In 1959, a village party secretary in Henan province sat down to fill out his annual grain production report. The actual harvest was three hundred kilograms. He wrote down thirty thousand. His superiors knew the number was false. Their superiors knew. Everyone in the chain knew. And every one of them passed the lie upward anyway, because telling the truth had become more dangerous than letting people starve. Tens of millions of people died in the famine that followed. The paperwork showed record abundance throughout.
This is what communism does at its most effective. It does not merely seize property or silence dissent. It poisons the capacity for truth itself, training entire societies to survive by lying until the lie becomes the only available language.
But to understand how a political system achieves this, you have to go further back, to the ideas that made it possible, and further inward, to the human weaknesses those ideas were designed to exploit.
Marx’s core claim: human beings have no souls, only economic interests
Why did a penniless German exile, writing in a London garret, produce a pamphlet that within a century dragged billions of people into catastrophe, tore apart countless families, condemned entire nations to terror and starvation, and made the twentieth century the bloodiest in human history?
The answer begins with what Marx took away.
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Every person carries within them two competing impulses. There is the pull toward goodness: the desire for truth, the capacity for compassion, the striving toward something higher than oneself. And there is the pull toward darkness: envy, resentment, the refusal to accept responsibility for one’s own life. Goethe captured this tension in Faust with an image that has never been better: two souls sharing one body, one straining toward the light, the other clinging to the earth. “Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast, and one is striving to forsake its brother. The one holds fast with joyous earthly lust onto the world with organs clinging close; the other soars impatient from the dust to lofty fields of high ancestral souls.”
Most people live their entire lives inside that tension. The question of which soul wins out is the central question of a human life.
Marx abolished the question. In his framework, people have no souls, no conscience, no moral aspiration that transcends material interest. A person is simply a product of economic relationships. All spiritual striving is illusion, a projection of class position dressed up as ethics. Once that premise is accepted, the implications follow directly: your suffering was caused by other people, and your remedy is to take from them.
Communism then packages this as science. “Scientific socialism,” “historical materialism,” the pretense that it is an objective law of history rather than a belief system, as irresistible as gravity. Many serious thinkers saw through the masquerade early. Bertrand Russell, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950, visited Soviet Russia in 1920 and wrote afterward that Bolshevism resembled a religion more than a political doctrine. The German philosopher Karl Löwith, a foundational figure in twentieth-century historical thought, described Marxism as an attempt to build a “Kingdom of God on earth, built without God.”
The parallel is structurally exact. Communism has its prophet (Marx), its sacred texts (Capital and the Communist Manifesto), its apostles (Lenin, Stalin, Mao Zedong, who led the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949), its holy sites (the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow’s Red Square, the Mao Zedong Memorial Hall in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square). But communism is religion’s mirror image, reversed at every point. Where religion asks you to purify yourself, communism asks you to purify the world of others. Where religion locates the source of suffering in human moral failure, communism locates it in other people’s ownership of property. Where religion offers redemption through self-examination, communism offers it through seizure.
Why communism spread faster than any religion in history
Buddhism took a thousand years to spread across Asia. Christianity needed three centuries to become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Communism needed one hundred years: from the publication of the Communist Manifesto in 1848 to the early 1950s, when roughly one-third of the world’s population lived under communist regimes. No traditional religion has ever matched that pace.
The reason is not hard to find. Traditional religion spread slowly because it made difficult demands. It required believers to restrain envy, resist greed, accept responsibility, extend compassion. Buddhist monks spent decades in personal transformation. Early Christians held their faith through persecution. Real inner transformation is hard and slow.
Communism demanded none of this. It spread fast because it worked with the grain of human weakness rather than against it.
Envy is the most universal and least acknowledged human emotion. Someone else has what I want; their success must therefore be my injustice. Communism took this private shame and gave it a public language, rebranding it as class consciousness. The division of humanity into “proletariat” and “bourgeoisie” is, at its core, the institutionalization of envy. Alongside it came the displacement of blame: I am poor not because of my choices or circumstances, but because someone is exploiting me. And beneath both ran the fantasy of unearned wealth, the premise that the problem is merely maldistribution, that you need not create anything, only reclaim what is already rightfully yours.
These are not exotic ideas. They are the path of least resistance through ordinary human nature. Communism did not invent them. It organized them, validated them, and pointed them at a target.
What ideology adds to ordinary resentment is moral insulation. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who survived Stalin’s labor camp system and wrote its definitive chronicle in The Gulag Archipelago, identified the mechanism precisely: ideology, he wrote, is what gives evildoing “its long-sought justification,” transforming the person who commits harm into someone who receives not reproaches but praise. The camp guard, the denouncer, the official who signed the execution order: each understood themselves as serving history. That is communism’s most durable achievement, turning cruelty into virtue by changing the label.
This is why communism swept the world faster than any religion before it. Falling is always faster than climbing.
Every communist experiment ended in mass death or collapse
Communism promises liberation. It has never once delivered it.
The reason is structural. Genuine problem-solving requires creation, and creation requires individual effort, ingenuity, and the right to benefit from one’s work. Communism’s only tool is seizure: take property from landowners, strip authority from intellectuals, expropriate freedom from individuals. A society built on that logic always ends the same way, because seizure consumes what it cannot replace.
