Is communism actually possible? The honest answer depends on which communism is meant. As a system of ruling parties and planned economies, communism has existed and can be studied. As Marx described it, a classless, stateless economy that distributes goods according to need, it has never been tried, and whether it could work remains an open question that rests on three contested assumptions: that abundance can become near-total, that coercive authority can fade away, and that people will contribute without market incentives.
This article separates those assumptions and examines each against the arguments of named defenders and critics. Its claim is narrow. Feasibility is not a single verdict but a bundle of separate tests, and the historical record of states that called themselves communist speaks to only some of them. Treating the failure of one as proof about the others, or the success of a small commune as proof of a whole economy, are the two errors that most often distort the debate.
What Would Have to Be True
Marx's Own Conditions
Marx never wrote a detailed blueprint, and he mocked those who did. The most explicit passage is in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, written in 1875 and published by Engels in 1891. There he described a higher phase of communist society in which productive forces had grown so far, and the old division between mental and manual labor had faded so completely, that distribution could follow need. The conditions were stated as results of development, not as policies that a government could simply decree.
This matters for the feasibility question because it makes the claim conditional. If Marx was right, communism is possible only after capitalism or something like it has produced extraordinary productivity. A poor, agrarian country that declares it has reached the higher phase would, on his own terms, be mistaken. Critics inside the Marxist tradition have made exactly that objection to twentieth-century revolutions in Russia and China.
Three Separate Tests
It helps to split the question into economic, political, and motivational tests. The economic test asks whether an economy can allocate resources without market prices and still meet needs. The political test asks whether a stateless society can exist at the scale of millions, or whether some coordinating authority always returns. The motivational test asks whether enough people will work productively without wages tied to effort.
A system could pass one and fail another. A small religious commune may pass the motivational test through shared belief while saying nothing about a national economy. A planned economy may pass an economic test for basic industrial goods and fail on consumer preferences. Keeping the tests apart prevents a vague yes or no from standing in for a real analysis.
The Abundance Problem
Needs Without Limits
Distribution by need only works smoothly if needs can be satisfied at reasonable cost. That is the idea behind post-scarcity, the condition in which basic goods are so cheap to produce that rationing becomes unnecessary. Some thinkers believe automation points that way. Others note that needs are not fixed: as incomes rise, expectations rise with them, and a society's definition of necessity expands.
The distinction between needs and wants is the hard part. Marx treated human needs as historically developing, which means that a communist society would need some way to decide which claims count. The theory does not say who makes that decision or how disputes are settled, and critics argue that this gap is where scarcity politics would return in a new form.
Automation and Its Limits
Modern advocates, such as Aaron Bastani in Fully Automated Luxury Communism, published in 2019, argue that cheap energy, automation, and information goods are moving economies toward abundance. Their case is strongest for goods that cost almost nothing to copy, such as software and digital media. It is weaker for housing, land, medical care, and food, which still depend on physical resources and human labor.
Skeptics add an environmental point. Even if production can be automated, planetary limits on energy, materials, and emissions constrain how far abundance can extend. A post-scarcity economy for everyone at present Western consumption levels is not clearly achievable. A narrower version, guaranteeing basic needs for all, is a more modest and more defensible target.
So the abundance test is partly empirical and partly definitional. If communism requires unlimited goods, it fails by arithmetic. If it requires only that a society can reliably meet basic needs without wage dependence, the question becomes one of political choice and distribution rather than physical impossibility.
The Problem of the State
The Withering Away Argument
Marxist theory holds that the state exists to manage class conflict, so when classes disappear the state loses its function. Engels expressed this in Anti-Dühring, published in 1878, where he described government over people giving way to the administration of things. This is the doctrine called the withering away of the state, and it is the basis for the promise of a stateless society.
Lenin developed the idea in The State and Revolution in 1917, arguing that a temporary workers' state would be needed to suppress former exploiters before fading. The doctrine therefore contains a built-in timing problem. Everything depends on when the transitional state decides its job is finished, and the people who run it are the ones who must give up power.
Anarchist and Liberal Objections
Mikhail Bakunin raised this objection against Marx in the 1870s, warning that a revolutionary state would create a new ruling class rather than disappear. The twentieth-century record seems to support the warning: no ruling communist party ever dissolved its state, and most strengthened it. Milovan Djilas, a Yugoslav communist leader turned dissident, described the resulting bureaucracy as a new class in his 1957 book.
Liberal critics such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek went further, arguing that any large society requires institutions with legitimate authority and that attempts to abolish them invite worse substitutes. Defenders reply that the experiments so far began in conditions of war, poverty, and encirclement, so they cannot show what a mature, wealthy, democratic attempt would produce. That reply is logically fair but also unfalsifiable until such a case appears.
Between these positions sits a modest reading. A society might remain organized through local councils, federations, and public rules without a centralized coercive state. Whether that counts as stateless depends on how strictly the word is applied, and so the political test is partly a dispute about definitions.
