Why Communism Is a Dead End: Lessons From Communist Romania
As a child in school, I discovered that communism is a dead end. In 1950s Romania, the propaganda was pasted and sung everywhere: “Communism is the ideal society.” “We are all devoted to constructing communism.” And then there was Lenin’s slogan: “Always forward!”
The reality that bread was on rations and meat stores were empty was justified by the promise: “We are not there yet. We are still on the pre-communism step, called socialism.”
Education in Romania was serious, thanks to historical interaction with neighbors from the West. The education system had been founded long before communism. The study of language and mathematics drew heavily on French traditions, physics on British scholarship, technology on German advances, and language and music on Italian influences. Underlying all these disciplines was the Greco-Roman intellectual and cultural heritage that laid the foundations for modern science and art.
Feel free to question, create, and disagree. You are entitled to your own ideas, but not to the history of the world.
Because the teaching of history was systematic, an animated drawing appeared in my mind. “Systematic” means that I was taught world history in two cycles — middle school (grades 5th – 7th) and high school (grades 8th – 11th). Each cycle covered the evolution of society the same way, chronologically and geographically. The high school cycle was an in-depth repetition of the middle school cycle, and it reinforced the movie of history in my mind.
The first cycle began with communal life, hunting, gathering, and sharing. There was no geography, just a narrative about society. The miserable life, hungry and short, was not mentioned. Images were not in the textbook. Communal life was a challenge to a child’s imagination.
The cycle continued with antiquity. That was inspiring. Geography and chronology brought together Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Persia, India and China, and finally the Roman empire. My mind was gyrating on the map, from the Mediterranean to the East, and back to the Mediterranean, and always upward. Although in the same region, Rome was newer and significantly more advanced than Egypt.
The teaching of the Middle Ages was a rerun of my movie, and sharpened my vision: China and Japan, India, the Middle East, the Near East, monotheism, and the invasions of Europe from the east. This era seemed to settle into a steady state of feudalism, serfs, landowners, monarchs, and many battles, winners and losers, changed frontiers, and the expansion of the world map.
The sciences and the arts took flight, and the textbook was full of pictures. The movie remained the same: the map was swept in time, and the direction was clearly upward, toward advancement, high above antiquity. In the final year on the serpentine — modern and contemporary history — I was not surprised by the advancements, steam power, the end of slavery, science and technology. My mental image was an upward serpentine, one turn for each cycle covered in school:
I remember feeling dissatisfied with the image that was taking shape. In communal life, the sharing was voluntary, a matter of survival for everyone in the hut. Under communism, instead of sharing there was forced confiscation of private property: the land owned by the peasant, all the means of production, and the house owned by the family living in it. Those who refused to give in were sent to labor camps or killed.
This is how I kept hearing a question: The claim is that communism is the future. Is the claim true?
Check my drawing, because to start from “communal” and end at “communism” meant going nowhere, not upward. In fact, as early as the 1950s it was painfully evident that life under communism was trending toward lack of advancement (life, freedom, movement, food), and to an abundance of misery.
Feel free to question, create, and disagree.
You are entitled to your own ideas, but not to the history of the world.
If you would like to learn more on the harmony of societal design in the universal design of nature and evolution, please consider reading (in sequential order) my following books:
- Bejan and J.P. Zane, Design in Nature (Doubleday, New York, 2012);
- Bejan, The Physics of Life (Saint Martin’s Press, New York, 2016);
- Bejan, Freedom and Evolution (Springer, New York, 2020);
- Bejan, Time and Beauty (World Scientific, Singapore, 2022); and
- Bejan, Diversity through Freedom (Springer, New York, 2026).
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Communism, McCarthyism, and the New Red Scare
Adrian Bejan is J. A. Jones Distinguished Professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University. Born in Romania in 1948, he is internationally known for formulating the constructal law of evolution in nature and for his contributions to modern thermodynamics and the field of heat transfer.