Communists and some socialists argue communism failed because of the implementation.  That the many intricacies it’s authors put forth were not appreciated.  They will point to both it’s observations about inequality and successful predictions about social change.  This last point is important.  Many of Marx’s (for example) observations where in general correct, but I assert he did not know why.  He couldn’t have.  It wouldn’t be understood for another 100 years.

The same trap ensnared Marx, Engels, earlier Soviets, Mao Zedong and many others.  The presumption that humanity could be described as one broad set of human behaviours.   A second human population, identical in appearance and random in placement was at work, and playing by very different rules.  Game theory, a model of perfect selfish logic.

Both property and freedom derive directly from how the conscience operates.  The conscience in turn is what separates civilization from the animals.  These conceptual primitives are the basic proxies of trust, which is necessary for investment, in turn specialization, and then in turn for economy of scale.  If you don’t know economy of scale is the single most important economic force on earth.  The force of efficiency through experience, only possible because risk of waste is lowered though the paranoid kindness of civilized humanity.  Perhaps Marx did not understand that this, not the accumulation of wealth and power is what attracted the whole of humanity to industrialization.  He took a partial view of Adam Smith’s affection for capital as the most significant force in capitalist economics.  Capitalism is about currency, but that currency is derived from property which is a mutually understood provision of autonomy.  Autonomy being the fundamental right of a being to pursue survival.

This is not just another dismissal of Engels and Marx’s ideas, or more specifically not of their observations.  They observed industry leaders accumulating strange amounts of capital.  Capital that was then used to then enslave the poor and diminish the importance of the bourgeoisie or middle class.  They saw the rich becoming much richer.  They noticed that capitalism leaned toward the centralized controls of oligarchy.  They noticed the tendency of to drive wages to the bare substance living, equating it to slavery.  They posited that the societal destructive forces would eventually collapse the social order and subsequently cause an economic collapse.  That people would fold their arms or take up arms and factories and governments would fail alike.  Ultimately they noticed that capitalism seems to promote short sighted selfish behaviour and when the people rejected that behaviour they would form a new order.

Many people have been taken by the validity and verifiability of these claims.  Many were real demonstrable claims as displayed in their home country of Germany.   It would soon face the second and third generations of revolution, war strife and economic collapse that every nation eventually must grapple with.  Their time was the time of Nietzsche and his dark views.  A time where Freud and Jung in neighbouring Austria and Switzerland were desperately trying to understand why people acted in the insane manner in which they did.  He came after a period of hundreds of years of relative economic prosperity that set Germany up for it’s eventual fall.  How could a system that formalized greed and exploitation be accepted such as this?

What no one realized or likely could have realized at the time was that the underlying makeup of the populous had changed.  During the hundreds of years of internally growing prosperity, psychopaths were breeding faster than non psychopaths were.  They had likely grown from some fraction of a percent to several percent.  Likewise attracted to power and wealth they had assumed higher and higher positions in both government and industry.  Germany, along with it’s region had begun a tri-generational social and economic collapse.  Psychopaths accumulate wealth and power to shield themselves from social interaction.  Psychopaths view the world in a binary master/slave model as to ease the same awkward risk, cutting down or kneeling before everyone they meet.  Psychopaths had all but completely overtaken the communal benefits of economy of scale to line their own halls and pockets and the society was crumbling around them for it.

Starting in the revolution, and finally complete with Germany’s forces surrendering to the allies, the psychopaths population had finally been reduced down enough that empathic (non psychopath) humans could near spontaneously generate uncorrupted economies of scale once again.  They had been culled by their own lack of cooperation.  Their inability to blend in to the small self organizing groups that sprung up in the absence of a betrayed central trust doomed them to eventual exile and death.  Not immediately, but over three, long, murderous generations.

Marx was right.  Capitalism was failing, but in error he pointed to the wrong reasons why.  He did not recognize the two separate sets of behaviour, the emapths with their emergent properties as Adam Smith observed, and the game theory selfish logic of the newly prevalent psychopaths.  The capitalist system had been manned, especially at the top by a new people with new rules.  Ones that would lie cheat and steal, at will, to the end of maintaining their own personal veil of normalcy.  Corruption of the trust both implemented and implied by the system.

I was inspired to discuss this by the accusation that the civilization gene is ‘Cultural Marxist crap.’  No, but I can see how someone would think this for the same reasons that someone comes to believe that communism is a valid social strategy.  Marx and Engels correct observations.   The accusation couldn’t  be further from the truth.  Civgene validates Adam Smith and capitalism, when it is undertaken by those with a conscience and it’s inherent attributes property and freedom.  The metamind is undoubtedly guiding the invisible hand, avoiding rationally indiscernible risks.  Meanwhile civgene demonstrates what nature has already demonstrated before.  That the social attributes property and freedom closest work alikes, territory and treaty, only end in a master/slave dichotomy with the end of centralized power as a cheap substitute for trust inspired investment.  Marx, Engels, Nietzsche, Freud, and Jung’s surroundings were distorted.  A madhouse an inch from collapse.  A society collapsing under the weight of it’s psychopaths and their graft, and their desperate corruption.