Editing Communism (section)

===Issues===
One of the (many) major flaws in communist ideology is that its economic theories simply cannot be translated into the real world. For all the bullshit and genuine problems that happen in the free market (or the corporation-dominated form that exists today, at any rate), it still has the advantage of solving what economists call the ''economic calculation problem''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem .] To make a long story short, free markets work by allocating resources to where they are most needed and will produce the most value for people, and they are able to do this through ''price signals''. 

Consider: Games Workshop wants money. You have money. So they make little [[Space Marines|metal figures]] that you want and so you buy them, and [[profit|they make money]]. Then they decide they want to make more money. So they try making a [[Manta|big honking model that costs a lot of money]], but you don't buy it because you're poor. By doing this [[Age of Sigmar|over]] and [[Primaris Marines|over]] again, GW eventually figures out what will and won't sell at what price, and you come to regard them as a money grubbing lawful evil because they're making a thing you want and charging you close to the highest price you're willing to pay to get it.  

In a free market, nobody really needs to know what the whole economy looks like or how much steel the country will need in a given year; people only need to know how ''their own'' business works: what their customers want and what they'll pay for it. Under planned economies, by contrast, decisions are made by politicians and bureaucrats who have no understanding of how anything works and who pay no price for being wrong, leading to massive malinvestment and waste. Even nominally Communist governments were forced to implement some capitalist policies after learning this the hard way, though the degree to which they did so varied from country to country, with China being among the most capitalist and North Korea being the least.

Furthermore, Bakunin's predictions about the dictatorship of the proletariat turning into a dictatorship ''over'' the proletariat have proven to be consistently correct, with party bureaucracies quickly assuming the same exploitative practices that their capitalist precursors used and claiming the means of production for themselves rather than passing them onto the workers. Often, they actually made those practices worse and suppressed labor movements more aggressively than the capitalists they had overthrown. 

Liberal philosophers like Karl Popper on the other hand took a more fundamental approach to their critique; Popper in particular had the major criticism that history doesn't run on predetermined rulesets and laws, like Marx thought, and that such a line of thinking, especially when paired with the promise of a socialist utopia, would ultimately just serve people like Lenin and Mao Zedong, who would abuse this ideology to create authoritarian nightmares that only serve themselves. Seeing how the Socialist dream always ended in stagnation, dictatorship and misery, he was ultimately proven to be right about a lot of things. Sociologists like Didier Eribon formulated another criticism on how Marxism views society; mainly that the working class, especially in our day and age, is not a uniform monolithic bloc that can be rallied to join a revolution or even a cause. While sharing common interests, how these interests manifest themselves in any individual can range wildly and also how the influence of social background often unconsciously makes people act against their own interests (like the current wave of impoverished white people in the Rust Belt and the US South violently opposing any sort of social benefits, even though they would disproportionately benefit from such systems being established).

Even in an ideal universe where the bureaucracy running a centrally planned economy wasn't corrupt or inept, the technology to monitor and plan any sort of national economy has yet to be invented and what we have now can't keep track of everything well enough to make it work; the average economy is incredibly complex and not even the most advanced computers that currently exist can predict every possible variable that might affect how the economy functions (let alone predict the long term effects of a plan), so mistakes will inevitably occur and snowball with dangerous consequences. As a result, a centrally planned economy invariably destroys the countries in which it is attempted due to drop of quality in consumer products, and eventually, food sources. Countries like China use the international market to get around this, but this is only delaying the inevitable. It gets even worse when you factor in the further increased complexity demanded by globalization. Technological advancements in the future might be able to mitigate this issue or even solve it outright, but they may not happen for a very long time. 

Other types of planned economies exist too, but they are much less common and tend to exist on smaller scales so we can't really tell how well they'd work on a national level, let alone an international one. They do seem to function surprisingly well on a regional/municipal scale though, especially those which are decentralized and use little to no top-down authority when making decisions. Only time will tell if they work on larger scales too, assuming that they are not forcibly ended by their rivals first. 

The economic failures of Socialist countries can also be found in Communist ideology itself; if your state says that it's heaven on earth, then said state won't do a whole lot to potentially improve things it has apart from occasional repairs or inventing new things that aren't necessary for its own survival. The downfall of the USSR and its aftermath is a good example of this; WWII destroyed a lot of stuff in Russia, so the government increased funding for sectors essential to rebuilding the nation. Productivity remained high until the late 70s, when, paired with party cronyism, the job of rebuilding Russia was finished and productivity started to stagnate on a high level. The only sectors that saw regular innovation and new invention were the arms and nuclear weapons industry. So it came to be that the West ultimately shot waaaay past the USSR in terms of productivity and wealth and ultimately defeated it. 

