BONUS EPISODE – WHY CAPITALISTS MAKE THE BEST COMMUNISTS

Hello, and welcome to Relevant History! I’m Dan Toler, and I want to talk about Communism! Yes, this is another bonus episode, where I give my take on a topic tangentially related to history, but a quick note on upcoming regular episodes before we begin. I’m currently working on a standalone episode covering the life of Mithridates VI of Pontus, also known as the Poison King. After that, we’ll delve into the Unifications of Italy and Germany, which I’ll be covering as a single story arc because the two events happen at the same time and many of the events and characters overlap. I thought the Mithridates episode would only take a couple of weeks, but after spending six months in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, it’s been hard to get in the right headspace. I also took a promotion at work, which has put me on the night shift, disrupted my sleep, and basically turned me into a zombie for about a week. Then I had to take time off to go collect my fiancée from New York and adjust back to days, then back to nights again. Basically, writing has been slow going, so I’m releasing this bonus episode in the meantime. Which of course meant stopping my half-finished Mithridates script and starting this one from scratch, only adding to the gap between episodes. The good news is that when this episode goes live, the next script is already half done. Show notes over – let’s get started!

One of the things I love about history is that it’s full of incongruities – things that wouldn’t seem to go together, but they do. Things like World War II cavalry charges or ancient social welfare systems. These incongruities tell us something about ourselves. World War II cavalry charges tell us something concrete and literal – that different countries often have different levels of technology. Ancient social welfare systems tell us that the poor have always been with us; that as soon as people transitioned from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to what we would call civilization, some number were no longer able to sustain themselves. When I sat down to write this episode, I myself was having an incongruous day. My grandmother had been in hospice care and passed away in the early afternoon, and there were all kinds of family members around. Meanwhile, my sister had planned a bonfire well over a month in advance and had a bunch of friends outside with their kids. So on one side of the house, you had people mourning and the funeral home people collecting the body, while on the other side of the house, you had young families with little kids just brimming with life. It was a weird day, and I didn’t get much writing done. But it did put me in mind of another type of incongruity, and that’s our human tendency to behave in ways that are counterproductive to our stated goals.

This brings us to the topic of today’s episode: Communism. Well, not Communism per se, but the means people use to try and achieve it. And for the purposes of this essay, when I say “Communism,” I mean Communism as generally understood since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, meaning a hypothetical future society where private property is abolished and everybody has what they need because society distributes wealth equally. This distinguishes Communism from Socialism, which is an economic system whereby workers collectively own the means of production. People often conflate the two for a couple of reasons. To begin with, Communism wasn’t very fashionable in some places in the 19th century, so Communists in countries like the United Kingdom called themselves Socialists. But more importantly, the most famous efforts to create Communist societies have used state socialism as a stepping stone. For example, the Soviet Union never claimed to have achieved Communism, which again refers to a hypothetical future egalitarian state. Rather, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics claimed to be a Socialist society that used the power of the state to develop in a Communist direction. And this is the incongruity I want to talk about. Why do people who want to achieve an egalitarian society often use methods that make people poorer and reduce economic production?

        -Now, I don’t want to get too bogged down in the Soviet Union. When evaluating any ideology, it’s easy to cherry pick examples of where that ideology went wrong and use that as an excuse to dismiss the entire ideological package. At the same time, any serious analysis of Communism will have to grapple with the Soviet example, and actually that’s not hard to do.

        -The Soviet Union was founded on Marxist-Leninist principles, meaning the principles written in Marx’s Communist Manifesto and adapted for Russian society by Vladimir Lenin and others. So it looks different from modern 21st century far-left movements, much like modern far-right movements look different from early 20th century monarchist movements. But this old-school far-left political system fails to deliver the utopia it promises, and the great irony is that Marx himself would have predicted it.

        -Karl Marx viewed history as an inevitable series of social revolutions, and this view persists today among a lot of far-leftists, who often criticize their opponents for being on the “wrong side of history.” According to Marx, agrarian and mercantilist societies have inevitably given way to capitalist industrialized societies. And, writing in the 19th century, Marx predicted that the next revolutionary change in society would be from a capitalist industrialized system to a socialist system, where the industrial workers would collectively own the means of production and usher in a new era of egalitarianism.

