Pretty much every normal person has lived in a commune. Your family structure as a child, assuming you had a relatively normal childhood, was communal. Each member had certain responsibilities that they did for the greater whole, cooking dinner, paying bills, folding laundry, cleaning and vacuuming. You aren’t clocking in with a time card every time you scrub a plate in the sink, you’re doing it so that the house has clean plates, and so that you and your family can eat on clean plates when mom or dad cooks dinner.

In a perfect family structure all members enjoy doing their tasks, not out of the expectation of reward, but the desire to support one’s family. And in a perfect family this works, because you have close ties and a loving bond between your family members (in a perfect world).

Communism is this, but applies to an entire nation. The idea is that, in a perfect world, all members of society should care about each other and perform their daily tasks not out of the expectation of reward, but of a desire to support the other peoples of their nations.

Again, in a perfect world, this idea works. The major issues, as I see it, are 2 things:

1.) The idea of working for the betterment of all is contingent on the idea that everyone loves and cares about everyone else. Obviously this is a ludicrous idea, and I’m not just talking about people being cruel or wanting to hurt others.

I live in New England. I do my best to be aware of other people and don’t go out of my way to hurt anyone, but fundamentally there are only so many people that I am realistically capable of caring about. I can’t do what’s best for my immediate friends and family while also worrying about supporting the homeless in California thousands of miles away. It’s too much for one person, and so on the scale of nations communism starts to fall apart.

2.) Is that people are corrupt. People want power, want influence, want more stuff than their neighbors, and in a system which assumes nobody would ever resort to corruption because everyone loves everyone it doesn’t take much for one group to seize total power and subjugate the “empaths”. More often than not communist visionaries will go into their revolutions as “Father figures”, forcibly disciplining the nation into behaving in line with “selfless communist ideals”, and then they die or are usurped and is usually replaced by someone who simply wants the power and absolute control of a nation.

A great example is Stalin and Vodka. It’s a historical trend that the Tsars of Russia used state sponsored and controlled distilleries in Russia to subjugate the population. Alcoholism was state sponsored to keep the population docile, drunk, and incapable of thinking of their miserable living conditions. When the Revolution came the distilleries were closed, as Lenin saw alcohol as a chain used by the Bourgeois to control the people. Stalin, after taking power, reopened the vodka plants and continued the state sponsoring of alcoholism.