Blood boiling, a sense of righteousness, a quest for equality and liberation! We have all felt this sometime or the other during our lives. The feel of being a comrade in arms and heralding the new world. Many have fallen into this attractive ideology and over the generations many have fallen out of it as well. The 'Proletariat' and 'Bourgeois' that Karl Marx so distinctly portrayed in the Manifesto calls out to many men but I was not one of them for one simple reason. Let's be clear I don't love Communism and nether do I hate it, it is there and so am I and we shall exist as two insignificant entities in this vast universe. We shall both bide our time, strive and perish for all eternity resulting in absolutely no consequence whatsoever. So honestly, it doesn't even matter but let's go ahead to just satisfy your curiosity.
Buddha through his years of penance and enlightenment came across one epiphany that changed the course of this world. Just one small epiphany : 'Desire(Attachment) is the root of all suffering'. It may seem very simple but this is a profound statement in itself that took 12 years of penance, sacrificing one's family and also sacrificing the lure of the throne.
We shall now look at Communism from this simple idea of Desire.
Karl Marx very aptly said 'From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs'.By the needs refer to only materialistic needs and does not classify desire into it. We are all not practising buddhists and definitely not Buddha and we have our desires. These desires make us who we are giving rise to ambition, passion, attention and thus affecting the ability and quality of work that comes out from the person. Thus it is no simple feat to connect ability and need in the simple manner Marx did. Furthermore a limit on desire does much more in terms on adding on stress and mentally torturing the person.
Let us wrap this up with a simple example that I love telling people.
Communism provides an equal opportunity but it fails on one basic ethical principle. If one person likes a cycle and another person a plane, and the government gives both of them a car, the first one can sell it and buy a bike but the second one does not have any opportunity to get a plane. It is like a restriction on the freedom to pursue your dreams. One person gets happiness in family, one in philanthropy and another in knowledge and some in money. How can one quantify which desire is better and which desire is good? At the end of the day, all of them are desires and who are we to say which one is greater or lesser. But Communism hinders the desire for money and thus a certain fraction of the population is not given an equal opportunity to strive for what they want the most.
Although Gandhi said 'Enough for every man's need but not for every man's greed', need and want aren't separate independent entities. Most of the time there is significant overlap. Thus the limit on desire is a partial limit on need. I rest my case saying that Communism is logically inconsistent.
Let's talk about Capitalism and Socialism some other day😜
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