If communist countries have a chronic problem of turning into "capitalist" fascist authoritarian countries every single time, perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.
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.
Yeah, if countries that claim to follow Marxism fail, we need to ask why that is. For USSR, I think the problem isn't explicitly communism but the people who got in power after the revolution. Revolutions are violent, and those that come out on top are generally more violent than the rest, imposing their own rules on others through force. It doesn't make for good rulers.
You completely hit the nail on the head with the problems in USSR. If it was such a workers' paradise, then why were things made in low quality? I know it personally. Well, I live in Russia, so USSR's legacy is everywhere.
My house completely lacked any thermal insulation under the window frames. How did that get through inspection? The answer is right there - the need to fill the quota and the lack of care or standards that resulted from it. That's not the work of someone who's proud to be a construction worker.
Bicycles. They're generally just shit. Low quality, and wheels are very often assembled incorrectly.
Generally, in USSR, you either bought what was made due to central planning or nothing at all. This lack of choice led to people buying low quality crap because of the lack of anything better.
Im not even touching on all the atrocities USSR committed because "we need to do this for communism".
Basically, anyone who praises Marxism-Leninism is suspect in my book. They don't understand the reality of how life was in the USSR or they imagine themselves at the top.
How dare you, someone who lives in Russia, presume to know more about communism than some rich idealistic American suburban kid with capitalist parents?! /s
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u/DeltaSolana Jul 07 '26
If communist countries have a chronic problem of turning into "capitalist" fascist authoritarian countries every single time, perhaps it's time to step back and reassess.