Title: Communism
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 37.4
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## Communism

Let’s explore communism as a political philosophy that can influence a governance structure. It’s a little off-theme for the book, but a fun discussion nevertheless.

When pro-communist individuals push their agenda, the classic refrain is: Real Communism Has Never Been Tried™. They are right … well, *close* to right. While real communism, “a stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need,” has been attempted hundreds of times as the goal of numerous revolutions and utopian communities, it has never been sustained at the level of the nation state.[[82]](#_ftn82)

While it is possible to describe communism in the abstract, it cannot exist in reality at above certain population thresholds without collapsing into another governance structure. Let’s take a look at architecture to understand what we mean by this: It is theoretically possible to describe an upside-down Lego pyramid structure while also knowing that, while it is possible to construct that structure at a small scale, if it were to be made large enough (like the size of a building), that upside-down pyramid would inevitably collapse and form a pile of rubble that looked like a “right way up” pyramid (or rough pile). When built out in large populations, “real communism” intrinsically collapses into brutal, single-party despotism.

To be fair, *most* governing models collapse to some extent after being built to the level of the nation state. The U.S. government, for example, currently does a lot of things—like featuring political parties and having citizens directly vote for presidents—that it was originally designed to avoid doing.

The problem with communist systems is that every single component part must stay rock solid. Should even one component fail, a communist government will devolve into single-party despotism.

In contrast, capitalist systems can break in many more ways before they transform into something “obviously evil.” Sure, real communism has never been tried at the level of the nation state in that no nation state has ever operated as a communist system, but it has been tried dozens of times in that revolutions have succeeded under the mandate of raising a communist system only to fail to achieve that end because the premise itself is misguided.

You may notice we carved out the qualifiers: “when built out in large populations” and “at the level of the nation state.” This is because communism hasn’t just been tried successfully; successful communism is quite common. The vast majority of the world population at some point in their lives has lived under a governance model that is technically communist, be it a family unit, parish group, or local sports team.

Communism, “a stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need” is one of the most common and stable systems people form when creating small-scale governance structures.

When explaining why communism does not lead to stable and peaceful governance models, detractors most frequently argue that people will not be motivated to do high-skill work (like become doctors, etc.) when they are rewarded the same as those doing low-skill work. To the contrary, this has almost never been a real problem in societies attempting to become communist (outside of cases in which governments decided to just kill everyone who was trained in high-skilled jobs, like the Khmer Rouge). But if motivation isn’t the problem, what is?

The real problem is fourfold:

- The Power Consolidation Problem
- The HOA Problem
- The Centrally-Managed Economy Problem
- The Cancer Problem

While non-hierarchical systems can theoretically exist on paper, functionally they always collapse into a hierarchically centrally managed “command economy” economic system. Why does this happen?

### The Power Consolidation Problem

Communist and communist-adjacent governance models often attempt to structure themselves in one of two ways: Either they become strict bureaucratic hierarchies or they become extremely loose systems in which no single player has too much power (this second way of structuring communism-like governances being more theoretical than something that has been tried repeatedly at the nation-state level). Both of these models suffer from the same weakness: They create power vacuums that are easily exploited by ill-intentioned individuals while being difficult for well-intentioned players to claim.

Telescoping history (Lenin’s plan for skipping two-stage theory, which posits the necessity for decades of a stable capitalist society before getting a stable communist one) requires giving a small group of individuals disproportionate power for a short period of time (those individuals who set up the communist state). The problem with these groups is that only one group need be reluctant to relinquish power for it to stay consolidated.

What do we mean by this? If there are a thousand people tasked with transitioning a society to stable communism (a low number for a nation state) and just two or three decide they want to keep their new power, those who are willing to give up the new power can’t force those who want to keep it to relinquish it through the very fact that they themselves gave it up. The vast system needed to create the transition can be thought of as a defensively fortified castle: You need everyone to voluntarily leave that castle because if anyone secretly stays behind they can just reactivate the defenses once the others are out. The fact that everyone knows that means almost no one leaves the castle.

