Yes Communism! Part VI: From Populism to Social Revolution

Political change has a habit of trickling over into society as a whole. If a broad mass of the poor and powerless put their weight behind the trickle and push it through every crack in the power structure, they might flood the entire system. If they were to accomplish this, they would have the chance to wield political power for their own purposes and reorganize society accordingly. If their bravery faltered and they politely stepped away from this opportunity, showing mercy to their mortal enemies, they would allow a wide open path for the elites to crush the new democracy, restore absolute power, and hold society under the terroristic reign of counterrevolution. 

Only socialism can crush the oligarchy. For us to achieve socialism, we must pass through popular democratic struggles: freedom of speech for revolutionaries, substantial universal suffrage for the poor, reproductive autonomy from the paternalist authorities of family and the state, the right to organize sympathy strikes in a militant union movement, and a basic guarantee for living without having to beg employers for work. All of these are bound together by a desire for freedom and an antagonism that counterposes the people and the elite. They can only achieve decisive victory in their own partial struggles by working together as a single movement fighting for a totally new society—communism. 

Part V. All power to the people 

Achieving an authentic democracy for the poor would also mean exercising overwhelming force over the monopolist 1%. It would fuse popular political power with control over the wealth that is currently locked away under the names of a few elites. 

Today, these two things are kept scrupulously apart. We are permitted to vote, protest, and organize within the narrow lane of “business-as-usual” politics, while the actual decisions that shape our lives—what gets produced, who gets hired, where the money flows—remain the exclusive concerns of corporate boardrooms and lobbyists, answerable to no one but shareholders and wealthy patrons. 

A politics that only democratizes the state while leaving the ownership of wealth untouched always degenerates into a politics of a spectacle. Empty spectacle forces us to surrender our most full-hearted ambitions over to the grotesque and humiliating ritual of mutilated hopes. 

What we need instead is a popular political power that reaches directly into the ownership and management of wealth itself and treats the monopolists not as untouchable stewards of the economy but as an obstacle to our power that must be swept aside. 

This demand might seem almost absurd given how things stand today. Even sovereign governments find themselves unable to tax, regulate, or discipline the corporations and banks that operate on their own soil, let alone bring them under popular control. 

That apparent absurdity is itself a symptom of our society’s sickness. Wealth and power have drifted beyond democratic accountability. The lives of a majority are at the mercy of a minority. 

For anyone who wants to see their hopes for a just better world become a reality, it proves the urgency of fighting for a maximally different society—what I have just described under the name “communism.”

How do we get from here to there? 

We have to learn, in our own small and scattered efforts, to do things ourselves, and through relationship-building and the hard work of sustaining a struggle, to stick together with each other and accomplish things as a united movement. 

Most of you already have some experience of this, even if you don't always flag it as part of the movement of “communism.” 

Think of the political campaigns that mobilize people to put their heads together in advocacy for a specific cause, the mutual aid networks that keep neighborhoods afloat during social upheavals and natural disasters, the tenants' associations that fight to put limits on the power of landlords, and the workers that organize collective disobedience and walkouts against their workplaces. 

These are fragments of self-activity, moments in which people discover that they can meet their own needs and defend their own interests without waiting for permission from their elected representatives. 

Our task is to take these scattered, partial experiences of struggle and unite them into something that stretches across boundaries. 

We have to organize struggle from individual habits of resistance into a sustained social force for change, a repository of collective experience in the methods of pooling our abilities and converting them into the power to accomplish change. 

Only once this happens can our self-activity begin to take shape into a political movement fighting for a law that everyone will live under, including our most well-funded and well-armed opponents.

How does a movement convert resistance into a united political force? 

Let’s look at how it has already begun to happen in modern politics, even if not always in the hands of the left. 

In the twenty-first century, populism has grown into a widespread challenge to the leadership of the old bureaucratic parties. 

Populist politics, of the left and right alike, makes it possible for leaders to intervene in the public sphere and rise to power without having to first work their way up the chain of command in the corporate and bureaucratic institutions that have the political establishment in their pockets. 

Populist movements bypass the administrative machinery in order to then take command over it with the promise of fixing or transforming it. 

This pattern of populist upsurge is made possible by the very traits of populism that people point to in order to brand the phenomenon as based in irrational impulses: the role of charismatic rhetoric that draws on the resentments and hopes of each supporter in maintaining the close contact between leaders and masses, the centrality of bombastic rhetoric and virality over means-tested solutions, and the hostility of populists to expert management of policy. 

What distinguishes these characteristics of populism from the safe and predictable style of politics? 

It isn’t any of the particular policies that populists vow to enact in their campaigns. We’ve all seen how many times those turn out to be empty promises once a populist enters office and has to manage and maintain the institutions of administrative specialists instead of venting the discontent of the masses at them. 

What makes populism distinct from other forms of politics is that it openly embraces the “us versus them” nature of partisanship. Its logic always opposes the People against an Establishment. 

The People can be as small as 30% of the population or as big as the entire world’s population. 

The People can be as exclusive as a future master race or as inclusive as everyone on earth. 

The Establishment can be as specific as a particular despised politician or the entire power structure of the globe. 

The Establishment can be targeted for failing to do its job or for the very fact of its being an Established monopoly power.

