文：张兴贵

序言

二十世纪是人类历史上物质财富与科技文明爆发式增长的世纪，也是人类在政治哲学与社会实验中付出最惨痛代价、经历最深刻苦难的世纪。在这一百年的历史长河中，共产主义运动无疑是规模最为宏大、卷入人口最多、对全球地缘政治格局塑造最为深刻的实验。

这场运动最初肇始于一种对人类终极解放的崇高追求。面对早期工业资本主义带来的贫富分化、阶级对立与社会异化，无产阶级革命的先驱们以惊人的理论魄力，勾勒出了一幅超越阶级剥削、消灭强制性国家机器、实现人人平等与自由联合的乌托邦图景。这一宏伟蓝图曾如同一座照亮暗夜的灯塔，吸引了无数满怀理想主义情怀的知识分子、工农大众与革命先锋，为此不惜抛头颅、撒热血。

然而，当理论走出书斋、迈向暴力革命与国家政权的构建时，这场历史性实验却呈现出了与其初衷完全背道而驰的惊人走向。从莫斯科的克里姆林宫到东欧的政治剧场，从古拉格群岛的冰原到农业集体化引发的大饥荒，所有的共产主义实践无一例外地陷入了极其沉重的历史悖论：

一个宣称要“消灭国家”的理论，在实践中却建立起了人类历史上规模最庞大、控制最严密、权力最集中的全权主义国家机器；

一个宣称要“废除一切阶级特权”的革命，最终却在公有制的废墟上孕育出一个靠垄断生存资料与政治权力维系统治的“新阶级”；

一个宣称要“将人类从资本奴役下解放出来”的计划经济，最终却消灭了社会的自发秩序，导致了长期的物质匮乏、文化死寂与道德溃败；

一个宣称代表“人类最广大根本利益”的体制，在其面临全方位危机时，却遭到了统治官僚阶层自上而下的掠夺性抛弃与全民性的无声唾弃。

这绝对不是某一个历史人物的偶然性格所致，也不是某一次政策执行偏差的结果，而是一场由其内在制度逻辑决定的系统性悲剧。

历史是最好的教科书，也是最清醒的解毒药。我们回顾这段沉痛的历史，绝非为了在胜利者的姿态下进行简单的政治批判，更不是为了宣泄历史情绪，而是为了警醒当下与未来。

在二十一世纪的今天，随着数字监控技术的飞速演进、全球化逆流带来的焦虑、以及面对复杂社会问题时追求强权解决的倾向抬头，极权主义的幽灵在中国死灰复燃，在欧美文明的边际徘徊。人们必须清醒地认识到：任何以“集体”、“人民”或“终极理想”为名义建立的无约束权力，终将异化为压迫人类最深重的枷锁；而人类社会的繁荣、尊严与幸福，绝不可能建立在顶层指令之上，而只能孕育于限制权力、保护私产权、捍卫思想自由与尊重个体的宪政法治轨道之中。

谨以此书，献给所有在二十世纪的宏大实验中承受苦难与牺牲的无辜心灵，献给那些在中国新极权的黑暗中依然不懈追求真理与自由的思想者，并希望它能成为构建未来文明坚固防线的一砖一瓦。

第一章 认识论陷阱：全知理性与信息不可知性

自19世纪中叶马克思与恩格斯将社会主义从“空想”推向“科学”以来，共产主义理论便建立在一个极其雄心勃勃的哲学基础之上：人类不仅能够彻底认识自然界与人类社会的运行规律，更能够凭借这种认识，自上而下地重新设计、组装并掌控整个社会的历史进程。这种将社会视为一部精密机械、将历史视为线性演进轨迹的构想，构成了共产主义运动最核心的精神支柱。

然而，二十世纪大规模的社会实验表明，这种建立在“完全理性”与“历史必然性”之上的宏大设计，最终无一例外地陷入了严重的经济瘫痪、制度僵化与人道危机。从认识论的视角来看，共产主义的根本困境并非仅仅在于道德假设的过于崇高或政治执行中的偏差，而在于其底层认识论的根本性溃败。

