80% by 1958 and to 97% by 1975, while secondary school enrollment rose to 46% by 1977. This is unprecedented considering that in 1950 more than 80% of China's population was illiterate.

Another unprecedented achievement of socialism in China is their poverty alleviation programs. Since 1980, China has pulled 800 million people out of extreme poverty.⁴ That is double the population of the whole EU. China is responsible for three quarters of the world's reduction of extreme poverty.

It's clear that the old tale claiming "communism doesn't work" is completely incorrect. Socialist policies have improved living standards across the board. Communists took economically and culturally underdeveloped societies and transformed them into industrialized societies that provided significantly better lives for their people.

As Dr. Michael Parenti explains on page 85 of Blackshirts and Reds: ⁵

To say that “socialism doesn't work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.

Myth 2: The famine of 1932 was a genocide & people who live in socialist states are starving.

Another common myth claims that Stalin intentionally starved millions of Ukrainians and people under communism are starving.

First, let's get the so called "Holodomor" out of the way. For this we’ll focus on Professor Mark Tauger’s 2001 study, Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931–1933.⁶ Tauger has studied this famine for over 30 years and is widely regarded as the leading expert on the 1932 famine.

Tauger's research shows that the primary cause of the famine was environmental conditions. Here is a brief summary of some of his findings:

In 1931, Siberia, the Volga region, Bashkiria, and Ukraine experienced severe droughts and hot winds, which persisted through 1932 and contributed to a poor harvest. Other regions faced excessive rain and flooding, including a hurricane, which destroyed crops and reduced yields. In the south, a warm spell caused fall-sown crops to grow prematurely only to perish when temperatures returned to normal.

These extreme weather conditions also created the ideal environment for pests, plant diseases, and weeds. Rust fungus devastated crops, alongside infestations of smut and ergot, collectively destroying millions of tons of grain and affecting both humans and livestock.

Infestations of field moths, locust, weevils, hessian flies, and other insects caused further problems. One district in Ukraine witnessed the destruction of around 500 hectares of beets by weevils in just 3 hours. Locust infestations covered 2.2 million hectares of grain in Kazakstan, and 3 million hectares were affected by meadow moths.

I highly recommend people read Tauger's research to understand the severity of the issues. With that said, the famine was not engineered by Stalin or the Bolsheviks and it didn't have an anti-Ukrainian bias. While human actions may have exacerbated the issues, they can't be claimed to be the primary cause of the famine.

To directly quote Tauger:

I show that the environmental context of these famines deserves much greater emphasis than it has previously received: environmental disasters reduced the Soviet grain harvest in 1932 substantially and have to be considered among the primary causes of the famine. I argue that capital and labor difficulties were significant but were not as important as these environmental factors, and were in part a result of them. I also demonstrate that the Soviet leadership did not fully understand the crisis and out of ignorance acted inconsistently in response to it. I conclude that it is thus inaccurate to describe the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as simply an artificial or man-made famine, or otherwise to reduce it to a single cause.

Besides historical famines, some anti-communists argue that people in socialist states are just generally starving. While there have been challenges, especially in countries hit by brutal sanctions, the statistics don’t support the claim that socialist states starve their populations.

For example, in 1999 the CIA declassified an analysis from 1984 called The Nutrient Content of the Soviet Food Supply. ⁷

The analysis said:

The findings of this study indicate that the Soviet food supply on an average per capita basis has long been generally adequate from a nutritional point of view.

The analysis also noted that:

The nutrient content of the Soviet food supply resembles that of the US food supply in many respects. The per capita level of food energy (calories) nearly matches that in the United States. The protein level also nearly equals that of the US food supply. The level of carbohydrate remains higher, and that of fat lower, but the gaps have narrowed somewhat since 1965.

In other words, not only were the Soviet people eating a sufficiently nutritious diet but it was nearly equivalent to the US diet in many ways. If we look at socialist countries today, even some of the poorest like Cuba, we see that they achieve relatively low numbers of starvation compared to other countries in the same region.

Though Cuba is not included in some of the latest Global Hunger Indexes⁸, if we view the 2020 report, we can see that Cuba scored a 5 on a 0-100 scale (with 0 being the best score). This is a "low level" of hunger. According to World Bank data on Cuba⁹, they have some of the lowest levels of undernourishment in Latin America. The Prevalence of undernourishment (% of population) is at 3%.