The People of populism does not just mean the People of a Constitution. Sometimes, the People even shred through a Constitution. Theirs is a bond of feeling more than it is a contractual system. 

The deeper significance of this is that populism is a politics based in the group bond between supporters, which extends far beyond the individual policy demands or electoral campaigns and into a shared language of conviction and a common experience of struggle in pursuit of their desires. 

Populism borrows the network forms of organization that we already practice every day. You are already doing it by accessing this article online—I think it’s safe to assume that you didn’t learn about this magazine from a mainstream media outlet, a university, or some other institution. 

In twenty-first century populism, the charismatic leader plugs directly into their audience of supporters through the internet, bypassing the layers of official institutional mediation—party machines, donors, lobbyists, the mainstream media, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO), diplomatic networks—the things that are normally required to campaign for a political movement. 

Segment V.A. Populism is a democracy of sentiment   

In the direct engagement of populism, there is a temptation for the followers to lose themselves in the charisma of the leader (which we sometimes describe as “parasocial bonding”) because it feels fast, direct, and responsive in a way that the older bureaucratic apparatuses never were. 

Populists should be careful not to mistake the leader for the movement. 

No one is coming to save everyday people. Not even the leaders that they elevate to power. 

When a movement perceives its leaders as the ones who have made it, it underestimates its own abilities. 

Whatever a movement’s leaders turn out to be, they will only ever be what its People, collectively, demand them to become and make of them. 

If the leader becomes just another face of the Establishment and its institutions, it means that the movement has failed to exercise its power over them and become lost in enemy territory, to the tentacles of monopoly.

We are familiar with the fact that European Christians came to North America to flee religious persecution. But why are we taught about the Puritans, who were only a more extreme version of England’s mainstream, and not the Anabaptists, who survived mass murder in moments like the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572? Perhaps it is because these figures of our nation’s past might teach us some lessons in how to resist tyranny. 

The Huguenot tradition of free association and popular sovereignty can offer us much insight today. Day after day, in the operations of ICE, the police, and the military, we see that people collaborate with evil out of their fear and personal weakness. This makes me think of the lesson taught by Étienne de la Boétie in his Discourse on Voluntary Servitude (1577): Everything that they do is everyone’s doing, the good and the bad. 

Oppression and evil persist because everyone allows them to. Tyrants rise when people no longer know how to exercise their freedom. So let’s learn a little personal responsibility. Each of us can only learn to help ourselves if we act together. 

Sometimes we might think that sticking to what we know we can accomplish is the best way to ensure success. We overestimate failure as always marking a movement for death. In reality, trying for the greatest possible goal and falling short can be an educational experience in how to best exercise our own abilities. 

Admitting failure, reflecting on it, and then trying something new to meet the challenges on the road of a life in the pursuit of more life is the way that something grows. 

The same attitude should govern our approach to fighting for reforms. 

Radical interventions in the politics of institutions—whether in the form of electoral campaigns or protest movements making demands—should not just be focused on the art of the possible, balancing the budget, or smoothing out all inefficiencies to create the perfect system. 

People’s lives are not buttons on a screen or data on a spreadsheet. 

Perfection is always imaginary and impossible, more useful as a yardstick for the successes and failures of systems than the overall wellbeing of everyone. 

Good government would mean freeing more time in our lives and opening a bigger space in society for activities beyond work and consumption, especially voluntary associations directed towards accomplishing specific goals and building the world that we want to see as a reality around us. 

While funding something like a social center or free public transportation may seem absurd and wasteful by capitalist logic, it expands the arena of society dedicated to associating with others as an end in itself. 

Section V.A.a. How things go wrong 

Regular people are often tempted to see each of our partial victories, which improve the conditions of our everyday lives, as already our ultimate victory, our achievement of the power to govern the world according to our principles. This desire for easy victories can become a relinquishment of our own power if we are not careful. 

The elite are adept in the means available to them to integrate partial victories into the same old world, using the illusion of free spontaneity, the temptation of settling with the little things, and the ache to return to normal in order to tighten their control over us. 

If we look into the pre-history of the current populist surge, we can see one example of how this has been achieved. 

The horizontal, decentralized forms of organization that the democratic movements of the twentieth century and the millennium used to escape hierarchy and create the conditions for everyone to participate in politics have since been integrated into the business world that we struggle to subject to popular power. 

Modern management systems now delegate authority throughout their sprawling supply chains, allowing elites to run entire companies through algorithms that manage everyone at the same time rather than a small layer of foremen who can only pay attention to a few groups of people at a time. 

The flexibility of modern work, which was once a central demand of radical movements in the 1960s-1970s, is now the exact reason for the growing precarity of workers. 

Anyone can be slotted into practically any job. 

Workers are expected to manage themselves and take on a constantly shifting list of tasks. 

People working to enrich service platforms on starvation wages are legally classified as “independent contractors” and excluded from the protections set aside for employees. 

Amazon's delivery drivers and DoorDash’s fleets of gig workers are horizontal in form and despotic in substance. 

Ownership over wealth and power is more concentrated than ever, and yet the actual terrain of work, housing, communication, and leisure are so decentralized and fragmented that there isn’t any one single institution that political movements can take command over and achieve power over all the others.

I don’t point this out to make you feel hopeless. Rather, this new regime of power demonstrates to us just how brittle and downright wasteful the neoliberal state and its breakfast club of corporations have actually become. 

