People are willing to be selfless on a global scale.
Communism could work in a society where material greed has been eliminated as a driving motivation. Where people don't need to feel they are better than anyone else, since the maxim "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs" relies on the fact that each member of the society will find their niche and be perfectly happy in the knowledge that everyone is contributing what they can (no matter how un-equal these contributions might be)
Basically, in order for communism to work, you'd need a batch of humans raised in absolute isolation from any other complex industrial society, who are imprinted with these social maxims from birth.
That's what makes it a utopia, imo, given my background in both psych and polisci.
We can make rational decisions;that doesn't make us fundamentally rational.
Especially with the dawn of the information age, where even our mighty prefrontal cortexes are bombarded with such info that we are not physically capable of processing it all; which is why 90+% of our decisions are made subconsciously, and why info wars are such a huge thing now.
I don't think that's really human nature, or at least not in it's entirety. There are primal motivations to both good living standards and community efforts, our last century+ of consumerism and push towards competitiveness in an economical sense aren't just born out of nowhere, they are constantly pushed in society, as you well say, especially in our information age, that try to amplify *one* aspect of human nature disregarding the other ones. Liberal capitalism as we are used to be living in thrives in consuming goods, especially those that aren't essential, and the different States of the world need to promote this, and it's done via strong economical policies and also the educational system, where in a lot of places isn't with an integral human development perspective, but a productive one in mind. It is, by definition, a system. This is beyond if it works or not, but consider that is "just human nature" is a very narrow viewpoint to this, I'm you sure you know better, incredible complex system. There are pre-colonial cultures in America that aren't really pro competitiveness in the same sense as we are used, for example, with better cultural predisposition to disregard pure wealth in favor of a different higher standard of living. That's human nature too. A point that prooves how this competitiveness can be even against human nature is the way it affects mental health in a lot of people. How humans often do not want to be competitive, and how society pushing cause a mental stress that just destroy the human mind.
A strong educational system that doesn't confine to the capitalist standards would absolutely be necessary in this sense, as you say, and from that perspective, it would absolutely be possible a society with higher community standards. The problem comes in how to achieve that, and in those experiments we see failure and successes in different scales. But it's easy to just think that it's impossible due to human nature. It isn't, as "human nature" isn't a single rigid thing.
Thats odd, I'd thought there would be some taboo about doing so.
I'm critical of communism/socialism and I'm not American, I'm Australian. We have universal healthcare. A lot of the defences of communism/socialism seem to be US whataboutism.
A lot of defences of marxist ideologies seem that way because of the whole "lol communist failed so many times!" thing. Capitalism, especially the current biggest force driving it - the US - has failed in different levels, on many different periods of our history. They are allowed to reform and re shape, but it ends up in critical conditions again. Add to this the different crimes commited in the name of freeing countries from socialism and voila, that's where this comes from. People always lose perspective of the crimes of any "side" of this capital/marxism battle that, unlike nazism and fascism, said crimes aren't really inherently coming from the ideologies but a lot of other reasons involved, from pure evil to "material" evil. Which one you consider the most has a lot to do with where you come from, people from Eastern Europe will justifiably be more anti-socialist that those of us who got "economic freedom" in the form of coups and prolonged years of torture and killings.
