What Is Communism?
“Communism is a political and economic ideology that positions itself in opposition to liberal democracy and capitalism, advocating instead for a classless system in which the means of production are owned communally and private property is nonexistent or severely curtailed.”
-Investopedia

The end goals of communism as described above may seem quite attractive on the surface to many people. So much so that the believers and followers of communism have murdered millions of people in the past 100 years alone to achieve their end goal. Their failed, dark, bloodied history is too well known to be repeated here. One argument that communists throw quite often is that “true communism” has not been tried before or “Well! that wasn’t true communism”. It is interesting to note that these arguments are very similar to the arguments presented by followers of other failed Abrahamic ideologies as well.

The critics of communism also frequently use an argument which is, “Show me an example where communism actually works.” Well, I finally found one and it is worth learning for us as to why communism works for this very particular example.

So, the example where communism actually works is Ants.

Communist Ants 😀
Credit: Photo by Prince Patel on Unsplash

Ant colonies achieve the “beautiful” coveted end goal of communism i.e communist utopia. If you have observed ants carefully, they are extremely hard workers. All of them work hard. You’ll not find a lazy ant. They work not for their individual self or their family, but for the whole commune. They don’t have private property. Ants collect their food, save it for the future and distribute it amongst themselves. Ant colonies have thousands of worker ants working day and night for the queen and the colony without any complaints. If you step on a few of them, the others won’t even bother unless it’s their queen ant. By the way, queen ant never works hard or go out on the fields like worker ants. She is worshipped, protected and all the ants are more than willing to die for her. No ant ever complains, demands anything or ever questions the decisions of the queen ant. There is no concept of rewarding hard work individually. The labour of each ant is the shared property of the commune. It’s like the perfect communist utopia all working so beautifully!

Then naturally, the question begs. Why is it that ants could achieve communist utopia but humans can’t? Forget humans, even other animals like lions, sharks, dogs aren’t able to achieve this “beautiful” communist utopia. The answer is simple. The difference between different worker ants is hardly significant. There is hardly any variation in outputs of different worker ants of the same commune. And the second most important reason why communism works for ants is that: “They don’t have brains.” That actually explains a lot about how communists behave.


Featured image credit: knowyourmeme.com
Originally published for my personal blog.

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