Why did communism, wherever it went, fail? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

I think that this question, while well intentioned, may not be (for lack of a better term) "right".

First, in today's world there are five nations that officially lay claim to being Communist. Cuba, China, Vietnam, Laos, and North Korea (there remains some debate over the explicit categorisation of the Juche but communist is generally accepted). These countries have not "failed" and with a superpower like China being communist it seems intrinsically strange to assert that it has failed wherever it went. Of course people will immediately jump in to clarify how this or that country (usually China) isn't really communist but actually socialist but for the sake of this explanation I won't go into it. (Well, I will a tiny bit. China is run by the Communist party and considers itself communist. Can we not then, gentle commentators, agree that we can very widely consider China to be a 'communist country'?)

However, I can understand this idea since the collapse of the Soviet Union gave rise to the idea that literally every single country that came from that union was an individual example of communism "failing". That's simply not true, of course, since the political situation of independence, national borders, socialism vs. communism, and so on is much more complicated than "If the USSR was communist and created 40 countries then communism has failed in 40 countries!".

Also, you have to understand that communism, as far as the way I assume you ask the question, has a compartively short history in the political sphere. Marxism is limited to, I believe, 1850s and forward, providing us with only 150 years of data compared to capitalist republics and so forth. There again too, you have the global economy, the opening of Japan's borders in the 1850s and 60s, the internet, the automobile, the telegram, telephone, etc. etc. etc. It's fairly difficult to make an accurate assessment of "WHY COMMUNISM HAS NEVER WORKED" with all of the above data points considered.

Now, if your question was geared towards, say, why the USSR's communism failed or the difficulty of adapting the ~~contemptible~~ [objective historian word] philosophy of Marx to a rapidly changing global economy failed, those are questions that can certainly be answered but I think they would warrant new posts in r/askhistorians with the specific question stated succinctly.

If you would like to learn about the collapse of communism in ways and nations that we know of, however, I would highly recommend:

Archie Brown's Rise and Fall of Communism
Richard Pipes's History of Communism
Zbigniew Brzezinski's Grand Failure: The Birth and Death of Communism in the 20th Cenutry

There are biases, of course. Brzezinski in particularly falls prey to this but I have tried to recommend three texts whose leanings will (hopefully) cancel each other out.

As a catch-all informative read on economic systems in general though, you can't go wrong with Comparing Economic Systems in the Twenty-First Century, Fifth Edition. It's a textbook but I bought it for fun from Amazon a year or two ago and enjoyed its information thoroughly.