Debunking Communism // The Impracticality Argument

Why has communism never worked?

Communism has never worked, because of one simple necessity - administration. Communism is premised on the public ownership of property , and the means of production, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” Socialism is only a mild improvement in that citizens maintain some form of private property rights, but those who have read Marx understand they are essentially one and the same. Even Lenin said “the goal of socialism is communism.”

So what makes administration communism’s downfall? Well, communism is branded as a compassionate and collective philosophy, purported to create societies run by the people, for the people. However, what happens in reality looks a lot different.

We’ve all heard the phase, “There are too many cooks in the kitchen”, right? In simple day-to-day life, even a couple extra voices chirping in with unwanted opinions drives us nuts - extrapolate that out for a country of millions and you have a recipe for national impotence - a country rendered immobile by the sheer weight of dissenting opinions.

So what ensues should not surprise us, if we choose to pay attention to history. By brute necessity, the power funnels down to a small group of leaders, often to the second wave of revolutionaries, who have long since killed off the first. These surviving leaders persist in waxing poetic, propagandistically demagoguing about the glorious revolution… we’ve finally triumphed over these filthy capitalists, and we will all now thrive in this magnificent, equitable, diverse communist utopia… callously ignoring the abject poverty and ankle-high bloodstains of their audience, who accomplished their own demise wading through a river of blood.

You see, the appeal of communism is that it sounds compassionate - look after one another, everyone will get what they need... - but the Achilles’ heel of communism is that it still requires administration, it still requires a government. Any time the few is given power over the many, the few will slide into corruption and tyranny without proper checks and balances.

That very flaw, embedded deep in the human condition, is exactly what so many in our society are objecting to, and yet their solution is to replace it with something drastically more susceptible to it. A free market representative democracy is not perfect, and we should work to improve it, but tearing it down and replacing it with communism will only accomplish what communism has accomplished time and time again. Perhaps ignoring these educated-into-imbecility academics, and picking up a history book for ourselves, will show us what that looks like.