A blunt, skeptical take on modern communist fantasies and why the promised utopia collapses under reality, coercion, and human incentives.
The level of denial running through today’s communist fantasies is staggering and worth calling out plainly. They imagine “free” everything paid for by “hundreds of trillions” and expect a life of leisure and abundance. That ignores history, incentives, and the ugly tradeoffs that follow when the state controls production. This piece walks through those claims and shows why they don’t add up.
Let’s be blunt: the romanticized vision of communal living sounds neat until you test it against basic human behavior. The idea you can simply decree abundance and wipe out private choice misunderstands how goods get produced and allocated. Promises of guaranteed housing and endless cultural time are emotional, not economic, arguments. When resources and incentives vanish, human nature fills the gap in ways the utopians refuse to admit.
But first, here’s a direct excerpt from the fantasy being sold online.
Here’s what the post says:
https://x.com/reddit_lies/status/2096690404083036300
You wake up in your nice, modern apartment, in a relatively dense and walkable city. People walk, bike, or take public transport. There are generous urban spaces with a lot of outdoor and indoor places encouraging cultural activities and an active community lifestyle. Everything is public property, meaning no fences, no private parks, etc.
That line shows the weak seam in the whole sales pitch: “your nice, modern apartment” and “everything is public property” can’t both be delivered without a mechanism that enforces inequality. If the state truly owns everything, privileges emerge to allocate the best housing to the well-connected. That’s not theory; it’s pattern. Idealized language hides the power brokers who decide who gets the perks.
The fantasy continues with detailed blueprints for daily life and cooperation.
Everything is accessible to everyone. Nobody “owns” their residence, as private property does not exist; there is enough housing for everyone to have a right to housing, and people get to choose a residence from a list of available residences. Your days are mostly made of community life, for example taking turns at cooking in common spaces where people get together to eat, people take turns in doing maintenance on infrastructure, some people will specialize in one field more than in another one and are thus free to choose one area over the other. If there is a need, they’ll volunteer to take up some work in an area they’re not specialized in, but they will do it out of a sense of community service.
There is no “work” in the way we know it today, there are no 9-7 office jobs, there is just a list of works that need to be done on any given day and if, for example, on a given day tehre is overall less work to do than normally, people will have more free time that day to spend on whatever other passions they have.
Some days will require more work to be done, and people will accept doing more work on that day due to their sense of duty toward the community. Things get produced according to what the community needs, and all needs get produced in sufficient numbers such that everyone has access to them equally.
Reading that makes your head hurt because the mechanics are missing. Who produces the goods? Who runs the factories and maintains machines? The proposal treats production like an automatic faucet. “Sufficient numbers” does not appear by magic—someone must plan, procure, and enforce. The cheerful language masks the coercion that would be necessary to keep the system running.
In our current system, people can specialize and choose. I write for a living, and I keep a nursing license I could use if I wanted. Those are voluntary choices rooted in market signals and personal preference. Under an all-knowing planner, choice becomes permission. That might sound noble to an ideologue, but it strips autonomy in practice. People who like variety and entrepreneurship get flattened into assigned roles or punished for stepping out of line.
The utopian note even claims crime would disappear because private property is gone and community bonds are strong.
If needs change, production changes. There is no selling or buying; there is an organization of what needs to be produced and how much. Crime is probably outright inexistant [sic] due to the inexistence [sic] of the concept of the concept of private property and people’s much stronger sense of community. The political organization is one of direct democracy, where everybody is encouraged to participate in their community’s politics, meaning they get together to debate issues and find solutions. There is a lot of communication between every level of society.
That paragraph is the perfect example of optimism substituting for evidence. Direct democracy sounds appealing until you see how easy it is for a small, connected elite to capture the organs of decision-making. History shows decision-making under centralized systems becomes control, not liberation. Warnings from the past should matter to anyone who cares about freedom.
Look at 20th-century examples and the pattern is grim: politically connected people get the cushy posts, while ordinary citizens become cogs in farms, factories, or bureaucracies. There is no real vacation, no market feedback telling producers to improve quality, and the safety net can morph into shackles when the state decides someone is expendable. Rations, scarcity, and punishment follow in place of abundance.
Mocking the utopia is not cruelty; it is practical realism. People who crave dignity and choice should reject systems that promise equality but deliver coercion. The rhetorical flourish about shared kitchens and cultural spaces ignores a simple truth: incentives matter, property matters, and freedom matters. Without them the fantasy crumbles and suffering fills the gap the rhetoric leaves behind.