The established order is dependent on borrowing our own creative solutions to the problems that life poses to us and hollowing them out into sources of more profit and power for the few. 

Populism, for all of its limitations, has already begun to demonstrate simpler and more transparent methods of organizing a collective will than anything that the old institutions offer. But it keeps running up against the limits of the political structure it operates within, even while achieving major democratic and republican victories. 

Bound into their servants by the democracy of sentiment, a revolutionary populist leader can even cross the lines of ethnicity, culture, and color and take on the characteristics of their followers. 

Benito Juárez, a Zapotec lawyer, was able to become the father of the mestizo nationalist pantheon of Mexican nationalism by fighting without compromise for the abolition of peonage, the rule of law, and equality before the law. 

Abraham Lincoln has meant much the same for African Americans and the multiracial democracy of America for his fight to achieve the abolition of chattel slavery, equality before the law, and the unity of many in the common good of a democratic republic.  

Both of Lincoln and Juárez were the vehicles of a populist democracy of sentiments in spite of their deepest personal failings—from the Native assimilationist elements of the land reform offered by the 1856 Ley Lerdo, to the nuclear familial proletarianization of resistant freedpeople carried out by the Army and the Freedman’ Bureau. 

When the sustained fight for a multiracial democracy of the poor from below falters, we are left with multiracial imperialism. It comes with its own populist twin, our inverted mirror image—the multiracial fascism of “We the People.”  

This dialectic is not one-way. The experiences of the U.S. Civil War and the Mexican War of the Reform illustrate that the pitfalls of charismatic authority contain the seeds of an all-inclusive democracy. But populism can achieve its promise only through the sustained struggle of the millions—Lincoln could only be resurrected by the Civil Rights movement, and Juárez could only be revived by the Mexican Revolution. 

The masses must take in the voices of their martyrs for their own faces to take on the shapes of heroes. 

A populist movement that falls into easy habits loses the creativity of its originality. A decadent populism’s efforts to unite people into a collective experience become tethered to individual candidates, obnoxious attention-seeking behavior, the narrow rhythm of mainstream media election cycles, and the capture of movement discourse by the loudest and most well-funded voices. 

The types of populist movements that fall into these habits, like Make America Great Again (MAGA), may have impulse, intuition, and power, but they do not fill their desires in with understanding, reason, or strategy. 

The impromptu and narrowly self-interested elite leadership of this sort of populism constrains its momentum within the limits of focus set by institutions and their timelines. It’s just like the way that makeshift fencing keeps the running bulls of Spain from stampeding into any destinations other than the bullring where they are to be killed. 

Mr. Jacob Chansley, the QAnon Shaman himself, found this out when President Trump abandoned his allies to the Feds after MAGA’s January 6th, 2021 coup attempt failed. Many of the J6 rioters will still not learn any lessons from this, since Trump offered the compensation of impunity when he pardoned around 1,500 of them just after his inauguration in January of 2025. 

Many of these veterans of MAGA have sought out employment in ICE, the fugitive slave catchers of the 2020s. They have come to make up a great multiracial throng in a Gestapo that terrorizes the nation with raids and camps. ICE have even organized a First Peoples tracking unit on the southern border known as the Shadow Wolves. The unit is led by Tohono O’odham agents—the people of a nation which is bisected by the very border that they are employed to police. 

In MAGA, we can find such strange inversions of things into their opposites! I would even dare to suggest that there is a utopian element in this utopian democracy of modern fascism. I am no Trumpian—I have opposed him since 2015. I only ask that you try to understand the deeper significance of this populist restoration.  

The democracy of sentiment falls under monopoly control when its members accept the monopolists as their representatives and masters. This elite constraint sharpens a growing pain typical of newly emergent mass movements: narrowness of ambitions. 

The emptiest of populisms simply vent people’s frustrations at the symptoms of a system without ever daring to suggest doing away with the system itself. As a populism slows down and becomes sclerotic, these morbid symptoms grow. 

Every populist upsurge suffers from a tendency for the shared sentiments of the movement to harden into a cult of the leaders who set the agenda with their rhetoric and followers who learn to repeat whatever the leaders say and carry it out as a command. 

The movement becomes focused primarily on maintaining itself against its enemies and entropy. 

This was also the greatest pitfall of twentieth century Communism, which became focused on maintaining garrisoned states that dedicated their collective work to competing in a Cold War with their capitalist enemies. 

The self-aggrandizing nature of Communist leaders, the conformist mood of their followers, and the growth of disputes among factions over how to manage their strategies in geopolitics gradually converted the self-preservation of the Communists into sectarianism with each other. 

In the Communist case and modern populism alike, mass identification with the leader becomes stronger as the group bond hardens into a work team focused on the single-minded task of survival, and then it sabotages itself when it hits the limits of its solidarity with other people. 

A movement that begins by teaching people to think and act beyond tired old stereotypes can just as easily end by teaching them to “stand back and stand by.”[26] Their leaders could become a new manager that commands them to wait for instructions, to obey orders, and to hold on to sloganeering like a safety blanket instead of adapting themselves to new conditions. 

This problem is an old phenomenon. Read the Friedrich Schiller poem “Ode to Joy” that the fourth movement of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is set to, then listen to the music again. That orchestration is one of the first modern critiques of the dialectic of great revolutions inverting into triumphant restorations.