        -Working in the early 20th century, Lenin had a problem; Russia was not an industrialized capitalist nation-state. It was a mostly-agrarian multi-national empire with tiny modern regions around St. Petersburg and Moscow. Outside of those unique urban centers, particularly Moscow, there was no class of industrial workers to rise up and no means of production to collectively own.

        -So you have this multi-ethnic empire mostly made up of subsistence farmers, and you want to create not just an industrialized system, but a state-directed industrialized system with collective ownership. It’s no wonder you end up with a Stalin, who forces people off of their farms and into urban factories, often being forced to work alongside people from other nationalities who they distrust. Only the iron fist of someone like Stalin can achieve what you’re asking this system to do. Only something like the Holodomor will convince the Ukrainians to go along. Only something like the gulag system will absorb dissident elements.

The Soviet example is not a critique of Communism per se, although it does provide a good lesson in totalitarianism. Nonetheless, Soviet-style state socialism is – bar none – the foremost Communist ideology of the 20th century. Besides the Stalinist Soviet Union, the Maoist Chinese Communists, Fidel Castro’s nationalist Cuban Communists, Tito’s even more nationalist Yugoslav Communists, the short-lived Khmer Rouge, and others implement single-party political systems with complete state control of business and the economy. This system – state socialism – is now considered obsolete in most modern leftist circles. Automation has eliminated most traditional industrial jobs, so the idea of a mass uprising of industrial factory workers is kind of silly. But state socialism is only one type of Communism. Again, Communism – a sort of utopian egalitarian society with no ruling or owning classes – is just the desired end state. There are other Communist ideologies that advocate other paths to get to this desired end state.

        -One of the most popular Communist movements is Anarchism. Now, I should be clear that there are many flavors of Anarchism and not all are Communist in nature, but most Anarchists are really what you would call Anarcho-Communists, which means they desire the same end state as traditional Communists, but favor a different type of revolution. Broadly speaking, Anarchism is opposed to the existence of any kind of social hierarchy, and sees state socialism as fundamentally flawed because it exchanges the old ruling class for a new ruling class – the Communist Party. Anarchists believe that to achieve a Communist end state, you first need to eliminate social hierarchies. Only then, when the social playing field is level, can true democracy function. In this system, free citizens will form local communes, which will band together into larger confederations, and the system will be so popular that the whole world will eventually become one big Communist confederation. To be fair to the Anarcho-Communists, their system has never really been tried. The best example I can come up with is the Ukrainian Anarchist government during the Bolshevik Revolution, which ended up being crushed by the more successful Bolshevik movement. Spanish and Italian Anarchist movements would remain relevant from the 1930s up through as late as the 1950s, but none were ever successful outside of a few local regions.

        -Another type of far-left ideology is libertarian socialism, which is often used as an umbrella term for anything on the libertarian left quadrant of the political compass, including Anarcho-Communism. Because it’s an ill-defined term, there are different types of libertarian socialist movements. For example, many favor common ownership of the means of production, but also believe that workers should be able to compete for better pay, while Anarcho-Communists believe in a strict “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his need” type of policy.

        -One good example of a functioning libertarian socialist society is an Israeli kibbutz or a hunter-gatherer tribe. These are small societies that essentially function as extended family groups, and for this reason, as we’ll see, they’re able to defy some of the negative trends that affect state socialist societies.

        -I should also mention what is NOT Communism. Communism is NOT a society that calls itself “Communist” or “Socialist” but patently is not. A good example is North Korea, which calls itself the “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea,” but has actually been a hereditary dictatorship with a strict social hierarchy since the 1950s. If I found a city-state called “Dan’s Happy Fun Land” where we hold a lottery every Friday and randomly torture someone to death, it’s not a happy or fun place to live, no matter how much I pretend it is. Similarly, just because a country or a movement uses the word “Communist,” “Socialist,” “People’s Republic,” or some other lefty jargon in its name doesn’t automatically make it a left-wing organization. I put modern China in this category, too. China has morphed into a state capitalist system and has been so for decades. So you get the iron-fisted one-party rule of the Communist Party, but private ownership of businesses that are incentivized by massive public subsidies to achieve the Communist Party’s aims. Workers compete with each-other for better wages, which allows for both more inequality and more economic freedom while the Party maintains political control via massive public surveillance and a dystopian social credit score system. It’s less like the Soviet Union and more like a technologically advanced version of Nazi Germany, so it’s a bizarre case and I’ll talk about it more in a few minutes.

