> We have founded a society where there are no rich people!”
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
Many in the west would like this idea. Try goggle "communism support young americans".
Same with the RETVRN types who dream of an ancient-like societal structure without realizing that they would likely be slaves.
The excuses they might make, that libertarianism requires some basically supportive context (provided by who? and in what system?) to get off the ground, also undermine the arguments of the hard-independent individual crowd.
(I happen to think that "libertarianism" is a fruitful collection of ideas and insights, but in the context of many other systems with complementary ideas and insights. On a practical level, we need the best of many systems working together.)
They rationalize why the things they want (like property rights) aren't really a state.
"According to a new Yale Youth Poll, a survey affiliated with the Yale Institution for Social and Political Studies, voters aged 18 to 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points when asked who they would support in the 2026 Congressional elections, while voters aged 22 to 29 favored Democrats by 6.4 points." from https://www.newsweek.com/republican-support-poll-young-gen-z... Whatever else they might be (and I can think of quite a few unprintable descriptors), I'm pretty sure the Republicans aren't communists or leftists.
This is like Apple dropping the iPhone Mini. Everyone who wanted a small phone didn't just want a screen that's harder to read, or a marginally lower volume to carry in their pockets. They wanted the ergonomics of the original iPhone. My regular-sized (not plus) iPhone is too big for my hands. A lot of the interactions have to be done with both hands, or risk dropping the phone (which has happened many times) doing acrobatics to reach the far edges and corners.
The iPhone Mini never solved that. It was still uncomfortably large, so I never bothered with it because the tradeoffs weren't there. No doubt a smaller screen is worse, but if the ergonomics were significantly better, that would have been my choice.
Tradeoffs. One is willing to cope with some downsides if they perceive the gains to overcome the losses.
Truth is, even present-day UK Labour who are quite centre-right neolibs leaning more to the right, are closer to communism than the US Democrats are.
Even if they do, when you're living somewhere that's free to fail you before you're even born, the second-worst case can still look good. And also the absolute worse case is Pol Pot, and there's many examples equally awful showing that a lot of people just flat out refuse to accept humans can be that evil.
But also, basically all types of governments can demonstrate the sorts of failure mode that Communism is famous for. Holodomor and Great Leap Forward's famines were Communist failures, the Irish Potato Famine and several in India under the British were Capitalist failures.
> the fact that this ideology is flawed at its very core?
You may be surprised if you read a copy of The Communist Manifesto. Several parts of it have been considered "common sense" in capitalist nations for over a century.
Me, I think Karl Marx made the same error as Adam Smith, that both think humans free from rules are naturally amazing and they largely ignore power seeking behaviours and the consequences of that. Hence Smith is associated with laissez-faire, and "socialist" and "anarchist" were seen by the authorities of the 19th c. as being much the same*.
(I over simplify a bit, this is just a comment and not a script for a replacement idiology).
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definition_of_anarchism_and_li...
To Quote Ronald Reagan...
“How do you tell a Communist? Well, it’s someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It’s someone who understands Marx and Lenin.”
But that aside, when you're already getting failed and the people failing you specifically hate one thing, it's very easy to reach for that thing.
To your quote: Well, I'm not a communist (unlike a previous partner)… but I'm also not a capitalist, because I see that capitalism also is a deeply flawed ideology doomed to catastrophic failure and devastating results, and that history has shown us this, too, repeatedly.
I'm also not "anti-" either of them, because I'd rather see someone take the best of both and find some new mechanism to deal with the other repeatedly observed historical fact: that a non-trivial fraction of the population are power-hungry sadistic arses. To quote, albeit from fiction: "To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2416-the-major-problem-mdas...
(Both capitalism and communism have failure modes separate from the problem of dark triad personalities, but both sets are much easier to deal with if your society has also solved the problem of dark triad personalities, and a society does also need to solve the problem of dark triad personalities irregardless of what else it does).
If you're thinking of countries like Sweden and Norway, those would be called social democracy.
Marxism is a flawed ideology because it doesn’t account for human nature.
But: There's no additional overhead to "seize the means of production" vs. any other system of governance and organisation, given that corporations, money, ownership, and the law are all things that any functioning system of government controls anyway, regardless of if they want these things to be collectively owned (/nationalised) or privately controlled.
Now, my former partner who is a self-identified Communist of some kind (I can't remember which kind), she wants to abolish money, and abolishing it rather than using it would need quite a lot of extra effort.
> How do you allocate resources and labor fairly?
I believe the general claim here is "democratically". This doesn't really work too well, but on the other hand, neither does letting people accumulate so much money they become the de-facto leadership with the carrots and sticks of "I will move my business to whoever has the lowest tax/cheapest labour/least expensive safety requirements".
Consider also that normal people are nowhere near as carful with language use as you or I may wish; some of the people you're worried about may be identifying themselves as "Communists" in the first place only because they're exactly one step to the left of the Democrat Party's Overton window while also repeatedly observing the US Republican party describe the Democrats as "socialists".
(Conversely, my former is one of the people I expect you to be correctly worried about, as she agreed with my assessment that she was to the left of the Cuban communist party).
Now that's out of the way, perhaps some systems give you better unfair society that seizes things by force, compared to others. Perhaps we could calmly deliberate about which system that creates an unfair society by seizing things by force is the best, and then implement that system, creating the best possible unfair society that seizes things by force.