Summary:

This is perhaps the single-most common dismissal used by capitalists against socialist governments. This is repeated ubiquitously against across all capitalist and conservative sources as an Axiom. This aphorism appears in countless forms but rarely with specific attribution - it’s treated as received wisdom that needs no justification. The argument implies that:

1. The theory is internally consistent and appealing,

2. BUT human nature or practical realities make it impossible,

3. Every attempt has failed, proving it can’t work,

4. Advocates are naive idealists ignoring reality.

Variants:

• “Real communism has never been tried” (mockery of defenders)

• “It’s utopian thinking”

• “Sounds good, doesn’t work”

• “Nice idea, wrong species”

• “Human nature makes it impossible”

• “You can’t change human nature”

The rhetorical function allows the person making the argument seem reasonable (”I understand the appeal...”) while dismissing the actual counterpoint entirely. Positions capitalism as “realistic” and “practical” vs. socialism as “idealistic” and “theoretical.” It frames issue as settled empirical fact rather than debatable question and it functions as a thought-stopping cliché that ends discussion before it begins.

Sources:

• Pervasive across Cato Institute, Mises Institute, TPUSA, PragerU materials

• Repeated by Milton Friedman, Thomas Sowell, and other prominent conservatives

• Standard conservative talking point found in political discourse, social media, and casual conversation

• Hoover Institution: “The False Appeal of Socialism” (2020)

• Frequently cited without attribution as “common knowledge”

The genius (and weakness) of this argument is that it’s designed to be unattributable - it masquerades as universal wisdom rather than ideological propaganda.

Rebuttal

CAPITALISM DOESN’T EVEN WORK IN THEORY!

This argument is designed to masquerade as universal wisdom instead of an ideological propaganda. “It’s repeated everywhere precisely because it’s a thought-stopping cliché, not an actual analysis.” Everyone who makes this argument always advocate for another system: Capitalism.

It is meant to paint defenders of socialism and communism as idealists living in a utopian society while defenders of capitalism are painted as “realists” who understand the inner workings of the real world. However, nothing can be further from the truth.

While these anti-communists do concede to the fact that communism works in theory, they seem to forget that capitalism, doesn’t even work in theory, let alone in practice.

Why Capitalism Fails in Theory:

Contrary to popular belief, capitalism isn’t when people sell “things” or commodities, which is basically a thing of value that can be traded. Traditionally, people used money to buy commodities such as sugar or rice, and the majority would then consume most of it. However, around the 1600s something changed:industrialization. Commodities that were locally produced and sold, were now produced on a mass scale and sold non-locally in mass quantities. People who were already wealthy were able to use their money in order to trade for commodities in large quantities, not to use or acquire these commodities, but to resell it in order to acquire surplus value. Marx labeled this process the M-C-M’ cycle:

For example, if someone invests €100,000 to buy five cars and register them for ride-sharing services like Uber, the cars are not purchased for personal transportation, rather they are bought as capital. Drivers are hired to operated them. The cars are kept on the roads as much as possible. After a year, the entrepreneur has earned €160,000 in fares and commissions. This is the classic M–C–M′ cycle in modern form:

M (Money): €100,000 capital outlay

C (Commodity): Cars, app registrations, and labor time

M′ (More Money): €160,000 — the original sum plus surplus value extracted through the drivers’ work

The point isn’t that society gains more mobility — the cars’ use-value — but that money has returned to its owner augmented. The drivers’ labor and the vehicles’ wear are just the intermediaries through which money begets more money.

In Marx’s analysis, this raised a crucial question: where does that “more money” actually come from? It cannot come from the mere act of exchange, since every trade in a market swaps equivalents — €1,000 worth of goods for €1,000 in cash. The capitalist doesn’t create new value by buying and selling alone. To find the source of profit, Marx followed the chain backward and found it in the one place where something new is produced: the worker’s labor. The capitalist purchases labor power for less than the value it creates. The difference between what the worker is paid and the value their labor adds to the final product is the surplus value — and this, Marx argued, is where exploitation truly begins.

