From 'Seize The Means' To 'Please, My Back': A Comrade's Complete Emotional Collapse In Eleven Acts
By Earl 'Red' Hutchins, Senior Correspondent, Actual Life Under Communism
History, as a wise man once said, repeats itself — first as tragedy, second as a twenty-three-year-old in a Mitski hoodie sobbing into a turnip. We at ALUC have spent considerable time tracking the psychological journey of the Fully Automated Luxury Communist, that peculiar creature who spent three years posting infographics about post-scarcity economics and is now discovering, at considerable personal cost, that beets do not harvest themselves.
What follows is a clinical, compassionate, and only mildly gleeful documentation of their emotional arc.
Stage One: Transcendent Euphoria
Capitalism has fallen. Our subject — let's call him Dimitri, though his birth certificate says Brandon — posts a seventeen-tweet thread explaining that this is, actually, extremely good. He uses the word 'praxis' four times before lunch. His pinned tweet from this morning reads: "Imagine a world where your worth isn't tied to productivity. That world is coming and I am READY."
Brandon has never operated a piece of agricultural machinery. Brandon considers this irrelevant.
Stage Two: The Confident Skills Assessment
The new People's Labor Allocation Bureau sends Brandon a form. He fills it in with the quiet confidence of a man who once facilitated a workshop on decolonizing your spice rack. Under 'transferable skills' he lists: critical theory, community organizing, podcast hosting, and — this is real — "holding space."
He tweets: "Just submitted my skills assessment to the collective. Hoping to contribute through education or perhaps wellness infrastructure. Exciting times!"
The Bureau receives forty thousand forms listing 'emotional labor' as a primary qualification. The beet fields remain unstaffed.
Stage Three: The Letter Arrives
It is not the wellness infrastructure posting.
Brandon stares at his assignment for a long time. The word 'agricultural' appears. So does a grid reference. So does the phrase 'mandatory quota.' He reads it three more times hoping it will change. It does not change.
Stage Four: Bargaining Via Strongly Worded Document
Brandon composes a letter to the Bureau explaining that his gender studies thesis — 'Heteronormativity and the Commodification of Oat Milk: A Marxist-Feminist Reading' — demonstrates precisely the kind of analytical rigor that should be deployed in an educational capacity. He uses the word 'frankly' twice. He requests a meeting. He does not get a meeting.
Old tweet, unearthed by a follower with too much time: "Under socialism, bureaucracy serves the PEOPLE, not capital. No more faceless institutions ignoring you!!!"
The ratio is, by all accounts, historic.
Stage Five: Ideological Reframing (Desperate)
Brandon pivots. Actually, he explains on a voice note to his Discord server, working the land is deeply communist. It's grounding. Literally. It connects you to the means of production in a tactile, embodied way. He references something Murray Bookchin said. He sounds like a man trying to convince himself a root canal is a spa treatment.
Photo: Murray Bookchin, via cdn.britannica.com
"Excited to do some hands-on work for the collective this season. Soil is political."
Nobody replies.
Stage Six: First Contact With Actual Soil
The soil is not, it turns out, particularly political. It is mostly cold and it gets into places Brandon did not anticipate. The foreman — a weathered woman named Agatha who has no strong feelings about Gramsci — shows Brandon how to operate the harvesting equipment. Brandon asks if there's an onboarding document. Agatha looks at him for a very long time.
Photo: Antonio Gramsci, via 2.bp.blogspot.com
Stage Seven: The Physical Reckoning
Day four. Brandon's hands have done something unfamiliar. His lower back has filed a formal complaint with his upper back. He checks his phone during the fifteen-minute break — the only break — and finds a tweet he posted eight months ago: "Under communism we will finally have TIME. Time to rest. Time to create. Time to simply BE."
He is currently on hour eleven of a fourteen-hour harvest shift. He puts his phone away.
Stage Eight: The Dangerous Nostalgia Phase
Brandon thinks about his old barista job. He didn't like it, but the espresso machine was warm and nobody expected him to lift anything heavier than a portafilter. He thinks about this with a tenderness that alarms him. He briefly considers whether the wage relationship was, in some narrow technical sense, not entirely without merit.
He will not be tweeting this thought.
Stage Nine: The Theological Crisis
If the revolution was supposed to liberate human potential, Brandon finds himself wondering, why does his potential currently consist entirely of not dropping the beet crates? He raises this question at the weekly collective meeting. A farmer named Yevgenia, who has been working this land for thirty years, tells him to sit down. He sits down.
Stage Ten: Hollow Compliance
Brandon meets his quota. He does not celebrate. He eats his dinner — which is fine, genuinely fine, he has no complaints about the dinner — and goes to sleep at nine PM, which is the earliest he has gone to sleep since he was seven years old. His last tweet was eleven days ago. It said "checking in" and received three likes, one of which was his mum.
Stage Eleven: Tearful, Muddy Acceptance
It is week six. Brandon is, objectively, better at this than he was. His back has stopped screaming and started merely sighing. Agatha told him yesterday that his row spacing was 'acceptable,' which he is choosing to receive as a compliment. He has stopped checking his old tweets. He has started going to sleep at eight forty-five.
He does not post about this. There is nothing to post. The beets do not care about his analysis. The quota does not negotiate. The soil remains, stubbornly, apolitical.
Somewhere, in a different district, a young woman named Courtney has just received her labor allocation. She was hoping for the arts facilitation panel. She is going to the mines.
Her pinned tweet, posted nine months ago, reads: "Imagine a society that valued people over profit. I, for one, cannot WAIT."
The journey begins.
Earl 'Red' Hutchins is a senior correspondent at Actual Life Under Communism. He has personally interviewed fourteen former podcast hosts now working in root vegetable extraction and reports that most of them have 'good days and bad days.'