Why communism will never work

 So, I may have made similar articles at times, such as this one about the problems of the far left, but I do want to update and expand on the concepts here. I often hear from communists a mix of "true communism has never been tried", combined with defending states they would consider to not be true communism anyway, so I would like to go into the issue and explain why communism will never, ever, ever, work. 

The revolution problem...

As stated in my previous article, the first problem is one of the issues with revolution. Karl Marx is a prolific critic of capitalism, but he wrote in a zeitgeist of revolution. We just had the American revolution and French revolution not long before Marx wrote, and it was pretty common to have political violence and turmoil at the time. Revolution was just the way of doing things. If you disliked your government, you overthrew it and replaced it with another. But...revolution isn't pretty. I'm convinced we got lucky with the American revolution. We happened to have people in charge of it guided by enlightenment ideals in which they were especially sensitive to the tyranny issue, so they made a government with the express intent of having a weak federal government and executive. They were anti power almost to a fault. And while I may have criticisms of their constitution in the 21st century, that mindset generally led to positive results.

But...most forms of revolution don't end anywhere near as cleanly. The french revolution, for example, got rid of the monarchy, had a period known as the "reign of terror" in which anyone and everyone was beheaded, and then they got Napoleon running the country. Then he tried to take over Europe twice, and failed both times, and then they went back to monarchy for a bit before having another emperor and eventually setting into democracy some time in the 1870s mostly because they couldn't agree on who should be king. Russia, well, we know what happened with Russia. Lenin, then Stalin. China had Mao. Cambodia had pol pot. North korea had the Kim family. Cuba had castro. In all cases, we ended up with an authoritarian dictatorship. Tankies will defend this by saying that if they didn't turn to authoritarianism, capitalists would've used democratic mechanisms and freedom of speech to overturn their communism, but doesn't that just mean that communism can't survive without authoritarianism? So these countries will have revolutions, overturn the government, kill the people they don't like, and then suppress freedoms because they fear being overthrown themselves. Gee, and you wonder why I don't like communists and rip on the illiberal tendencies of many far lefties. 

Okay, so how does socialism actually work?

Okay, say we got a country that has somehow had a successful revolution, and managed to have a truly democratic government with civil liberties. Okay, so how do we establish socialism? While I can give some credit to market socialists at least, who want to have worker coops act as businesses within a market environment, a lot of the far left are anti market. They want to replace market structures with some other system. But if you don't have markets, what do you replace that with? Generally speaking what you get is some sort of government control of industry. Now, for the record, I'm not against government control of various industries, particularly those with market failures. I support universal healthcare paid for by the government, and I could get behind stuff like free college like K-12, public utilities, the USPS, etc., but I wouldn't want the government to make my deodorant. I wouldn't want them to control food production. I wouldn't want them to control the entire economy. There's a reason capitalism is given so much credit, and it's because markets are generally more responsive to market failures. For example, Nvidia is overcharging for graphics cards after the crypto bubble popped still. AMD came in and offered a card with 50% more performance for the money. With monopolies you get stagnation, with competition you get lower prices, innovation, etc. One company gauges, another can theoretically come in and make crap cheaper. Medications. Mark Cuban released that site charging "at cost+10%" for medications, attempting to solve the healthcare crisis in that sense. While I do believe we need to actually have medicare for all, markets do sometimes have a certain level of resiliency and innovation that communist countries don't. Bernie sanders complained about like 20 different kinds of deodorant at the grocery store. I mean, you want that. Because some companies make better products than others. And while we tend to have a terrible oligopoly problem in the US at times leading to price gauging and inefficient options, if you have only a government service, often times there's few checks or balances to ensure the products produced are good. People in Russia often had to eat the same foods all of the time with little to no diversity, while in America we make so much food we throw it away and the options are endless. Ya know? Again, sure, government can step in when there's a legitimate market failure (and i think healthcare is as such that it would be a good idea), but I don't want the government making my iphone. With just communism we probably wouldnt have iphones at all. Sure, china has huawei, a state controlled company making mobile devices, but if not for the west doing it first, I doubt they would have anything. 

