Chapter 5Communist Bullshit
Five years of work. Not theorizing — building. Designing the mechanics of an alternative economic system from the ground up, testing the logic, revising it, testing it again. Five years of research into every previous attempt to solve the same problem: the communes, the cooperatives, the welfare states, the proposals that got to a parliamentary committee and died there, the ones that got further and were reversed. Five years of understanding, in more detail than is comfortable, exactly how deep the problem runs and exactly why every previous answer fell short.
And the number one response — not a question, not a counter-argument, not even skepticism dressed up as engagement — is four words.
"That's communist bullshit."
Not from a stranger on the internet. From a friend. Someone who, the moment the letters UBI left the air between us, had already decided. There was no curiosity. No "tell me more." No "how would that work?" Just the closure. The conversation ended before it started, in the time it took to say four words, and then we talked about something else.
This isn't unusual. Anyone who has proposed a structural alternative to capitalism has experienced some version of this. The conversation terminates at the label. Communism. Socialism. Redistribution. Robin Hood. Venezuela. The words work like a circuit breaker — the moment one appears, the thinking stops. The person doing it believes they're being rational. They aren't. They're executing a reflex they didn't choose and have never examined.
You can engage with arguments. Over five years, this project has faced real ones. The Russian gulags. Cuban poverty. Venezuelan economic collapse. Who's going to pay for it. People will stop working. You can't fight human nature. These are at least positions — you can examine them, hold them up to evidence, test them against the actual history. The real objections will get their answers in these pages, and the answers aren't comfortable for the objection. But "communist bullshit" is an argument's absence. It's a door slamming. And this chapter is about who installed the door, and why, and what it's protecting.
Read it. Read the whole thing. And then — at the end — tell me whether we were ever actually talking about the same thing.
The first thing people reach for when they hear "give everyone a basic income" is Robin Hood. You want to steal from the rich and give to the poor. You want to redistribute. You want to come into someone's house and take what little they have to give it to someone who won't work for it.
Let's be precise: no. Nobody's touching your money. Your savings are untouched. Your salary is untouched. Your assets are untouched. The system this book proposes introduces a completely different resource — one money can't buy, can't inflate, and can't control. If you want to keep playing the money game, keep playing it. This book is written for the people for whom that game is already lost — and for the people who can see, if they're honest, that the game is designed to be lost by most of the people playing it.
But hold on to the Robin Hood reaction for a moment, because it's worth examining. Why does your mind go there immediately? You heard "basic income" and you heard "theft." You heard "everyone gets something" and you heard "someone is taking from me." Where did that connection come from? You didn't sit down and derive it. You didn't weigh the proposal, examine its mechanics, and conclude through analysis that it constitutes robbery. You felt it. Instantly. Before the sentence was finished.
You absorbed it. Through a thousand stories where generosity is naive, where sharing is weakness, where the person who challenges the existing distribution of wealth is always — always — the one you're supposed to distrust. Robin Hood himself is the proof. He's one of the very few folk heroes in Western culture who explicitly challenges the concentration of wealth and power. One of the very few stories that says: the accumulation at the top is illegitimate, and the people below it are right to resist. And look at what every modern adaptation does to him.
It adds romance. It adds personal adventure and a love interest and a villain who's satisfyingly cruel. It ends with him pardoned by the rightful king — the good rich person, the legitimate authority, restoring the natural order after the bad rich person temporarily disturbed it. Robin Hood doesn't win by changing the system. He wins by being forgiven by the system. The radical is domesticated. The systemic critique becomes an individual story with a personal resolution. The threat is neutralized. And the reflex is reinforced: challenging the distribution of wealth is outlawry, not justice. The best outcome available to someone who questions the arrangement is to be forgiven by the people who benefit from it.
That's no accident. It's a pattern. And Robin Hood is just the most obvious example of it, the one that has been running the longest. The same pattern runs through almost every story a capitalist culture tells about itself, through the films it produces and the heroes it chooses and the problems it decides are worth solving. It runs so deep that most people can't see it. Which is, of course, the point.
Not the mythology, not the cinematography, not the performance. The character. Strip it back to what's actually happening in every Batman story ever told.