If it slips into this pitfall, populism retreats into a logic of substitutional representation in which the many delegate their judgment to the few, who become more focused on maintaining their own control over the movement than on strengthening the momentum itself. 

This is well illustrated by the current position of President Donald Trump, who has grown indifferent to alienating his followers and now focuses his waking hours on converting the old institutions into venues for self-serving pageantry.

Section V.A.b. How to make things right and keep power 

How does a movement keep the energy of a populist upsurge from going out with a whimper? 

Only the conscious weaponization of the group bond for the power struggle can assure victory for populism. 

This would maintain a link between the partial victories and the ultimate victory by transforming the shared experience of support for a leader, who promises to satisfy many demands, into a struggle for the rule of the movement faction over the world, destined to be remade in its own image. 

Commitment to a revolution can motivate the movement supporters to continue exercising their own agency, pooling their time and resources together for the sake of establishing their permanent presence in society and setting out on the long road to power. 

When populist followers interpret the rhetoric of their charismatic leaders their own way and act on it accordingly, they are already seizing on a spark of originality and independence. 

This spark can then be fanned into a flame when the movement begins to convert the rhetoric that unites them into a common bond of sentiment into a concrete program for power that has a clear meaning for their tactics and strategy. 

The movement must adopt a partisan spirit, seizing its own place in the struggle for power between competing factions, each with their own favored vision for society, and constantly struggling to achieve authority over all of the others. 

People can only understand the concrete meaning of what they want by fighting to make it a reality. They must direct their hearts and their minds towards the new world. 

To achieve reality requires every participant in a movement to take on the responsibility of learning, again and again, from moment to moment, to act for themselves and together with others in one moment, and to reflect on the meaning, prospects, and limits of their struggle.

Might makes right. But right is not all might. Right must also convince and inspire masses in the millions in order for it to become a reality for everyone.

Segment V.B. Would you rather own nothing and be happy? 

You cannot achieve knowledge and freedom without struggle. To believe anything else is to voluntarily accept slavery. Without a struggle for change and the organization of our truth-seeking efforts into associations that are autonomous from the norms of established institutions, Ideology sets in. 

Italian Marxist organizer Paolo Virno already warned us in 2004 that, if left under the control of monopoly capital, the “publicness without a public sphere” characteristic of the Internet would fail to be reborn as the “political community” of a “radically new form of democracy” and devolve into the “unchecked proliferation of hierarchies as groundless as they are thriving.”[27] 

We have seen just what this means in the petty censoriousness of Human Resources (HR) department moralism, the obnoxious hierarchies of faces and fans in influencerdom, the racially biased incarceration of millions, and the violent terrorization of undocumented immigrants by the very children of immigrants themselves. Many of the ICE agents are even latinos who speak English with heavier accents than those they kidnap! What Virno describes is what I have indicated in American history under the name of Baconism. 

Any Ideology that pretends that it has superseded all partisanship is a totalitarianism of monopolists posing as a true democracy. 

German-Jewish writer Walter Benjamin continued the thread of this line of thought in 1935, under the shadow of Nazi terror, by pointing to the fact that the “growing proletarianization of modern man and the increasing formation of masses are two aspects of the same process. Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves.”[28] 

Benjamin describes a decadent element of Bacon-style populism: its restriction of the democracy of sentiments, which can only continue spreading like a prairie fire if it tears up the fences. Without a great movement of Metacoms and Diggers, Tecumsehs and Chartists, Ghost Dancers and unionists, we will continue to suffer under the tyrannical “publicness without a public sphere.” We see this totalitarian tendency in internet mobs and hate campaigns all the time today. We’re all broke and angry, tied up by the emotional manipulation of algorithms, and taking our frustration out in all the wrong ways. 

How can the modern masses take power and strengthen multiracial democracy in one movement? Only a populist upsurge that fights against the monopoly power for more free time and space for all and has its heart of hearts set on communism can accomplish this. 

Part VI. Peace means respecting the rights of others

The entire revolutionary process could be completely peaceful if the elite, the establishment, reactionaries, and other opposing factions did not put up stubborn resistance against it. 

How peaceful or violent the process of birthing a new democracy would be is entirely up to its enemies. 

If the established elites make it impossible to bring revolution about by peace, then it will have to be achieved by the sword. 

If it comes to that, we need not mourn. Revolutionary violence would be a transformative force against the repressive conservatism of the old world. 

The first would become the last, and the last would become the first. In the heat of the battle to reconstruct democracy, the revolutionaries would be reborn as new people. 

The participants that a movement draws in can reveal quite a bit about the nature of a movement, whether it appeals to them through the emotional appeal of its vision or the pragmatic improvement of their conditions. 

Historically, we communists have understood our movement as the most ambitious of the many struggles for democracy waged by the regular people who have to work to make a living. 

This is based on our conviction that the struggle of propertyless masses for political power can transform into a revolutionary challenge to capitalism as a whole. 

This process starts from a variety of things in the short run. 

Sometimes, it begins with something negative—a refusal. Think of the street uprisings and neighborhood watches that have confronted the bureaucratic harassment and terrorism that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and police departments have inflicted on the rest of society. 

