Communism is absolutely fantastic on paper. In reality, it is simply incompatible with mankind for several reasons.
In order to actually achieve the utopian communist system people dream of, it requires a complete hive-mind mentality from every single individual living under the system. This is why small communes which practice communism do have moderate success: the group of people participating all have that same mentality. The problem lies in scale.
The likelihood of the success of communism is inversely proportional to the number of people participating in the system. The more people you add to the system, the more likely it is you're going to introduce people who don't have that hivemind mentality and who would rather do different/their own things. When this division is introduced, the only way to ultimately deal with it is through coercion and force (thus the gulags/censorship/etc). Some might suggest using the "tools of democracy" to deal with this, however this does not remove the division, it only highlights it, breeds resentment and eventually violence.
Another element which is introduced at scale is the problem of logistics. As you scale, it becomes more and more difficult to decide how and where resources should be allocated throughout the system. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to democratically decide everything. Instead, individuals must be appointed to handle these tasks but the problem with an individual, or even multiple individuals, is eventually it will slow down the allocation of resources. It will misappropriate those resources at times and this again creates division among the people within the system.
If this weren't enough, we then need to introduce another element: greed. There's no escaping it, greed is almost inherent to human nature. While not everybody is a "greedy asshole" there will always be at least a fraction of people who are. This combined with the above logistics problems will ultimately lead to the greedy ending up in positions of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, almost no one would deny this. As a result, the greedy will almost always abuse positions of power to enrich themselves. And once in power, they can become exceedingly hard to uproot, especially at scale where they will likely have other greedy people helping to protect them (greed protects greed).
I could write a book about the additional issues which happen at scale, but suffice it to say these three issues alone are enough to make communism untenable at a scale of more than a few dozen people without severe totalitarian rule. It really is a pipe dream which looks great on paper, but paper is the only place it works. Unfortunately, most of the people in this country pushing communism do so because they've only ever been taught to work it out on paper.
I come from communist Vietnam and I can say that you are absolutely correct.
Communism only works if everyone is a lifeless working shell, like in 1984. And in order to make everyone a lifeless working shell, they need oppression. Even in good faith, that oppression is to ensure every rule need to be followed by everyone. Hence the constant monitoring and censoring.
Communism is absolutely fantastic on paper. In reality, it is simply incompatible with mankind for several reasons.
In order to actually achieve the utopian communist system people dream of, it requires a complete hive-mind mentality from every single individual living under the system. This is why small communes which practice communism do have moderate success: the group of people participating all have that same mentality. The problem lies in scale.
The likelihood of the success of communism is inversely proportional to the number of people participating in the system. The more people you add to the system, the more likely it is you're going to introduce people who don't have that hivemind mentality and who would rather do different/their own things. When this division is introduced, the only way to ultimately deal with it is through coercion and force (thus the gulags/censorship/etc). Some might suggest using the "tools of democracy" to deal with this, however this does not remove the division, it only highlights it, breeds resentment and eventually violence.
Another element which is introduced at scale is the problem of logistics. As you scale, it becomes more and more difficult to decide how and where resources should be allocated throughout the system. At a certain point, it becomes impossible to democratically decide everything. Instead, individuals must be appointed to handle these tasks but the problem with an individual, or even multiple individuals, is eventually it will slow down the allocation of resources. It will misappropriate those resources at times and this again creates division among the people within the system.
If this weren't enough, we then need to introduce another element: greed. There's no escaping it, greed is almost inherent to human nature. While not everybody is a "greedy asshole" there will always be at least a fraction of people who are. This combined with the above logistics problems will ultimately lead to the greedy ending up in positions of power. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, almost no one would deny this. As a result, the greedy will almost always abuse positions of power to enrich themselves. And once in power, they can become exceedingly hard to uproot, especially at scale where they will likely have other greedy people helping to protect them (greed protects greed).
I could write a book about the additional issues which happen at scale, but suffice it to say these three issues alone are enough to make communism untenable at a scale of more than a few dozen people without severe totalitarian rule. It really is a pipe dream which looks great on paper, but paper is the only place it works. Unfortunately, most of the people in this country pushing communism do so because they've only ever been taught to work it out on paper.
I come from communist Vietnam and I can say that you are absolutely correct.
Communism only works if everyone is a lifeless working shell, like in 1984. And in order to make everyone a lifeless working shell, they need oppression. Even in good faith, that oppression is to ensure every rule need to be followed by everyone. Hence the constant monitoring and censoring.