Most soldiers do not, in fact, risk their lives in battle. They do everything in their power to avoid getting shot at. Some studies of combat have suggested that only about 20% of the soldiers in any action are actively involved in the fighting - the others are taking cover. Even those that do risk their lives are often doing so to protect their loved ones back home - blood relatives. This is not a criticism - they’re just behaving like humans.
Finally, I’m speaking here in broad generalities. Sure, we’re capable of putting the greater good in first place. Limited altruism is obviously possible. But not for all of us, and certainly not every day, in every way, for a lifetime. People who are capable of that kind of selflessness are singled out, and labeled “saints.” If we were all like that, or even if many of us were like that, such behavior wouldn’t be regarded as exceptional. And it’s that kind of mass altruism that communism would require in order to succeed.
In communism you wouldn’t be risking your life for the greater good. You’d only be co-operating for the greater good, and the theory is you would be well rewarded for it, so you would be more willing to comply.
And as for ‘survival of the fittest’ we have managed to ‘remove’ many of our animal instincts to the point of unrecognition. Survival of the fittest can be just another one of the things we leave in the past. We are afterall very good co-operators.
Getting back to the OP: It is a remarkable fact that the United States is the only industrialized nation where no communist, socialist, social-democratic, or labor-based political party has ever played an important role in national politics. In their book It Didn’t Happen Here: Why Socialism Failed in the United States (W.W. Norton & Company, 2000), Seymour Martin Lipset and Gary Marks study the question and conclude the failure of socialism here resulted from a combination of factors, including:
American poltical culture is uniquely antistatist, individualist and libertarian, even compared with other English-speaking countries.
Leaving out the systematic submergence of certain ethnic and racial groups, there has never been a rigid social (as distinct from economic) class system in the United States, such as characterized the societies of Marx’s Europe.
Unlike their counterparts in Western Europe and elsewhere, American socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries failed to build a power base in the labor unions, which were mostly concerned with bread-and-butter issues like wages, hours and working conditions.
Unlike their foreign counterparts, American socialists failed to build alliances with traditional religious believers, and in fact alienated them, to the point where the American Catholic clergy became openly hostile to socialism.
In the early 19th century, European socialists got their foot in the door, and established their political presence as defenders of the people, by campaigning for such things as press freedom and universal suffrage. Although these were radical ideas in Europe at the time, they were well established (at least, universal suffrage for white males was well established) in the United States from earliest decades of the republic, which deprived American socialists of the opportunity to fight for them here and reap political benefits thereby.
The winner-take-all, first-past-the-post system marginalized American socialists, compared with other countries that had proportional-representation systems. This systemic barrier, however, has marginalized all American third parties of all ideologies.
The American federal system prevents Congress, if it ever had a socialist majority, from enacting any thoroughgoing program of socialism on a national scale. However, this cuts both ways: The federal system also provided socialists with more opportunities to contest and win elections at the state and local levels. (See below.)
Although American socialists won important offices at the state and local level in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and even controlled the governments of some cities, socialist leaders at the national level failed to build on these achievements. In fact, such non-revolutionary municipal reforms local socialist leaders were able to achieve were dismissed and derided as “sewer socialism” by national party leaders.
Compared with more practical and compromise-oriented socialists in other countries, American socialists were unfortunately given over to extremism, sectarianism, and splitting over minor points of doctrine.
The ethnically diverse character of the American working class led American workers to identify with their ethnic group before their class, inhibiting the development of “class consciousness” here. White American proles, for instance, have never wanted to think of themselves as being in the same social class as the blacks.
The Socialist Party made the crucial mistake of opposing U.S. entry into World War I. This made the party much more popular among German-Americans, but it also drove a lot of Anglo-Saxons out of the party, especially in the Midwest.
For some reason, Marks and Lipset end their analysis with the 1930s and '40s – the period when much of the Socialist Party’s agenda was co-opted by Roosevelt in the New Deal; the party became even more marginalized by sectarianism; many of the Communist Party members, on Stalin’s orders, hid their party affiliation while they sought positions of influence in government and the labor unions, and indeed went so far underground that those who escaped the McCarthy-era purges gradually stopped being Communists at all; and the Cold War taught Americans to identify the idea of socialism with treason. But the political upheavals of the '60s and ‘70s apparently do not even merit discussion as lost opportunities for socialism in America, in Marks’ and Lipset’s view.
Still when I think Soviet Union and communists… the idea of “atheists” isn’t what pops up. Might be because religion isn’t a big issue to me. Recently somone tried saying that there were much more atheists than we think… by saying the Chinese were atheists. I was like… whadda mean they are atheist ? They are commies he said. I never thought about the chinese being atheists…
When the words USSR and Soviet are mentioned… do you associate Athiesm to them somewhat ?