Dr. Sam Ben-Meir

Few words in modern political language are as burdened—or as reflexively rejected—as communism. To invoke it today is to invite immediate dismissal, as though history itself had rendered a final and irreversible judgment. The argument is familiar: the twentieth century tried communism, and it failed—catastrophically.

But this argument rests on a confusion so basic that it would be surprising—were it not so convenient. It assumes that what occurred in the Soviet Union, Maoist China, or other so-called actually existing socialist” states exhausts the meaning of communism. It treats a historically contingent set of regimes as if they were the definitive expression of an idea that, by its nature, exceeds any single instantiation.

No one would accept this reasoning elsewhere. We do not reduce Christianity to the Spanish Inquisition, nor liberal democracy to the worst crimes committed in its name. And yet, when it comes to communism, the move is made without hesitation: Stalinism becomes its essence, and the verdict follows automatically. This is not historical analysis but ideological closure.

To claim that communism has been tried and failed” is to assume that history operates like a controlled experiment: a hypothesis is tested once, under specific conditions, and the result is decisive. But political ideas are not laboratory propositions. They are lived, distorted, betrayed, revived, and transformed across different historical conditions.

Consider the Soviet Union. Within a few decades, the USSR transformed itself from a largely agrarian society into a major industrial power. Its role in defeating fascism in World War II was decisive. Its scientific and technological achievements—from early space exploration to advances in education and public health—were significant.

None of this is intended to excuse the immense suffering, repression, and violence associated with Stalinism. But it does undermine the simplistic claim that the Soviet experiment can be written off as a total failure. The point is not to redeem the Soviet experiment, but to reject the lazy conclusion that its crimes exhaust the Idea it claimed to embody. More importantly, it raises a deeper question: why should this particular historical formation be treated as the final word on what communism is—or could be?

To equate communism with Stalinism is not only historically crude; it is philosophically incoherent. It is akin to arguing that because a medical treatment was once misapplied with disastrous results, the underlying principle of healing must be abandoned altogether.

What, then, is communism—if not the regimes that claimed its name?

Here the work of Alain Badiou is indispensable. For Badiou, communism is not first and foremost a state form or an economic blueprint. It is an Idea: a commitment to the possibility of a society organized around radical equality, in which collective life is no longer subordinated to private accumulation or hierarchical domination.

The communist Idea affirms, first, that no human life carries greater intrinsic worth than another—that equality is not an aspiration but a starting point. It insists, further, that this equality must take material form in the way society is organized: in how resources are distributed, how work is structured, and how power is exercised. And it demands, finally, that human capacities—creative, intellectual, affective—be developed in common, not narrowed, exhausted, or deformed by systems that convert life into labor and potential into profit.

At this point, a familiar objection arises: isn’t this precisely what every failed revolution has claimed—that the Idea was betrayed, not realized? The force of the question should not be dismissed. But the objection proves too much. If every historical failure were enough to invalidate the principle in whose name it was undertaken, then no political idea—democracy, rights, even justice—could survive its own history. The issue is not whether past attempts fell short. The issue is whether the Idea itself names a genuine possibility that exceeds the conditions of its distorted realization. To collapse that distinction is not a mark of realism, but a refusal to think beyond the limits imposed by history as it happened.

This is not utopian in the sense of being detached from reality. It is, rather, a claim about what reality itself permits—a claim that history has repeatedly, if briefly, brought into view.

The Paris Commune remains one of the most striking examples: a short-lived but profound attempt to reorganize political life on egalitarian principles, abolishing standing hierarchies and rethinking the relationship between labor, governance, and everyday life. Similarly, during the Spanish Civil War, experiments in worker self-management demonstrated that production and social organization could function without traditional capitalist command structures.

Nor were such experiments confined to moments of revolutionary rupture. In postwar Yugoslavia, systems of worker self-management operated for decades, reorganizing firms around collective decision-making rather than centralized state control or private ownership. These arrangements were uneven, constrained, and ultimately entangled in broader political contradictions. But their significance lies elsewhere: they demonstrate that non-capitalist forms of economic coordination can persist beyond exceptional moments, taking institutional shape within complex, modern societies.