The pattern has repeated across every country that attempted communist governance.
Stalin’s forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the early 1930s liquidated the “kulak” class, better-off peasant farmers, and handed their land to the state. The famine that followed killed between five and ten million people. In Ukraine alone, approximately 3.5 to 4.5 million died of starvation in what Ukrainians call the Holodomor, roughly 13 percent of the country’s entire population. Raphael Lemkin, the legal scholar who coined the word “genocide,” described it as the classic example of Soviet genocide.
In China, Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward of 1958 to 1962 forced peasants into communal farming brigades and ordered backyard steel furnaces that produced unusable metal instead of food. Yang Jisheng, a Chinese journalist who spent decades interviewing survivors, documented approximately 36 million deaths from starvation in his book Tombstone. Some scholars place the figure as high as 45 million, surpassing the total casualties of the First World War. Throughout the worst years, the CCP continued exporting grain.
Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, under Pol Pot, pursued a radical agrarian vision between 1975 and 1979 that killed approximately a quarter of the country’s entire population, between 1.5 and 3 million people, in some 20,000 mass graves.
Venezuela, once the wealthiest country in Latin America, saw its economy contract by more than 75 percent under the socialist policies of Hugo Chávez and his successor Nicolás Maduro. Inflation reached approximately 1.7 million percent in 2018. By 2020, an estimated 95 percent of the population had fallen into poverty, and more than seven million people had fled the country.
Communist rule destroys the capacity for truth
The greatest irony of communism is that it launched its revolutions in the name of the poor and produced more of them, in greater misery, than the systems it replaced.
It promised workers’ paradise and built the Gulag. It promised equality and installed a privileged class more brutal and unaccountable than any capitalist. It promised the end of exploitation and constructed the most thorough exploitation system in human history.
The damage went deeper than economics. Back to that village party secretary in Henan: he was not an exceptional man. He was a normal person operating inside a system that had made truth-telling lethal. His lie was not ideological conviction. It was survival. In Stalin’s Soviet Union, the same dynamic operated at every level. A factory worker would rise at a party meeting and deliver a passionate speech praising the collective farm’s output, then go home to find the shelves bare. Everyone in the room knew the speech was a lie. Everyone knew that everyone else knew. And no one dared be the first to stop.
During China’s Great Leap Forward, local officials competed to report ever-larger grain harvests, figures so absurd that Chinese people coined a phrase borrowed from the space race: “shooting satellites,” as if the numbers had left the earth entirely. The village secretary knew the numbers were false. The county party chief who compiled them knew. The newspaper editor who published the good news knew. Tens of millions starved while the official record showed abundance.
The Cultural Revolution, the mass campaign launched by Mao in 1966 to purge rivals and terrorize the population into submission, extended this into everyday relationships. Children reported their parents. Students beat their teachers. At a girls’ school attached to Beijing Normal University, students beat the school’s principal, Bian Zhongyun, to death. The threads of trust that hold a society together, between parent and child, between teacher and student, between neighbors, were cut one by one.
Hannah Arendt, the German-American political philosopher, described the endpoint in The Origins of Totalitarianism, her landmark 1951 study of how totalitarian regimes sustain themselves: the goal, she wrote, is a population for whom the distinction between truth and falsehood no longer exists. When that point is reached, control requires no further persuasion. It rests on the ruins of the capacity to think clearly. Recovery from that kind of damage takes generations.
Communism keeps returning under new names
The Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 did not take the ideas with it.
On university campuses across the wealthiest democracies, on social media, in street movements, communism’s intellectual descendants circulate under new names: socialism, progressivism, and various ideological hybrids that do not identify themselves as communist. The language has changed. The core logic has not: your problems were caused by someone else, and the solution is to take from that someone else.
Leszek Kołakowski lived this from the inside. He was a Polish philosopher who spent his early career as a committed Marxist, was expelled from the Polish United Workers’ Party for heresy, and passed the rest of his life dissecting the ideology he had once believed in. In his definitive three-volume study Main Currents of Marxism, he wrote that communism cannot be dismissed as a historical aberration. It was a defining feature of the twentieth century, and its intellectual patterns continue to shape the present.
The reason those patterns persist is that they draw on something that does not change. The weaknesses communism exploited, envy, the displacement of blame, the fantasy of redistribution without creation, are not products of any particular era. They are features of ordinary human psychology, available in every generation, waiting for an ideology that knows how to use them.
Resistance to communism begins with personal honesty
When you feel envy at another person’s success and that feeling tips into resentment; when you trace your difficulties back to society, to the system, to other people, as a reflex rather than a conclusion; when the fantasy of redistribution feels more compelling than the work of building something yourself: in those moments, a small piece of fertile ground inside you has prepared itself to receive communism’s seed.
A person who can look at their own envy and set it aside, who can accept responsibility for their own life rather than exporting blame, who can see that real change begins with themselves: communism has nothing left to offer that person. There is nothing left for it to grip.
Communism conceals itself in the most private corners of the human interior, in the envy we are ashamed to admit, in the resentments we prefer to nurse, in the instinct to flee responsibility. Recognizing it is also recognizing something true about ourselves. And that recognition, unflinching and clear-eyed, is the beginning of genuine freedom.
This article represents the author’s personal views and do not necessarily reflect the views of Vision Times.