It's astonishing that despite Cuba being a victim of the US embargo and a poor country, it still scores extremely well on the Global Hunger Index. Even though Cuba has very little, they do their best to make sure that people are fed.

As of 2024, the GHI for the world had an average score of 18.3, which is a moderate level of hunger.¹⁰

However, most socialist countries score below this average. For instance, China scores a 5 and Vietnam scores 11.3. Socialist-inspired countries also show lower levels of hunger. Belarus scores a 5 and Nicaragua scores 13.6.

Obviously there is still work to be done in many countries but it cannot be claimed that these countries are starving their people. Even though things aren't perfect, it is clear that efforts are being made to minimize hunger.

If liberals were truly concerned about people starving in socialist countries, they would advocate an end to the sanctions, embargoes, and economic warfare inflicted on these countries. But we all know liberals don't care about starving people. Anyway, now that we've handled the claims that socialism doesn't work, can't provide a positive quality of life for people, and supposedly starves people, we can move on to the third and final myth in our list.

Myth 3: The Gulag system is comparable to Nazi concentration camps and death camps.

Anti-communists will try to draw comparisons between Nazi Germany and the USSR as much as they can in order to vilify communism. These types of comparisons usually fall into double genocide theory, which is a recognized form of Holocaust denialism. We see this a lot when it comes to things such as the famine of 1932 and the gulag system. Unfortunately, most people's idea of the Soviet prison system comes straight from the fairy tales of Solzhenitsyn and genocide simulators like Call of Duty.

Of course, prisons are not fun places in any state, whether capitalist or socialist. However, the attempt to compare the Soviet prison system to nazi death camps is absolutely ridiculous and holds no basis in reality whatsoever.

Compared to both Western prisons of the time and the old tsarist system, the Soviet penal system had many progressive features. For example, literary scholar Kenneth Neill Cameron noted in his 1987 book Stalin, Man of Contradiction¹¹ that:

As we would expect from such a state, the legal and prison systems that it established were essentially just and nonpunitive. In fact, they were praised and admired by liberal attorneys and penologists throughout the world. People’s courts, in which ordinary citizens sat with a professional judge on the bench, tried 80 percent of all cases, and legal services could be obtained free of charge. As a desirable alternative to prisons, “agricultural and industrial labor colonies” were established where some prisoners brought their families and where they were allowed to marry. The basic objective of the system was rehabilitation, not just in words, as in capitalist states, but in reality...

We can find similar sentiments from the American sociologist Jerome Davis in his 1933 book, The New Russia.¹² Jerome noted that the Soviet prison system put an emphasis on economic opportunity, and industrial and social training for prisoners. He described penal colonies without walls and few guards, and the existence of a type of self-governance within prisons.

To quote directly from Jerome Davis:

The educational work in the prisons is a unique feature. There is regular class work, recreation with an educational aim, wall-and printed newspapers, clubs, theatrical performances, sports, musical activities, and self-government in the most advanced grades. Every sort of stimulus and pressure is brought to bear to socialize (”sovietize”) the inmates. In the institutions I visited, including old Czarist buildings and modern farm industrial colonies, I saw these activities carried on with great enthusiasm and earnestness.

Considering all of the extraordinary features that Jerome Davis witnessed while visiting prisons, it is no surprise that he thought the Soviet Union had the most advanced penal code in the world. This isn’t to say the Soviet system was without problems or that prisons were a utopia. However, the idea that Soviet prisons and penal colonies were akin to Nazi concentration and death camps is absolutely ludicrous.

There is a lot more we could say here, and I will probably write more in-depth about this topic in another article. But for now, the point stands: equating the Soviet penal system with Nazi concentration and extermination camps is historical revisionism. One was built to rehabilitate, educate, and reintegrate people into society as healthy productive members, while the other was for the purpose of systematic extermination. Not only is it wrong to make such claims, but it trivializes the crimes of fascists in an attempt to denigrate socialism.

At the end of the day, socialism proves time and time again that it can create better lives for the working class and is far from the hell on earth that the bourgeoisie would have us believe it is. Navigating cold war propaganda can be disorienting, but the evidence is on our side!