When communism comes about as a transition from capitalism, the same problem is at play but at a larger scale. Many individuals in positions of power must apply pressure for this transition to happen. The mechanisms which allow for an economy to function without supply and demand are also blindingly easy to hijack by anyone with power during the transition.

Finally, anarcho-communist systems that emerge—either from the systems collapse event of a previous system or loosely organized group action like CHOP, Occupy Wall Street, or the Anti Work movement—suffer from this dynamic worst of all. In these systems, it is very easy for any random individual to decide they want power and claim it (look at Raz Simone or Doreen Ford). This means power is often claimed by the individuals who are most delusional about their own competence and most willing to ignore the collective’s rules (after all, the point of anarcho-communism is that no one is supposed to rise up and grab power then claim to speak on behalf of everyone). In the instances cited, things fell apart quite early, but these selective mechanisms lead late stage communist systems to consistently drift towards kleptocracies, with those most willing to steal and ignore communal rules for self gain, accruing incrementally more power every year until they run everything.

**A key problem with stateless, classless structures is that they suck at defending themselves against power consolidation among those with even temporary administrative power. One of the key functions of “class” within a society is to create the societal equivalent of white blood cells that fight the totalitarian leanings of those who are hungry for power.** Even if communism is achieved in the short run, the society will be unstable as it transitions between generations for the above reason.

Small communist systems work because no one stands to gain something from hijacking them. Consider Kibbutzim. These communist structures are typically effective so long as they remain small, but almost every single time they become significantly cash positive and transfer between generations, they get sliced up and sold, becoming capitalist company towns—the antithesis of the dream.

While anarcho-communism aims to make everyone in a society equal, it also makes everyone in a society weak. Essentially, anarcho-communist structures exist with giant, gaping power vacuums at their hearts, constantly sucking in those who thirst for power. When a toxic individual begins to consolidate power around them in a normal governance structure, they are torn down by the bourgeoisie (those who own capital and the means of production), as social stability enables them to harvest disproportionate yields from society. In communist systems, this class does not exist.

Societies founded on communism have committed genocides and other horrifying acts at rates higher than other contemporary civilizations because their power vacuums intrinsically draw in selfishness, power obsession, sociopathy, and cults of personality. In other words, communist systems end up with the most vile leaders not because they choose them, but because people with integrity and calm hearts have trouble navigating their power structures.

A problem with democracies is that they act as filtering systems, removing anyone from contention for high office who is not willing to schmooze, manipulate, and brown-nose. This is bad, but not catastrophic. Some research, for example, suggests that narcissism is positively correlated with political participation in Western democracies.[[83]](#_ftn83)

Whereas democracies filter for weasels while communist “utopias” filter for monsters, individuals who are morally depraved, power hungry, and sociopathic. Why? Because forcefully taking power in a communist system requires seriously harming at least a few dozen innocent people. Such is true in both the distributed model, where the vacuum exists because no one has enough power to stop those pursuing it, and in the hierarchical model, where it exists because the strict hierarchy makes it possible to quickly consolidate and maintain power.

We have heard communists say things like: “Well, if someone does bad things, the people will just tear them from power.” To us, that sounds about as naïve as a capitalist claiming that when businesses do bad things, consumers won’t buy their products. In the vast majority of cases, people are too busy prioritizing other things to bother intervening. History has repeatedly demonstrated this to be the case. It is very rare for someone to be taken out of power only for being a bad person within any governance system. Humans are not great at thinking for themselves once they enter groups above a certain size, which partially explains why bad people get torn from power in small groups and not in large groups. In large groups, moods change like an ant trail and mob mentality takes over, which prevents humans from thinking.

