4 ms·

I don't think that's entirely it - Socialism fails because we're not post-scarcity.

• adventured 9y ago
  If we were post-scarcity (in the sense it's commonly meant) it would still fail, because no two desires are the same (either in actual shape/scale or desired implementation). What you want, versus what I want, will never be the same and in most cases it won't be even remotely close to the same. That's true about life ambitions and it's true about basic material desires. You'd have to reach a state in which all people can have all/any things at all/any times. It's an impossible condition. Humanity's desire for things is unlimited (as witnessed by the last 5,000 years of development). Conceptually if Joe's neighbor has seven boats, Joe is going to want 10 boats. That's human nature and it can't be smashed out of humanity with force and or mental conditioning. Then what? It requires infinite materialism. And that's to say nothing of the basic human desire to be different (frequently via material objects), to want to stand-out, to be unique, to own unique things, to have a unique expression, that by itself destroys the post-scarcity premise (ie there are many other factors that confound systems like Communism beyond base materialist scarcity questions). That aspect is as old as humanity, is represented even in most primitive tribal systems and it perpetually clashes with Communism's collectivist ethos (which you routinely would see in the rebellions against Communist rule in the 20th century). The sole means for it to work, is to convert humanity into something else.