An anon comments on why Communism and similar ideologies doesn’t work well – a more detailed version than the common green text version floating around:
What makes communism and socialism not work?
A bunch of reasons.
1. It has impossible goals. It seeks to abolish class distinctions. How it seeks to do so I’ll cover in the next point. Class is an inevitable and natural thing. There are great examples in both the USSR and China. In the USSR the Nomenklatura became the new elite class with infinitely more privilege and power than the bourgeois and aristocratic rulers they replaced. In China during the Cultural Revolution the elite was “rusticated” meaning they were forcibly relocated and made into farmers. Their children quickly rose to the top despite being rusticated.
Due to the advancement of computer technology and automation, social hierarchies are also becoming more IQ predicated. By failing to acknowledge IQ, like leftists often do, they’re going to miss a huge contributing factor in determining what creates a lot of the dispossessed and lower class. IQ variation will always create a lower class regardless of governing system.
2. It is constitutionally illogical. We use syllogistic logic to arrive at truth. Meaning that we analyze positions relative to the existing evidence and against self-contradiction. Essentially if x then y.
Marxism uses Hegelian Dialectics. Hegelian Dialectics arrives at truth by positing a thesis, countering with an antithesis, and arriving at a synthesis. I say something, you say something, we arrive at a shared conclusion. This allows for ideas to be formed without concern for evidence or contradiction, so bad ideas propagate. Applied to class conflict the proletariat was the thesis, the ruling class the antithesis, and the classless society the synthesis. Dialectics were also applied to their legal systems, agriculture, and to our culture to disastrous effect.
3. It ignores human motivation. Normal people have a stronger national identity than a class identity. History, race, culture, and religion form stronger bonds than economic class. WWI was a clear demonstration of this. Dialectical Materialism considers these factors to be “spooks”; meaning that they are the result of false consciousness and can be ignored.
4. It is considered to be a perfect ideology. Marxism cannot fail, but it can be failed. Real socialism has never been tried. This allows them to escape moral culpability for their actions. Strategically this prevents them from reworking their ideology.
Think of the word Lumpenproletariat. Proletariats are the vehicles by which the revolution is achieved. Lumpenproles are proletariats who shirk this duty and refuse Marxism. That attitude deems any popular rejection as a moral failure of the people. The Frankfurt School escaped this trap by being willing to rethink Marxism, which is why leftists consider Cultural Marxism to be epistemologically distinct from Marxism. Some will even flat out deny it exists.
5. Marxism is very complex, but not effective in the slightest. This means that Marxists have to be intelligent enough to memorize this dross and disciplined enough to never consider how stupid it is. Arrogance without results is the domain of fools.
Marx used a dumbed down, over simplified model of society to create over-simplified “solutions” which, while I am sure that he meant well, just make things worse. Marx’s main problem was that he had never had to work for a living. He had no real, visceral feeling for the way working people think and feel.
He was an outsider, looking in, with little thought-projections inside his head about what they must be feeling. We all go through this as kids watching adults at work, but we never really understand until we, too, experience what it is to work with others, whether that labour be mental or physical. Marx never learned that, never gained that aspect of mature experience. Thus there is a certain inherent childishness in Marxism, and its adherents. It’s wrong. It’s not like they think it should be, so it is reality that is incorrect, not their thoughts.
Communism is not quite a bogeymen from the yesteryears, nor is it something that has no chance to take power in western society (for better or for worse).
I’ve certainly observed people in recent times using Hegelian Dialectics to create increasing strange political ideas and stances that are then let loose in society as a whole. A simple example would be the pride flag that is so common nowadays, which is a weird smorgasbord of very different social issues all lumped together under an awkwardly defined ideology. With a careful look, one can see many ideologies and tendencies in modern society that have communist roots as described above.
Original screencap:
Temple of Zagan 