ABSTRACT
For better or worse, the fate of governments and the plight of the poor are bound together. Poverty has become a matter of state, and the expeditious alleviation of material want has emerged as a basic measure of the success of contemporary regimes. The Marxist-Leninist regime's preoccupation with command and control can work to the material advantage of the population in poor societies in the years immediately after a communist party comes to power. The absolute primacy of political power over economic power in the determination of living standards has serious implications for both the strategy through which to acquire material comforts and the actual patterns of material comfort in communist societies. Western measures of inequality systematically underestimate even the purely economic dimensions of inequality in Marxist-Leninist states, since the premises behind them are not valid in Marxist-Leninist countries. At the governmental level, Marxist-Leninist regimes are to some degree economic victims of their own political successes.