Those who resist the modern-day fugitive slave catchers are implicitly posing the demand for a right for everyone to live beyond the totalitarian whims of administrative authority. Demanding something to leave you alone, fleeing from it, or forcing it to leave other people alone is a starting point for seeking the growth of a world of our own, where many people’s worlds can fit. 

Segment VI.A. The new democracy 

As a movement clarifies the meaning of its struggles and begins to fight to achieve a new way of doing things, it begins to develop its own positive hopes into a law that could govern society. 

If people began to demand that Amazon be nationalized and made into cooperatively owned and operated infrastructure run for the sake of workers and consumers alike, it would signal democratic struggle blossoming into a revolution of the common good. 

Decision making power and wealth are currently monopolized in the hands of a few, even though we all contribute to it. When crowds of people struggle to change the conditions of their own lives, they also challenge any status quo of elitism and monopoly power. 

The victory of these movements, meaning their achievement of decision making power over the organization of society, would not mean that everything would be taken over by bureaucrats, but that participatory democracy would become the rule for all parts of society. 

This could actually lead to a reduction of bureaucracy. In the capitalist system a huge mass of people depend on the state for employment, assistance, and subsidies, leading to a waste of time and resources. That waste could be curtailed if we focused our collective efforts on meeting our own needs instead of keeping society predictable and increasing shareholder value.

In a liberal representative democracy, it is out of the reach of most citizens to address these problems. This can only be counteracted by something that draws on the best elements of democracy by going beyond democracy—a struggle for the free distribution of commonly created wealth, everything for everyone, all for all, even with care for the land, all of the animals, the birds in the air, the fish in the water, and the planet as a whole. 

The path to ameliorate the abuses of monopoly power through democratic struggle must lead to a self-governing cooperative commonwealth in order to succeed against all odds. 

That would mean changing the meaning of the common good as we know it. 

Today, it is the abstract "general interest" of the state, defined by a handful of elites (elected and otherwise) on behalf of everyone else, measured in statistics and polls rather than expressed in convincing rhetoric. 

Tomorrow, it could be the multifaceted common good of a participatory association in which everyone has their share of power over organizing society's activities for the good of each and all. 

Segment VI.B. Declaration 

We the People have had enough. Let’s declare our independence from the bad old world and assemble together to constitute ourselves into the new one. We must compel the pharaohs of capital to let our people go. 

They have reduced government to a board meeting for the Fortune 500 and their friends in the Epstein files; We demand that society take money out of politics and seize power for the people. 

They have passed women and children around like toys to be used and abused; We demand that the people take the power to abuse away from the bosses and subject all pedophiles and rapists to the communities of their victims as their judges, juries, and executioners, conducting themselves in accordance with revolutionary law.

They have put citizenship behind price tags and bureaucratic hoops; we would extend citizenship and suffrage to all and only deny it to the exploiters and oppressors of the people. 

They have kidnapped our neighbors, relatives, and friends and tortured them in dark dungeons all over the country; We demand that the people detain and publicly try the ICE and police terrorists who are attacking the most vulnerable members of our society. 

They have assassinated Ali Khamenei and kidnapped Nicolás Maduro; We demand that the people arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, deliver him over to the people of Gaza to be tried, and assist Palestinians in imposing the unbending rule of law on all Zionist terrorists. 

They have worked to usurp all legal limits to the power of capitalists, bureaucrats, and fascists; We demand that the people restore the rule of law by putting the government of the common good in the hands of the masses. 

They play with our lives for the whims of businesses and bankers; We demand that the people declare the banks public property and compel all capitalists to give their assets and information over to society. 

They have stolen our wages, forced the hardest working to accept poverty, and made working to make a living into a conditional privilege; We demand that the people seize hold over key industries, compensate all workers equivalent to their contribution, and direct their work to meeting everyone’s needs. 

They have put most of our resources into pointless industries and wasted time and effort selling cheap plastic slop; We demand that the people put our efforts together towards making good jobs and quality goods freely accessible to all.

They have driven entire species of our fellow animals to extinction, rendered entire ecosystems uninhabitable, and carved up the entire earth and its resources into property to be used for wasteful and destructive industries; We demand that the people conserve our planet’s beauty, responsibly steward its wellbeing, and treat it as the usufructory inheritance of all things. 

They have made housing and healthcare into commodities and gambled with the lives of millions; We demand that the people make these fundamentals of wellbeing a basic right for all members of society regardless of how much money they can make or deservingness they can demonstrate. 

They have made debt a whip to discipline and punish the poor; We demand that the people cancel all debts and drive the creditors from the temples of democracy. 

They have condemned the poor and despised of the tent cities, ghettos, and reservations of the world to abandonment and death; We demand that the people invite each and all to a dignified life of self-determination in our multiracial and multinational cooperative commonwealth. 

They have made the youth into the property of their parents, the subjects of bureaucratic tyranny, and the victims of adult exploitation; We demand that the people set aside a fund of social wealth for the wellbeing of all children and free the youth to decide their own destiny, organize their own common affairs, and voluntarily associate among themselves. 

They have reduced our schools into businesses and holding pens and mis-educated our children with lies and slander; We demand that the people commit to the polytechnical and participatory education of the next generation in thinking and acting for their own betterment as the highest priority for achieving a better future for all.

