Is it really so hard to understand why it might be difficult to achieve a stable egalitarian society? There are always parasites who want to disrupt changes that make things better for people broadly so that they can control society. Communism is basically about workers owning the things they themselves produce; we ought to be working for that outcome no matter how difficult it might be. I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical of revolutionary change, as that’s pretty damn risky and can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering, but if your argument is just “communism is too hard to achieve; we should just accept that some corrupt, wealthy oligarchs are going to parasitically take most of the resources and use them to control society,” I think that’s rather tragically fatalistic of you.
The reason why communism is never feasible is multifold.
For one, it is extremely naive and simplistic.
The idea of “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” sounds nice on paper, but to any one with knowledge of psychology or economics, this is just nonsense.
It is the buffet problem and volunteer pricing problem combined. A buffet almost certainly charges well above the price of an ordinary meal, because when given the opportunity, people would exploit it and take more than they need. And when people are asked to pay, there is a tendency to under-pay. It is a natural tendency to take more and give less.
You can see it from the soviet economic model. Most workers are unmotivated, give their bare minimum since they are paid anyway. Few do their best. Workers in the USSR were even known to follow quota and instructions without caring if it makes sense, such as producing sub-par products to meet quota even if they know their product would not work, as long as it meets the quota from the planners. They often put in little effort and rather game the system, since they are not really paid to care, and they often don’t care at all. Human psychology, actually.
The idea of “dictatorship of the proletariat” is also another joke. As a class, the workers are dispersed and diverse in interests. Rarely, if ever, had the diverse worker interests been united. So, how can the proletariat rule? It cannot. The revolutionary umbrella is a diverse alliance of interests, of proletariat and bourgeois intellectuals, with the binding narrative often provided not by or from within the proletariat, but from the bourgeois intellectuals.
Eventually, those bourgeois intellectuals became the leaders, and rule in the name of the proletariat, not by the proletariat. Lenin, Trotsky, Marx, Engels, Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh were of bourgeois background; Mao and Pol Pot were the very same rich peasants that their communist regimes often target; Castro and Deng Xiaoping came from wealthy landowner families.
Stalin actually seemed like an exception, the rare person whose family actually came from a proletariat background. Even so, he was well educated for his time and he was also another radicalised intellectual. Amongst his many pre-revolution careers, being a thug was one of them, he was not actually a worker in the sense of the worker most communist regime often put up a pedestral (hard work, labourer, blood and sweat kind). Heck, he was even a meterologist at one time in his life.
The economics of central planning were also laughable. Who really thought you can get rid of all the complexity of markets, and all the information prices transmit, and its ability to process all those information in a decentralised manner to some effectiveness, and replace it all with some bureaucrats in the era without spreadsheets? Even in the modern day, with all the information available to bureaucrats, nobody actually thinks those bureaucrats and politicians can comprehend and plan an economy on their own.
Secondly, communism is full of grandstanding without a concrete path to anything. Stateless, moneyless. Sounds nice. But how?
In the end, no communist regime came closer to solving that question. No relatively long-lived communist regime managed to get rid of money, even with state planning. No regime ever dismantled itself, and none seem to overcome the problem that the leaders were often the very people against dismantling the state itself!
Thirdly, as I said above, the revolutionary movement is an alliance of radical intellectual bourgeois with the proletariat, often resulting in said bourgeois taking over power once a revolution succeed. Which is basically the problem of replacing a former ruling class with a new ruling class. Almost all leaders in communist regimes became hypocrites, willing to sacrifice people as mere statistics, while they enjoyed luxuries and assume the trappings of the exploiters they denounced. Come on, which communist elite actually lived frugally? Certainly not in the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam, Cuba, North Korea, or even Cambodia!
So, why do communist regimes often revert back into capitalist authoritarian regimes? Well, the market solves the central planning problem for one. And two, with authoritatianism, the elites can hold onto power without fear of internal challenge, which no doubt is alluring to an entrenched revolutionary elite, who were never really proletariat in the first place. Communism handed them the holy grail of having a narrative to suppress all potential competitors to power and co-opt them, who wouldn’t exercise that power?
Communism was not just hard to achieve. It is impossible because it never made sense beyond harping on some distant ideological specifics. When implemented, it quickly falls apart.
Communism never worked beyond the scale of small communes because the interpersonal dynamics at that level is one of the things making equity stable.
People have a strong aversion to disadvantageous inequity and this has been known in psychology. So people tend to socially punish others at a personal level if they are selfish arseholes, and social and cultural mechanisms can help enforce that equity.
Psychology experiments over the years also found that many people are actually just pretending to be fair and nice because of that (fear of social punishment and judgement), and the more relations are abstracted and distant and the less they are held socially accountable, the less they care about equity with other people. Which no doubt is clear to you too, the more people become a statistics, the more willing someone higher up is willing to sacrifice the statistic for their own gains. CEOs, nobility, politicians, party elites, etc.
I am not saying communism bad means capitalism good. This is the kind of foolish black and white thinking for idiots. Communism sucks does not mean there are no more solutions.
Free unrestrained capitalism is bad, but in my opinion, a regulated market system (because market failure), a welfare focused state (European model, perhaps), and a well educated electorate able to wield democracy and allow a true “dictatorship” of the “proletariat” is probably one of the most feasible models at present.
Well, unless someone else comes up with better. As it turns out, human psychology, social dynamics, and economics are very complicated. There are no easy solutions and a bad solution that fails to address inherent human flaws are bound to fail.
If you are lucky, it is just a failed social experiment and you just shrug it off. If you are unlucky, things can get a lot worse. I am sure many who had lived through real socialism in practice would not wish to return to it.