        -Finally, I’ll spend a chunk of this episode talking about the current trend of Green Communism, a strategy many proponents are calling “de-growth.” Broadly speaking, this is a movement to freeze or roll back current levels of energy and industrial production, whether for environmental reasons or to create a more egalitarian society. The main underlying assumption of the de-growth movement is that humanity is approaching – or has already passed – the maximum level of material output that Earth’s ecosystem can sustain. Since the current global capitalist model can only function in an environment of endless growth, this is a valid criticism if true, and it’s something I’ll circle back to later on.

What all these flavors of Communism have in common is a desire for re-distribution of wealth, and not only that, but redistribution of wealth within a certain context. What I’m talking about is modern, industrial wealth. Pre-industrial societies have had their own equity movements, like François-Noël Babeuf’s agrarian communist movement that we talked about in my series on the French Revolution. But in these kinds of societies, we’re talking more about cooperative land use and mutual aid for farmers whose crops have failed. There’s not really any industrial output or capital to spread around. The same goes for hunter-gatherer societies. These societies have nothing that we modern, western people would consider “wealth,” and once again, there’s nothing to re-distribute.

        -Within the context we’re talking about – modern, industrialized societies – a disproportionate amount of the industrial output goes to the upper middle class. I’m not talking about money, which disproportionately goes to the fabulously wealthy. I’m talking about usable stuff, like new cars, appliances, electronics, and so on. The upper middle class also tend to own the nicest homes on the nicest properties, again with the exception of the truly wealthy, who may own the nicest homes of all, but who are a tiny percentage of the population. This has made the upper middle class – the bourgeoisie – the most influential slice of society. The upper middle class sets the trends that others follow, is the most educated class, and has an outsized influence in politics. Even in the barely-industrializing societies of Colonial America and Revolutionary France, all but a handful of leading revolutionaries were upper middle class.

        -The same can be said for Karl Marx’s time in 1848, when he wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

        “Each step in the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class. An oppressed class under the sway of the feudal nobility, an armed and self-governing association in the mediaeval commune; here independent urban republic (as in Italy and Germany), there taxable ‘third estate’ of the monarchy (as in France), afterwards, in the period of manufacture proper, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a counterpoise against the nobility, and, in fact, corner-stone of the great monarchies in general, the bourgeoisie has at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political sway. The executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.

        “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.

“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his ‘natural superiors,’ and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous ‘cash payment.’ It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless and indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

         “The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

“The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.

        “The bourgeoisie has disclosed how it came to pass that the brutal display of vigor in the Middle Ages, which Reactionists so much admire, found its fitting complement in the most slothful indolence. It has been the first to show what man's activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has conducted expeditions that put in the shade all former Exoduses of nations and crusades.  

“The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

        “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

         “The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

         “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”

        -Marx begins by praising the bourgeoisie for being revolutionary themselves and creating the industrialized, enlightened world of the nineteenth century. But he says that their entire way of life depends on constant economic expansion, which has replaced personal relationships with financial ones and has encouraged capitalist empires to extend their reach across the globe. Now, I know quoting Marx is a bit passe, and that there are more modern leftist thinkers, but this passage describes modern society just as accurately as nineteenth century society, and its critiques remain as relevant today as they were back then.

        -To steelman Marx’s argument, he objects to mankind being turned into what John Stuart Mill calls homo economicus, a creature whose primary life purpose is to serve as a cash cow for greedy businessman, and whose every action must be monetized to support the bourgeoisie class. I think many of us today can relate. But I think there’s a core misunderstanding at the heart of most far-left thought, and it explains where many of these movements go wrong, and how they actually produce outcomes that push us further from any kind of utopian, egalitarian end state.

I’m talking about the confusion between money – meaning cash, investments, etc. – and usable wealth – by which I mean real estate, vehicles, industrial equipment, consumer goods, and so on. We live in a world where money itself is often treated as a sort of “high score” system, and the people with the highest scores get their faces on magazines and fly private jets to their New Zealand estates and their Swiss business conferences. We hear about people with billions or tens of billions of dollars, while the average American earns in the neighborhood of $40,000 a year. Why not just spread the money around? Because money does not equal usable wealth, and usable wealth is a lot harder to spread around.