Even "democratic socialism" would probably lead to poor results. Because while the control would be democratic, can you imagine average people voting on what products should be made? In reality, much like our existing bureaucracy and federal budget, the vast majority of the expenses and sausage being made would be largely ignored by the people, with some people complaining everything is waste, and others not even knowing what is and isn't being made. With capitalism, people vote with their pocketbooks. I'm sorry, but I just can't get behind some centrally planned system here. I'd rather a decentralized system. And while I might put market socialism in a different category due to the fact that is decentralized and market focused, when I hear "democratic socialism" and I see these people advocating against markets and for literal socialism, I tend to cringe, because I just can't imagine that working well. Decentralization and market forces provide a lot of positive incentive structures that without them, we would need to reinvent the wheel and come up with an entire new way of doing things. And I'm just not convinced it would work as well. There are a lot of legitimate criticisms by capitalists against communism and I am ultimately on the whole "capitalism won the cold war, let's keep it that way" mindset, even if I DO think there needs to be a resurgeance of the left within a capitalist framework.

The work problem

Much like capitalists, communists are generally speaking NOT anti work. If anything, as Bob Black would say, "Some of them, like Marxism and most brands of anarchism, believe in work all the more fiercely because they believe in so little else."

Seriously, if you thought the right had a massive work fetishization, the left is just as bad or worse. To me, they look almost the same, they just seem to complain about the bourgeosie more than safety nets. Conservatives glorify work and go on about how hard they work and how the government needs to stop taking their money. Leftists go on about how hard they work and how the bourgeoisie and landlords need to stop taking it. Same kind of energy, just a different boogeyman. Marxists do not hate work like I would say I do. Rather, they hate capitalism. They love work. They just believe capitalism alienates people from their work because capitalists control the institutions in which they work, and if we only had communism, work would be a just and noble idea. Communists are such work fetishists that they go on and on and on about their labor theory of value and how all value in society comes from workers. They take this to crazy degrees, almost to the point of being luddites and being anti automation. Because without work, their entire ideology seems to collapse. 

There's an old anecdote about Milton Friedman going to China. I know that this was never a proven thing, as the anecdote changes, but it has some good points. Anyway, Friedman goes to China, and he sees all of these workers and shovels building roads. Friedman asks his guide, where is all of the heavy machinery, you could build the roads more efficiently if you had better technology? His guide responds, "you don't understand, this is a jobs program." Friedman responds, "if jobs is what you wanted, you should have just given them spoons instead of shovels." 

Hence why I'm so anti jobs programs. Because when people glorify and fetishize work, and see work not just as a right but a sacred duty, they don't try to eliminate work. They don't try to make our lives easier. No, they buy their propaganda so much that they keep work around simply because their ideology is dependent on it, and the idea that people not work goes against their principles. For as much as leftists rely on the grievances of workers in order to promote their ideology, they ultimately have no solution to the work problem, so you'll still be working under communism, just as under capitalism. And you likely won't work any less, or in any better conditions than under capitalism. Why? Well, let's focus on that next.

What about work incentives?

Work incentives are a tricky issue under communism. Because they just eliminated the market and replaced it with this centrally planned system that removed the entire underlying incentive structure from capitalism. Capitalism has solutions to get people working. I am often a critic of these solutions as I view them as coercive, but generally speaking, capitalism relies mostly on market forces to enforce itself and encourage work. basically, you need to work to survive. You work for money, and you buy things you need. No real force is needed to force you to work, because the consequences of not working are severe enough most will voluntarily do so regardless. And this is often a criticism of capitalism from the left. Wage slavery is a real problem, and as you guys know it's something I criticize myself and offer solutions to. But....leftists solutions aren't my solutions.

So what do leftists suggest we do to make everyone work if we don't have markets pressuring people to? Well, in the best case scenario, the government is a monopoly on the entire economy, and all work available, and you need to get your basic needs by working for the government. So a market with a monopoly, with no other alternatives being viable because when you allow people to build their own businesses or trade, you suddenly got capitalism and markets again! 

But in reality, it's worse than that. Since work is the sacred duty it is under communism, it's literally illegal to not work. You are forced to get a job. We discussed this with Rammstein in the GDR recently. If you don't work in a communist country, they'll probably kill you or ship you to the gulag. Starvation is the least of your problems, although that's a risk in some cases even if you do work (see: holodomor, great leap forward, north korea in general, etc.). 

See what the problems are now?

Growing up in America coming off of the cold war, we were always taught that capitalism is good and communism bad. Capitalism has freedom of choice and diversity of services. Communism doesn't. Communism has shortages and a lack of innovation. Communism struggles to incentivize work effort. Communism is oppressive and should never be tried. ANd you know what? I STILL believe that. I mean, even reinvestigating it post deconversion from christianity and discussing stuff with leftists too...i mean, i can't really find much positive about communism itself. Even if leftists are often correct in criticizing capitalism at times, the solutions leftists propose are bad. Overthrowing the system is dangerous and is prone to purges, political violence, and authoritarianism. Replacing the market leads to centrally planning the entire economy via the government, leading to inefficiency, bureaucracy, and a lack of freedom or choice. Replacing the market and forcing people to work under communism leads to inefficient outcomes since work is treated as the end, not mere the means to it, and people are denied the ability to work for themselves or find their own way in life. 