That being said, mixed economies combining elements of communism and capitalism (e.g. Keynesianism and the "Nordic Model") have consistently proven to be functional enough to not destroy countries, albeit these successes have much more to do with cultural factors than with any success of communist ideology, the latter of which has steadily been abandoned over the last few decades. As mentioned above, these mixed economies are typically viewed by socialists to be more closely related to capitalism than communism, and most of them believe that the welfare systems they depend on are likely to be privatized in the absence of a stronger shift away from a capitalist economy. Several of these economies have indeed been abandoning their socialist elements over time in favor of a more capitalistic system, due in no small part to economic stagnation and near-collapse due to socialist economic policies, although one could also point to major corporate and capitalist interests undermining said socialist policies as a cause of both of those. We're not in a position to say which of those explanations is more likely to be true, so we'll leave it at that.  

Furthermore, Communist governments tend to move away from the tenets of Marx and Engels in an attempt to force their ideas to work in situations they were never intended to function in. Marx believed that the shift to socialism and then communism could '''only''' work in an advanced industrial capitalist society with an established working class and that any attempt to make it happen before that point was doomed to backfire (and as Venezuela has since shown us, even THAT prediction was clearly wrong), and one must also remember that while much of what he said was prescient, he had no idea how capitalism would develop past his own era. 

Lenin got around this by claiming that he could "telescope" the capitalist and socialist revolutions into a single event with the aid of the aforementioned vanguard party and proposing an alliance with the Russian peasantry to compensate for the undeveloped presence of the working class. Even then, Lenin tentatively allowed a shift back to private ownership for the Kulaks just so the Soviet economy could get back on its feet, before Stalin purged them all as class enemies and triggered a widespread famine known as the Holodomor (which the vast majority of historians suspect was intentional on Stalin's part). 

Mao Zedong took this to an even further extreme by forcing the revolution in the primarily agrarian China and then trying to kick-start industrialization with the "Great Leap Forward". It was a total failure for several different reasons, and Mao's hamfisted attempt to retain control of the Communist Party afterwards gave rise to the Cultural Revolution and all the bloodshed that came with it. Somewhat like Lenin, Mao's successor Deng Xiaoping ended up implementing capitalist policies (while leaving all the other oppressive elements intact) in response to the earlier economic crises. While it did salvage the economy, it also ended up producing a system that arguably combines the worst qualities of both capitalism and communism that survives only by constant pandering to nationalist sentiments. 

Because of the legacy of the Cold War and everything mentioned above, mass famines among numerous communist countries, and widespread human rights abuses from the regimes of communist leaders, communism is about as "loved" as fascism; there's good reason why people occasionally put Stalin and Mao, and communism/socialism, on equal footing with [[Nazis|Hitler]] and Imperial Japan in terms of evilness. Even the forms of communism that originated independently of the Leninist traditions are generally poorly regarded at best due to guilt by association. This is ironic, given that Lenin (and later Stalin) spent a considerable period of time trying to wipe out the forms of communism that diverged from Leninism.

As an interesting closing note, some people claim that the rise of automation (robotic and algorithmic) has the potential to bring about a society that resembles what communism tried to achieve. Today, most farming is done either automatically, or by a single dude riding a combine and doing the job of hundreds of farmers in a single day, manufacturing has also similarly gone through a wave of automation which has seen many factories reduce the number of their workers from hundreds to mere dozens, and the recent bastion of human labor - the service sector - is slowly seeing the penetration of algorithms and in rare cases robots into the fold. What all this means is that humanity needs to do less and less work while the automated systems do it just as well if not better, these 'means of production' can be (in theory) easily nationalized and the usual problems of people slacking off due to everyone being paid equally is eliminated since both the neurosurgeon and waiter who are 'paid the same for their effort' are robots. Add to that the rise of 3D printing which may act as poor man's Star Trek replicators (eliminating the need to buy a smörgåsbord of stuff) and theoretically we could be on track towards "fully automated luxury gay space communism". However, none of these advances do anything about the economic calculation problem. They do not tell us how many robots to build or whether those robots should farm corn or assemble 3D-printed guns. More relevant from a communist perspective is the fact that these robots are still ''privately owned'' and so fail to address the core issue with capitalism in that the workers do not control the means of production and still have to sell their labor to live. All of this automation merely reduces the demand for human labor in some parts of the economy, pushing workers into whatever sectors of the economy are still hiring humans and leaving them destitute if they can't find anyone to sell their labor to. In fact, the original Luddite movement was a reaction to this very issue: it was composed of textile workers who had lost their jobs as a result of machinery eliminating the need for their skilled labor. (Contrary to popular belief, they didn't oppose technology itself so much as the fact that said technology was being used by employers to put weavers out of work and offered the ones that remained employed nothing in return but lower wages.) As always, only time will tell if automation can live up to its hype but historical precedent thus far is not promising.