“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings. The inherent virtue of Socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”
~Sir Winston Churchill
What Lack Consciousness Builds
Every command economy makes the same promise: give up envy’s target — the unequal reward — and get equality in return. It has never once worked as advertised. Not because the people running it lacked good intentions. Because the mechanism itself is broken at the root, and no leadership, however well-meaning, can repair a mechanism that was never designed to work.
The Seed: Manufacturing Grievance
Every one of these systems starts with the same move. Before you can justify seizing what belongs to someone else, you first have to convince people that what belongs to someone else was never rightfully theirs — that success itself is evidence of exploitation, and that the gap between what you have and what your neighbor has is not the product of different effort, different choices, or different luck, but of theft. Envy dressed up as justice.
That reframing does real psychological work. It converts a private vice — coveting what your neighbor has — into a public virtue: demanding what your neighbor has. Resentment gets relabeled solidarity. Theft gets relabeled redistribution. And once that relabeling takes hold, the actual economic machinery of the society gets rebuilt around it.
The Philosophers Who Said It Out Loud
This isn’t a fringe reading of a few radicals. The idea that inequality is itself the crime — and resentment of it, righteous — runs through some of the most influential philosophy of the last three centuries.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Genevan Enlightenment philosopher, got there first, in 1754. His Discourse on the Origin of Inequality opens with the line that would echo through everything after it: “The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying ‘this is mine,’ and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society.” Not description — accusation. Civilization, in Rousseau’s telling, exists to protect a founding theft.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the French philosopher often credited as the first self-described anarchist, made the accusation explicit a century later, in three words still quoted today, usually without what follows them: “Property is theft.” Ownership, he argued, let one person extract value from another’s labor — rent, profit, interest — without labor of his own, which made it theft by definition, dressed in legal language.
Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary and founding theorist of collectivist anarchism, pushed the premise to its honest conclusion: if the order is built on theft, tearing it down isn’t vandalism, it’s overdue justice. “The passion for destruction is a creative passion, too,” he wrote — destruction itself as the generative act, not a regrettable prerequisite to one. Notice the distance from plenty consciousness here. Bakunin isn’t proposing something to build. He’s proposing that the tearing-down is the building.
The Philosopher Who Diagnosed the Whole Thing — From the Other Side
The sharpest description of this mechanism doesn’t come from a socialist. It comes from Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who despised socialism and egalitarianism as much as anyone in the Western canon — and who handed later thinkers the precise anatomy of how lack consciousness works from the inside anyway.
Nietzsche called it ressentiment. His claim, in On the Genealogy of Morals, was that the powerless don’t simply endure domination — they invert it, redefining the strength and success of others as evil and their own weakness and need as good. “The slave revolt in morality begins,” he wrote, “when ressentiment itself becomes creative and gives birth to values.” Crucially, he called it reactive: it produces nothing of its own, existing only in opposition to what it envies. “Slave morality from the outset says No to what is ‘outside'” — that No, he wrote, is its only creative act.
Max Scheler, the German philosopher who turned Nietzsche’s diagnosis into clinical detail, published a monograph simply titled Ressentiment in 1912. Where Nietzsche described the mechanism, Scheler mapped it: not ordinary anger, which discharges against its target, but a repressed grievance with no outlet, which gradually reshapes an entire value system around itself — until envy has fully disguised itself as ethics, invisible even to the person feeling it.
Two philosophers— independently described exactly this same phenomenon from outside: a psychology that cannot build, defines itself only by opposition, and dresses envy up as justice so completely that the substitution disappears from view.
Marx supplied the economics.
Rousseau and Proudhon supplied the moral accusation.
Bakunin supplied the appetite for demolition.
Nietzsche, arguing against all of them, supplied the diagnosis of what was driving the machine.
What Gets Broken First: The Price
A price isn’t an arbitrary number — it’s a signal, a compressed piece of information about scarcity and value, generated by millions of people deciding what they want and what they’ll give up to get it. When copper prices rise, nobody explains why to the mining company or the electrician three countries away; they simply respond, and in aggregate keep copper flowing where it’s needed. Economist F.A. Hayek called this the price system’s central function: it communicates fragmented knowledge, scattered across millions of minds, through a mechanism no planner could replicate. His teacher Ludwig von Mises went further: abolish private property and genuine exchange, he argued, and rational economic calculation becomes not just harder but impossible — there’s no longer a real price to observe, only a number a bureaucrat wrote down.
Introduce the lack-consciousness premise — need instead of merit as the basis for who gets what — and the number disconnects from the information it once carried. Prices set by decree don’t know anything; there’s no feedback loop left to inform them. What’s left is a committee guessing, and reality doesn’t wait patiently for it to guess right.
What Gets Broken Second: The Incentive
Even solving the calculation problem leaves a second one: nobody works as hard for “the common good” as for themselves. The Soviet Union ran a decades-long experiment on exactly this point. Collective farms — the kolkhoz — covered most Soviet farmland, worked by people with no stake in what came out of the ground. Alongside them sat tiny private plots, often under half a hectare. By the 1970s those plots — some 3 to 4 percent of sown land — produced a quarter to a third of the country’s entire agricultural output, with yields five to ten times higher. Same soil, same people; the only variable was who kept what came out of the ground.