I'm not saying capitalism is perfect. It's not. But...ultimately, I think we need some level of capitalism for society to work optimally. We need markets. We need decentralized planning. We need freedom of choice and the ability to vote with our dollars and our feet. And we need democracy. My ideas are more about improving the current system without abolishing it, reforming it rather than replacing it outright. Maybe my ideas aren't perfect. leftists tend to have this idea that nothing can save capitalism and no matter how many reforms they make, they'll be rolled back or compromised or the rich will find ways around them. This isn't completely untrue. But we have to ask, are whatever problems remain after solving the core issues really worth addressing? Sometimes it's better to allow some problems to exist because the "solutions" are so much worse than the problem itself. I'd say that is true of their goal to abolish capitalism. 

Don't get me wrong. I'm not opposed to ALL forms of socialism as firmly as I am ripping the idea here. I've discussed market socialism before and find it...interesting. I just believe it's overrated and much like everything else won't solve all of the problems with the market and the workplace. But I am somewhat supportive of worker cooperatives or codetermination. The thing is, I'm not sure we can mandate such things, especially coops (codetermination has been tried and works) without destroying innovation or desire to form new businesses within an otherwise market economy. Having to share the profits when you built a business from the ground up might cause people to rethink starting a business. Why go through the risk when you don't get the reward? There are ways to potentially allow small businesses to be individually owned while having larger businesses be gradually more collectivized, but yeah, it's just not a priority for me, nor is it a solution.

My ideas work better

I don't believe there are many problems with capitalism that can't be solved within capitalism. My own ideology was formulated by people like Phillippe Van Parijs, who actively tried to bridge the capitalist-socialist divide and create a new libertarian ideology within capitalism that achieves the best of both worlds, recognizing the neoliberal era left needed to shift away from traditional leftism to something else. And karl widerquist offered his idea as a sort of third way between traditional capitalism and socialism, recognizing both are coercive and that forced participation is the problem in the first place.

I want to build on that briefly here. Capitalism actually IS more conducive to freedom. it is good if you can choose what products and services you buy and to choose among alternatives. it is good to have money somewhat tied to work incentives, and to have that kind of reward structure, it just shouldn't be as coercive as it is. It's good to be able to choose among employers, or among businesses, and more importantly, since this is what raw capitalism gets wrong, the ability to choose nothing at all. If anything, my ideas fix the oppressive flaws of capitalism, without abolishing the system's advantages. Socialists and communists want to reinvent the wheel, tearing down the entire system to build up something else in its place. And what they build up is objectively inferior IMO, if you care about human well being and freedom at all. My ideas expand on capitalism, and make it all that it can be. It makes it deliver on its promises, and compensate for its flaws. The best, most developed and advanced countries in the world have done variations of this. The places I look to as the gold standard as far as what currently exists are the Nordic countries like Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, etc. And as we discussed, indepentarianism and human centered capitalism just expand on that "Nordic theory of love" and make people even more free by freeing them from the economic compulsion to work at all. As it turns out, to truly be free, we need to be able to resist all (within reason) coercion by social systems and be able to live our best lives without others trying to control us. And in order to do that, we need our basic needs met, unconditionally. So, governments should focus on having a form of capitalism that does that. Human centered capitalism if you will. Capitalism that doesn't start at $0 as others would say. Basically, capitalism with UBI, universal healthcare, free college, and a robust response to other forms of market failures that threaten to rob people of their freedom and well being, but without abolishing what makes the current system great in the first place. That is what I believe we should strive for.

Communism doesn't deliver

Communism doesn't deliver that. It is an inherently violent and authoritarian social and economic system that tends to rob people of their freedom, and makes them all slaves of the government. Whatever economic security it provides is offset by the crushing authoritarianism that it imposes on people otherwise. It ruthlessly suppresses all opposition because it allegedly can't sustain itself otherwise. It replaces the market with a state run economy prone to inefficiency and lack of choice. And it replaces more natural incentive structures with straight up state coercion. Communists will say "real communism hasn't been tried" but "real communism" as they state it is a pipe dream. The result we got from communist states....is precisely what we get when we try to accomplish communism. So communism is not the solution and should never be tried. We need to look elsewhere for positive solutions to capitalism's problems. And if you have read the rest of my blog, you will know what I'm about by now, and why my solutions are arguably better.