Communism—Actually, It's Worse on Paper (and pretty bad in practice)
Why Communism Fails Because of Its Theory, Not Despite It
There’s a kind of intellectual safe-haven for those who’ve read just enough Marx to be dangerous but not enough to be disillusioned.
“Communism is great on paper—it just doesn’t work in real life.”
It’s a phrase you’ll hear in coffee shops, classrooms, and podcast intros. It’s used like a spell to preserve the ideal while waving away the evidence. A century of mass murder? Bad luck. Stalin? A bureaucratic mishap. Mao? Misunderstood agrarian enthusiast. Pol Pot? Took the ‘paper’ a bit too literally.
But here’s the trouble: the theory is not good. The paper is not noble. It is, from the first sentence to the last, a deeply flawed document animated by false anthropology, magical economics, and moral presumption. Communism is not a noble dream tragically abused. It is an ideological disaster exactly because its assumptions are wrong and its goals are wrong.
Let’s take this from the top, starting with the The Communist Manifesto (1848), co-authored by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, which still serves as the ideological cradle of it all.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (Ch. I)
Everything—religion, family, law, art, your fondness for your grandmother’s crockery—is reduced to economics. This is a bold and comforting story if you dislike responsibility. It means you’re not wrong, you’re oppressed. Your failings are systemic, your suffering ideological. Salvation is one revolution away.
It’s not just wrong, it’s dehumanizing in the opposite direction. Where capitalism (at its worst) reduces people to producers and consumers, communism reduces them to victims and revolutionaries. Everyone’s identity is flattened into a binary: bourgeoisie or proletariat. And those who refuse the script?
“What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, is its own grave-diggers.” (Ch. I)
Charming.
This logic carries forward: the family is bourgeois. Religion is bourgeois. Culture, history, tradition—bourgeois. Marx’s solution is to dynamite every “structure” that might transmit inequality across generations. The result is a theory that abolishes the very institutions that make human flourishing possible.
Take the family:
“Abolition of the family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.” (Ch. II)
Yes, Karl, they do. And rightly so. Families are not perfect, but they are one of the few natural bulwarks against the excesses of both state and market. Abolishing the family is like removing the lifeboats from a ship because they take up deck space. But Marx is so convinced that property is the original sin that he’s willing to sacrifice everything to erase it.
And what replaces these natural bonds? The state. The Party. The Collective. You will own nothing and be...emotionally numb.
Here’s the kicker: Communism is built on an impossible anthropology. It assumes that man, in his natural state, is cooperative, egalitarian, and benign. That all selfishness is imposed by structures like private property. That if we destroy those structures, the milk of human kindness will pour freely from every heart.
This is laughable to anyone who has shared a flat, taught kindergarten, or used the internet.
The only way this fantasy survives is by becoming violent. Because, surprise! People like property. They like their children. They form bonds, hierarchies, and loyalties. They’re tribal, partial, personal. So if you’re going to abolish everything that makes them human, you’ll have to do it by force.
And here the Manifesto gets honest:
“The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” (Ch. IV)
You can’t say they didn’t warn us.
This is not the language of idealism. This is not “good on paper.” It is a plan for perpetual revolution, which must be enforced by terror. Not accidentally, but inherently. Because the only way to implement an ideology that denies human nature is to deny the humans who object.
Let’s put it differently: Communism fails in practice because it is evil in theory. Not evil because it desires fairness—but because it lies about the kind of creature it is trying to make fair. It demands angelic behaviour from fallible men, then grants them terrifying power to accelerate the purification. It erases limits, traditions, and safeguards, and replaces them with abstract ideals and revolutionary committees. Which, if you hadn’t noticed, don’t cuddle.
When people say Communism is “better on paper,” they usually mean it sounds compassionate—sharing is good! Rich people bad! Equality! But these words, unmoored from realism and humility, become cudgels. They sound gentle until they are made real.
There is, ironically, one way in which Communism is good on paper: as fiction. It is imaginative. It belongs to the same realm as utopian novels, with magical gardens, talking animals, and humans who share power without envy. But we know better than to govern by emulating Narnia.
Beware the Blueprint
Both traditional societies and market economies , for all their flaws, begin with a brutal realism: people respond to incentives. That’s why they can be reformed. They are wrong about many things, but they are not wrong about us. By contrast, Communism begins by denying sainthood. It then builds a world that only saints could inhabit, and only devils would enforce.
So no, Communism is not good on paper. It is cruel on paper—a naive, totalizing, and ultimately inhuman vision written in elegant prose and anxious to be soaked in blood.
If you doubt that, just read the fine print. It’s all there, in Chapter I:
“The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”
And so they did—at the cost of their churches, their families, their property, their traditions, their histories, their lives.
But sure, tell me again how it’s “a great idea on paper” just as neo-communist masses are chanting ‘Death, Death, to the IDF’ at Glastonbury, attempting to visit their revolutionary blueprint on Britain. Incidentally, Glastonbury is not far from the place where King Arthur’s legend once helped to found a kingdom that was actually better on paper (and in books), but which also was good in practice.
Vernon Rogers splits his time between Miami Beach and his dog, Mr. Noodles.
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