My kids tried communism, multiple times, and it has failed every single time. I have two sons who love playing Minecraft. We play together on servers I host. Every few months we end up starting a new server from scratch, so we can start over with a new version of Minecraft or some new set of mods we want to try. This is a lot of fun for all of us, but, my boys always decide they want to build a house together and live together, sharing all of their resources and such.
Now, this isn't that different from how I have played with my older friends in the past. We generally have separate houses, and we each own our own stuff, but we share as well. If someone needs something and someone else has extra, the person with extra will share. We often build and maintain a central warehouse of extra stuff we don't need that anyone can come and take from if they need it.
As similar as these two economic systems appear, they are actually wildly different. In the first case, sharing is compulsory. If one of my sons decides he needs a bunch of skeleton bones to make bone meal to fertilize the crops, he can go and take them without even asking. Because ownership is shared, he owns them as much as anyone else, so he can go and take as desired, for whatever use he feels is necessary. If my other son decides he wants to use them for something else, he can do it without asking as well. Two days ago, this exact scenario led to a heated argument. The bones in question were collected by one of my sons and used by the other. The one who collected them went to use them and discovered they were all gone. He believed that as the collector he had some kind of special right to use them before anyone else. My other son was playing by the rules they had agreed upon, where everything was shared ownership, and right to use was based on immediate need. In the second case, sharing was 100% voluntary. Whoever worked to obtain the materials didn't just have first dibs but had sole ownership. We chose to share our excess as we desired. And we didn't always share all of our excess. Diamonds are rare and precious in Minecraft, so if someone asked if anyone had spare diamonds they could have, odds are the request would not yield any willing to give diamonds, even if some of us did have more than our immediate needs called for. If you want diamonds, you can go mining for them yourself. I worked hard for mine! Alternatively, I might be willing to sell you some of my diamonds, in trade for something of similar value. On the other hand, if someone wanted to cobblestone to build a house, a tower, a castle, or whatever with, pretty much everyone would be willing to share, because cobblestone is not rare and is trivial to obtain more of as needed. We were also generally quite willing to give food, as it is not super rare and not hard to get. In fact, I would often go to great pains to build a machine to produce unlimited food on nearly every server we played on, and then I would allow anyone to take as much of the food it produced as they wanted, because food is a pretty important resource in the game.
Another way of putting it is that the system my sons keep trying to use is communism, while my friends and I use a system of capitalism, but we also share, because in capitalism, reputation matters, and in capitalism sharing is a good way of earning a good reputation.
The outcomes of these two systems, even in Minecraft, is quite different. The capitalist system my friends and I use is conducive civilized, friendly gameplay, where we all build wealth together. Yes, there are some people who are poor. They build low quality houses, spend a lot of time exploring, and spend very little time mining and accumulating wealth. Some of us are very wealthy, with massive herds of all manner of livestock, multiple houses, towers, castles, and even cities full of villagers with valuable trades. We build automated machines for producing certain valuable resources in massive quantities. We spend a lot of time mining, accumulating massive amounts of valuable resources. We put a great deal of effort into obtaining the best gear possible. We decorate our properties in gold, lapis lazuli, and beautiful marble and quartz. Some of us have different kinds of wealth than the others. Some amount of trading happens. We are generous with common resources that we have plenty of, but we are tighter with rarer resources that require a lot of time and effort to obtain. We even go our of our way to either mark our property or claim property far enough away from others that disputes won't arise. This system keeps everyone friends. It avoids petty arguments. We don't steal from each other, because we are all civilized human beings, so there are no arguments about property rights at all. If the wealthy won't share with the poor, the poor either do without or work harder to get what they want. The poor don't whine and wail that the rich are taking advantage of them or exploiting them, even when the poor have to trade with the rich to get what they want. In Minecraft, it's easy to understand the work that goes into generating and accumulating wealth, so civilized humans playing the game understand that they have no call to blame the wealthy for their own poverty. Sadly, in real life capitalism is poorly understood. Many people believe that CEOs get paid a lot of money for very little work, when that is not true at all. Many see wealthy business owners as leeches exploiting the poor, when the reality is that creating and maintaining a successful business is an incredible amount of work. The "exploited poor" could be wealthy, if they worked as hard as the owners and CEOs. Many people choose employment over ownership specifically because they understand how much work ownership is and aren't willing to do it. This is not to suggest that exploitation doesn't exist within Western capitalism, but the truth is that it is extremely rare. I've done the math, and I've found that the average American could easily make a living making and selling artisan soap, with a startup cost of less than $100 (even after "Bidenomics" rampant inflation). It's a trivial skill to learn. All you need to do it is a large pot, some cheap chemicals and other ingredients, and something to mold the bars in. The time required is low enough that a stay-at-home mom could do it at the same time as caring for 2 children (maybe