Common Objections to Communism — Answered

There is no fixed "human nature" in the way this argument assumes. Human behaviour is shaped by material conditions — by the mode of production, the social relations people are born into, and the institutions that surround them.

For 95% of human history, people lived in communal societies without private property, classes, or states. Greed, individualism, and competition are not innate — they are products of capitalist social relations. A society built on cooperation produces cooperative people. A society built on exploitation produces selfish ones.

The Soviet Union, in a single generation, transformed a nation of illiterate peasants into a spacefaring civilisation with universal healthcare and education — all through collective effort. If "human nature" were truly selfish, none of this would have been possible.

Further reading: Materialist Philosophy | Dialectical Materialism

This figure comes from The Black Book of Communism (1997), a book so dishonest that several of its own co-authors publicly disavowed it. The lead editor, Stéphane Courtois, was accused by his colleagues of being obsessed with reaching the 100 million figure and of inflating numbers to get there.

The book counts Nazi soldiers killed by the Red Army as "victims of communism." It counts unborn children from declining birth rates as "deaths." It counts famines caused by drought and war as deliberate policy. By the same methodology, capitalism has killed far more — through colonialism, slavery, imperial wars, preventable famine, and denial of healthcare.

Meanwhile, capitalism kills an estimated 20 million people every year through preventable causes — lack of clean water, food, medicine, and shelter — all of which exist in abundance but are denied to people because distribution is not profitable.

The real question is not "how many did communism kill?" but "how many does capitalism kill every single day — and why do we accept it as normal?"

Further reading: Soviet Achievements | Colonial Legacy

This is simply false. The Soviet Union transformed a feudal, agrarian country into the world's second superpower in under 30 years. It eliminated illiteracy, provided universal healthcare and education, achieved full employment, built world-class public housing, and put the first human in space — all while being encircled and attacked by the capitalist powers.

Cuba, despite 60+ years of the most brutal economic blockade in history imposed by the United States, has a higher life expectancy than the US, a lower infant mortality rate, universal healthcare, and has produced more doctors per capita than any country on Earth.

Every socialist state has faced invasion, sabotage, sanctions, and coups backed by imperialist powers. The question is not "why did some socialist states struggle?" but "why did capitalism need to spend trillions of dollars and kill millions of people to destroy them?"

Further reading: Soviet Achievements | Cuba & the Revolution

Venezuela is not and has never been a socialist country. The majority of its economy is privately owned. The Bolivarian government implemented social-democratic welfare programmes funded by oil revenue, but it never socialised the means of production or established a planned economy.

Venezuela's crisis was caused by: (1) dependence on a single commodity (oil) under capitalist market relations; (2) catastrophic sanctions imposed by the United States, which blocked the country from accessing its own gold reserves and oil markets; (3) economic sabotage by the domestic bourgeoisie, who hoarded goods and crashed the currency to destabilise the government.

If anything, Venezuela is an argument for actual socialism — it shows the limits of social-democratic half-measures within a capitalist framework.

This assumes that people only work under threat of starvation. In reality, humans are naturally productive. People build, create, teach, heal, and organise because meaningful work is a fundamental part of human life.

Under socialism, people work because the fruits of their labour serve themselves and their community, not a parasitic class of shareholders. The Soviet Union achieved full employment — everyone had work, and that work was compensated fairly. There was no unemployment, no homelessness, and no hunger.

The real question is: who would work under capitalism if they had a choice? Most people hate their jobs precisely because they are alienated from the product of their labour. Socialism abolishes this alienation.

Further reading: Political Economy

This is a myth. Marxism-Leninism has never advocated absolute equality of outcome. Under socialism (the lower phase of communism), the principle is: "From each according to their ability, to each according to their work." Those who work more or in more skilled roles receive more.

What socialism abolishes is not differences in income, but exploitation — the ability of one class to live off the labour of another without working. A surgeon and a factory worker may earn differently, but neither exploits the other. No one lives as a parasite on someone else's labour.

Under capitalism, a billionaire earns more in a day than a nurse earns in a lifetime — not because the billionaire works harder, but because they own the means of production. That is what communism abolishes: private ownership of what society collectively needs.

The image of Stalin as an all-powerful tyrant comes primarily from Cold War propaganda and from Khrushchev's 1956 "Secret Speech," which served Khrushchev's own political purposes by scapegoating his predecessor.

