Communism doesn ' t work because the knowledge you would need to centrally plan an economy without markets can only be obtained through markets . A few problems with this statement 1 . Endstate communism requires postscarcity economic conditions . In that situation , a market is not required to determine what goods are manufactured , as there is a surplus of all goods . 2 . Socialism is not incompatible with market economics . Neither was the Soviet Union a bad example . If anything it was a particularly benign one , because at least they had some idea of the value of goods and services relative to each other , since they could observe market prices in the surrounding economies . But even that didn ' t save them in the end . Centrally planned economies simply cannot direct resources anywhere close to efficiently without market prices . And my issue with this block is related to the above endstate communism communism isn ' t something you ' try ' or ' do ', it ' s something you try to achieve is postscarcity so the market is irrelevant . Socialism doesn ' t necessarily restrict you to a planned economy . That is just what all socialist states in our world did generally because the first one , the USSR , did .