        -Imagine you won the lottery. You wake up tomorrow and you hit the $800 million Powerball jackpot. What would you do with your life? Different people will have different answers. Maybe you’d retire. Maybe you’d throw yourself into some kind of non-profit work. Maybe you give a few million dollars to friends and family. It doesn’t really matter. Most people picture themselves living in a nicer house, driving a nicer car, and so on – enjoying the material benefits of their vast wealth. This works just fine. As a matter of fact, it works so well that most lottery winners spend all their money within a few years.

        -Now, imagine a scenario where everyone gets a financial windfall all at once. The President and the Federal Reserve Chair get drunk over lunch and decide to give $10 million – tax-free – to every American citizen. Does every American get to go out and buy a $10 million home? Of course not. Demand for real estate goes up and home prices shoot through the roof, not because there’s some conspiracy against homebuyers but because there are only so many big, beautiful houses on premium lots. It’s an issue of supply, and it’s universal to every society. It’s why most Soviet citizens lived in concrete brutalist apartment blocks, not in dachas on the Baltic coast. It’s why archaeologists can dig up an ancient village, observe that one house is way bigger than the others, and infer that the owner was the village chieftain. The biggest obstacle to an egalitarian economy isn’t the unequal distribution of money, which is just a means of exchange. It’s a shortage of the usable wealth that people want.

        -All of which raises an uncomfortable question. What if usable wealth itself is never enough? Humanity has spent the last 12,000 years improving its material conditions. Our ancestors were hunter-gatherers who ate what they could find and slept under the stars. We live in glass and stainless steel high-rises, and obesity-related diseases now kill more humans annually than starvation. If your bed isn’t infested with lice or bedbugs, it’s more luxurious than that of any medieval king. Despite this huge improvement in living standards, modern people always want more. I think there are two reasons for this.

        -To begin with, there’s the “keeping up with the Joneses” effect, which anyone who’s ever worked in sales will be familiar with. Simply put, we want to own the same stuff as the people around us, and because we’re prone to parasocial behavior, this extends to the people we see on social media and in popular culture. This “stuff accrual” instinct is basic behavior, since nobody wants to look like they’re poorer than their peers. That’s why people will buy designer sneakers even though they’re struggling to pay rent, or lease an expensive car instead of buying an economy car.

-The other issue is the hedonic treadmill. Basically, people have a baseline level of happiness. When we improve our material conditions, that level of happiness temporarily spikes, but then we adapt to those conditions and our happiness level returns to the baseline. If we want to get that spike in satisfaction again, we need to upgrade our material conditions again. That’s how you get people who earn a million dollars a year and still live paycheck to paycheck. No matter how much they earn, they find some new toys to spend it on. This can be true even for people who aren’t super-rich; because technology keeps improving, there’s always some new toy. This year’s flagship smartphone has more bells and whistles than last year’s, so people will buy it whether they need a new phone or not. Next year, another phone will come out, and those same people won’t be content without one. All the while, as we humans accumulate more and more material wealth, we strip our planet of its resources and engage in activities that endanger the entire ecosystem, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t make anyone any happier. Is it time to say “enough is enough,” agree that life is better than it’s ever been, and stop the never-ending growth cycle?

That’s the premise behind the modern de-growth movement, which is the current flavor du jour of Communism. The movement’s advocates will no-doubt tell you that Communism is an antiquated term, but then if you drill down into what the movement is calling for, it’s clearly Communism. At the end of the day, most utopian movements are. And again, that’s not a value judgement. It’s just what we call a movement that aims for an egalitarian society with distributed ownership. The problem with de-growth is that it flat-out doesn’t work as a strategy. Modern economies don’t “de-grow.” They either grow or they shrink. If they shrink enough, they can become pre-modern and enter a stagnant state, but that’s horrendous for everybody, and we have historical examples.

        -Exhibit A is the Late Bronze Age Collapse. If you listen to my show, you’re probably already familiar with this, but here’s a quick primer. In the 12th century BC, for causes unknown, human civilization completely collapsed across the Eastern Mediterranean. The Mycenaean Greek cities collapsed, beginning the Greek Dark Ages. In neighboring Anatolia and the Levant, the Hittite Empire would suffer a similar fate. The Egyptian New Kingdom would survive, but would begin its own slow decline before collapsing a few generations later. In the Middle East, the Assyrian Empire would survive, but would take more than 200 years to recover.