### The HOA Problem

When people imagine who will be making most of the decisions in a hierarchically organized communist or anarcho-syndicalist country, they tend to imagine decisions being made by people like themselves, their friends, or the public faces of the movement. Most of the decisions actually made in these systems are not made at the top but rather at the level of community government. At the level of community government, those who rise to power in communist and anarcho-syndicalist systems are little different from those who rise to power in capitalist societies (this contrasts with those who rise to the very top of the hierarchy, as discussed above). While capitalism has many problems, one of its strengths is the uniquely small amount of power it gives to the lowest rung of the power hierarchy (bosses, line managers, community watch association heads, etc.).

The Homeowner Association (HOA) Problem can be summed up thusly: While those in higher strata of a governance system (who are less numerous—like the blocks at the top of a pyramid) have more influence as individuals, those in the lower strata of the pyramid collectively have more impact on individuals’ daily lives. If more competent, ambitious, and ruthless people get promoted up the pyramid toward its middle, those who stay at the lowest rungs, the individuals with the greatest impact on the daily lives of most people, are those most likely to feature a toxic mix of megalomania and incompetence. The HOA problem occurs when an economic or governance system ends up pumping an unwise amount of authority into the bottom level of this pyramid.

Consider your experience in high school. Did the principal ever personally make your life hell? Probably not. Your school district’s principal selection probably didn’t matter much to your daily experience. The people who make your life hell in high school are the over-zealous detention proctor, the sexually aggressive gym teacher, or the pedantic English teacher. But what is truly terrifying to remember is it only took *one person* near the bottom of the power hierarchy with a bad mood to make your life a living hell. It doesn’t matter if 95% of your teachers treat you wonderfully; all it takes is that one bad or angry person to make your life a living hell.

The people who take power at lower-to-intermediate levels of the hierarchy in a communist society are the same people who—in the U.S. at least—end up running homeowners associations, joining parent-teacher associations, and taking positions as shift managers at your local fast food chain. They are the busybodies who are good at networking and brown-nosing on a small scale and are willing to sacrifice copious amounts of personal time to achieve positions of trivial power.

One of the biggest downsides to communist systems is the power it gives such individuals. When communism plays out in practice, the “free thinking” teenage punks who typically support communism under a capitalist system become the pro-capitalists and the most fervent communist is the busybody who currently runs your HOA. The young punks are not running the show—and when they are, during the transition period, don’t expect them to be nice (see *The Killing Fields* or *Red Scarf Girl*). Stepping through a portal into a communist alternate reality doesn’t change who is running things; it only changes how much power they have and the tools they use to wield it.

Essentially, fighting for communism or anarcho-syndicalism will not ultimately grant you and your friends more power; a successful fight for communism instead grants more power to the low-level bureaucrats in your daily life, be they police, HOA board members, or detention proctors. The natural consequence of giving power to the people—of moving the power distribution in a system from the top to the bottom of the pyramid—is that it also gives loads more power to those just one level above “the people.” Even if you somehow manage to have incorruptible visionaries at the top of the hierarchy, you will have little tyrants at the bottom.

### The Centrally Managed Economy Problem

Top-down managed economies (also known as command economies) feature significantly more “friction” than self-organizing economies. (And as we mentioned above, even when a communist system is founded using a decentralized structure, a centrally managed structure will eventually accrue.)

Historically, the intrinsic inefficiency in hierarchically managed economic systems has always been the downfall of those trying for communism. Mistakes in judgment get magnified as they travel down a hierarchical system, meaning larger systems experience exponentially greater damage from little mistakes.

This isn’t just a “communist” problem. This magnification is also seen in large companies that operate with a hierarchical bureaucracy. It is one of the reasons small companies so frequently outcompete their larger counterparts despite large companies presumably having innumerable unfair advantages due to their greater resources, name recognition, institutional knowledge, and any systemic unfair advantages they’ve set up in their respective markets—and all that is just scratching the surface.

If large-scale, centrally managed governance structures were neutral or beneficial to efficiency, then small companies would never have a chance against larger ones. In that way, ironically, the most “successful” companies in a capitalist society demonstrate why communism won’t work. If you could figure out a fix for corporate management that maintained its integrity as companies scale, then a real and functional communist system might be worth trying again.