Calculation and Incentive Debates
Mises and Hayek on Knowledge
Ludwig von Mises argued in 1920 that without market prices for capital goods, planners could not compare the costs of alternative production methods and would be unable to calculate rationally. Friedrich Hayek extended the point in the 1940s, claiming that the relevant knowledge is dispersed among millions of people and cannot be gathered by any central authority. These arguments target planned economies in particular, not every possible form of collective ownership.
Defenders have replied in several ways. Oskar Lange proposed in the 1930s that planners could adjust prices by trial and error. Later economists, including Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell in the 1990s, argued that computing power could make large-scale planning feasible. Such proposals have not been tested at national scale, and critics maintain that they underestimate the role of prices in conveying information about preferences.
Work Without Wages
The motivational objection says that if rewards are detached from effort, free riding spreads. The evidence is mixed. Kibbutzim in Israel, Hutterite colonies, and some monastic orders sustained communal property for generations, but typically in small groups bound by strong shared identity and social pressure. Many kibbutzim also privatized parts of their economies from the 1990s.
Experimental work on cooperation shows that people often contribute voluntarily, yet also that cooperation declines when free riders go unpunished. That suggests that a communal economy can run on non-monetary motives at small scale, but at larger scale some mechanism of recognition, monitoring, or sanction is required. The question becomes whether those mechanisms can exist without recreating the hierarchies the theory hopes to abolish.
On balance, the incentive question has no decisive resolution. It is clear that communal motivation works in some settings and fails in others, and equally clear that no one has shown how to transfer its small-scale successes to a national economy.
Experiments That Existed
Communes and Cooperatives
Small-scale experiments offer the closest evidence. Nineteenth-century communities such as Robert Owen's New Harmony in Indiana, founded in 1825, lasted only a few years. The Oneida Community in New York, founded in 1848, survived for about three decades before turning into a joint-stock company. Their record suggests that communal living can work for a time but struggles with turnover, internal conflict, and the pull of outside markets.
Worker cooperatives such as the Mondragon federation in the Basque Country, founded in 1956, show a different pattern. They have survived for decades by operating inside a market economy and accepting pay differentials, which places them nearer to market socialism than to communism in the strict sense. They demonstrate that collective ownership is feasible, not that distribution by need is.
State Experiments Reconsidered
The Soviet Union, China under Mao, and other ruling parties tried to build communism at national scale, yet their own leaders described their societies as socialist and the final stage as a future goal. Soviet industrialization achieved real gains in output and literacy, while coercive collectivization and political terror produced catastrophic costs. Nikita Khrushchev's 1961 party program promised the beginnings of communism within about twenty years, and the promise went unmet.
These cases are informative but limited. They show that centrally planned, one-party systems struggled with the knowledge, incentive, and power problems described above. They do not show whether a democratic, decentralized, and wealthier society could do better, because none was attempted. Both defenders and critics overreach when they claim that the twentieth-century record settles the question.
The most defensible reading is that the record counts strongly against one method, the revolutionary vanguard state with command planning, and says little about the others.
Utopia, Ideal, or Direction
The Utopian Charge
Critics often dismiss communism as a utopia, meaning a good society that cannot exist. The word comes from Thomas More's 1516 book, whose title is a pun on a good place and no place. Marx and Engels themselves used the label as an insult for earlier socialists, in Engels's 1880 pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, claiming that their own theory rested on historical analysis rather than wishful design.
The irony is that later critics applied the same charge to Marxism. Karl Popper argued in The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945, that attempts to build a complete ideal society tend to justify coercion in the name of the goal. Whether communism is utopian in the pejorative sense depends on whether one thinks the final stage is a prediction, a moral aspiration, or a regulative ideal.
Ideals as Direction
A more modest defense treats the final stage as a direction of travel rather than a destination. On this view, expanding public goods, shortening working hours, and reducing the role of money in basic needs are steps toward the ideal even if it is never fully reached. Philosophers such as G. A. Cohen, in Why Not Socialism? from 2009, argued that the camping trip, where people share tasks and equipment without markets, illustrates a principle that could guide larger institutions.
Cohen also conceded the hard part, which is design. We know that people cooperate on a camping trip, but we do not know how to organize a modern economy so that similar motives prevail. His honesty on this point captures the state of the question: the ideal is intelligible and attractive to some, while the institutional path remains unsolved.
Seen this way, the question of possibility has two answers. If communism means the full stateless, post-scarcity society, no one has shown it to be achievable and strong arguments suggest serious obstacles. If it means a set of aspirations that can shape institutions, partial and local versions already exist.
The most accurate conclusion is therefore conditional. Communism in the Marxist sense has never been attempted in the conditions Marx specified, and the twentieth-century attempts failed by their own stated standards. Whether a future society could meet the abundance, authority, and incentive tests remains unproven in either direction, and anyone claiming certainty either way is going beyond the available evidence.