The tendency towards long-term political figureheads comes down to a few root causes generally:
The leader/figurehead is an extremely popular figure in that country, generally due to being a revolutionary hero, and thus is popular enough to remain in a high position of authority or prominence for most of their life. This is your Kim Il Sungs, Fidel Castros, Lenins, etc.
The communist party within that country wants a sense of stability that having a long-term figurehead provides. I keep using leader and figurehead interchangeably here as quite often what happens is that powers and responsibilities shift downwards over time, so while the leader may remain the same they actually have less authority within the system than you would think at a glance. A combination of this and #1 is what has happened with the Kims in North Korea; Kim Jong Un is still head of the communist party but is not the leader of government, which is split between what is effectively a prime minister and a head of the legislature. Each successive Kim has held less and less power within the government.
The late stage Soviet system did have issues with this sort of thing, less so because those at the top were consolidating power and more because they weren’t investing in the party and recruiting new blood into their ranks, which resulted in the same party members remaining in power for decades and contributed to the eventual collapse of the union later on as the common Soviet was less a devoted Marxist and more a person living within a Marxist society.
I’ve never actually learned this stuff, I’m reading through this thread and I’m still not getting some things that maybe should be obvious. What is the role/function (both ostensibly and in practice) of both the communist party itself and their leader more specifically?
The answer largely depends on the specific country/party; socialism is a scientific ideology, after all, and often experiments with new ideas or processes depending on the specific conditions of that country and its needs.
Generalizing though, the party is an ideological animal whereas the government/state is a practical one. The latter concentrates on day-to-day issues like infrastructure, education, the economy, etc while the former acts to guide the state towards the goals of socialism. As a practical example, the government may be working to expand light industry to create more luxury goods for its people while the party would be working to ensure the long-term benefits of such go to the working class and not get consolidated into the hands of a wealthy minority. Both the party and the state are tightly integrated to ensure that this isn’t just a bunch of armchair Marxists reading theory and yelling at a government that largely ignores them, so you’ll often find that party membership is essentially required to get into the state in the first place (though there are, contrary to popular belief, multiple parties within typical ML governments. China, North Korea, Cuba, etc all have multiple parties, just with a very dominant communist party, so there is some wiggle room here).
The confusion around long-lived leaders generally boils down to this separation of party and state: a populist figure like the Kims might start off as both head of state and head of party, but gradually shift duties more towards the latter until they completely abandon the head of state position. Since the party still has massive influence this means they still have quite a lot of sway, but they’re not making the day-to-day decisions directly anymore.
Thanks for the good explanation. That last part is a problem I could see, too. I know I heard an issue the USSR had is that their bureaucracy class got too entrenched and separated from the people. No idea how to solve that, though, as I’m obviously still learning about this in general. This has been such an interesting thread lol.
The tendency towards long-term political figureheads comes down to a few root causes generally:
The late stage Soviet system did have issues with this sort of thing, less so because those at the top were consolidating power and more because they weren’t investing in the party and recruiting new blood into their ranks, which resulted in the same party members remaining in power for decades and contributed to the eventual collapse of the union later on as the common Soviet was less a devoted Marxist and more a person living within a Marxist society.
I’ve never actually learned this stuff, I’m reading through this thread and I’m still not getting some things that maybe should be obvious. What is the role/function (both ostensibly and in practice) of both the communist party itself and their leader more specifically?
The answer largely depends on the specific country/party; socialism is a scientific ideology, after all, and often experiments with new ideas or processes depending on the specific conditions of that country and its needs.
Generalizing though, the party is an ideological animal whereas the government/state is a practical one. The latter concentrates on day-to-day issues like infrastructure, education, the economy, etc while the former acts to guide the state towards the goals of socialism. As a practical example, the government may be working to expand light industry to create more luxury goods for its people while the party would be working to ensure the long-term benefits of such go to the working class and not get consolidated into the hands of a wealthy minority. Both the party and the state are tightly integrated to ensure that this isn’t just a bunch of armchair Marxists reading theory and yelling at a government that largely ignores them, so you’ll often find that party membership is essentially required to get into the state in the first place (though there are, contrary to popular belief, multiple parties within typical ML governments. China, North Korea, Cuba, etc all have multiple parties, just with a very dominant communist party, so there is some wiggle room here).
The confusion around long-lived leaders generally boils down to this separation of party and state: a populist figure like the Kims might start off as both head of state and head of party, but gradually shift duties more towards the latter until they completely abandon the head of state position. Since the party still has massive influence this means they still have quite a lot of sway, but they’re not making the day-to-day decisions directly anymore.
Thanks for the good explanation. That last part is a problem I could see, too. I know I heard an issue the USSR had is that their bureaucracy class got too entrenched and separated from the people. No idea how to solve that, though, as I’m obviously still learning about this in general. This has been such an interesting thread lol.