A man whose parents were murdered in an alley inherits one of the largest private fortunes in his city. Rather than using that fortune to address the poverty, the inequality, the institutional corruption his own city's history produced — rather than funding the schools, the hospitals, the housing that might change the conditions that produce desperate people — he puts on a costume and goes out at night to beat up the desperate people themselves. He punches the symptoms. He never asks about the disease. And we call him a hero.
Batman is a billionaire vigilante whose entire project is the maintenance of the existing order. The order that made him rich. The order that made Gotham poor. The order that keeps producing the criminals he keeps punching, in the same alleys, decade after decade, because nothing about the conditions that produce them ever changes. He never questions it. The story never asks him to. And generation after generation of children absorbs the lesson: wealth is qualification, order is justice, and the person in the alley deserves what they get.
Iron Man is the same argument in different packaging. Tony Stark is a weapons manufacturer. His company produces the instruments of war and sells them to whoever can pay. People die. Wars are prolonged. Instability is profitable, and Stark Industries has been profiting from it for decades. Then Stark has a personal crisis — his own weapons are turned against him — and the story offers him redemption through technology. He becomes a better weapon. A more precise weapon. A weapon with feelings and a quip. The weapons industry continues. The wars continue. The profit model continues. He just switched sides within the same system. And we give him a character arc and call it growth.
Then there's Thanos. A powerful warlord who spends the entire first half of the story collecting six infinity stones — each one an extraordinary source of cosmic power — because only with all six together does he become capable of doing literally anything. Creation. Transformation. Abundance on a scale no other entity in the universe can achieve. He assembles the most powerful tool in existence. And the only thing he can think to do with it is kill half of all life.
Not double the resources. Not end scarcity. Not guarantee that every living being has what it needs. Kill half the people. Because in his mind — and, crucially, in the mind of every writer who worked on this story — the pie is fixed. It can't grow. It can only be divided differently, and the only way to divide it more comfortably is to reduce the number of people sharing it.
Here's the thing nobody in the film ever suggests. Not the heroes, not the villains, not the wise elder figures or the morally conflicted allies. Nobody sits across from Thanos and says: you now have the power to double the resources. Why don't you do that? It would have been the simpler solution. It would have been the kinder solution. It would have taken a single snap to spread happiness. But the story can't go there, because the story doesn't know how to go there. The heroes need a villain. The villain needs a plan to oppose. Both sides need to fight. The possibility of sitting down together and solving the problem — of using unprecedented power for abundance rather than elimination — sits so far outside the story's imagination that it never appears as an option. Not even as something to be rejected.
That's no writing oversight. That's the world these stories live in. A world designed around conflict, around sides, around the clean division between good people and bad people — even when, as we've already established, the good people are a weapons manufacturer and a billionaire who beats up the poor. The system can't be questioned. It can only be defended or attacked. Abundance can't be imagined. Only the management of scarcity. And the most natural thing in the world — two intelligent beings with a shared problem deciding to solve it together — is the one move the story makes structurally impossible.
These are the stories of this particular moment. The pattern predates them and will outlast them. The next generation will have its own billionaire heroes and its own villains who believe they're saving the world by managing scarcity rather than imagining abundance. The analysis will apply.
These stories weren't produced by a conspiracy. There's no room full of executives deciding what values Batman should encode. The stories emerge naturally — inevitably — from a culture whose deepest assumptions are capitalist, and they reinforce those assumptions by making them feel like adventure, like justice, like fun. You watched these films and you felt something. Excitement, maybe. Satisfaction when the villain went down. The clean pleasure of a world where the right people win. You loved these stories. You were supposed to. That was always the point.
The cultural theorist Stuart Hall spent much of his career explaining how this works — how popular culture doesn't merely reflect the values of the society that produces it but actively reproduces them, makes them feel natural, makes the assumptions underneath them invisible. You don't notice the assumption. You just feel the story. You don't need a propaganda ministry if the stories people tell each other for entertainment already do the work. The cinema does the work. The comic book does the work. The bedtime story does the work. And none of it announces itself as instruction. It just feels like a good story.
Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman mapped the same process through journalism in Manufacturing Consent, published in 1988 — showing how media systems, without explicit coordination or conspiracy, systematically produce the consent of the governed by filtering what counts as news, what counts as a credible source, what counts as a reasonable position. The filter is structural, not conspiratorial. Nobody has to issue an order. The system selects for certain stories and certain framings and certain silences the same way a market selects for certain products: not because anyone designed the outcome, but because the incentives reliably produce it. The outcome, in this case, is a population that has been entertained into accepting arrangements that don't serve them, by stories that made those arrangements feel like nature. Like the only way things could possibly be. Like common sense.
Everything you just read about Batman, about Robin Hood, about Thanos — the stories, the framings, the invisible assumptions baked into the entertainment you grew up with — none of it operates in isolation. It has a purpose. It points in a direction. And the direction it points is this: we are the good guys. Whatever we've built, however imperfect, is the correct side of history. And anything that challenges it — any alternative, any proposal, any system that dares to organize human life on different principles — is, by definition, the bad guys.
This is the lens through which most people in the Western world encounter socialism, communism, Marxism, or any collective alternative to capitalism. Not as systems to be examined on their merits and their failures. As the enemy. As the thing the good guys defeated, or are still fighting, or need to remain vigilant against. The analysis begins with the verdict already written. The measuring stick is picked up only to confirm what was already known before the measuring started.
So before this chapter goes any further, here's something that may be unexpected: this book agrees with you. These systems didn't work. The Soviet Union didn't work. Maoist China didn't work. The Cuban model, for all its genuine achievements in healthcare and literacy, hasn't produced the liberated society it promised. The various socialist experiments of the twentieth century produced, with remarkable consistency, concentrations of power and privilege at the top and scarcity and repression everywhere else. This book isn't here to rehabilitate any of them. It isn't asking you to reconsider your verdict on the gulags, or to find the humanitarian case for collectivization, or to discover a silver lining in the Berlin Wall.
They failed. The question worth asking — the question this chapter is actually about — is why.
If you've read this far with an open mind, keep it open for a few more pages. Not to be persuaded that the bad guys were secretly good. But to look honestly at what went wrong, because understanding what went wrong is the only path to understanding what might go right. And what went wrong, in every case, turns out to be the same thing. Not the ideology. Not the intentions. Not even the people, though the people were often brutal and the intentions were often betrayed. Something more fundamental than any of those. Something that was present in every failed alternative and is present in capitalism too, hiding in plain sight, so obvious once you see it that you'll wonder how the argument was ever framed any other way.
But first: the crooked measuring stick. Because before we look honestly at what didn't work, we need to acknowledge that the standard being applied has never been applied consistently — and that the propaganda you absorbed without knowing you were absorbing it has made certain failures invisible while making others definitive.
The Soviet Union produced a ruling elite — the nomenklatura — that lived in dachas outside Moscow, had access to foreign goods unavailable to ordinary citizens, sent their children to the best schools, and accumulated privilege while the population queued for bread. This is held up, reliably, as proof that equality is a lie and collective systems are inevitably corrupt. The measuring stick comes out. The verdict is delivered. Case closed.
The United States has produced the Sackler family. The owners of Purdue Pharma made billions by engineering an opioid epidemic that has killed more than half a million Americans — marketing OxyContin as safe when their own research suggested otherwise, funding the medical institutions that approved it, and using the legal system to delay accountability for decades. The wealth they accumulated is celebrated in the names of museum wings and university buildings. The measuring stick that condemns the Soviet nomenklatura for accumulating privilege while the population suffered is somehow never applied here. It goes back in the drawer.
The Soviet Union wouldn't let its citizens leave. No passport without state permission. No exit. You were inside the system whether you believed in it or not.
The United States imposes tariffs. When corporations can't compete on a level playing field — when a foreign manufacturer produces the same goods more cheaply and the American consumer would naturally choose the cheaper option — those corporations lobby the government to make the foreign alternative artificially expensive. The cheap option exists. Policy makes it inaccessible, with price barriers erected specifically to trap the consumer inside a domestic market that serves the producer's margins rather than the consumer's wallet. A different mechanism. The same principle: the citizen is confined inside the system for the benefit of those running it. Alexander Hamilton's Report on Manufactures in 1791 established the template. The Tariff of Abominations in 1828 applied it. American capitalism has been using government intervention to protect capital from competition for as long as American capitalism has existed. The free market is the story it tells about itself when the story is convenient.