They have made maternity leave and retirement conditional on employment, reduced the dependent disabled to destitution, and thrown the whole burden of keeping society alive to caretakers; We demand that the people organize equal and shared cooperative domestic work, set aside a mutual fund of social wealth for the care of all, socialize the care industry, and ameliorate the burden of care by persuading all into sharing the work of caretaking.

They have given agriculture over to plantation businesses that exploit their poor and vulnerable workers under a veritable reign of terror in the name of maximizing their own commercial power; We demand that the people enact land reform, provide for the wellbeing, organization, and civic participation of farmworkers, and organize agriculture to meet the needs of all, governing the earth in close, equal, and mutually beneficial cooperation with indigenous peoples and their relatives. 

They have wasted society’s wealth on pensions and military equipment for the petty tyrants in police departments and set aside millions of acres for disappearing people in prisons to avoid dealing with their problems; We demand that the people rationalize the justice system and massively reduce its cost by streamlining it to the investigation of the social problems that result in dysfunction, the prevention of crimes with improvements to society, and the reintegration of criminals into society wherever possible. 

They have directed billions of dollars, millions of jobs, and thousands of tonnes of resources to maintaining a bloated military that occupies the whole world with its bases and scorches foreign countries by land, sea, and air; We demand that the people redirect this labor force to publicly beneficial infrastructure projects and organize a militia made up of all the people that would train in seasonal gymnastic camps, with attendance rotating throughout the population, spending peacetime in disaster relief and social service projects.  

They have condemned millions to cruel and needless deaths in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Iran, Palestine, Venezuela, and Cuba; We demand that the people only turn our weapons against the monopolists and imperialists who commit crimes against the millions of poor all over the world. 

They have rendered international law a fiction that only becomes a reality in service of the wealthy and powerful countries that exploit everyone else; We demand that the peoples of the world instate an international rule of law for the common good. 

We can still make some compromises for the sake of unity. I can even think of a couple of dangerous immigrants I’d like to see locked away from society: Boer baboon Elon Musk and German jackass Peter Thiel, two Epstein class Enemies of the People.

Would this be a dictatorship? No more than the corporate-controlled world we are already living under. For the overwhelming majority of people, it would be a new democracy enjoying a great flourishing of public life. It would mean the rule of the law of the common good for all people, grounded in the mutually beneficial friendship of all peoples. Such a world could dedicate more of its efforts to making everything better for everyone instead of wasting millions of lives in pointless toil and sadistic slaughter. 

Segment VI.C. Who cares about anyone else?

I am well aware that most people today would rather keep their heads down and settle for immediate improvements to their conditions rather than shooting for the stars without any guarantee of success. 

I don’t believe that the two have to be directly at odds. Everyday hopes meet wild political ambitions all the time in protest movements and populist upsurges. People must learn to want much more out of their own lives if the free society of communism is ever to become the inspiration of a mass movement. 

Clamoring for easy victories can end in people raising a white flag of surrender in everyday life just as much as it does in politics. Those who ache for more freedom in their own lives must also resist the temptations of consumerism, which measures the successful improvement of life by how many cheap comforts society manages to deliver to our hands. 

We should never abandon our desires for lasting quality and originality in the name of maximizing quantity and status. 

This doesn’t mean that communism is an ascetic cult that can only be practiced by a righteous sect cut off from the rest of humanity. A communism that glorifies poverty misses the forest for the trees. 

The point of our movement is to fight for a good and dignified life for all, to be made possible by mutually beneficial sharing in wealth and self-directed voluntary association in politics. 

Section VI.C.a. A lesson in ethics  

The corrective to empty consumerism is not a sacrificial cult, but a collective education in ethics. We are already building a school for that in one of the most important arenas of our present-day political struggles: anti-imperialism and anti-racism. 

Imperialism and racism recruit people to its side by appealing to their worst impulses—apathy, fear, greed, and arrogance. Today, with anti-immigration themes predominating, racist imperialists expect us to hate immigrants for moving to our country in search of a better life while millions of us are forced, at a much smaller scale, to commute and move just to seek employment. 

Some racist imperialists might be motivated by real grievances over the structure of modern work, but their demands against immigrants are a blind force of hatred that serves monopolists rather than a liberating light of truth that emancipates all. 

Like a bloody ritual sacrifice, the politics of racism and imperialism satisfy the herd instinct to run from personal responsibility and into the arms of lazy conformity at the same time that it seduces the individual impulse to embark on self-righteous crusades of tyranny against others. 

The freedom that racism and imperialism offer to people is a partial freedom that stunts and distorts them into beasts of prey that can only evaluate life through the zero-sum game of enslaving or being enslaved. 

Imperialist racism is a decadent, servile attitude towards life. 

If you enlist yourself to carve up the earth into territory to be exploited, you will surrender into a voluntary slave for whoever gets you yours. 

If our horizon stops at being well fed and well supplied for ourselves, then whoever supplies us can also discipline us, and can take back whatever they once gave to us. 

Anti-imperialism and anti-racism, by contrast, force each of us to think beyond the prejudices of our own immediate satisfaction and struggle to transform solidarity and self-determination into a law for the social organization of the entire world. 

Even many of you who feel attached to the country that you consider your home can still understand these principles on a gut level. 