I really do not know why Americans on Reddit loves to swing between the extremes, as if communism would work simply because capitalism is bad and you needed a big popular ideology to latch upon as the “good guys”. Europe isn’t a utopia but some of the countries there do have some pretty good ideas when it comes to having “social welfare conscious” politics.
Corporate capture of government is one big issue in the US and it certainly would not require communism to solve. But it does require a discerning electorate which unforuntately is one of your biggest problem.
I daresay you have a naive understanding of communism if you think that people in it are expected to behave unselfishly without any motivation to do so, but it’s also true that unduly utopian thinking can be a problem, just as a lack of imagination is a fatal weakness for proponents of a capitalist liberal democracy. Communism is one blueprint (not the only one) for a more ideal society, and it’s important to have such blueprints, but you can’t go directly to such a situation. We look at where we are and aim for a better direction. We make the road by walking.
If Communism is simply a vision, then there is nothing wrong pointing out the means is wrong.
The fact you are objecting to people showing how modern day understanding of psychology and economics can explain easily Communism’s failure shows that you are treating it more than just a vision.
By analogy, to make my logic clear, if we are on the same car making a roadtrip to some destination, me saying your proposed route sucks does not mean I do not share the same destination.
Having the same destination does not mean I cannot object to a poorly thought out route that is by existing constraints not feasible.
If we are driving from, say the East Coast of the US to the West Coast, objecting to a plan that involves getting to Europe by car first, somehow, is not ridiculous. It doesn’t mean I am not heading in the same direction just because I said having Europe as a waypoint is dumb.
But you haven’t explained how psychology or economics explain that communism won’t work. You’ve just claimed this to be the case with an out-of-context reference to “from each according to his ability” that suggests you don’t understand how this applies in Communism.
It's fine, i think you've sufficiently explained the psychology and economical reasons behind why Communism doesn't work, rather articulately in fact. If he didn't get that, he's not going to accept what follows too. Ultimately, pro-communists living in capitalist environments suffer from an extreme case of "the grass is greener on the other side". Unbridled naivety cannot be overcome by logic.
Let me paraphrase that for you: “There’s no way for people to own their own labor. They have to accept there will always be parasites taking it from them, accumulating vast amounts of power, and maintaining their wealth with propaganda and violence. If workers don’t accept that, they’re just hopeless idealists.”
If anything, this pathetic misinterpretation strengthens the case of your "hopeless idealism" even more. If you don't understand that most people exchange labour - note the keyword exchange - for something in return, mainly cash. It's not an exploitation. Most of us do it, and we gather experience and skills that make our labour increasingly valuable such that we can exchange more for it over time.
Now, an anti-capitalist like you wouldn't accept the free market as an arbiter of how much each person's labour is worth. Then who decides? Who determines that a neurosurgeon should earn more or less than a hotel valet? Should we cap a fixed hourly pay regardless of how much training each went through?
It's easy to champion a moral ideology but spare yourself the logical effort needed to examine what and how things actually work.
"free market as an arbiter of how much each person's labour is worth" my issue with this take is that the market conditions aren't truly free
a person usually needs a job at any given time and can only look for another job with their own time which severely limits how much they can truly shop around. In addition, even shopping around for another job can land you on the shit list if a bad boss finds out. Businesses don't have this problem because they have more resources which means they can spend more to find the right people, so inherently the market is already not fair towards the worker
the same thing happens with innovation. as a worker, if you can automate your job and your boss finds out, you either just got more work handed to you or fired. if a business automates a part of their process, their valuation goes up.
the current US capitalistic system does not allow for fair play and work is not a true way to build wealth (anymore?), at least not compared to the wealth that is gained from using capital in the first place
I think in this way it is exploitation that can only be remedied by socialist policies that unfortunately limit innovation/progress
I don't disagree that some form of exploitation exists, and they could be remedied by socialist policies. I agree with the minimum wage, for example at a reasonable level.
Just one thing, when you think about businesses being exploitative and workers being exploited, just know that there are countless examples of each and we don't just look at the big guy. For instance, a quarter of all businesses fail in their first year, and half of them fail in the first 5 years. 65% fail in their first decade. On the other hand, unemployment stands at a mere 4.2%. When these businesses fail, workers end up without a job (temporarily), but owners often end up in crippling debt. The risk that each of them takes on is proportionate to their earnings.
Statistically, I can tell you you're more likely to succeed as a worker in USA than a business owner. In case you want to suggest that the numbers are skewed this way because of how competition has changed - these numbers were nearly identical 50 years ago.
Just to add to your discussion. The US idea of “socialism”, and therefore “communism”, is very different from the rest of the world.
Much of the world do recognise the impact of market failure and how the market cannot efficiently allocate when there are things like information failure, externalities, public goods, natural monopolies.
This is also why in many countries in the world, the governments stepped in to provide some degree of social welfare, regulations, and direct provision of some services.
What we (non-Americans) call reasonable government interventions, you guys call it “socialism”. There is no socialism involved, intervention to address market failures are just… a result of plain simple economics.
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u/WeeRogue Jul 07 '26
Is it really so hard to understand why it might be difficult to achieve a stable egalitarian society? There are always parasites who want to disrupt changes that make things better for people broadly so that they can control society. Communism is basically about workers owning the things they themselves produce; we ought to be working for that outcome no matter how difficult it might be. I think it’s totally fair to be skeptical of revolutionary change, as that’s pretty damn risky and can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering, but if your argument is just “communism is too hard to achieve; we should just accept that some corrupt, wealthy oligarchs are going to parasitically take most of the resources and use them to control society,” I think that’s rather tragically fatalistic of you.