“to employ a hundred people is… exploitation, but to command the same number [is] honorable.”

That’s an actual book by the way, explaining that although communism has failed in the past across different nations, races and cultures, it might work in the future where machines can create anything we want. Think Star Trek’s replicator technology.

Writer Roger Kimball works through the paradox of how Socialism survives:

Really, the socialist impulse is a hardy perennial.  How could something so frequently and thoroughly discredited persist in the hearts of men?  Some think it has something to do with the gullibility of the human animal, some (but I repeat myself) with the persistence of the utopian dream.  I suspect there are many explanations, of which the raw desire for power plays an unedifying but also underrated role.

To that last point is the fact that socialism can’t work without massive amounts of State control, from the extreme communist versions of 100%, to lesser versions like Fascism where private ownership is permitted but only as the State directs, to our modern social democracies where one is harried on all sides by bureaucrats in the Administrative State, who live for ever more regulation.

Only one brand of socialism, anarchism (including anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian-socialism), has pushed back against such control, in its effort to create a utopian vision of a society where workers are self-organizing and manage their own industries and communities, all cooperating with each other in multiple. For their pains a lot of anarchists have been killed over the years by their communist comrades, who despised losing State control, and didn’t think anarchists systems could work anyway. To be fair to the communists, anarchism never has worked outside of very small-scale, limited things like the famous Mondragon Corporation in the Basque region of Spain.

Other points raised in Mr Kimball’s essay include:

  • The power of original sin. Meaning the guilty rich: he quotes actor Jim Carrey extolling socialism, apparently not realising that the twin pillars of socialism – no private property and wealth equity – would deprive him of his $180 million of wealth and his lifestyle.
  • The hatred of spontaneous order arising from people trading in marketplaces. The anarchist utopia is actually a little like that – anti-central control – except they think people won’t want the concept of private property, including money and can be controlled on that. Some anarchists even reject the idea of marketplaces because they know where those will lead.
  • A simple contempt for the world of commerce and money, even when it’s people like Carrey and Burn Loot Murder Marxist leader (and grifter) Patrice Cullors who clearly love money: they just don’t like the grubby ways and people who make it.
  • Rationalistic hubris that makes people think that because they can create rules for some aspect of society they can create them for much else, if not all of society.

One thing he doesn’t mention is the eternal call of “kindness”, although he does discuss the sentimentality of socialism, from which other feelings spring.

He also doesn’t mention the simple human desire to get things for free from other people without having to do anything but vote. But I wonder whether the post-scarcity society of “luxury automated communism” would actually be a happy one?, given that New Leftist, Herbert Marcuse, bemoaned the end of Class Warfare as ordinary people got most or all of what the Establishment had (“automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment’“), which led to this comment on him:

For Marcuse, a worker who can afford a resort place, a working-class girl having access to amenities that were previously only available to the elites, and a person of colour owning a car, are all problematic. People escaping the drudgery of millennia means they can’t anymore play the convenient role of the victim in the intellectual’s schemes of class warfare. Which is why Marcuse gives up on ordinary people as political agents, and looks instead to the ‘lumpenproletariat’ for his new revolutionary subjects.
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Notice also the anti-materialism: how dare these proles enjoy amenities! How dare they enjoy that split-level home! They’ve lost their souls, but I, Marcuse, can tell them what’s good for them – know your place proles! 

This is why it’s a waste of time appealing to the Greens about how their “Clean Energy” plans will make us all poorer. Even if they did believe it (they mostly don’t but will as energy costs soar), they wouldn’t care because they’ve imbibed Marcuse even when they haven’t read him.

Plus other feelings like envy:

The whole gospel of Karl Marx can be summed up in a single sentence: Hate the man who is better off than you are.

Never under any circumstances admit that his success may be due to his own efforts, to the productive contribution he has made to the whole community. Always attribute his success to the exploitation, the cheating, the more or less open robbery of others.

Never under any circumstances admit that your own failure may be owing to your own weakness, or that the failure of anyone else may be due to his own defects — his laziness, incompetence, improvidence or stupidity. Never believe in the honesty or disinterestedness of anyone who disagrees with you.

This basic hatred is the heart of Marxism. This is its animating force. You can throw away the dialectical materialism, the Hegelian framework, the technical jargon, the ‘scientific’ analysis, and millions of pretentious words, and you still have the core: The implacable hatred and envy that are the raison d’etre for all the rest.
– Henry Hazlitt

Given all the failure it’s not surprising that modern socialism has almost given up on the traditional economic focus of Marxism and thrown in with Gramsci, Marcuse and company to create a new Socialist Zombie – although as that post points out those communist revolutions did their best to lay waste to all other aspects of society also:

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See Also:
Class War
Middle Class Warfare
The Pandemic Road to Serfdom
American Socialism and its Discontents
It’s Class Warfare Jim, but not as we know it!