You may be thinking: “OK, so what? Large bureaucracies are a little less efficient. How bad can a little inefficiency really be in an economy?” Recall that during the Great Leap Forward in China—a centrally planned initiative to move the economy forward and improve the life of Chinese citizens—thirty million people starved to death. This was a set of policies designed to improve the economic conditions of the country. The evil of good intentions implemented inefficiently can stand toe to toe with the most insidious acts humanity has ever committed.

Probably the most common pattern in the breakdown of a centrally managed system involves Goodhart’s law, which states that when a measure becomes a target (in other words, once a particular metric determines rewards), it ceases to be a good measure.

Whereas a capitalist system will automatically distribute resources to the more efficient of two factories due to its self-organizing behavior, a communist system will need some mechanism to determine how to distribute resources between two factories. This mechanism almost always involves which of the two scores higher on specific metrics.

Goodhart’s law states that as soon as those metrics determine how the company is judged, they stop being accurately reported. This may not be due to outright lies, but rather the system contorting itself to meet them. Miscalculations that caused famines in early communist China resulted from municipalities learning they could fudge the numbers on wheat production by keeping less and less wheat for their own citizens. When the authorities began to realize this and started testing for citizen health, municipalities took to presenting specific cohorts of citizens for this testing, giving them an extra portion of what very small amount of food was left. This only further exacerbated the state of the starvation most people experienced by pooling the little wheat left around the “show people.”

Hazards of centrally-managed economies are not limited to communist regimes. While the modern day CCP (the Chinese Communist Party, which controls the Chinese government) is not communist in the traditional sense, its single-party hierarchy suffers the same problems as a hierarchical communist system (and any other centrally-managed system), as people can only rise up the hierarchy by demonstrating dedication to the party and are rarely punished for being overzealous in their displays of dedication.

Foreigners are horrified to see people being welded into their apartment buildings and having barbed wire put around their homes as part of China’s zero-COVID policy, but what they don’t realize is that these are not responses to explicit government orders, but rather a product of a reasonable government mandate getting exaggerated a bit with every rung of the hierarchy through which it passes. There is little risk of punishment from overzealously interpreting an order and overzealous interpretation of orders slightly boosts one’s odds of promotion. Thus, like a twisted game of telephone, the order becomes more extreme and draconian with every chain of the pyramid it is filtered down through.

### The Cancer Problem

In biology, the square-cube law explains why animals cannot get above certain sizes except in very specific circumstances. The square-cube law states that if an animal were made twice as tall, twice as wide, and twice as long, its volume and mass would increase by a factor of eight, but its ability to support that mass—its cross-sectional area—would only increase by a factor of four.

A similar law applies to classless social structures. Essentially, communist systems at the state level are intrinsically some of the largest governance structures possible and thus are susceptible to the “cancer” problem addressed in our chapter exploring governance sizes.

**Essentially, small departments within larger communist systems become more heavily focused on *proving* their utility to the exclusion of actually *providing* utility.** This behavior gets exaggerated until eventually their primary function centers around maintaining their own existence. While this is not a problem unique to communist systems, we see it more frequently within communist systems, as they are almost always larger than other types of governance systems.

### Can These Hazards Be Addressed With Tech?

One of the key questions of communism in the modern age is whether technology will patch the weakness of communist systems and create a true “stateless, classless and money-less society where each individual contributes according to ability and receives according to need.”

The answer is a big “yes … but.” Through the utilization of AI and blockchain technology, much of the friction imposed by human oversight on a centrally managed economy can be removed. An AI-controlled army (of humans or machines) could be used to eliminate potential tyrants and fix the power vacuum issue. No lower middle management is necessary when those positions are held by machines or a distributed blockchain network.

The problem of course is … *bro, are you serious*? We get that humans are not always great, but this is supervillain shit—like being opposed to war and subsequently creating an army of kill bots that sit in the corner of every room holding a gun to people just to remind them not to step out of line.