Which begets the first contradiction of capitalism: there’s only so much you can squeeze workers’ wages before the system begins to undermine itself. The more labor is exploited to maximize profit, the fewer people there are with the purchasing power to buy what capitalism produces. In other words, by impoverishing its own consumers, capital saws off the very branch it sits on. This creates a crisis of underconsumption. Capitalism ends up undermining its own market base.

The second way capitalism fails theoretically is that if there are multiple firms that produce the same commodity, each firm must expand their output to flush the competition out of business. But, when all the firms end up doing that simultaneously, the market becomes saturated and the price of the goods drop exponentially. This leads to periodic cycles of bankruptcies, layoffs and and boom and bust cycles. Many of which, we have witnessed in our lifetimes (depending on our age).

During these recurring crises, weaker firms collapse while stronger ones buy up their competitors. This process leads to the consolidation of ownership — both horizontally, when companies absorb rivals within the same industry, and vertically, when they expand control up and down the supply chain. Over time, this turns competitive markets into a handful of monopolies and cartels, exactly as Lenin described in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. What begins as a system of competition ends as a hierarchy of concentrated power.

As Lenin demonstrated in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, by 1907 just 0.9% of German enterprises controlled over half of all industrial workers and the majority of total output. What Marx had theorized as the concentration of capital had already become measurable reality.

Unfortunately, the contradictions and pitfalls don’t end there. As a handful of cartels and monopolies dominate production, their need for profit and raw materials grows insatiable. To keep their factories running and capital expanding, they must look beyond their own borders. Hence begins the drive to colonize the world — to seize new territories, control resources, and secure cheap labor. To keep their factories running and profits rising, they expand outward — colonizing the world. Colonialism reconfigured entire societies for extraction: in India, the British East India Company replaced food crops with tea, opium, and indigo; in Cuba, only sugar could be grown; in Rwanda, fertile farmland was seized for industrial coffee under German and Belgian rule. The result was the same everywhere — famine, dependence, and the destruction of local industry. Colonies that had once fed themselves were forced to import basic food from the imperial core, enriching the same corporations that had robbed them.

As Lenin explained in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, German enterprises entered the colonial race late. By the early 20th century, Britain and France had already divided most of the globe into their own spheres of exploitation. To secure access to raw materials and markets essential for its survival, German capital had only one option left — to seize colonies by force. Thus, imperial rivalry transformed into military conflict, culminating in the First World War: a struggle not of nations, but of capitalist powers fighting over a world that had already been divided.

Capitalism Fails in Practice

When the First World War ended, the map of empire changed, but its logic remained. The victors didn’t simply punish Germany for aggression — they neutralized an economic competitor. The Treaty of Versailles makes perfect sense when viewed through the lens of capitalist rivalry, not morality. France and Britain sought to permanently weaken Germany’s industrial base, which by 1914 had already surpassed both in steel production, chemical research, and machine manufacturing.

By stripping Germany of its colonies, restricting its military, seizing patents, and imposing astronomical reparations, the Allies ensured that German capital could not re-enter global markets as an equal competitor. Versailles wasn’t about peace; it was about market control. It froze the world’s hierarchy of production — guaranteeing that France and Britain would continue extracting from their colonies while German capital was deliberately handicapped.

The tragedy of Weimar Germany was not that fascism overpowered democracy, but that centrism surrendered to it. The ruling class, terrified of socialism and unwilling to sacrifice profits, preferred to dismantle democracy rather than risk redistribution. By the early 1930s, parliament had already hollowed itself out through emergency decrees, wage cuts, and deference to capital. Hitler did not overthrow the system; he inherited it.

As I wrote in The Economy of Evil, fascism did not emerge from chaos or irrationality. It was a rational response of a ruling class cornered by its own contradictions. When capitalism could no longer rule by consent, it ruled by coercion. Fascism became the mechanism through which industrialists preserved their property, destroyed unions, and restructured production under the guise of national renewal.

