why did communism fail 
there s been extensive study of the reasons for communism s failure but researchers have pinpointed a couple of common factors that contributed to its demise the first is an absence of incentives among citizens to produce for profit the profit incentive leads to competition and innovation in society but an ideal citizen in a communist society was selflessly devoted to societal causes and rarely thought about their own welfare 16the second reason for communism s failure was the system s inherent inefficiencies such as centralized planning this form of planning requires aggregation and synthesis of enormous amounts of data at a granular level all projects were planned centrally so this form of planning was also complex growth data was fudged or error prone in several cases to make facts fit into planned statistics and create an illusion of progress the concentration of power in the hands of a select few also bred inefficiency and provided them with incentives to game the system for their benefit and retain their hold on power corruption and laziness became endemic features of this system surveillance such as that characterized east german and soviet societies was common it also disincentivized industrious and hard working people the economy suffered in the end 