China ran the same experiment at larger scale: peasants who couldn’t keep their surplus had no reason to produce one — “they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work,” as the joke went. When post-Mao reforms let them keep what they grew above quota, output doubled in four years. That’s the second thing lack-consciousness destroys: honesty. When need gets you resources, the rational move is to appear needier, not to produce more — a permanent culture of shirking dressed up as shared sacrifice.
The Deeper Problem: What We’re Actually Like
For nearly the entirety of human history, ordinary people lived at or barely above bare subsistence. Economic historian Angus Maddison’s long-run estimates put per-capita income essentially flat — near the subsistence minimum — for centuries at a stretch, across nearly every society on earth, until the Industrial Revolution finally broke the pattern roughly two hundred years ago. Competition over genuinely scarce resources was the normal condition of human societies, not an aberration produced by bad politics. Voluntary large-scale cooperation is a comparatively recent, fragile achievement, built on property rights, enforceable contracts, and prices that let strangers coordinate without knowing each other.
History doesn’t support the hope that people will readily share according to need once profit and property are removed; cooperative distribution at scale, absent market incentives, has never been achieved voluntarily — only imposed, by force.
The Myth That Won’t Die: “It Just Needs the Right Leader”
This is the excuse wheeled out after every failure: the system was fine, the leadership was the problem. Stalin was a monster, but a gentler hand could have made it work; Mao went too far, but a moderate successor could have gotten it right. Hayek demolished this argument in 1944: if Germany’s system produced Himmlers and Heydrichs, does that prove something rotten about German character — or that brutal men rising to the top is what any such system inevitably produces? His answer: the job itself selects for the wrong kind of person, regardless of who starts out running it. Central planning of an entire economy requires someone to decide what everyone produces, earns, and is permitted to have — and there is no way to hold that much coercive power without being willing to coerce.
The people most willing to coerce, lie, and eliminate rivals are the ones who end up holding the levers, because the job itself selects for ruthlessness over restraint. As Hayek put it, the odds of a gentle, scrupulous person rising to run a totalitarian machine are about the same as an unusually tender-hearted person landing the job of plantation whipping-master. That’s the answer to “it could work with different leadership.” It couldn’t — not because every communist leader happened to be a bad person, but because the system is a machine for selecting bad people to run it, and for destroying the honest information a good person would need to run it well.
The Utopia That Was Never Built
Marx’s communism was never a single stage — it was two. His Critique of the Gotha Programme lays out a transitional first phase, socialism, where the state still exists, still runs a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and distributes goods by contribution: work more, get more. The second phase, true communism, is the actual destination — stateless, classless, moneyless, organized entirely around “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” That requires the literal dissolution of the state and the total elimination of private property in the means of production.
That has never happened. Not in Russia, China, Cuba, Cambodia, or North Korea. Every one of them stalled permanently in phase one. This is precisely why the USSR called itself the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, not the Union of Communist Republics — by its own founding theory, it never claimed to have arrived. Communism was always the horizon that kept receding while the “temporary” dictatorship became permanent. After more than a century and dozens of attempts across every culture and continent, that stops looking like bad luck. It looks like the goal itself was never achievable — a blueprint for a machine that cannot run.
What Got Built Instead: Fascism, Not Communism
What Russia and China actually built is fascism — not something adjacent to it, the thing itself, by its own historical economic definition.
Classical fascism, as practiced in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany, never abolished private property. It kept the deed in private hands and asserted total state authority over its use. Hitler said it outright: property owners should “consider himself appointed by the state,” which “will always retain its right to control the owners of property.” The title stays private. Every power that ownership is supposed to confer belongs to the party.
That is the system China and Russia run today, regardless of which label they prefer. China’s Communist Party seats party cells inside nominally private firms and reminds founders who actually holds power whenever one steps out of line — Jack Ma found this out in 2020, losing his company’s record IPO and majority control within months of criticizing regulators. Russia’s oligarchs technically own their companies outright, right up until they cross the Kremlin — Mikhail Khodorkovsky learned that lesson via a prison sentence and the forced breakup of Yukos into state hands. Neither country nationalized these firms. Neither needed to. Demonstrating the power once was enough.
The Real Difference Between Socialism and Communism
In theory, socialism is the waystation and communism is the destination. In more than a century of attempts, no country has ever completed that trip. What every one of them built instead was a permanent transitional state, a new privileged ruling class exactly like the one communism promised to abolish, and private property preserved wherever it was economically useful — the same bargain fascism struck from the start. The honest conclusion isn’t that communism failed. It’s that communism, in Marx’s own terms, has never actually been attempted anywhere — only its unfinished antechamber has, repeatedly, wearing fascism’s actual economic architecture under a different flag.
Where That Leaves Us
Put the pieces together and the pattern isn’t complicated. Manufacture grievance over who has what. Replace price with decree, which blinds the system to what things actually cost and what people actually want. Ignore what several thousand years of human history already demonstrated about scarcity and cooperation. And staff the resulting machine with whoever is willing to do what running it requires — which is never, in the end, the gentlest person in the room.
The empire of envy doesn’t fail because the wrong people keep getting put in charge of it. It fails because it was built, from its very first premise, to make failure the only possible outcome — and to make sure the person willing to enforce that failure on everyone else is always the one left standing at the top of it.
Cushman Younger 2026
Contact: cushman.younger@gmail.com
Some of Cushman Younger’s favorite poems – NOW available on Amazon Kindle under the title “The Cruel March of Time“.
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