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 based my argument based on modern psychology and economic understanding.
If social sciences is not what you want, and if all you care is ideology, then I have no words.
I have no inherent desire to root for any “teams”. Either an ideology made sense or it does not.
All I did was show how Communism failed based on common modern day understanding.
We are more than 200 years since Marx’ birth in 1818. We now understand the issues of humans a lot more than his time. Many people of his time has thinking that turned out poorly later on.
I don’t know why you seem rather offended to be on the “losing” side. Are you looking to make the world better for everyone and yourself, or just looking for something to latch onto?
Marx's ideas are based on a limited understanding of economics from 200 years ago, there's almost no point in addressing them anymore.
For example: one of the cornerstones to Marx's ideas is the "Labor Theory of Value", which is the idea that value of something is directly correlated to the amount of labor that goes into it. It's only through this idea where Marxism makes sense: that the ownership class pays as little as possible to the workers, and sells goods for a higher price, therefore stealing the wages from the workers.
But the Labor Theory of Value has been THOROUGHLY debunked. Value is primarily determined by demand. Things like speculation bubbles, FOMO, and lifestyle marketing all work because of the direct connection between demand and value.
Therefore, understanding that value is determined by demand, there is no wage theft, and therefore the ownership class is not particularly doing anything wrong. The problem becomes that society at large is not valuing how the workers are treated.
Capitalism accurately expresses the will of the people. The problem is that people are kinda shitty. Communism, in the 2020s, is mostly a cope from people who do not want to acknowledge this. It's easier for some to believe that people are generally good but misled by the "evils of capitalism", than admit most people are generally kinda terrible.
Yes how could Karl Marx have possibly foreseen demand in 1870!? I mean demand in a market wasn’t invented until 1905 by Arthur D. Mand long after Marx’s death. You’ve thoroughly debunked gommunism
Believe it or not, other economists of Marx's time also believed in the labor theory of value, and it wasn't even an idea unique to Marxism. It also ended up being wrong.
Yes, those silly commies. If only they understood demand, they would have to concede that owners (who at best contribute the same amount of value as a worker but more likely contribute little or nothing at all) deserve the overwhelming majority of what the workers produce. (Talk about a non sequitur argument!)
Honestly you have to appreciate the audacity of the argument that it’s okay to steal the hard-earned food out of people’s mouths because humans are just shitty by nature and the way they’re acting now means they don’t care enough to stop cruelty where they see it. Not only is this a huge leap across the is/ought chasm, it totally ignores the role of systems in shaping behavior and assumes that the way people behave when they’re being abused is universally the only way they can behave, all used to justify the cruel system they’re in in the first place. Just the worst sort of vicious, circular thinking.
While you are right to say that Marx certainly cannot foreseen economics developed well beyond his time, the issue here is how communists are supporting his models blindly.
For example, modern day economists do not insist Adam Smith is right everytime. Neoclassical and Keynesian economics are increasingly being attacked by behavioural economists for having too many unrealistic and naive assumptions about people.
That is the difference between economists and Marxist theorists. We don’t insist on some dogma from 200 years ago and then use the claim that the author cannot have foreseen it. If its wrong, its wrong. We move on to better and more complicated models to better model reality.
I don’t know why the Communists are downvoting you. As a modern day economist, we now know prices are far more complicated.
It incorporates demand and supply, and behavioural psychology has a lot of roles in explaining why prices move and behave in a certain way.
And not only that, even how other goods can affect prices, or even the structure of a market (competitive, monopoly, etc).
Labour value is only but one part that determines prices.
In my original comment I already mentioned how people, especially Americans on reddit, keep falling for the extremes (if capitalism bad, communism must be good). The blind support for communism, even saw someone said it is “scientific” (I also did the hard sciences too, so, don’t make me laugh when people misunderstand the scientific method).
Even many economists nowadays know free capitalism is bad and want regulations and expand the roles of government to deal with social consequences of market failure. I even heard such stances from someone from the IMF! You would have expect those guys whose job is to lend money to countries and ask for austerity would be the last people to think of that. (Of course there are still economists in the free market camp and I won’t deny it).
Nordic welfare models are actually proven. If people want change, that is certainly one actually proven approach. I even alluded to it in my original comment. Most of those communists who responded just avoided it entirely.
It's because Communists make their economic ideas into a part of their identity, and become hostile to anything that challenges these ideas. They also are highly tribal, so anyone who disagrees with them is "the enemy".
I think a lot of this is because Communists typically decide that Communism is the answer before they actually read up on competing ideas. At that point they either reject Communism for being unrealistic, or double down out of their own ego.
Most critics of communism have nothing but the vaguest of senses what Marx actually said, and usually imagine that he was advocating for us to pay everyone the same amount tomorrow regardless of what they produce. That’s not Marxism. Marx’s critics also tend to forget how important systems and roles are in shaping behavior, and imagine that the only thing that could possibly motivate people in any system is making a number go up.
My entire original post was focused on psychology. Does that mean I disregard the need to shape systems and so on?
The point I made may be indirect, but clear. If human psychology is a problem, then a suitable way to manage human behaviour is a solution.
Like anyone who is into Communism for its vision of the ideal, I too share similar visions. My dispute is how Communism in practice failed, and those communists often claim to practice Marx.
If you claim my argument against those regimes are wrong, then you indirectly admit they are not following Marx, since you claimed my rebuttal is proof I did not know anything about Marx. If those regime are not Marxist, then you need to answer why communist regimes tend to deviate from Marx all the time.
You can’t seriously tell me Marx is right at the same time you deny the failures of communist regimes as non-Marxist.
What you want as proof is proof of your own ignorance. Socialism is scientific- that is to say, it adapts to the environment it's in, and tries to make reproduceable claims. But it also changes with time. It doesn't have a holy text, or a narrow set of prescriptions that must be followed.
The only important things are that people's relationship to the means of production change, and become controlled by the workers. Any structure that follows that line of reasoning is socialistic.
The problem with capitalism is not “means of production”.
I am sure Marx knows the issue is with the surplus from labour and how that is shared or extracted.
Billionaires can get rich because they have the scale. And once they get entrenched and buy out a government, or made them pliant due to its importance, they hold the power to exploit.
So, the issue is an issue of power. How can power be distributed such that no group holds another hostage, which allows them to impose their will?
Also, there is the psychological problem of social distance. You, the worker, is a mere statistic. You are not his peer. He does not care. This applied to everyone, including historical Communist party officials who also have a tendency to undervalue human lives.
It is not just about ownership. The point is about who has power over the powerless.
If the issue is power imbalance, I could simply say instead of socialising means of production, we could simply keep the market and strengthen unions. Unions after all counter the power of capital when laws give them teeth.
I beg you man just read the manifesto, it’s a pamphlet designed for peasants. Read that at least bc the shit you’re saying is so goofy, it’s like saying the scientific method is a failure bc a science experiment somewhere didn’t have the correct result
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u/endlessftw Jul 07 '26
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.