why does Communism get a bad name?

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the idea behind it sounds ok i think

Not enough money in it for corporate America.

It has a bad name because it became associated with mass murder and nuclear aggression.

Elements of it sound great, but in practice it falls foul to corruption at every level. Plus it doesn't give people enough incentive to better their own life if they want more or better than their neighbour; it kills entrepreneurial and creative spirit. Communism also suffers from a huge burden of bureaucratic processes, but this is common to socialism too - there is no mechanism to strip the fat and inefficiency away from management processes, this in turn also serves to cripple creativity and innovation. No good having a great idea if it gets killed / sat on by the bureaucrats above you.

Successful "Communist" leaders tend to be either enemies of the United States, murdering dictators, or both. Of course, there's an element of circular reasoning there - the USA tended to actively dislike and seek to undermine Communist countries, largely because the USSR supported them - but that's why so many Americans hate the notion of Communism or indeed anything left of neoconservatism.

The bad name is of it's own doing.

Surely twenty million dead Russians can't all be wrong?

Because of people who believe a workers' state is possible. This is why I think all the <insert_name>ist communism are terrible.

Last edited by RushKing on 24 Mar 2014, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

In part because avowedly Marxist states have all, without exception, fallen into totalitarianism.

The economic model has also demonstrated itself to be anywhere from flawed to disastrous, though whether that is an aspect of corruption, incompetence, or inbuilt failures in the system is a subject on which scholars may debate at length.

Any questions?

I think communism would only work within a small population, like a tribe or a village. Or it could be that humanity does not have the intelligence to make it succeed.

Cause it's a bad idea that always leads to bad results?

1. Communism assumes a degree of altruism which is wholly incompatible with what we know about human nature.

As a result, it is immediately challenged with problems of collective action (the tragedy of the commons, free-riders etc.)

The classical marxist reply to this comes in the form of hand-wave: People are only selfish because they are alienated (Entfremdung). Once the communist utopia has been established, people will cast away their selfish actions and everything would then work. Yet everyone we know about human nature documents that this is an extremely naive view. And such developments have never come to pass in countries that actually try to implement communism.

2. Communism lacks a plausible decision-making mechanism.

Marx popularized the famous claim "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".

Yet in the absence of markets, the information needed to find out what "ability" and "need" are is almost impossible to come by. The most lethal example of this is the abysmal failure in China of "The Great Leap Forward" which had a death toll due to famine equal to multiple Holocausts (between 23 an 46 million, and probably closer to the latter).

It has actually been established mathematically that highly centralized organizations are incapable of making efficient decisions on complex political issues. This is known as the "Impossibility Theorem", the major reason for awarding Kenneth Arrow the Nobel prize in Economics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_ ... ty_theorem

See also the "Liberal Paradox" by Amartaya Sen (also a Nobel laureate, but for an unrelated work), which is even stricter than the Impossibility Theorem.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_paradox

So not only do Communist states lack a way to make efficient decisions, it is impossible to "fix" them and make them efficient.

3. Communism lacks the necessary checks-and-balances to prevent corruption.

Centuries - nay, millenia - of studies on governments have yielded a general view that all political power must not be concentrated in one political office. However, communism introduced a State agency which was basically sovereign: The Politburo. As such, no meaningful division between the legislative, executive and judicial branches of governments was established. This is likely the major reason why people like Stalin, Beria and Mao weren't stopped: Such an organization has no political fail-safe mechanism when a evil person manages to accumulate political power.

4. Communism is a Nirvana Fallacy.

See here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nirvana_fallacy

A lot of people "like" communism because it sounds good. Yet people are evaluating communism on what it says on paper, and not how it will look like if one tries to implement it in the real world. Any real-life political system will look unfavourable compared to "ideal" communism, because "ideal" communism is literally a Utopia of kindness, friendship and love. I think this is why so many teenagers are attracted to communism; they lack the life experience to see that such a political utopia can never be implemented in real life.

Communism: Stick a fork in it. It's done.

EDIT: I actually feel bad for a lot of people who support communism, as they will never ever get what they are hoping for. Currently, the Communist party in Denmark (or the closest equivalent, any way) stands to gain 10 percent of the popular vote at election day. Yet all of these votes will more or less be wasted, because even the party closest to it (The Socialist People's Party) would never lend support to some of the batshit things the Communists have as an official political position. One party official even suggested that they would shut down newspapers that were advocating "pro-business" views if they managed to achieve government office.

... dafuq?

It's a tragedy of human nature that true communism, like true libertarianism or true anarchism, cannot work. The ideas sound wonderful (utopian) on their surfaces, but they rely too much on a lack of selfishness and greed that is evolutionarily unlikely. The only true eusocial organisms are those that have direct genetic benefit from being eusocial.

The paradox is that selfishness and greed will most likely be humanities undoing. Individualism wasn't what took us from the planes of Africa to civilization. It was cooperation. I think it is highly likely that communism existed in our tribal days, but was replaced once population grew too large for it to work because the opportunity to exploit the group became irresistible to some.

How does this explain primitive communism? We know we didn't always live with states or classes. In fact, most of our time on this planet was like that.

Primitive communism worked when 1)communities were small enough (<50 individuals) for individuals to police each other and 2)the members of a community were generally closely related by blood.