Parenti called it “capitalism in extremis” — the system defending itself with violence when ideology and markets fail. What began as economic crisis under Hindenburg and Brüning matured into political extermination under Hitler. Capital’s contradictions had finally produced their ultimate form: a state that openly fuses corporate, military, and nationalist power to annihilate class opposition.

In the end, the familiar refrain that “communism works only in theory but fails in practice” collapses under scrutiny, because capitalism has failed on both counts. Its theoretical foundations — competition, equilibrium, self-regulation — implode the moment they are practiced. Each stage of capitalist “progress” has revealed a deeper contradiction: the wage squeeze that undermines consumption, the overproduction that destroys markets, the imperial expansion that breeds world wars, and finally, the fascist synthesis that fuses capital with the state. These are not accidents of mismanagement but the logical outcomes of a system that can sustain itself only through crisis, conquest, and coercion. History’s lesson is not that communism failed to live up to its ideals — it is that capitalism inevitably lives down to its own.

Check out all the other arguments as I build the talking points:

In 2017, Canada commissioned a project dedicated to the “Victims of Communism” and hired a Toronto architect to design it. It was entitled the “Arc of Memory” which featured two curving walls totaling 21 meters in length and four meters in height. The wall originally was supposed to feature names of so-called “Victims of Communism.” The original list had 550 names. As we reported earlier, when the list came out it had the unfortunate problem of including Nazis and Nazi collaborators. It wasn’t just ordinary soldiers, but at one point, the wall had people like Ante Pavelić, who was the leader of the Independent State of Croatia. The Independent State of Croatia was so brutal that actual Wehrmacht soldiers expressed disgust. As more and more names were discovered, more and more of them turned out to be Nazi collaborators. At one point, the research showed that over 60% of the names in the Victims of Communism list were Nazis or Nazi collaborators. Unfortunately, as they had already installed the wall, they faced increasing scrutiny, until earlier this week, when they decided to scrap the idea of listing the names altogether.Now, what remains is a large wall dedicated to all the “Victims of Communism”, which according to research by the Canadian government, is a grand total of zero. As with much anti-communist propaganda, this, too, collapsed under a little scrutiny. As we approach Christmas, for the twelve days of Christmas, we shall debunk anti-communist talking points.

CORE DEATH TOLL & HISTORICAL FAILURE ARGUMENTS

1. The “100 Million Deaths” Argument

ECONOMIC THEORY ARGUMENTS

1. Communism works in Theory but Fails in Practice

The Counter-Argument:

This tiresome and oft-repeated non sequitur of a soundbite has been recycled by many anti-communist organizations from Prager-U, TPUSA and most recently, a little over a month ago, Quillette Magazine published an article affirming this ludicrous number. To anti-communists, these inflated statistics are held up as definitive proof of the alleged “barbarism of communism.”

The fundamental flaw in the “100 million deaths” narrative: it treats political ideology as a kind of metaphysical cause of death. Policies are lifted out of context, conditions are ignored, and complex histories are reduced to an inflated scoreboard where people prosecuted for crimes that would be illegal anywhere are reframed as victims of communist persecution.

In that same 1997 edition of the Black Book of Communism, Courtois again asserts that “communist regimes committed crimes involving around one hundred million people, compared to around twenty-five million under Nazism.”(Original French Version available here). Despite this claim being edited out of other editions, the 1997 publication sold over a million copies, was translated into more than 27 languages, and became a primary source for the talking point now repeated by well-funded anti-communist organizations such as TPUSA, Victims of Communism Foundation etc.

Subsequent French and international editions quietly removed Courtois’s “100 million vs. 25 million Nazis” comparison after he was widely criticized—including by his own co-authors—for methodological manipulation and for minimizing Nazi crimes in order to inflate communist ones.

Several of the book’s own contributors immediately rejected Courtois’s claims. Nicolas Werth and Jean-Louis Margolin both tried to distance themselves from the “100 million” figure as soon as the book was released. They accused Courtois of being fixated on reaching that number, even if it meant manipulating the data to get there. Werth stated plainly that he had never cited twenty million deaths for the Soviet Union, and Margolin likewise insisted that he had never reported one million deaths for Vietnam. Both maintained that Courtois had effectively invented figures in order to hit the symbolic round number he wanted.