What these examples reveal is not simply that alternatives have appeared, but that they recur—under different conditions, in different forms—whenever the limits of existing arrangements become intolerable. These experiments were fragile, often constrained or ultimately undone by internal contradictions and external pressures alike. But their significance lies precisely in their existence. They show that the communist Idea is not a fantasy imposed on reality from outside. It emerges from within history itself.

If Badiou provides a philosophical framework, Slavoj Žižek offers a diagnosis of our present predicament. For Žižek, the real problem is not that we have rejected communism, but that we have accepted a world in which no alternative to capitalism seems conceivable.

We are told, endlessly, that while the system may be flawed, it is ultimately the only viable option. Attempts to imagine something else are dismissed as naïve, dangerous, or historically ignorant. This is what Žižek calls ideology at its most effective: not the imposition of false beliefs, but the foreclosure of thought itself. We are permitted to critique the system endlessly—so long as that critique never threatens to become an alternative.

In this context, the word communism acquires a paradoxical importance. It is not simply a label for a particular program. It is a way of insisting that the space of the possible has not been closed—that the current organization of society is not the final horizon of human life. To abandon the word is, in a sense, to concede defeat in advance.

There is, however, a further reason to revisit the communist Idea today—one that has less to do with historical memory and more to do with material conditions. For the first time in human history, technological development has created the possibility of abundance on a scale previously unimaginable. Automation and artificial intelligence have dramatically reduced the amount of human labor required to produce essential goods.

Writers such as Aaron Bastani have argued that these developments open the door to what he calls fully automated luxury communism: a society in which the necessities of life are provided universally, and human beings are freed to pursue activities beyond mere survival.

We already live in a world where warehouses operate with minimal human labor while workers remain precarious, where food is produced in abundance while millions remain food insecure, where algorithms perform cognitive tasks once thought uniquely human—and yet the basic conditions of life remain unequally distributed.

Even if one rejects Bastani’s vision, the underlying point is difficult to dismiss. The traditional justification for inequality—that scarcity necessitates competition and hierarchy—no longer holds in the same way. The productive capacities of modern societies are more than sufficient to meet basic human needs. And yet, these capacities are organized in ways that perpetuate scarcity, exclusion, and precarity. The problem is not technological limitation but social form.

If communism is so often rejected, it is not simply because of historical memory. It is because the Idea itself poses a challenge that many find difficult to confront. To take equality seriously is to question not only economic arrangements, but the entire structure of social recognition. It asks whether the privileges we take for granted—of wealth, status, or power—can be justified at all. It demands a rethinking of what it means to live together. It also asks whether the advantages we inhabit are defensible—or whether they persist only because we have learned not to question them.

This is not a comfortable question. It is far easier to dismiss the Idea as dangerous or impossible than to consider what it would require of us. And yet, the alternative is not stability. It is a world increasingly marked by ecological crisis, extreme inequality, and technological systems that intensify rather than alleviate human suffering. To insist that this is the best we can do is not realism. It is resignation. What we call realism today is our learned incapacity to imagine a world in which we no longer benefit from inequality. What passes for realism is often nothing more than the defense of advantage.

The point is not to return to the twentieth century, nor to repeat its mistakes. It is to recognize that the communist Idea names something that remains unresolved: the problem of how to organize collective life on the basis of equality rather than domination.

We may find a different word for it. But any such word will have to carry the same weight—the same insistence that another form of life is both necessary and possible. For now, communism remains the most honest name we have. Not because it is free of history, but because it refuses to let history close the question. That is precisely what makes it so difficult—and so necessary—to think again.

To dismiss the communist Idea is not simply to reject a word or a history. It is to accept that the present arrangement of life is as far as thought—and as far as justice—can go.

Sam Ben-Meir is an assistant adjunct professor of philosophy at City University of New York, College of Technology.