Communism Is Not Complete Until God and Family Are Gone

Why Young People Are Drawn to Communism Today

A generation that never lived through the Cold War now votes. In a March 2025 Cato Institute/YouGov survey, 62 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 viewed socialism favorably and 34 percent said the same of communism, against 14 percent for communism across all age groups.

Several reasons overlap. The camps, the famines and the censorship belong to a grandparent's memory. Housing costs, tuition and flat wages leave the sense that the current system returns nothing, and that sense becomes an appetite for a different one.

The word itself is vague: people picturing Scandinavia and people picturing state ownership of the means of production are counted in the same number. And if the Soviet Union and China were never real communism, no evidence can ever count against the idea.

The argument therefore has to begin with the terms. What did communism promise, and what became of the promise?

What Communism Promises

Workers will be freed from exploitation. The means of production will be held in common, and people will work according to ability and receive according to need. Classes will disappear, and the state, having outlived its function, will wither away. Religion is a tool rulers use to pacify the governed, so it too becomes unnecessary. No one will go hungry, and no one will be used by another.

After more than a century of experiment, not one of these has been delivered.

A Workers' State That Does Not Pay Wages

Consider North Korea, a country that calls itself a workers' state and writes the right to labor into its constitution.

In practice, workers at state enterprises receive almost nothing. A nominal monthly wage is reported to buy less than a kilogram of rice, and most households survive through the informal jangmadang markets rather than state rations. The workers' state does not feed its workers.

Laborers sent abroad to earn foreign currency face something more extreme. North Koreans working on Russian construction sites volunteer for the assignment in order to support their families. Most of their pay is taken by the state under headings such as loyalty funds, and little reaches their hands. A system founded on abolishing exploitation made the state itself the only employer and the only exploiter.

Why the Promise Is Never Kept

The failure follows from the structure of the system.

The first reason is economic. A price is information gathered from countless individual judgments. Abolish private property and markets and that information disappears, leaving no one able to know what should be produced or in what quantity. The problem Mises and Hayek raised in the 1920s was confirmed by the experiments that followed.

The second reason is power. When the state holds all property, work, housing and food fall under its discretion, and anyone who dissents loses the means of survival itself. The state never withered away. It entered every part of human life.

The Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, North Korea. Their cultures, histories and religions differ, and their outcomes converge. The only thing they share is the system they adopted.

What Comes After the Economy

The destruction does not end with the economy. Nationalizing property leaves the system unfinished, because people retain loyalties the state never had to command. As long as those loyalties outweigh the state, control will always have a gap in it.

Two places produce such loyalty: faith and family. Every communist regime that took power reached for both, because doing so is a necessary step toward completing the system.

Why Religion Is Destroyed

Religion is attacked first, for three reasons.

The first is that the worldviews cannot coexist. Materialism treats human beings as products of matter and economic relations. Admitting God removes the premise.

The second is the ranking of loyalty. A believer recognizes an authority above the party. When an order violates conscience, that person refuses, and control is never completed.

The third is organization. Churches, temples and mosques hold communities the state did not create, with their own funds, their own leaders and their own teaching. A system that governs the whole cannot tolerate organizations outside the state.

Hence the closures and the executions. The Soviet Union shut tens of thousands of churches and monasteries. The Cultural Revolution destroyed temples and churches. China today pursues the sinicization of religion and intervenes in the appointment of clergy and the content of sermons.

Why the Family Is Destroyed

The same structure governs the logic applied to the family. Again, there are three reasons.

The first is that the theory treats the family as a historical product. In "The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State," Engels described the monogamous family as an institution born alongside private property. The idea that the family must change once private property disappears follows from this. How to read these passages is still disputed. What is not in dispute is that every regime that took power reached for the family.

The second is that the family is a loyalty the state cannot monopolize. Parents love a child for the child's sake and not for the party's, and no order can manufacture that feeling.

The third is that the family is the only channel of instruction the state cannot censor. Faith, memory and values pass to the next generation through conversation at the dinner table.

So the Soviet Union encouraged children to inform on their parents and made a schoolbook hero of a boy said to have denounced his father. China's people's communes introduced collective canteens and set out to dismantle the household table. North Korea places collective ideological instruction from early childhood above the role of the home.

The family is older than the state, which is why it remains the last unit of resistance.

Keeping It Unfinished

The Cold War ended. The idea did not. The Chinese Communist Party commands the world's second largest economy and demonstrates a new form of control built on surveillance technology. And as the opening figures show, the beauty of the words is passing to the next generation while the record of what happened does not.

Two things are required. The first is to remember. The second is to protect what communism set out to destroy: freedom of belief, the autonomy of the family, private property, the rule of law and an independent press. These are not abstract principles. They are institutions whose loss cost people their lives.

Words that promise an ideal will keep appearing. The measure is not the words but what the system actually did to people. The record already exists in full.

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