        -Now, nobody knows what caused the Bronze Age Collapse. Some people say it was famine caused by sudden climate change due to volcanic eruptions, which we know happened during this period. Some people say the collapse was caused by a series of attacks by the Sea People, mysterious invaders who may or may not have attacked during this time period, and we do know the Egyptians had trouble with pirates, who controlled entire kingdoms and sacked several Egyptian cities with their unstoppable fleets, like Anatolian proto-Vikings. Other theorists propose war or the overexploitation of natural resources. My favorite theory is that new ironworking technology upset the entire economy and nobody knew how to deal with it. It’s no coincidence that the region would recover with the dawn of the iron age.

        -Regardless of its cause, we do know some of the effects of the Late Bronze Age Collapse, and they’re not pretty. The population losses are impossible to calculate, but they must have been massive. Within a few generations, entire cities simply disappear, with great temples reduced to their foundations by local farmers gathering stones to wall off their fields. Imagine world-class metropolises like New York or London or Tokyo becoming abandoned, not because of nuclear war or some other one-off calamity, but because of slow social collapse. It has happened before. It can and probably will happen again.

-In the present, as in ancient times, great cities — the hubs of human civilization — rely on external inputs of food, building supplies, and other material. When those external inputs are no longer available — for whatever reason — the civilization collapses.

-Another useful historical example is the early middle ages in Europe. The collapse of the Western Roman Empire left behind a patchwork of semi-tribal proto-states. Over the course of several generations, one bit of territory after another fell out of the imperial sphere. One trade good after another became unobtainable or prohibitively expensive. As rural areas became more dangerous and trade less reliable, less food was able to make it into the cities. So people either starved or went out and started farming themselves.

-In the year 133 AD, the city of Rome became the first human city to reach a population of 1 million. In the sixth century, that number would drop to only 30,000. A city that had once ruled the world’s greatest empire west of China, which had been the center of Mediterranean life for hundreds of years, didn’t simply decline to second-tier status. It became a cluster of villages inside the old imperial walls, with weeds overtaking the ancient temples and a tiny urban core — a large town — centered on Vatican Hill. I know a guy who says if he could live in any historical period, it would be the high middle ages. There are plenty of medievalists who agree, and plenty who would jump at the chance to take Doc Brown’s time machine to the late middle ages. But I’ve never heard anyone say they’d fancy a visit to the early middle ages, because the early middle ages were just an awful time to be alive, at least if you lived in the regions that comprised the old Western Roman Empire.

-My point is this — de-growth leads directly to human misery. This is obvious to people in poorer countries, who know what it’s like to actually go hungry. You see plenty of far left movements in the global south, but not much support for de-growth. Instead, de-growth is most popular in countries with high standards of living — primarily in the west. And I wonder if this isn’t because people in countries with high standards of living have come to see the economy as something abstract. I’m thinking of a comic that went around during Covid, where there are a couple of dinosaurs watching helplessly as an asteroid streaks through the sky, and one dinosaur is saying “Oh no! The economy!” Not to ruin a joke by explaining it, but the subtext here is that the economy is a silly human construct — that a threat to the economy isn’t a real threat to people. It’s just something out-of-touch rich people are worried about.

-This is a particularly smooth-brained take. The economy is more than your salary, the cost of rent, or how much is in your retirement account. The economy represents the sum total of productive human activity. When the economy is down, people are doing less work, providing fewer services, and making less stuff.

-Now, the costs of de-growth will fall mostly on the rich if you’re talking about raw dollars. But that’s not a very good metric for what’s going on. For example, rich people spend only an insignificant portion of their budget on basic necessities. The hedge fund manager in his private jet may eat fancier food than you and wear a tailored suit, but he doesn’t eat ten times the calories or wear multiple outfits simultaneously.

-What this means is that the real, material costs of de-growth will fall mostly on the global poor. Let’s stick with the example of food, since the agriculture industry is a major target of de-growth activists. In the west, most people have enough money to pay more for food. If you’re rich, pricier food is a rounding error on your monthly budget. If you’re middle class, a doubling of food prices is inconvenient but affordable. If you’re poor, it can be more inconvenient, but the government will just increase welfare spending so everyone gets fed.