Anti-imperialism and anti-racism don’t have to mean obsessive hatred for the culture of one’s own country or vicarious patriotism for the “enemy” nation. It can begin at as practical of a concern as de-arresting immigrants from ICE custody and placing the modern day Gestapo agents under citizens’ arrest. 

If people in just a few cities began such experiments in the civic ethics of solidarity today, we would already be making great strides along the path to a new democracy. 

The broader horizon of the struggle against imperialism, whenever it reaches the point of seriously considering its own ultimate victory, is a world organized according to the dignity of each rather than discarding the vulnerable as scrap meat to the cannibalistic orgies of the elite. 

A world beyond racism and imperialism would be a world where the relationships between communities are based in mutually beneficial voluntary association rather than unequal and unfree dependency. 

A movement that fails to extend its solidarity beyond the convenience of its own borders will never learn to elevate itself into the law of a new civilization.

We need a strong sense of what is right to fight against the odds and in defiance of the ideological habits that we are indoctrinated into from cradle to grave.

Communism is not about absorbing all individuals into a hiveminded blob, collectivizing toothbrushes, or exterminating all elites. 

Communism is an experience of struggling for a free society against a world that claims to have already achieved the height of freedom. 

Section VI.D. Confessions of a selfish communist

You might be wondering what’s in it for me. Maybe you feel uneasy—would we communists just pull out the rug from under you once we have power? 

You may have heard communists insist that we are fighting for a reasonable world that prioritizes the “greater good.” I will be the first to admit that we are also unreasonable and individualist by standing for something currently marginal and persecuted. 

Isn’t that the meaning of being an independent spirit who fights for their convictions? 

I want communism because I want to have the freedom to be selfish in a healthy and mature way. 

We communists actually think that everyone else is too generous to billionaires, bureaucrats, and politicians. Others are too collectivist towards those who don’t want to live life for the sake of making money. 

A world that expects us to toil for others without stopping until we finally exhale our last breath and die is intolerably conformist and authoritarian.  

We communists do not set our own interests aside for the sake of anyone else. 

We do not just go along with the prejudices of common sense. 

We are against the power to discriminate against people according to the color of their skin, their creed, their origins, their gender, or any other mere circumstance of their existence. 

We dream of a world where each and all will be judged only by the content of their character. We do not rate peace as more important than life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. 

We engage with this “We the People” business of democracy in order to go beyond it and towards a good life for ourselves. 

There is no contradiction in this: we are communists because we are individualists. We believe in freedom and independence, the flourishing of every person as the condition of a truly good life for each and all. 

If you want to work for a world that is actually good for everyone rather than just the few, then then you might be more like us than you think. 

No one can make the leap for you. You must do it yourself—but you will not be doing it alone. I'll be there with you, and so will millions of other people all over the world who fight for the freedom of each, the good of all, and the harmony of everyone.

[1] Donald Trump, “President Trump Delivers Remarks at Mount Rushmore, Jul. 3, 2026,” The White House, July 3, 2026, https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/president-trump-delivers-remarks-at-mount-rushmore-jul-3-2026/.

[2] Tecumseh, “Tecumseh’s Speech to Governor William Herbert Harrison [August 11, 1810],” in The Story of Tecumseh, ed. Norman S. Gurd (William Briggs, 1912), pp. 85-86.

[3] Donald Trump, “Remarks by President Trump at the 2020 Salute to America,” Speech, The White House, July 4, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-2020-salute-america/.

[4] Rick Perlstein, “Exclusive: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy,” The Nation, November 13, 2012, https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/exclusive-lee-atwaters-infamous-1981-interview-southern-strategy/.

[5] “Nixon Adviser Admits War on Drugs Was Designed to Criminalize Black People,” Equal Justice Initiative, March 25, 2016, https://eji.org/news/nixon-war-on-drugs-designed-to-criminalize-black-people/.

[6] Lewis F. Powell, Jr., “The Memo,” August 23, 1971, Lewis F. Powell Papers, Powell Memorandum: Attack On American Free Enterprise System, Washington and lee University of Law Scholarly Commons, p. 30 https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=powellmemo.

[7] Jimmy Carter, January 19, 1978 State of the Union Address, State of the Union Addresses of Jimmy Carter, Project Gutenberg., https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5045/5045-h/5045-h.htm.

[8] “‘Welfare Queen’ Becomes Issue in Reagan Campaign,” The New York Times (New York, New York), February 15, 1976, https://www.nytimes.com/1976/02/15/archives/welfare-queen-becomes-issue-in-reagan-campaign-hitting-a-nerve-now.html.

[9] Ron Moskowitz, “Professor Sees Peril in Education” San Francisco Chronicle (San Francisco, California), October 30, 1970. 

[10] George H. W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” January 29, 1991, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint-session-the-congress-the-state-the-union-1.

[11] Bill Clinton, “Text of President Clinton’s Announcement on Welfare Legislation,” The New York Times (New York, New York), August 1, 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/08/01/us/text-of-president-clinton-s-announcement-on-welfare-legislation.html.

[12] Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “Speech Delivered At The First (Inaugural) All-Russia Congress of Mineworkers,” April 1, 1920, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/apr/01.htm.

[13] Jacob Weisberg, “W.’s Greatest Hits,” Slate, January 12, 2009, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/01/the-top-25-bushisms-of-all-time.html.