more). But, running the business is a lot of work. You'll probably need to setup a website, unless you can find enough local stores willing to resell your product. You'll have to take care of orders in a timely manner. You'll have to keep up with demand even if you don't feel like working today. When you are running your own small business, you can't just call in sick and let someone else cover your shift. You are accountable, if you make a mistake. Most people don't want that level of responsibility, even if it means they can work from home and make more money for less hours. Even if you can make a living working only 30 hours a week, running a business is much more stressful. You might hear that some CEO makes $400k a year, and that might sound unfair. The problem is, if that CEO wasn't getting paid that much, it wouldn't be worth the stress of the job, and without a CEO the business would collapse and all of the "poor exploited" workers would lose their jobs. Some of those workers might think they could do the job, but odds are the business would still collapse when any one of them in charge. In Minecraft though, there are no employers. You kind of have to run your own business. I suppose on a server with a huge number of people, there might be a few willing to run businesses, and that would create the opportunity for others to be employees instead of owners, but few Minecraft servers have that many people, and if they did, running business would be just as stressful as it is in real life. The key though, is that capitalism creates a space and atmosphere for civility.
Communism, on the other hand, creates conflict. When property is shared between multiple people, that creates circumstances perfect for breeding conflict. This is true of more than just communism to. Business partnerships are significantly more likely to fail than sole proprietorships. Part of the reason corporations are governed by a board of directors rather than collectively run by the shareholders directly is exactly because of the potential for conflict in systems of shared property. In Minecraft, on a small scale, this is extremely obvious the first time people start arguing about who gets to use what. My sons have tried communism this way tens if not hundreds of times now. It always ends the same way. They get in a fight over something one of them used that the other was planning to use, and then they stop doing the shared ownership of everything they have, until eventually they are using the same system of capitalism my friends and I use. Now days, they no longer start by sharing a house, because they know how that is going to go. They still start with shared resources though. And here's where things get really interesting. It's always the same one who suggests the shared ownership. In my experience, communism is almost always the idea of people who aren't very wealthy and want more without having to work for it. Even Karl Marx, the one who wrote the Communist Manifesto, giving communism a formal definition, meets this definition. He came from a wealthy background, but he wasn't wealthy himself. He even spent a lot of his life in poverty. He was well known to be a lazy drinker. On several occasions he wrote articles on communism and related subjects in exchange for alcohol. He came from a family that was originally wealthy enough to not need to work for a living, and he spent his entire life trying to avoid working for a living. Of course he wished for a communist system, where all of the wealth of society was shared with him, so he could live a lavish lifestyle while still avoiding work! Similarly, look at which Americans promote communism the loudest. It has always been college students who would rather protest than do their coursework or get jobs after graduation. Now and then someone who isn't lazy will get suckered into promoting the movement, but the vast majority of those who promote communism are looking for a handout, not a morally superior economic system. I can even see this in my sons. The one who suggests this system is always the one who wants something someone else has and would gain access to it through the institution of a communist system. Now, it might be tempting to believe that in practice the conflict potential can be eliminated through government. This is false though. Government itself is a system of shared ownership, and it is plagued with conflict. Government within communist systems can give the illusion of reduced conflict, but this is actually false. Government can mitigate some conflict by forcing people to accept a particular decision, rather than letting people argue and fight over it. More importantly though, conflict is constant within government. Every large scale communist government has been plagued by these new problems. When you give an individual or group greater power within a communist economic system, conflicts are always resolved in favor of the individual or group with greater power. In Russia, members of the ruling Soviet Party had exclusive access to special stores where they could get stuff that was not available to the general population. The Soviet rulers had the authority to take whatever they wanted, rather than abiding by the communist rules of shared ownership. We see the same exact kind of system in North Korea right now. Those who are part of the wealthy ruling group literally have stores only they are allowed to go to, while the general population lives in poverty. Communist China gives members of the ruling party more resources and greater access to resources than everyone else. Communist Cuba does this too. It is literally impossible to have a communist system of government where the government doesn't give itself special privileges with regards to resource access. The whole point of communism is that the resources are shared among everyone, but in practice it is impossible for this to actually work. If there is no government, this facilitates mass contention that would lead to civil war if attempted on a large scale. If there is a government, the resources are no longer shared among everyone, because the government will always claim sole ownership of a portion of the resources and special privileges over the rest. The only way a communist system ever could work is through divine intervention, forcing people to remain civilized without a government that takes more than its share.