-According to the World Economic Forum, there are nine countries in the world where people spend more than 40% of their income on food. All but two are in the global south, and the other two, Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, are former Soviet republics. It’s safe to say that a doubling of food prices would mean widespread starvation in all of these countries. In Nigeria, where the average person spends 56% of their income on food, that average person could be homeless, naked, and have zero other expenses, and still not be able to afford a doubling in food prices. If de-growth activists succeed in eliminating enough farming or making it less efficient via onerous regulation, human beings are going to die. Horribly. A lot of them.

-When presented with this certainty, people will often jump to an obvious solution: wealthy countries can just send them money! Then they can buy food. But remember, money is only a means of exchange. It only works as long as there’s something to exchange. If there’s a shortage in the food supply, no amount of financial subsidies are going to feed everybody. There’s just not enough to go around. The worst part about this kind of de-growth-induced systems collapse is that it can creep up on you. One year, a particular out-of-season fruit is no longer available at your local grocery store. The next year, it’s a few more items. Selection dwindles, and soon bare spots on the shelf become normal. This isn’t happening because of a shortage of money. It’s happening because of a shortage of food. But by the point we in the west even know there’s a serious problem, people are already starving all over the global south. So much for de-growth, which is nothing more than slow civilizational suicide.

Most far-left ideologies share Communism as their desired end-state. Yet if you talk to any college activist, they’ll tell you that Communism has never been tried. And at least in this case, the college activist would be technically correct. Point to any supposed Communist state, and you’ll soon find that Communism never actually existed. For example, we already established that the Soviet Union was never a Communist state, but was instead founded on the ideology of state socialism — an ideology that is now rejected by pretty much everybody as a failed historical experiment.

        -Outside of small local communes like Israeli kibbutzes, or hunter-gatherer tribes, no Communist society has ever existed. By which I mean that no large-scale society, ever, has been totally egalitarian with no private property. Such a society would need to have enough material goods to keep everybody comfortable. Spreading around money won’t help unless there is first an overabundance of goods, and this has yet to be achieved. Communism has never been tried because no one has ever figured out how to establish it in the first place.

        -To find an example of a Communist society, I have to break the rules of good history and turn to the world of fiction. Sorry, but I’m trying to illustrate a hypothetical, and the real world hasn’t served up any examples. Instead, let’s talk about the Federation in Star Trek. And I mean the good, egalitarian Federation from The Next Generation, not the dystopian disaster from Picard.

        -In the Federation, every citizen has everything they need. Want any kind of food? Just go to a replicator and ask for it. The same goes for clothing. Everyone seems to be provided with housing, and there don’t seem to be any menial jobs. Thanks to technology and material abundance, everyone is free to pursue their dreams of exploring space, growing a French vineyard, or writing experimental poetry. Obviously, this requires a certain amount of social enlightenment. But just as importantly, there seems to be plenty of everything. Those little replicator machines just seem to pop out whatever you want. And when you’re done with something or you have trash, it just goes back into the replicator and all the matter is recycled.

        -Now, I’m obviously not suggesting that the solution to humanity’s ills is to develop some kind of replicator technology, although that would be awesome. What I am saying is to achieve an egalitarian, abundant society, we humans are going to need not just more growth, but more advanced technology. Otherwise, any attempt at Communism will lead to shortages, reduced standards of living, and the devolution of complex modern society. In other words, over the course of a few generations, humanity reverts to being a bunch of hunter-gatherer tribes. Not exactly what most people would call utopia.

        -We live in the real world, and we have to work within real-world constraints. If, hypothetically, we wanted to create a functioning Communist society, we’d have to stop looking for perfect solutions. Instead, we’d have to look for the best practical option. This option would be a system that offers rich rewards for production and innovation, even if those rewards lead to some inequality. If only there were a name for that system…

        -Of course, I’m talking about capitalism. And again, since everybody has their own personal ideas of what these words mean, so let’s get our definitions straight. By “capitalism,” I mean a system with private ownership of the means of production, consumer choice, and a rules-based system of commerce. So, this definition would include social democracies like the Nordic countries.

