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Political scientists, however, have developed the concept of communist state to reflect claims made by Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin, and others that the revolutionary state must be a " dictatorship of the proletariat," and that the working class is represented by the Communist Party. In practice, according to this theory, state and the party are effectively identical, and govern all aspects of the society -- economic and cultural, as well as political.
In the Soviet Union for example, the General Secretary of the Communist Party did not necessarily hold a state office like president or prime minister to effectively control the system of government. Instead party members answerable to or controlled by the party held these posts, often as honorific posts as a reward for their long years of service to the party. On other occasions, having governed as General Secretary, the party leader might assume a state office in addition. For example, Mikhail Gorbachev initially did not hold the presidency of the Soviet Union, that office being given as an honor to a former Soviet Foreign Minister.
Within most communist states there are no restrictions in theory and few restrictions in practice on the power of the state, resulting in state structures which are either totalitarian or authoritarian. The mainstream branch of Marxism-Leninism sees restrictions on state power to be an unnecessary interference in the goal of pulling the society toward communism. Other Marxist-Leninists have argued that a state with absolute power is incapable of moving society towards a democratic system such as communism.
In some communist party-run states, such as the Soviet Union, a large secret police apparatus closely monitors the population. Autocratic methods are often employed to crush opposition. Some political scientists have argued that there are deep similarities between communist states and fascist ones and that both are examples of totalitarian states.
The nature of each example of the communist party run state differs widely both between countries and within each individual state. Policies which incorporate the policies and techniques of the orthodox Stalinist state of the 1930s are characteristically more totalitarian, impoverished, militaristic, and static as can be seen in the examples of North Korea and Albania. Attempts to incorporate democratic principles as in the case of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev, socialist principles as in Yugoslavia, or capitalistic techniques as in China result in some mitigation of the negative features of the communist party run state but sometimes result in dynamic situations which may undermine the control of the party over the state or even lead to its collapse.
The People's Republic of China and to a lesser extent Vietnam have both moved toward market economics.
Advocates of communism praise Communist parties for running countries that have sometimes leaped ahead of contempary "capitalistic" countries, offering guaranteed employment. Critics of communism typically condemn Communist parties by the same criteria, claiming that communist-run countries all lag far behind the " Free World" in terms of industrialization and general prosperity. They regard the Communist practice of making it illegal to quit one's job, or to hire a dissident or his relatives, tantamount to slavery.
Other claims include generous social and cultural programs, often administered by labor organizations. Universal education programs have been a strong point, as has the generous provision of universal health care. Western critics charge that Communist compulsory education is replete with pro-Communist and atheistic propaganda and that it severely punishes critical thinking.
Central economic planning has in certain instances produced dramatic advances, for example, rapid development of heavy industry during the 1930s in the Soviet Union and later in their space program. Yet other examples touted by advocates of Communism, such as the development of the pharmaceutical industry in Cuba, have according to Western critics produced few discoveries of note (it is rather the West, particularly the US, which has produced the bulk of new drugs and vaccines). Early advances in the status of women were also notable, especially in Islamic areas of the Soviet Union. See Gregory J. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia: 1919-1929, Princeton University Press, 1974, hardcover, 451 pages, BooksEnthsiast.com
Many Marxists and Marxist-Leninists argue that most communist states do not actually adhere to Marxism-Leninism but rather to a perversion heavily influenced by Stalinism, a " Caliban state" which sharply diverges in practice from the humanistic philosophy of Marxist revolutionaries. This critique is particularly strong among social democrats and some critical theorists who hold that Marxism is correct as a social and historical theory, but that it can only be implemented within a multiparty democracy. Trotskyists argue that the bureaucratic and repressive nature of communist states differs from Lenin's vision of the socialist state. Some Marxists (for example Milovan Djilas, James Burnham) described communist states as systems where a new powerful class of party bureaucrats emerged, exercised complete control over the means of production and exploited the working class.
Regimes described as communist have, according to many observers, in practice been abusive of human rights. Democratic movements that arose within a framework of communist theory, such as that instituted by Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia's Prague Spring, have been forcibly put down (see also Hungarian Uprising).
One controversial doctrine that was popular in the 1980s was the Kirkpatrick doctrine which argued that communist states were inherently "totalitarian" while right-wing dictatorships which the United States supported were "authoritarian".
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