this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2023
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No, communism is a problem. There is an inherent flaw in the entire concept, which is entrusting the peoples needs to a select, “temporarily” empowered few. History has proven, over and over again that hierarchy is the problem. People don’t obtain obscene amounts of power and then…use it for good and then give it up. They use the power to be powerful. And the people surrounding the powerful start catering to the whims of that powerful person in the hopes that they can benefit from that power, which encourages unjust thinking and behavior. Look at any billionaire and see how people treat them. People come out of the woodwork to tell them they’re geniuses, pretend they’re right all the time, and indulge their every whim. It warps their brains. Communism relies on this incredibly flawed concept to…benefit the people?
It’s the problem in politics, it’s the problem in policing, it’s the problem in capitalism, it’s the problem in people. Any system based and reliant on hierarchy is doomed to fail, especially when that hierarchy is “temporary” and meant to establish “the people’s” will and best suit their needs. There is no top down solution, the only solution is bottom up.
Communism does work on a communal level - it's no coincidence they're rooted in the same word - but it absolutely needs a level of accountability at the top that can only come from actually knowing the people they're responsible for. Once you get beyond a couple of hundred people in a community at most, and it stops being an "everyone knows everyone" kind of thing, communism is just far too susceptible to corruption.
My gaming group takes a somewhat communist approach to starting out in survival games - Minecraft, ARK, etc - and it works well. No-one's going to destroy any friendships over half a stack of stone and two bits of cooked food so corruption isn't an issue. Plus it's more efficient for us to work together at that point rather than all try to individually collect everything we need. Sure, it's just video games, but it shows the system can work and have benefits. It just doesn't scale up at all.
Exactly. In the context of a small tribe, a family structure, a friend group, or a small commune, communism works. Why? Because there are social methods of enforcement. That is, if you're a greedy dick, everyone else will know and ostracize you for it. Thus, you have an incentive to play along fairly.
But once you get to a larger society — past Dunbar's number — you can no longer keep track of everyone and whether they're trustworthy or not. This allows bad actors to not play fairly with minimal consequence, breaking the system of relationships and trust that had allowed the system to work in the first place.