Introduction to Communism for Disillusioned Misanthropes

Take a read, this may describe your complaints about society. And, it may describe you; leading you on a road to self discovery. I have heard some of you and this is for you...

You're right. Society has become sick. People have become cruel, selfish, and lazy. The seven deadly sins are celebrated as virtues now. Greed is "ambition." Envy is "motivation." Sloth is normalized. Pride is "self-care." Wrath is "standing up for yourself." Gluttony is "treating yourself." Lust is "empowerment."

You've worked hard your whole life. You've done everything right. You pulled yourself up by your bootstraps. And when you needed help, the system told you to do the same thing again. Pull harder. Work more. Sacrifice more. Meanwhile, others game the system, take handouts, refuse to work, and get rewarded for it. You're not wrong to be angry. You're not wrong to see society as broken.

But here's what they never told you: The system that demands you work yourself to death is the same system that rewards laziness in others. It's not a bug. It's a feature. Capitalism needs both the desperate worker and the dependent consumer. It needs you exhausted so you can't resist. It needs others dependent so they stay compliant. The same billionaires who tell you to work harder are the ones who inherited their wealth and never worked a day in their lives. The same politicians who cut your benefits are the ones giving tax breaks to corporations. The same system that calls you lazy when you ask for help is the one that bailed out Wall Street with your tax dollars.

You hate society because society has been engineered to make you hate it. The dark triad personality you see everywhere (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) isn't human nature. It's what capitalism requires to survive. Greed is mandatory because corporations must grow or die. Manipulation is necessary because workers must be exploited. Cruelty is inevitable because profit requires treating humans as disposable resources. The system didn't go wrong. The system is working exactly as designed. And that design is destroying the people you want to help.

You want to fix society with tough love, discipline, and hard work. I respect that impulse. But you've already proven that doesn't work. You did everything right and the system still failed you. You worked hard and got nothing. You asked for help and got told to work harder. Tough love doesn't fix a system that profits from your suffering. Bootstrapping doesn't work when someone stole your boots. Personal responsibility doesn't matter when the game is rigged from the start.

Communism isn't about making people lazy. It's about recognizing that the system makes people desperate, cruel, and broken. It's about understanding that when people have their basic needs guaranteed (food, shelter, healthcare, education) they become better, not worse. When people aren't terrified of starvation, homelessness, or medical bankruptcy, they don't need to lie, cheat, and manipulate to survive. When work isn't a death sentence of 60-hour weeks for poverty wages, people actually want to contribute. When success isn't a zero-sum game where your gain requires someone else's loss, cooperation replaces competition.

You've seen the worst of humanity under capitalism and assumed that's just how people are. But people aren't naturally greedy. They're desperate. People aren't naturally lazy. They're exhausted. People aren't naturally cruel. They're traumatized by a system that punishes kindness and rewards sociopathy. You want a light triad society (one built on empathy, honesty, and humility). Capitalism makes that impossible because those traits get you exploited. Communism makes it possible because those traits get rewarded.

Every complaint you have about society is a complaint about capitalism. People won't work? Capitalism pays starvation wages for backbreaking labor while billionaires make millions per hour doing nothing. People are selfish? Capitalism requires it (corporations are legally obligated to maximize profit over human welfare). Society rewards the wrong behaviors? Capitalism rewards ownership over labor, inheritance over effort, exploitation over contribution. The system is rigged? Capitalism is designed to concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands while the rest fight for scraps.

And don't be fooled by the people who promise to fix capitalism with a few reforms. This isn't Bernie Sanders, AOC, or Mamdani who will seek to create a false consciousness or Stockholm Syndrome, installing Nordic Capitalism to keep people pacified while the system stays the same. Those are the enablers to the problems. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, they were known as social-fascists. They promise healthcare and education while keeping the exploitation intact. They offer you crumbs while billionaires keep the whole bakery. They tell you to vote harder while corporations still own your workplace, your housing, and your future. Nordic capitalism still has billionaires, still exploits the Global South, still requires endless growth on a dying planet. It's just capitalism with better marketing. Real communism doesn't reform exploitation. It ends it.

Communism isn't about free handouts or rewarding laziness. It's about ending the system that creates desperate, broken people and replacing it with one that lets humans be human. It's about making work dignified instead of degrading. It's about distributing resources based on need instead of greed. It's about building a society where helping your neighbor isn't naive (it's normal). Where hard work actually improves your life instead of just enriching someone who owns the building you work in. Where asking for help doesn't make you a failure (it makes you part of a community).

You've been lied to about communism your entire life. They told you it's about government control, censorship, gulags, and starvation. They lied because if you understood what communism actually is (workers owning their workplaces, communities controlling resources, production for human need instead of corporate profit) you'd realize it's exactly what you've been asking for. You want people to work? Communism gives workers the full value of their labor instead of a fraction while the owner takes the rest. You want society to reward contribution? Communism abolishes passive income from ownership so only labor is rewarded. You want to end exploitation? Communism makes exploitation impossible by abolishing the system where some people own and others work.

Cuba has zero homelessness, zero starvation, universal healthcare, and 99.8% literacy despite a 60-year embargo designed to starve them into submission. China lifted 800 million people from extreme poverty in 40 years through socialist planning. Vietnam rebuilt from genocidal war and now thrives. Every place that tried communism and "failed" was destroyed by the same capitalist powers that sent your job overseas, bailed out the banks that foreclosed your house, and told you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps while cutting your unemployment benefits.

The system you hate is capitalism. The society you want is communism. You just don't know it yet because they spent 80 years teaching you to fear the only system that would actually fix the problems you see. Read Marx. Read Lenin. Read about the Russian, Cuban, Chinese, and Vietnamese revolutions. Not the propaganda version (the actual history). See how workers took power, ended exploitation, and built societies where hard work was actually rewarded, where contribution mattered more than inheritance, where asking for help wasn't shameful because everyone supported everyone.

You're already a communist or Anarcho-communist (I don't like ancoms because they put themselves before society, even though they claim to be a communalist). You just think communism is the enemy because the capitalists who profit from your misery told you it was. Prove them wrong. Read or listen to the theory. See the evidence. Understand that the world you want (where people work hard, contribute to society, and help each other) can only exist when we destroy the system that makes those things impossible. That system is capitalism. The alternative is communism. And if you care about fixing society, wanna be rewarded for being a good person, and want society to be better, instead of just complaining about it, you owe it to yourself to understand what that actually means. Anti-Capitalist, socialism and Communism are of the light triad, Anarcho-communism is of an egoist or corrupted version of the light triad but all three are better than capitalism and the various Social-Darwinist ideologies...

Watch/listen to this video, it will help you understand the different Triads, both light and dark:

https://youtube.com/shorts/i3dY5_TmeCM?si=ORixPIyiKNgztLfF

Then I also suggest you read the article, I bet you will find something you agree with:

Philosophy Now

Philosophical Misanthropy | Issue 139

https://philosophynow.org/issues/139/Philosophical_Misanthropy

A video by the author of that article:

https://youtu.be/rYr5LFGaauQ?si=MxZ-KE0swEKx5Pai

The first book on socialism you should consume:

Why Socialism by Albert Einstein Audiobook.

https://youtu.be/lu8lQKVcbOs?si=82QOdgiCHf_OE1aa

And here's is the beginners guide to ML theory (Communism) in audio book form:

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXUFLW8t2sntNn5jQO8vF7ai9x0fna3PV&si=PRY-LOZcFK4F7wme