        -In fact, the most successful self-proclaimed Communist countries, China and Vietnam, have gone down exactly this path, marrying a free market economic system to an authoritarian political system. The common denominator is an economy that encourages growth, the production of goods, and the provision of services.

        -When I’ve discussed growth, goods, and services, I’ve often used trivial, low-stakes examples like smartphones. But other than food, commercially-motivated innovation has improved our lives in innumerable, substantial ways. Advances in healthcare have saved — or at least extended — countless lives. Advances in communications have helped families stay connected over long distances, and the internet, for all its flaws, has facilitated the spread of a lot of great content. In 1950, 7.24 American drivers were killed in accidents for every 100 million miles traveled. In 2019, the last year for which we have non-Covid-skewed numbers, only 3.2 drivers died for every 100 million miles traveled. Over the course of one human lifetime, our society reduced the rate of automotive deaths by more than half, and most of that reduction is attributable to advances in safety technology. You get my point. Growth and technological advancement aren’t good because they boost corporate profits. They’re good because they genuinely improve people’s lives, help us to live longer, and keep us healthier during those longer lives. Why on earth would we want to give that up?

Now, imagine we continue this pattern of improvement over the course of a few more generations. Imagine we have totally automated farms, AI brain surgeons, and self-driving cars that kill less than one person per million miles driven. Food is so cheap and abundant that the government provides it free to all citizens — mostly out of necessity, since the majority of the population is now unemployed. In such a society, we can expect people to vote for more and more public benefits to replace their old jobs. Play that process out long enough, and you end up with Communism — which we defined as a society where private property is abolished and everybody has what they need because society distributes wealth equally. And unlike state socialism or other failed systems, you end up with a Communist system that has a prayer of succeeding, since there really is enough material abundance to provide for everybody, and there really is no need for people to do menial work since all of those jobs have been automated. No-one has to be a cobalt miner or a septic tank technician because we have robot miners and robot septic tank technicians. There is no proletariat. We are all the bourgeoisie.

        -This scenario isn’t perfect, and it does present some risks. For one thing, Communism will have to be “ramped up” at the correct rate. Give out too many public benefits too quickly, and you’ll suck needed workers out of the labor force, slow your economy, and paradoxically decrease the rate at which Communism is achieved. Go too far, and your economy may collapse altogether and put you back in the stone age. It’s State Socialism Lite. Give out too few benefits too slowly, and you get rapid advancement but also extreme inequality, ending in a dystopian nightmare where a handful of trillionaires own everything and live lives of luxury with all their desires met by an army of AI servants, and everyone else is dead because they owned nothing and had no way to earn a living. Society is going to have to walk a knife’s edge, with real human consequences for anyone who gets it wrong. Incidentally, this is one reason I think it’s so important to have national governments and for people not to hand over power to any kind of international government. Some countries are going to get this transitional period wrong and become very unpleasant places to live for a while. There needs to be somewhere where people get it right.

        -At some point, this system will also have to address the legitimate criticisms of capitalism, foremost of which is the issue of never-ending growth. I spent a while talking about how growth is good and even necessary, but let’s get real — at some point, it’s not sustainable because there is no end point. The hedonic treadmill just makes people want more and more. Imagine we develop a Star Trek-style utopia and everyone on the planet decides they want a yacht. There are more than 8 billion people on the planet. Where are we going to source enough material for 8 billion yachts with robotic cooks and bartenders and stuff? Where is there enough harbor space for even a fraction of those 8 billion yachts? At some point between where we are today and a world with billions of yachts, humanity is going to have to say “enough is enough” and step off the hedonic treadmill.

        -Other possible solutions are right out of science fiction. Take asteroid mining, for example. The idea sounds far fetched, but it has some real benefits when compared with conventional mining. To begin with, humanity would expand its pool of resources from one planet to a solar system’s worth of asteroids. The mining would also be better for Earth’s environment, with most of the more destructive work performed on lifeless asteroids. Finally, there’s the potential to access elements like gold and platinum, which are rare on Earth but abundant on certain asteroids. There’s so much potential in this field that Neil Degrasse Tyson famously said that the world’s first trillionaire will be the first asteroid miner.

