V. Economy and Justice
C
ommunists aim for the realisation of an Umma, i.e. a “community based on the shared faith and the implementation of its law” (Ernest Gellner). Unlike Islam and the other Abrahamic religions, the communist faith is based on a secular scripture. The works of Karl Marx and other Marxist “classics” (Lenin among them) are to bring man not closer to God but to a just society. The writings of Marxism-Leninism contain several dogmas, which are all based on the rejection of the market. Those who consider the voluntary exchange of goods as the cause of all injustice theoretically advocate for the utopia of communism, which is free of exploitation and therefore just; in reality, however, they advocate for a society in which the management of scarcity replaces economic activity. Nonetheless the historical success or failure of the communist states can and should be disputed. If one asks about the implementation of the socialist idea under Soviet socialism, this success must be considered immense, especially in the economic field. The communists indeed replaced the market with a new economic order which, according to the teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, did not know private ownership over the means of production. Since 1989, reversing this “fatal success” has meant no less than the destruction of the structure of the socialist economies. Although what must be kept in mind, of course, is that for the economic basis of the transformation countries to survive the system change, the destruction could not happen in one fell swoop. The general public in the countries concerned grasped this fact more accurately than the majority of Western analysts because people in the post-communist countries had themselves experienced the dark absurdity of the socialist project: Socialism would represent the “longest and most difficult path
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