Most Communist governments have come to power as a result of peasant revolutions in largely agrarian nations. Considerable writing has been devoted to this paradox - proletariat revolutions in agrarian nations - and Wonks Anonymous is largely unconcerned with its explanation in theory or in practice.

More important to Wonks Anonymous are these fundamental regularities in the development of most Communist regimes:

• The supposed parties of the workers have come into power through an alliance with peasants who were - to a person - seeking land.
• A longer or shorter time after these parties obtained power they turned on their peasant allies and proved to be even crueler masters than the landlords that the peasants overthrew.
• The resulting repression and coercion stunted the development of agriculture and deformed the moral character of entire societies.

The prototype of this original sin of Communism was the forced collectivization of Russian agriculture under Stalin. The resulting famine and exile of peasants would be called genocide except that it was aimed at a class, not a nation.

But the seeds of this were planted much earlier in Russian history when, in 1899, Lenin was looking for a theoretical justification for a proletariat revolution in Russia. For which justification he needed an extensive group of capitalists and a larger mass of poor laborers who had little or no connection to the land.

Lenin found both of these in the Russian village. Peasants with some land, savings and significant herds were kulaks, already formed capitalists. Peasants who could possible have aspirations to these enviable riches - owners perhaps of some pigs or chickens and their own plot of land - were srednyaks, who were not to be trusted. Only the poorest of peasants, the bednyaks were free of the capitalist taint.

When, in 1917, the peasants spontaneously seized the land and showed an unseemly and almost universal ambition to become kulaks the Bolsheviks responded by adopting the slogan Land to the Peasants. Some, Bukharin for example, seem to have come to believe in the slogan. Most could only see the future workers paradise only in terms of huge factories and farms. These were to be run along the lines of the capitalist bureaucracies of the day:

The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.

This from Lenin's conclusion to The State and Revolution.

Reading the archives of Pravda from the period before collectivization one sees that, in this world, the peasants were seen by many as an enemy more threatening than the British bankers or the American monopolists. It was even proposed that the investment of these distant Capitalists be used to uproot the kulak cancer that grew within Russia.

By all accounts the Russian countryside is still demoralized and backward.

When the policy was applied in China the majority of the population was rendered powerless to resist the mad fantasies of Mao - The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution. When Mao finally made the world a better place by his departure this same population was left without rights or direct access to the means of production. The motive force of the Chinese revolution had become a dispossessed proletariat that is the envy of capitalists across the globe.

Meanwhile in Cuba, the utopia of choice of many who Wonks Anonymous knows, the damage is a bit more subtle. Here a lush tropical island has difficulties producing its own food and the general poverty is far greater than might be explained by the US blockade. Yet the government seems unwilling to try applying the old revolutionary slogan that powered the revolution.

We are told that Land to the Peasants would create unacceptable inequality as independent farmers got rich on mangoes and pork. Instead it is more acceptable to seek foreign currency.  This creates privileged classes who have access to tourists or who have relatives in the US who can send dollars but, somehow, this inequality is not as threatening as the inequality that comes from honest labor.

Wonks Anonymous has studied Marxism-Leninism extensively. He will never understand this.