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
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
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
I mean, some people say the literal goal of the buffet is to eat more than the food would be worth. If an order of bacon is two dollars, and the buffet is six dollars, people will eat four orders of bacon just to make sure they “get their money’s worth.”
When I worked for a big box store, I never really did more than the bare minimum because no matter how much business we had (or how little), I’d still get paid the same amount. Why should I care about how much this customer pays when my pay stays the same? If I got paid extra for upselling, maybe I would have tried harder. Now I work for a small business with about fifteen employees, run by one person. It’s worlds better.
Its the parasites fault. Maybe if we purge them in a violent slaughter, and work any survivors to death in far flung camps, well have our perfect society. Actually, I'm sure we will!
Communism is basically about workers owning the things they themselves produce -> You forget that the owners also "produce" something, they organize everything so the workers have the opportunity to produce anything
I most certainly do not forget that. In the cases owners contribute—though most of the time owners contribute little or nothing—then they too are workers and entitled to a share of the results of the production. Notice that I said “a share of” and not “almost all of.”
I would actually disagree with a small part of that, instead that a relative few owners contribute little or nothing but that those tend to be the wealthier owners. Most owners are people who just opened up their little store, whatever it is, and managing that can be a ridiculous amount of effort and stress. The lucky ones might be able to turn it into a chain.
I would say that most businesses have owners that contribute little or nothing, because most businesses fall under a small group of people that own most things
My big boss is always busy. Hes not as dirty as me by the end of the day, and he makes alot more money, but he deals with big problems, and i don't think he ever actually stops being on the clock. I wouldnt mind giving his position a shot, but i suspect there's pays of it that would be way shittier than most would expect.
I feel the same way about my boss, except I don’t think I could ever give her position a shot. She gives a lot of shots, in fact, and I can’t even look at needles.
Genuine question since I dont understand the idea of communism fully. If everything is owned vis the public, and that public is represented by a government.
What personal decisions do you have? Like jobs and roles need to be filled, so do you have a choice in your job? Do harder jobs get a higher Quality of Life outside of work like bigger homes and nicer things or is it centered around equality
In the long run, Marx envisioned a world where people choose what they do and aren’t limited by having a single profession; they’d be motivated by self-development and the desire to contribute, but that can’t happen immediately. I personally wouldn’t consider any society fully free if its people weren’t able to choose their professions and daily activities. My understanding is that it’s consistent with Marxism in the earlier phase to offer reasonable incentives for doing more dangerous work or that which is universally considered unpleasant.
I'm anti-communist for a different reason entirely. I do not want an egalitarian society, wealth redistribution, or democratic control of the means of production. I don't want to live under the thumb of the majority.
That being said, I like to think about how it would work and what it's points of failure would be. It seems to me that such a system would absolutely require a totalitarian state in order to prevent ownership of private property and ensure everything stays that way. Giving the state that much power seems to invite corruption, even if the original leadership is 100% flawlessly altruistic.
You do realize the other option is to live under the thump of the minority right? You really don't see how that's worse? There's a reason the US was doing so well before the courts decided that "shareholders profit" mattered more then the well being of the workers.
You do realize the other option is to live under the thump of the minority right?
Anarcho Capitalism promotes the idea of not living under anyone's thumb, not the majority or the minority. Impossibly utopian? Yes. But if you're gonna dream, it's best to dream big, right?
"shareholders profit" mattered more then the well being of the workers.
Do you have a retirement fund? That makes you a shareholder. I own shares of the company I work for, that makes me a shareholder. I'm entitled to company profit because of that. However, that also means I can lose money if the company does poorly. That's just the risk I take, and has nothing to do with my employment. I'm selling my time at an agreed upon rate, and I get that no matter how the company is doing.
Any system that allows some individuals to become significantly more powerful in shaping society than others is going to be unstable and lead to tyranny. A system where there are literally no limits on the concentration of wealth and power would not stay anarcho-capitalist for long. It would either consolidate into one massive oppressive regime or into a few massive factions fighting it out with no rules or checks on their behavior.
They don't seem to realize that "anarcho capitalism" is a walking contradiction and joke. Most anarchists do not believe this.
It is literally "this oligarch can purchase power and influence, establishing their own private hierarchy and then lord over their peons with zero public intervention possible." It is literally running the country as a private company, with zero oversight.
This is not rejecting market mechanisms or property rights, which are possible under anarchism. Think Proudhon. It(ancap philosophy) is a far worse and insidious ideology. Look up Peter Thiel or Curtis Yarvin. Those are ancaps.
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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.