Some people will argue that none of these are "real" communism, but the truth is, two kids sharing resources, without any sort of government or higher authority to siphon resources and distribute them preferentially to government officials is about as pure as communism could ever get, and even it doesn't work. Maybe it would work with adults. Plenty of married couples share resources like this with little or no conflict over resource allocation. The truth though, is that even this is closer to capitalism. As a married person myself, I can tell you that it is not like communism. I do have property that I own. My wife has property she owns. We share ownership of our home and vehicles. We share ownership of income and money savings. That shared ownership, however, still isn't like communist shared ownership. For big expenses, allocation of space, and vehicle scheduling, we discuss and negotiate. It's not "take what you need", and it's not "whoever needs it first gets it". For small necessary expenses we don't always need to discuss, but when funds are low or the expense is significant, discussion is critical in maintaining civility and avoiding conflict. Under this system, distribution of resources is not equal. The resource pool is not a free-for-all or a communal pot. It is literally owned by both of us, and this means that every single element is half owned by each of us. If I want to spend a dollar or even a penny, my wife is necessarily part of that, because she owns half of it. And I don't mean she owns 50¢ of each dollar and I own 50¢ of it. I mean, she half owns the whole dollar and I half own the whole dollar. There is no division so small that we don't both own half. In communism, it's all about equal distribution. In marriage it is not. It's more about need and negotiation. My wife sews and I do software development and mechanical engineering. So she gets sewing machines when she needs and we can afford, and I get computers, laser cutters, and desktop mills as we can afford and I need. We don't keep track of cost, because it's a lot less important than meeting our needs and maintaining a civilized relationship. We are going to be getting a bonus soon. I'm not going to be buying anything big out of it, but my wife will likely be getting a new sewing machine to replace an old one that's worn out and damaged. That's definitely not communism. It's much closer to the kind of capitalist cooperation my friends and I engage in when playing Minecraft together, where resources are individually owned, necessities are shared based on need, and other resources are sometimes freely given and other times negotiated over. This kind of relationship can look like communism from the outside, but the truth is, it isn't, and even if it was, it's not very scalable. What works for two people who have formally covenanted to live and work together, acting as single entity, won't necessarily work for a country of 330 million people, who mostly don't know each other and many of whom are not trustworthy enough to have a national credit debit giving them unfettered access to all of the country's wealth.
The truth is, if none of this is "real" communism, then it proves beyond a doubt that real communism is completely impossible. That said, according to Marx's definition of Communism, which is the official definition, what the USSR did and what Cuba, China, North Korea, and Cuba are all doing is "real" communism, probably even more so than the massively overregulated capitalism of the U.S. is "real" capitalism. (Note that regulation is inherently socialist, so a economy that is free market by default but where nearly everything is touched by massive amounts of government regulation is probably more honestly called a socialist economy than a capitalist one. As such, any failure of the U.S. economy right now is actually more evidence that socialism doesn't work, not evidence that capitalism doesn't work. The decline of our economy actually followed the rise of our socialist regulatory system. The less capitalist our economy has become, the worse it has functioned.) Anyhow, communism doesn't work, not even in Minecraft with only two people.