共产主义理论犯了一个致命的认识论错误：它假设人类社会存在一个可以被彻底掌握的“全知视域”，并认为通过高度集权的规划机构，能够汇集、处理并运用全社会所有的知识与信息。本章将从人类理性的边界、信息的本质属性、社会系统的演化特征等维度，深刻剖析共产主义在认识论层面无法逾越的致命陷阱。

第一节 理性狂妄的起源：从启蒙运动到历史唯物主义的机械论

要理解共产主义认识论的缺陷，必须首先溯源其思想脉络。共产主义并非凭空产生的政治构想，它是18世纪欧洲启蒙运动以来“理性主义”发展到极端的产物，并结合了19世纪工业革命时期的机械主义唯物论。

一、启蒙理性的膨胀与社会工程学

启蒙运动打破了神学对人类思想的禁锢，确立了理性在探索自然世界中的崇高地位。随着牛顿经典力学体系的建立，人类第一次发现，看似浩瀚无垠、纷繁复杂的宇宙，竟然受制于几条极其简洁、精准的物理定律。这种前所未有的认知突破，给人类带来了巨大的智力自信。

在这种自信的驱动下，社会思想家们开始产生一种强烈的情结：既然自然界遵循着可被人类理智完全掌握的客观规律，那么人类社会是否也存在一套类似的“运动法则”？只要找到了这套法则，人类是否就能像工程师设计桥梁和发动机一样，精密地设计出一个没有剥削、没有匮乏、没有混乱的完美社会？

这种将自然科学的逻辑无缝迁移至社会领域的倾向，被英国学者卡尔·波普尔称为“唯科学主义”。它过度夸大了人类理性的能力，将极其复杂的社会系统简化为可以被完全计算和操控的物理模型。

二、历史唯物主义中的历史决定论与“客观规律”

马克思主义将这种理性膨胀推向了巅峰。通过将黑格尔的辩证法与费尔巴哈的唯物主义相结合，马克思构建了历史唯物主义体系，试图揭示人类历史演进的“客观规律”。

历史唯物主义认为：生产力决定生产关系，经济基础决定上层建筑。人类历史沿着原始社会、奴隶社会、封建社会、资本主义社会，最终不可避免地走向社会主义与共产主义。

这种演进是像自然规律一样不以人的意志为转移的“历史必然性”。这种理论架构赋予了共产主义一种强烈的“科学”合法性。它宣告，共产主义的到来不是某种道德诉求，而是历史规律演进的必然结果。无产阶级政党只要掌握了这套“科学真理”，就拥有了历史的绝对解释权，甚至获得了代表历史趋势去干预、塑造、加速历史进程的合法性。

三、 理性狂妄的本质

弗里德里希·哈耶克在其著作《致命的自负》中，将这种坚信人类理性可以重新设计整个社会制度的信念称为“致命的自负”。这种自负的实质在于混淆了“人造秩序”与“自发秩序”：

人造秩序（如一家工厂、一所学校、一个军队）是由人类意志有意识设计出来的，内部结构清晰，目标单一，指令自上而下贯穿。自发秩序（如语言、法律、货币、市场）并非由任何单一个人或机构有意识设计，而是在数百万个体漫长的互动、试错、演化过程中自然形成的复杂系统。

共产主义的根本谬误，就是试图用对待“人造秩序”的设计思维，去强行改造和替换极其庞大的“自发秩序”。它坚信一个由“理性精英”组成的中央计划委员会，能够替代千百年来由无数个体交易形成的市场网络。这种对理性能力的无限拔高，正是其认识论陷阱的起点。

编辑： Gloria Wang 校对：王滨 翻译：戈冰

Why Communism Is Structurally Unachievable

By Zhang Xinggui

Abstract: Looking back at the historical trajectory of the 20th-century communist movement from ideal to reality, this article explores why its practice was invariably accompanied by power concentration, economic hardship, and social oppression. Attempting to reflect on this historical paradox from the perspective of institutional logic rather than individual factors, the article contemplates its cautionary significance for 21st-century society.