        -Another interesting possibility is the development of a multi-planetary civilization. A multi-planetary civilization, as its name implies, can extract resources from multiple planets, vastly increasing that civilization’s raw potential. Furthermore, it creates redundancy. If one planet wipes itself out via nuclear war, environmental destruction, or some other stupidity, the entire civilization isn’t destroyed; there are still other planets that can carry the torch, so to speak. This kind of technology is still somewhere in the future. Elon Musk says we’ll have a Mars colony by the 2030s, but he’s always super-optimistic about development timelines, and I don’t think humanity is likely to go multi-planetary in his lifetime or even my own. A multi-planetary civilization is a worthy goal, but we’re far more likely to see the first asteroid mine in the next generation than we are to see the first successful Mars colony. Now watch me be entirely wrong, and the Chinese colonize Mars with a giant blimp called the Red Zeppelin. Anything could happen.

Assuming extremists of some kind don’t push society too far off the rails, humanity is going through a transitional period that only has one parallel, and that’s the agricultural revolution. The industrial revolution and the tech revolution have changed human life in ways our agrarian ancestors couldn’t even have envisioned, and artificial intelligence combined with advanced robotics will continue to shape our society for decades. This is not unlike the experience of our pre-agrarian hunter-gatherer ancestors when humans first started planting crops and living in settled societies. Everything about our lives is going to change over the next few human generations, and societies that don’t adapt to the new realities will fail.

        -The most successful societies will be those who remember that no matter what our level of technological development, we are all human, and we all have human needs. The need for growth and abundance needs to be tempered by the quality of people’s lives right now. We need strong unions and anti-monopoly laws to keep us from returning to the Gilded Age, and there needs to be a social safety net for people who are left behind by the constant change. But the need for these kinds of protections doesn’t negate the need for capitalism. It simply means that like any mechanical vehicle, the metaphorical vehicle of capitalism needs a set of brakes to keep it from moving too fast and running off the rails.

        -I started out this episode by talking about incongruity, so let’s not be incongruous ourselves. We humans need technology, but we are not machines. Societies that forget this risk becoming like China, a place with a capitalist-ish economy, but with no basic human or civil rights for its citizens. It’s worth noting that the two examples of successful Communist societies I’ve cited — kibbutzes and hunter-gatherer societies — are successful mostly because they rely on strong family bonds, which is a human element that broad-scale ideologies like state socialism simply can’t replicate. Communism is a lot more palatable when your labor is going to support grandma than when it’s going to support some stranger.

All of this leaves aside a deeper question, though. Suppose we humans built a “perfect” society, one that’s both prosperous and egalitarian. Will that civilization succeed, or will it be doomed to failure? History can provide some insight.

        -One problem for such a society would be overall human fertility. If our utopian civilization is highly urbanized, it’s going to struggle to maintain its population. And from Ancient Rome to Renaissance Istanbul to modern-day New York, urban societies are routinely below the replacement birth rate. This just hasn’t been a major problem until recently, since before the Industrial Revolution even societies like the Roman and Ottoman Empires were mostly agrarian and rural, so the overall populations had a high birth rate and there were always plenty of new people to move into the cities to grow the population. But once the entire society has urbanized, you no longer have a rural population to draw from, and the overall birth rate drops. I can’t see how continuing this trend is going to help, and if you play things out long enough, it ends with human extinction, with the last few humans spending their days like pandas in a zoo, pampered by their robotic servants but never bothering to replace themselves.

        -Another problem is that humans seem to need to struggle to survive. People who don’t face any challenges get bored and become less resilient, unable to face challenges when they do arrive. In one study from 2013, quoted in LiveScience, researchers found that 15% of people in developed countries suffer from depression at some point in their lives, compared to around 11% of people in developing countries. In other words, living in a wealthier country may raise the risk of depression by almost half when compared to living in a poorer country. That’s the opposite of what you’d expect, but it makes perfect sense. People who need to struggle — at least to a certain extent — are happier than people who never confront or overcome challenges. Without challenges, do we humans simply atrophy?

        -We may soon see the day when capitalist societies usher in a new Communist utopia, one where everyone’s needs are met and people are more or less equal. Before we cross this threshold, it’s worth asking: “Is a utopian society a form of soft suicide?” It’s an important question; and that’s why it’s relevant.

THIS PODCAST IS LINKED FROM: https://www.DanTolerPodcast.com