Because the free market exists for workers. Your labor is subject to market forces — your wage is determined by supply and demand, your position can be eliminated the moment it becomes more profitable to eliminate it. The free market doesn't exist for capital. Capital gets tariffs when it needs them. Bailouts when it needs them. Subsidies, regulatory capture, and government contracts when it needs them. The market is free for the people who can't afford for it not to be, and managed for the people who can afford to manage it.
The Civil War. Over 600,000 Americans killed — more than in any other conflict in the nation's history — because the economic system of the American South required the ownership of human beings and refused to surrender that ownership peacefully. This is capitalism defending its investment, not a failure attached to capitalism from the outside. The enslaved people on those plantations were, as the earlier chapters have shown, the single largest asset class in the American economy. The war was fought to protect a balance sheet. Six hundred thousand dead to protect a balance sheet. This is capitalism's catastrophe. No aberration. The system, at its most honest, refusing to give up what it owned.
Today, over half a million people are homeless in the United States on any given night. The richest country in the history of human civilization, and people sleep on its sidewalks. Medical bankruptcy destroys families every day in a country whose GDP dwarfs every other economy on earth. Matthew Desmond, in Poverty, by America, documents this with the precision of a sociologist and the controlled fury of someone who has spent years watching it happen: poverty in America is an active product of choices made by people who benefit from its existence, never a residual problem waiting to be solved. Poverty suppresses wages. Poverty fills prisons. Poverty generates the desperation that keeps certain industries — payday lending, private corrections, for-profit healthcare — extraordinarily profitable. These are features. Never anomalies.
When Zoran Mamdani ran for mayor of New York City in 2021 — a city with those homelessness numbers, that housing crisis, that inequality — those invested in the existing arrangement responded by locating his personal history and disqualifying him with it, never by engaging with his proposals. Failed rapper. Never held a real job. The character assassination arrived before the conversation, because the conversation itself was the threat. Anyone who names the system clearly enough to be understood gets buried before the name can spread. It was done to Fannie Lou Hamer. It was done to Martin Luther King. It's the oldest trick in the playbook.
And yet Venezuela is the cautionary tale. Not Mississippi. Not the Bronx. Not the American healthcare system. Venezuela. Always Venezuela. The measuring stick extends all the way to Caracas and somehow can't find its way to the South Side of Chicago.
Here's what nobody in the capitalism versus communism argument has ever said clearly enough.
They were all the same system.
Not in their ideology. Not in their stated intentions. Not in the rhetoric they used to describe themselves or the promises they made to the people living inside them. But in their foundation. Every system that has been tried — capitalism, communism, socialism, every hybrid and variation constructed and collapsed over the past two centuries — was denominated in money. And money can be accumulated without limit. And wherever money can be accumulated without limit, someone will pursue that accumulation. And that someone will eventually control the system — whether they call themselves a CEO or a General Secretary, whether they answer to a board of shareholders or a politburo, whether they justify their position through the logic of the market or the logic of the revolution.
The Soviet Union told its people it was building communism. What it built was a system where a small elite accumulated power and privilege while everyone else struggled and waited and was told that the struggle was temporary, that the waiting was necessary, that the destination justified the conditions of the journey. Which is exactly what capitalism tells its people. Different paperwork. The same arrangement. The label said communism. The operating logic — uncapped accumulation by a small elite, enforced by institutional power, sustained by a culture that made the arrangement feel inevitable — was identical to every other system built on money and the unlimited pursuit of it. The Soviet Union was capitalism with red flags.
This is an indictment of money itself as the foundation of any system that claims to serve everyone equally — not a defence of the Soviet Union. The currency isn't neutral. The currency isn't a passive medium of exchange that takes on whatever values the system surrounding it chooses to embody. The currency is the operating system. Everything else — the constitution, the ideology, the stated values, the revolutionary promise — is the interface. And when the operating system runs on uncapped accumulation, the interface will eventually reflect that, regardless of what it was designed to say.