Preface

The twentieth century was a century that witnessed an explosive growth in human material wealth and technological civilization, as well as a century in which humanity paid the most tragic price and endured the most profound suffering in political philosophy and social experimentation. In the long river of this hundred-year history, the communist movement was undoubtedly the experiment of the grandest scale, involving the largest population, and exerting the most profound shape on the global geopolitical landscape.

This movement originally stems from a sublime pursuit of ultimate human liberation. Confronted with the wealth disparity, class antagonism, and social alienation brought about by early industrial capitalism, the pioneers of the proletarian revolution, with astonishing theoretical boldness, sketched out a utopian vision that transcended class exploitation, abolished the coercive state apparatus, and realized equality for all as well as the free association of individuals. This magnificent blueprint once acted like a lighthouse illuminating the dark night, attracting countless intellectuals, worker-peasant masses, and revolutionary vanguards brimming with idealistic sentiment, who did not hesitate to shed their blood and sacrifice their lives for it.

However, when theory stepped out of the study and headed toward violent revolution and the construction of state power, this historical experiment exhibited an astonishing trajectory completely opposite to its original intention. From the Kremlin in Moscow to the political theaters of Eastern Europe, from the frozen wastes of the Gulag Archipelago to the massive famines triggered by agricultural collectivization, all communist practices, without exception, fell into an extremely heavy historical paradox:

A theory proclaiming to “abolish the state” instead established, in practice, a totalitarian state apparatus that was the largest in scale, most tightly controlled, and most highly concentrated in power in human history;

A revolution proclaiming to “abolish all class privileges” ended up, atop the ruins of public ownership, giving birth to a “new class” that maintained its rule by monopolizing the means of subsistence and political power;

A planned economy proclaiming to “liberate humanity from the slavery of capital” ultimately destroyed the spontaneous order of society, resulting in long-term material scarcity, cultural desolation, and moral decay;

A system proclaiming to represent the “overwhelming fundamental interests of humanity,” when confronted with an all-encompassing crisis, was subjected to predatory abandonment from above by its ruling bureaucratic class and silent repudiation by the entire populace.

This is by no means the result of an accidental personality trait of any single historical figure, nor is it the outcome of a single policy execution error; rather, it is a systemic tragedy dictated by its inner institutional logic.

History is the best textbook and the most sober antidote. Our review of this painful history is by no means intended to conduct simple political critiques from the posture of a victor, much less to vent historical emotions, but rather to serve as a warning for the present and the future.

In the twenty-first century today, with the rapid evolution of digital surveillance technology, the anxieties brought about by counter-currents of globalization, and the rising tendency to pursue authoritarian solutions when facing complex social issues, the specter of totalitarianism is experiencing a resurgence in China and wandering along the margins of Western civilization. People must soberly realize: any unrestrained power established in the name of the “collective,” the “people,” or an “ultimate ideal” will eventually alienate into the heaviest shackle oppressing humanity; whereas the prosperity, dignity, and happiness of human society can never be built upon directives from the top, but can only be nurtured within the track of constitutionalism and the rule of law that limits power, protects private property rights, defends freedom of thought, and respects the individual.

This book is respectfully dedicated to all the innocent souls who endured suffering and sacrifice in the grand experiments of the twentieth century, to those thinkers who continue to unremittingly pursue truth and freedom in the darkness of China’s neo-totalitarianism, with the hope that it may become a brick and tile in building a solid defense line for future civilization.

Chapter 1 Epistemological Trap: Omniscient Rationality and Information Unknowability

Since the mid-19th century when Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels pushed socialism from “utopian” to “scientific,” communist theory has rested on an extremely ambitious philosophical foundation: humanity can not only thoroughly comprehend the operating laws of nature and human society, but can even more so, by virtue of this comprehension, redesign, assemble, and master the entire historical process of society from the top down. This conception—viewing society as a precision machine and history as a linear evolutionary trajectory—constituted the most core spiritual pillar of the communist movement.