[14] Joseph Stepansky, “‘Freudian Slip’: Bush Decries ‘Invasion of Iraq’ – Not Ukraine,” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2022, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/19/freudian-slip-bush-decries-invasion-of-iraq-not-ukraine.

[15] Barack Obama, “Transcript of Barack Obama’s Victory Speech,” NPR, November 5, 2008, https://www.npr.org/2008/11/05/96624326/transcript-of-barack-obamas-victory-speech.

[16] These anti-Communists turn the contingent outcomes of specific political conflicts into a law of history that applies to any and all social revolutions. Since this essay is not primarily dedicated to debunking anti-Communist propaganda, I will provide some reading recommendations for those who wish to see past the one-dimensional framework of these criticisms and better understand the history of twentieth century Communism 

For the general history of the Soviet Union, see Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, 2nd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2011). For the personality cult that arose around Joseph Stalin, see Sarah Davies and James Harris, Stalin’s World: Dictating the Soviet Order (Yale University Press, 2014). For the Soviet famine of 1930-1933, sometimes referred to as the Holodomor, see R. W. Davies and Stephen G. Wheatcroft, The Years of Hunger: Soviet Agriculture, 1931-1933 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). For the role of the Soviet Union in global politics, see Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge University Press, 2014) and Oscar Sanchez-Sibony, The Soviet Union and the Construction of the Global Market: Energy and the Ascent of Finance in Cold War Europe, 1964-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2023).

For the general history of the People’s Republic of China, see Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (The Free Press, 1999). For the famine following the Great Leap Forward, see Yang Jisheng, Tombstone: The Great Chinese Famine, 1958-1962, trans. Stacy Mosher and Jian Guo (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). For the Cultural Revolution, see Yiching Wu, The Cultural Revolution at the Margins: Chinese Socialism in Crisis (Harvard University Press, 2014). For the suppression of participatory democratic politics and the rise of bureaucratic consumer capitalism in China, see Ralph Ruckus, The Communist Road to Capitalism: How Social Unrest and Containment Have Pushed China’s (R)Evolution Since 1949 (PM Press, 2021). 

For the role of regular people and neighborhood-based democracy in the Cuban Revolution, see Steve Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the Guerrillas’ Victory (Monthly Review Press, 2016). For an overall history of revolutionary Cuba, see Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution, 2nd ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 2015). For the twenty-first revival of local participatory democracy in Cuba and other Caribbean countries, see Arnold August, Cuba and Its Neighbors: Democracy in Motion (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). 

For the events that led up to the famine and genocide in Democratic Kampuchea, see Michael Vickery, Cambodia: 1975-1982 (South End Press, 1984). For the genocide committed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, see James A. Tyner, From Rice Fields to Killing Fields: Nature, Life, and Labor under the Khmer Rouge (Syracuse University Press, 2017). 

For the rise of North Korea, see Suzy Kim, Everyday Life in the North Korean Revolution, 1945-1950 (Cornell University Press, 2013). For the history and politics behind the personality cult in North Korea, see Dae-Sook Suh, Kim Il Sung: The North Korean Leader (Columbia University Press, 1988). For the nature of modern North Korea, see Felix Abt, A Capitalist in North Korea: My Seven Years in the Hermit Kingdom (Tuttle Publishing, 2014).

[17] Ashley Nellis and Sabrina C. Pearce, Mass Incarceration Trends (The Sentencing Project, 2026), https://www.sentencingproject.org/reports/mass-incarceration-trends/; Jacob Kang-Brown and Peter Wagner, Following the Money of Mass Incarceration 2026 (Prison Policy Initiative, 2026), https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/money2026.html.

[18] Vyacheslav Molotov, “The International Situation, the Growing War Menace and the Soviet Policy,” The Communist International, February 1936, Marxists Internet Archive, p. 247.

[19] Nikolai Bukharin, “Last Plea—Evening Session March 12,” March 12, 1938, Marxists Internet Archive, https://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1938/trial/3.htm.

[20] Michael Parenti, “Stalin’s Fingers,” in Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism (City Lights Publisher, 1997), pp. 76-86.

[21] Kristen R. Ghodsee, “What to Expect When You’re Expecting Exploitation: On Motherhood,” in Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism: And Other Arguments for Economic Independence (Bold Type Books, 2018), pp. 49-75. 

[22] Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World (Public Affairs, 2020), pp. 155-156.

[23] Ward Churchill and Jim Vanderwall, eds., The COINTELPRO Papers: Documents From the FBI’s Secret Wars Against Domestic Dissent (South End Press, 1990),  p. 1.

[24] “Interview,” This Week, performed by Margaret Thatcher and Llew Gardner, Thames Television, February 5, 1976, Margaret Thatcher Foundation, https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/102953.

[25] Peter Thiel and Blake Masters, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future (Crown Business, 2014), p. 25. 

[26] Kathleen Ronayne and Michael Kunzelman, “Trump to Far-Right Extremists: ‘Stand Back and Stand By,’” AP, September 30, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-race-and-ethnicity-donald-trump-chris-wallace-0b32339da25fbc9e8b7c7c7066a1db0f. 

[27] Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life, trans. Isabella Bertoletti et al. (Semiotext(e), 2004), pp. 40-41.

[28] Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, by Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (Schocken Books, 2007, p. 241.