Werth and Margolin were not alone. Along with the historian Karel Bartošek, they publicly denounced Courtois’s methodology and the political agenda behind it. Werth, who authored nearly a third of the entire volume in his chapter on the USSR, and Margolin, who wrote the extensive section on Asia, both rejected the way their work was being used. Together with Bartošek, they resigned from Courtois’s editorial board at the journal Communisme in protest, making clear that they did not stand behind the inflated totals or the moral and historical equivalence Courtois attempted to construct.

Stéphane Courtois is a French historian, a director of research at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), and the editor of The Black Book of Communism. He co-founded and directs the journal Communisme. He is known for his transition from being a Maoist activist in his youth to becoming a prominent anti-communist scholar.

Courtois intended the “100 million” figure to serve a central historical and moral argument: to forcefully establish that Communism was ethically equivalent to Nazism and, by a sheer numerical measure of victims, was the “deadliest” political system of the 20th century. The single, round figure functioned as a rhetorical device designed to shock and to create a moral equivalence between the two totalitarian systems—a move that the co-authors, including Werth, vehemently rejected.

But when we examine the numbers with even minimal scrutiny, a striking pattern emerges: many of the deaths folded into this figure were not innocents at all, but rather individuals who had actively participated in fascist collaboration, wartime atrocities, or violent counterrevolutionary activity. In fact, the historical record often shows that communist governments were far more restrained in their responses than their adversaries would ever acknowledge.

First of all, Courtois’s own arithmetic is flawed. He claims:

USSR: 20 million

China: 65 million

Vietnam: 1 million

North Korea: 2 million

Cambodia: 2 million

Eastern Europe: 1 million

Latin America: 150,000

Africa: 1.7 million

Afghanistan: 1.5 million

“International communist movement”: 10,000

When added properly, these numbers total 94.36 million, not 100 million. Their own arithmetic fails. But the fraudulent math is only the first problem.

The Black Book’s fundamental flaw: it treats political ideology as a metaphysical cause of death. Policies are lifted out of context, conditions are ignored, and complex histories are reduced to an inflated scoreboard where people prosecuted for crimes that would be illegal anywhere are reframed as victims of communist persecution.

This methodology produces a shocking result: To understand the full scope of the deception, we must examine who the Black Book counts as “victims of communism.” Nazis and Nazi collaborators comprise the largest category.

The book dedicates significant space to the USSR, and early on makes clear who they’re counting. “However, other crimes on a much larger scale are habitually overlooked, including the murder or death in the gulag of tens of thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner from 1943 to 1945.”2 In other words: Nazis and their collaborators, semantically bleached and redefined to capture the sympathy of the unsuspecting reader.

Later in the book, the authors classify 37,000 captured UPA soldiers as “victims of communism.”3 This framing obscures who these men actually were. The UPA’s brutality was so depraved that even regular Wehrmacht officers lodged complaints with Himmler. One report came from Erwin Bingel, who described Ukrainian militias on horseback, armed with pistols and cavalry swords, riding wildly through a town park. They drove terrified civilians—men, women, and children—before their horses and unleashed a hail of bullets into the human mass. Those not killed outright were cut down with swords. Bingel wrote of this “horde of Ukrainians, let loose and commanded by SS officers,” trampling savagely over human bodies and ruthlessly killing children, mothers, and the elderly—people whose only “crime” was escaping the earlier mass murder, only to be hunted down and slaughtered “like wild animals.”

Page after page, as the book continues its geographic sweep of various nations, who they count as victims are super-obvious. “Political commissars and counterintelligence units in this army, under SMERSH and the NKVD, were deeply involved in such operations. The repression was especially severe in the countries that had sent troops to fight against the Soviet Union—Hungary, Romania, and Slovakia—where the NKVD deported hundreds of thousands to the Soviet gulags.” In other words, countries that invaded the USSR alongside Nazi Germany faced harsh treatment when they lost. The book presents prosecuting enemy combatants who committed untold atrocities alongside the Nazis, as an atrocity.

