By Earl 'Red' Hutchins
Every week, somewhere in America, a 24-year-old with a philosophy minor and a carefully maintained Pinterest presence repins a grainy photograph of a Soviet tractor against a dramatic sky. They tag it #aesthetic and #therevolutionwillbephotographed and feel, briefly, that they are part of something larger than themselves.
They are correct. They just have the wrong idea about what that something is.
In the spirit of public service — and in strict compliance with the Ministry of Labor Readiness Transparency Act, which I have just invented — we present the following guide to ten popular social media aesthetic categories and the agricultural or industrial posting that awaits each of them under actual collectivized conditions. Production quotas are sourced from our editorial team's extensive research into Soviet five-year plans and a general sense of dark irony.
1. Cottagecore
The Board: Linen aprons. Dewy mushrooms. A ceramic mug photographed against a windowsill with soft morning light. Someone baking bread in a farmhouse kitchen that has never, not once, experienced a pest problem.
Your Actual Assignment: Sugar beet harvest, southern agricultural collective, September through November. The beets do not photograph well. There is no soft morning light because you begin at 5 a.m. Your linen apron will not survive the first shift.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 47 metric tons per worker-season. You are currently at 12.
2. Communist Aesthetic (The Ironic Kind)
The Board: Hammer-and-sickle graphics. Constructivist poster fonts. That one Shepard Fairey-adjacent image of a fist you found in 2019 and have been repinning ever since. A screenshot of your Twitter bio that says "seize the means" next to a photo of your MacBook Air.
Your Actual Assignment: You, specifically, are getting the mines. Not because of any particular malice on the Revolution's part — it's just that someone who has been theoretically enthusiastic about labor for this long should have no objection to doing some.
Five-Year Plan Quota: Coal extraction, 8-hour shifts, six days a week. The Revolution thanks you for your ideological groundwork.
3. Dark Academia
The Board: Leather-bound books. Candlelit libraries. A photograph of rain on a Gothic university window. Someone's hand holding a fountain pen over a piece of parchment as though they are about to write something very significant about the nature of mortality.
Your Actual Assignment: Collective farm recordkeeping, which does involve paperwork, so points for partial relevance. You will be tracking livestock inventory in a prefabricated administrative building with one working fluorescent tube. There are no candles. The candles are a fire hazard.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 2,400 inventory entries per month, zero discrepancies. Last month's clerk had discrepancies.
4. Goblincore Foraging
The Board: Moss. Interesting rocks. Wild mushrooms photographed from below. A sense that the natural world is full of chaotic abundance just waiting to be gathered by someone wearing fingerless gloves and a thrifted cardigan.
Your Actual Assignment: You are the closest thing to a natural fit on this list, which is why we're sending you to the state forestry collective in a region where the winters are described, officially, as bracing. You will be foraging. It will not be aesthetic. You will be assigned a quota.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 600 kilograms of edible fungi, certified and graded. "Interesting rocks" do not count toward the quota, regardless of how interesting they are.
5. Solarpunk
The Board: Lush vertical gardens on brutalist buildings. Cooperatives that look like they were designed by someone who owns every season of The Great British Bake Off. A vision of ecological socialism that is genuinely quite thoughtful and has clearly had a lot of effort put into it.
Photo: Great British Bake Off, via hips.hearstapps.com
Your Actual Assignment: Irrigation ditch maintenance, which is, technically, infrastructure for a green future. We want you to hold onto that framing. You will need it.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 14 kilometers of functional irrigation channel by spring planting. The vertical gardens are Phase 7. We are currently in Phase 1.
6. Vintage Soviet Poster Collector
The Board: Authentic (or authentically-styled) Soviet propaganda prints. Bold reds and yellows. Heroic workers gazing toward a luminous horizon. The word ВПЕРЁД (Forward) above a image you found on Etsy for $18.
Your Actual Assignment: You are going to be on an actual poster. This is not a promotion. The poster will be motivational in nature and will be displayed in the break room of a tractor assembly facility to encourage your former colleagues to meet their monthly targets. You are the cautionary element.
Five-Year Plan Quota: N/A. You are now a visual aid.
7. Slow Living
The Board: Unhurried mornings. Analog clocks. Someone stirring oatmeal without looking at their phone. A philosophy of deliberate, mindful engagement with each passing moment, none of which are wasted on productivity culture.
Your Actual Assignment: Fruit picking, piece-rate compensation, which means that the slower you live, the less you eat. The Revolution respects your philosophy while gently noting that the cherry harvest has a three-week window and does not share your values.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 200 kilograms per day. Mindfully.
8. Academia-Adjacent Therapy Aesthetic
The Board: Journaling prompts. Watercolor illustrations of people sitting with their feelings. Quotes about nervous systems and emotional regulation. A deeply curated visual language suggesting that healing is the primary work of our time.
Your Actual Assignment: Pig farming collective, which we raise here not to be cruel but because the research consistently shows that caring for animals — even at industrial scale — has documented psychological benefits. You're welcome. Also, the pigs.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 340 pigs to market weight. Emotional support is not a billable unit under the current five-year plan, but we are reviewing this for Phase 4.
9. Maximalist Thrift Aesthetic
The Board: Layered textures. Secondhand everything. A bedroom that looks like a very organized estate sale. An implicit critique of fast fashion delivered through the medium of having a lot of stuff, just older stuff.
Your Actual Assignment: Textile factory, which is honestly the most thematically coherent posting on this list. You will be making the fabric. All of it. The quota does not care about the provenance.
Five-Year Plan Quota: 1,800 meters of standard-grade cotton weave per month. Vintage items are not an output category.
10. The "I Just Think Communes Sound Nice" Board
The Board: It's not really a coherent aesthetic. It's more of a vibe. Some Tolstoy quotes. A photograph of a community garden in Portland. A screenshot of a tweet about universal basic income. A general sense that if people just cooperated more, everything would sort itself out.
Your Actual Assignment: Everything. You are getting assigned to everything on a rotating basis because your skill profile, as assessed by the Labor Allocation Committee, is best described as enthusiastic generalist. This week you are on the beets. Next week, the pigs. The week after that, we'll see how the irrigation is coming along.
Five-Year Plan Quota: Varies. Bring a coat.
A Note From the Editorial Desk
None of this is meant to suggest that your aesthetic sensibilities are without value. The Revolution has always understood the importance of beauty, of meaning, of the human need to organize the world into images that make sense of it.
It's just that beauty, meaning, and sense-making will need to happen after the 5 p.m. shift bell, on your own time, using materials sourced from the collective supply depot (form 7-B, two weeks' notice required).
Your Pinterest boards will still be there when you get back. Assuming the Wi-Fi situation improves, which is, we are told, Phase 6.
Forward, comrades. The beets won't harvest themselves.