Under Stalin's leadership, the Soviet Union: industrialised in a decade what took the West a century; defeated Nazi Germany (losing 27 million people in the process); eliminated illiteracy; provided universal healthcare, education, and housing; and transformed a backward agrarian country into a nuclear superpower.

Were there excesses? Yes — and the Communist Party itself acknowledged and corrected them. But the overwhelmingly positive transformation of the lives of hundreds of millions of people is the defining legacy of the Stalin period, not the distortions promoted by the bourgeois press.

Every revolutionary leader in history has been demonised by the class they displaced. The British called George Washington a terrorist. The French aristocracy called Robespierre a monster. The ruling class always calls its gravediggers monsters.

Further reading: Soviet Achievements | History Timeline

This claim rests on World Bank statistics that set the "extreme poverty" line at $1.90/day — a figure so absurdly low that even the Bank's own researchers have questioned its validity. At $1.90/day, you are still in desperate poverty. Raise the line to $5 or $10/day (still poverty by any reasonable standard) and the numbers reverse — global poverty has increased under capitalism.

The bulk of poverty reduction in the 20th and 21st centuries occurred in China — where the state, not the free market, directed economic development. Remove China from the statistics and global poverty reduction under capitalism virtually disappears.

Capitalism did not "lift" people out of poverty. It first created that poverty through enclosures, colonialism, and forced proletarianisation — and then took credit for slightly reducing the misery it caused.

Further reading: Political Economy | Colonial Legacy

Under capitalism, "freedom of speech" means: those who own the media control the narrative. Six corporations own 90% of Western media. Billionaires own newspapers, television networks, and social media platforms. Workers have no meaningful voice.

Socialist states restrict counter-revolutionary propaganda — the right of the old ruling class to use their wealth and connections to organise the overthrow of the workers' state. This is not suppression of speech; it is defence of the revolution.

In the Soviet Union, there was extensive internal debate, criticism, and self-criticism within the party and in the press. Workers participated in factory committees, trade unions, and soviets. The suppression of fascist and counter-revolutionary agitation is no more "anti-free speech" than laws against incitement to violence are under capitalism.

True freedom of expression requires material freedom — freedom from want, from exploitation, from the tyranny of the boss and the landlord. Socialism provides that. Capitalism gives you the "freedom" to speak while you starve.

Every meaningful reform won under capitalism — the eight-hour day, universal suffrage, the welfare state — was won through class struggle, often led by communists. And every reform has been under constant attack by the bourgeoisie, who roll them back the moment the pressure eases.

The state is not neutral. It is an instrument of class rule. The capitalist state exists to protect capitalist property relations. You cannot use the master's tools to dismantle the master's house. Parliament, the courts, and the police exist to maintain the dictatorship of capital.

Social democracy has been tried for over a century. Every social-democratic government has either been overthrown by capital (Chile 1973, Greece 2015) or has itself become the manager of austerity (the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party). Reformism is a dead end.

Further reading: State & Revolution | Democratic Centralism

The Soviet Union did not collapse because of socialism. It collapsed because of revisionism — the gradual abandonment of Marxist-Leninist principles by the post-Stalin leadership, beginning with Khrushchev and culminating in Gorbachev's capitulation to imperialism.

Gorbachev's "reforms" — perestroika and glasnost — were not socialist policies. They were the introduction of capitalist market mechanisms into a socialist economy, which predictably caused economic chaos, shortages, and social dislocation. The Soviet Union was not defeated by capitalism; it was dissolved from within by revisionists who wanted to become capitalists themselves.

The result? Life expectancy in Russia dropped by five years in the 1990s. Poverty exploded. Oligarchs looted public industry. Millions died from the "shock therapy" of capitalist restoration. The collapse of the USSR was not a triumph — it was a catastrophe for the working class.

Further reading: History Timeline | Soviet Achievements

This is the so-called "economic calculation problem" popularised by Mises and Hayek. It claims that without market prices, rational allocation of resources is impossible. This argument was already refuted in practice by the Soviet planned economy, which industrialised a continent, won a world war, and achieved economic growth rates that outpaced the West for decades.

Today, the world's largest corporations — Amazon, Walmart, Apple — internally operate as planned economies. They do not use internal markets to allocate resources between departments. They use data, logistics, and central planning. The technology that makes corporate planning possible could run an entire economy — if it served the people instead of shareholders.

With modern computing, AI, and real-time data, the case for cybernetic economic planning is stronger than ever. The market is not a source of information — it is a source of chaos, waste, and crisis.

Further reading: Political Economy