But first: Why should you care?

Because a young girl just died of starvation in Nigeria. Would things have been different if Nigeria was free market capitalist instead of socialist? Could hundreds of thousands actually get a full meal to eat in Venezuela if it ditched its socialist, authoritarian regime? And conversely: if the U.S. was socialist instead of “capitalist,” would more people be able to afford rent and groceries? Would people get paid a livable wage and be able to own a home?

Economics is all around you: the clothes you’re wearing, the food you ate for breakfast, the device you’re reading this on. Everything you consume is a result of an intricate, impossible-to-imagine web of logistics, of choices, of calculations—a complicated mix of land, labor, capital, and entrepreneurship that forms the products that you enjoy and rely on.

Economic policy affects your life more than almost every social policy—like healthcare, SNAP, abortion, etc.—because nothing matters if you’re not surviving: without money, nothing can happen because you’re too busy trying to put food on the table. Logically then, shouldn’t we, as adults and voters, all have at least a rudimentary understanding of how economies work? Even if just the basic principles upon which capitalism, communism, and socialism function?

Another reason for this article is that I’ve noticed an exposive rise in the popularity of socialism—especially amongst my younger peers. In fact, left-wing populism has put a self-proclaimed democrat socialist mayor of the crown jewel of crony-capitalistic greed: New York City.

But instead of simply repeating the tired old cries of McCarthyism—Socialism is bad, Capitalism is good—I want to approach this topic with nuance, beginning from first principles and a brief history of each major economic system—capitalism, communism, and socialism—and then transitioning to examples of each in the real world (if possible). And finally, to conclude, I’ll judge each political and economic philosophy for its merits and nothing more.

My hope is that by the end of this article you will not only have learned something new about the various economic systems that have been tried and proposed over the course of modern history, but that you will reconsider your views on both capitalism and socialism. If you leave this article more determined to be a socialist than ever before, then so be it—at least you will have (hopefully) learned something new about fascism, socialism, and corporate greed, just like I did while researching these topics. I’ll let you be the judge of which system you would prefer to live under. But enough talk. Let’s begin!

A Brief History of Pre-Marx Communism

The seeds of communism were planted in the minds of men long before Marx and Engels outlined them in The Communist Manifesto. According to Marx, when humans were still hunters and gatherers and basic farmers, communism was the main economic system. And, to an extent, he was right: Land, labor, and capital were shared amongst the various bands of scraggly hunter-gatherers, and therefore so was the food, shelter, and whatever else was produced by society (though contemporary scholarship shows that there were still some private spaces). 

Marx was joined by several Greco-Roman philosophers in his skepticism of private ownership; in fact, Socrates outlined in Plato’s Republic his ideal state—one in which the government would eliminate all forms of private property to the “extent that even children and wives” were shared. Pretty interesting. 

Some 2000 years later, French Enlightenment philosophers made the next big strides in the development of communism—and that makes sense: the 18th century was rough for France. Its economy was suffering, and worse, the nobility enjoyed huge tax exemptions; they got out of paying the land tax, for instance—while the Catholic Church, which owned 10% of France’s land, was totally exempt from taxes all together. It didn’t help that French industry faced heavy competition with its political and economic rival England, which led to an industrial depression. It was here in France that disdain for private property reached a point where influential texts like d’Hupay’s Project for a Philosophical Community, in which the word “communist” was first recorded, called for the abolition of all private property. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, an anarchist, famously summed up French pre-revolution attitudes with his declaration that “property [was] theft.”