The Black Book decries ‘systematic persecution’ of the Catholic Church across Eastern Europe (page 410), while omitting that the Church had actively collaborated with fascist regimes. In Slovakia, Catholic priest Jozef Tiso led the Nazi puppet state and oversaw the deportation of 75,000 Jews to death camps. In Croatia, Franciscan priests ran Ustaše concentration camps, whose brutality even shocked Wehrmacht officials. When communist governments prosecuted complicit clergy and reduced the Church’s institutional power, this wasn’t religious persecution - it was accountability for committing the Holocaust.

While the USSR and Eastern European sections at least provide documentation of who was prosecuted—revealing most “victims” were Nazi collaborators, invading soldiers, and Holocaust-complicit clergy—the China section abandons even this pretense of evidence. On page 464, the authors claim 20-43 million people died during the Great Leap Forward. A margin of error of 23 million people—more than the entire population of Australia—reveals a methodology so fundamentally flawed that no serious analysis should proceed from these numbers. Since the China section accounts for 65% of the alleged “Victims of Communism”, we must continue to dismantle it.

Unable to provide documentation for their claim of 20-43 million deaths, the authors resort to pages of cultural philosophy word salad—discussing Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, quoting Chinese philosophers from 500 BC, and noting that the Tang dynasty (960-1127 AD) had harsh punishments. None of this constitutes evidence for deaths during the Great Leap Forward. This is intellectual fraud disguised as scholarship: make enormous claims, provide zero documentation, fill pages with irrelevant cultural commentary, and hope no one notices the complete absence of actual evidence.

Later on in the chapter, the author admits that they do not have actual data. On Page 479, they clearly state, “There is no precise tally of the number of victims.” The authors make their own great leap forward in methodology - from ‘no precise tally’ to ‘necessarily at least one per village’ to 2-5 million dead, all without citing a single named source or explaining how they determined what was ‘necessary.’

Incredibly, the Black Book cites China’s population decline of 60 million between 1850-1873—under the Qing Dynasty, decades before the Communist Party even existed—as context for understanding communist revolution. They admit these deaths resulted from ‘immense rebellions, repeated attacks by Western imperialists, and the growing despair of a population living in abject poverty.’ In other words, capitalist imperialism and the old feudal system killed 60 million people, creating the conditions that led to communist revolution. Yet the Black Book blames communism for attempting to industrialize a country devastated by centuries of imperialist exploitation and regular famine.

As we continue the Asia chapter in the book, both their claims and their orientalism get more outrageous, escalating to the atrocity propaganda that we are familiar with in the build-up to any war. On page 492, they claimed that “children were killed and even boiled and used as fertilizer”, which has a very shady citation by another anti-communist Becker, which ultimately shows that it is a rumor that an anonymous witness heard his parents discuss. As the book moves further, it increases its racism and the atrocity propaganda gets more outrageous. It claims that because of the famine, many people were cannibalized. Again, the source for this one anonymous person, who cannot be verified.

The claims gets more hysterical and the book actually debunks itself to anyone who bothers to read the rest of the Asia sections. The golden admission in the last sentence of the DPRK section, admits to what the critiques already say: “Even if we content ourselves with a figure of 500,000 victims of the primary or even secondary effects of malnutrition (including the usual, unverifiable rumors of cannibalism), we end up with an overall figure of more than 3 million victims in a country of 23 million inhabitants that has lived under Communism for fifty years.”4

Of course, the biggest debunker for the 100 millions of victims of communism is the fact that apparently the government of Canada has not been able to name even 550 of these 100 million of them without running into Nazis and Nazi collaborators. As a recent government study showed that at least 60% of the so-called victims in their memorial wall were Nazis and Nazi collaborators - leading the government to build an accidental communist propaganda monument. They built a wall dedicated to the victims of communism, but in lieu of the uncomfortable truth coming out, they scrapped listing names of these so-called victims. Therefore, in Ottawa, now sits a large wall dedicated with the total number of victims of communism: zero.