However, the large-scale social experiments of the twentieth century demonstrated that this grand design built upon “complete rationality” and “historical inevitability” ended up, without exception, trapped in severe economic paralysis, institutional rigidity, and humanitarian crisis. From an epistemological perspective, the fundamental dilemma of communism lay not merely in moral assumptions being overly lofty or in deviations during political execution, but rather in the fundamental collapse of its underlying epistemology.

Communist theory committed a fatal epistemological error: it assumed that there existed an “omniscient horizon” in human society that could be thoroughly mastered, and believed that through highly centralized planning agencies, all knowledge and information across the entire society could be aggregated, processed, and applied. This chapter will, from dimensions such as the boundaries of human rationality, the essential attributes of information, and the evolutionary characteristics of social systems, deeply analyze the fatal trap that communism cannot overcome at the epistemological level.

Section 1 The Origins of Rational Hubris: From the Enlightenment to the Mechanism of Historical Materialism

To understand the flaws in communist epistemology, one must first trace its intellectual pedigree. Communism was not a political concept created out of thin air; it was the product of “rationalism” pushed to its extreme since the 18th-century European Enlightenment, combined with the mechanistic materialism of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution era.

I. The Expansion of Enlightenment Rationality and Social Engineering

The Enlightenment shattered the theological shackles on human thought and established the supreme status of reason in exploring the natural world. With the establishment of the Newtonian classical mechanics system, humanity discovered for the first time that the universe, seemingly vast, boundless, intricate, and complex, was actually governed by a few extremely simple, concise, and precise physical laws. This unprecedented cognitive breakthrough brought humanity immense intellectual self-confidence.

Driven by this confidence, social thinkers began to develop a strong complex: since the natural world followed objective laws that could be completely mastered by human intellect, did human society also possess a similar set of “laws of motion”? As long as this set of laws was discovered, could humanity, much like engineers designing bridges and engines, precisely design a perfect society free of exploitation, scarcity, and chaos?

This tendency to seamlessly transfer the logic of natural science to the social domain was termed “scientism” by the British scholar Karl Popper. It excessively exaggerated the capacity of human reason, simplifying extremely complex social systems into physical models that could be completely calculated and manipulated.

II. Historical Determinism and “Objective Laws” in Historical Materialism

Marxism pushed this expansion of rationality to its apex. By combining Hegel’s dialectics with Feuerbach’s materialism, Marx constructed the system of historical materialism, attempting to reveal the “objective laws” of human historical evolution.

Historical materialism posits that: forces of production determine relations of production, and the economic base determines the superstructure. Human history evolves along primitive society, slave society, feudal society, capitalist society, and ultimately and inevitably moves toward socialism and communism.

This evolution is a “historical inevitability” that, like natural laws, does not alter according to human will. This theoretical framework endowed communism with a potent “scientific” legitimacy. It declared that the arrival of communism was not a moral appeal, but the inevitable outcome of the evolution of historical laws. As long as the proletarian party mastered this set of “scientific truths,” it possessed the absolute authority to interpret history, and even acquired the legitimacy to intervene in, shape, and accelerate the historical process on behalf of historical trends.

III. The Essence of Rational Hubris

Friedrich Hayek, in his work The Fatal Conceit, termed this firm belief that human reason can redesign the entire social system as “the fatal conceit.” The essence of this conceit lies in confusing “made order” with “spontaneous order”:

A made order (such as a factory, a school, or an army) is consciously designed by human will, possessing a clear internal structure, a singular goal, and directives running from top to bottom. A spontaneous order (such as language, law, currency, or the market) is not consciously designed by any single individual or institution, but is a complex system formed naturally during the long process of interaction, trial and error, and evolution among millions of individuals.

The fundamental fallacy of communism lies in its attempt to use the design thinking applied to a “made order” to forcibly transform and replace an extremely vast “spontaneous order.” It firmly believed that a central planning committee composed of “rational elites” could replace the market network formed over thousands of years by countless individual transactions. This infinite elevation of the capacity of reason is precisely the starting point of its epistemological trap.

Editor: Gloria Wang Proofreader: Wang Bin Translator: Ge Bing