This is why Marx was right about the diagnosis and irrelevant to what was built in his name. Karl Marx spent decades in the British Museum reading factory inspection reports and economic histories and philosophical texts and writing down what he found with the systematic precision of a researcher who understood the machine needed to be described before it could be addressed. What he found — that workers create value, that the owners of capital capture that value, that the gap between what workers produce and what they receive is the engine of the entire system — is a description, not a political claim. You can look at what has happened to wages and productivity in every developed economy since 1970 and tell me the description is wrong. I'll wait.
Marx died in 1883. He didn't design the Soviet Union. He didn't endorse the collectivization campaigns that starved millions of Ukrainian peasants. He didn't authorize the gulags or the show trials or the systematic murder of political dissidents by a state that claimed to be acting in the name of his ideas. What was built in his name, in conditions he never imagined, by people making decisions he never endorsed, isn't his work. The distance between the thinker and what was done with his thinking is enormous, and collapsing that distance is a political maneuver dressed as intellectual honesty. It has worked extraordinarily well. It has kept a generation of people from engaging with a body of research that describes their own lives with uncomfortable accuracy, because the name attached to that research was made radioactive.
That's the mechanism. The same mechanism as the Robin Hood adaptation that ends with the pardon. The same mechanism as the Batman story that never asks about the disease. The same mechanism as Thanos assembling infinite power and reaching for elimination instead of abundance. The culture conditions the reflex. The reflex protects the arrangement. The arrangement continues.
But here's where the chapter arrives at the only question that actually matters. Not capitalism or communism. Not left or right. Not which ideology, which flag, which revolutionary promise. The question is simpler and more devastating than any of those: what is the currency, and can it be accumulated without limit?
Because if the answer to the second part of that question is yes — if the currency can pile up without a structural ceiling, if the person who accumulates the most of it can use that accumulation to acquire influence, institutional control, and the power to shape the rules of the game in their own favor — then it doesn't matter what you call the system. It doesn't matter what the founding documents say. It doesn't matter how pure the original intention was or how genuine the people who built it were or how much they believed in what they were building. The currency determines the outcome, not the ideology. Give uncapped accumulation enough time and enough space, and it will produce an elite. Every time. Without exception. Under every flag that has ever been flown.
The people who pursued accumulation in the Soviet nomenklatura weren't uniquely corrupt. The people who pursue it in the boardrooms of multinational corporations aren't uniquely virtuous. They're people responding to the logic of the system they're inside, optimizing for what the system rewards, doing what the currency makes rational. And notice the language we use for money without even thinking about it. Liquidity. Cash flow. Currency — from the Latin for running water. Banks, like river banks, containing the flow. We've been describing money as water for so long that we stopped noticing we were doing it. And water, left to its own logic, always runs downhill. It finds the lowest point and pools there. It breaks through barriers. It carves channels over time that make it easier for more water to follow. The system is designed the same way: once you begin accumulating money, influence, and power, the accumulation feeds itself. More resources produce more power. More power secures more resources. There's no natural stopping point built into the architecture, no moment at which the flow says: enough. So it continues, not because the people directing it are monsters, but because the system has no dam. Change the currency — introduce a structural ceiling — and you build the dam. Change what the system rewards, and you change what people do.
The question this book is asking is about engineering, not ideology. What if the resource at the foundation of an alternative economy was one that can't be inflated, can't be taxed by any state, can't be accumulated beyond a structurally enforced limit, and doesn't require a single person to surrender a single dollar they already have? What if the currency was the one thing every human being on earth already receives in equal measure, every day, for the entirety of their life?
That question isn't communism. It isn't socialism. It isn't Robin Hood and it isn't Venezuela and it isn't any of the systems that failed for the reason this chapter has just described. It has never been asked before. Not seriously. Not with a working design behind it. The rest of this book might be the answer.
Remember the square. The one from the prologue — the square in my town that some people still won't name. The man who walks past Piazza Gramsci every morning and calls it "the Direzionale" doesn't know he's protecting an arrangement. He doesn't know who taught him not to say the name. He just knows he can't say it. That's how completely the conditioning works. It doesn't require your knowledge. It doesn't require your consent. It only requires your compliance — and it gets that compliance by making the alternative unsayable.
You just read the word "communist" and you didn't flinch. That means something has already changed.