Richard Pipes, Communism: A History, Modern Library, 2001, p. 154:
In sum, Communism failed and is bound to fail for at least two reasons: one, that to enforce equality, its principal objective, it is necessary to create a coercive apparatus that demands privileges and thereby negates equality; and two, that ethnic and territorial loyalties, when in conflict with class allegiances, everywhere and at all times overwhelm them, dissolving Communism into nationalism, which is why socialism so easily combines with "Fascism."
The enforcing of equality requires an agency of enforcement, the revolutionary vanguard, that is vastly unequal in power to those who are being equalized. And this for the simple reason that people will resist expropriation: they will not willingly surrender what they consider to be the product of their labor. The deplorable masses will have to be forced, for their own good, to become good socialists. But once the vanguard gets a taste of power and its privileges and perquisites, it will not willingly surrender them and the wealth that comes in their train. Greed is ancient and endemic in the human condition. It antedates capitalism. It is therefore not a product of capitalism, and cannot be erased by erasing capitalism. The upshot is that the method by which Communists aim to enforce equality insures that equality will never be reached.
As for the second reason, there is an innate tendency in humans to revert to the tribal and the territorial. International communism is no match for the nationalism that comes naturally to people.
The underlying problem is that Communism is irremediably flawed in its philosophical anthropology: there is no understanding of human nature, and what is worse, no recognition that there even is such a thing as human nature. The utopian conceit of the Communists was and is that man is infinitely malleable: collectively, he can remake himself. Change the relations of production and you change man from the petty, greedy, individualistic bastard he hitherto has been into a transformed being willing to merge with his species-being (Gattungswesen) and work for the common good.
What is now called cultural Marxism retains this notion of the malleability of man in the form of social constructivism.
Now apply the above insights to the current political situation as the Democrat party moves in the Communist direction!
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