From 'Eat The Rich' To 'Please Don't Make Me Gut Fish': A Marxist's Emotional Collapse, Documented
By Chad Whitmore III | Actual Life Under Communism
There is a particular species of online revolutionary who has spent considerable energy designing their post-capitalist life. They have visualized it in great detail. There will be a ceramics studio, probably. A community healing circle. Perhaps a podcast recorded in a sunlit loft where they discuss 'collective liberation through somatic breathwork.' The revolution, in their imagination, smells like palo santo.
Then someone hands them a copy of Das Kapital — or, more likely, a Reddit thread summarizing it — and the dream begins its slow, agonizing deflation.
What follows is the definitive emotional journey, catalogued with scientific precision and tremendous personal satisfaction.
Stage 1: Radiant, Unbothered Confidence
TikTok Audio: 'Gaslight Gatekeep Girlboss'
This is the golden era. Our subject — let's call her Brianna, because statistically it's Brianna — is posting 'the bourgeoisie won't see it coming 😌✊' while wearing a $140 vintage band tee. She has not read Marx. She has read about Marx, on Instagram, from an account with a cracked-egg avatar. Life is good. The revolution is aesthetic.
Marx, meanwhile, wrote in Capital Vol. 1: 'The capitalist process of production… produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, but it also produces and reproduces the capitalist relation itself.' Brianna has screenshot this and added the text 'PERIODT' in pink font.
Stage 2: The First Unsettling Google Search
TikTok Audio: That one sound where it goes quiet right before something bad happens
Someone in the comments — almost certainly a person with a tractor profile picture — asks Brianna what, specifically, she plans to contribute to the collective economy. Brianna types 'community wellness facilitation' and hits send. The tractor person responds with a list of Soviet-era labor quotas. Brianna googles 'what did people actually do under communism.' The results are not spa-related.
Stage 3: Aggressive Reframing
TikTok Audio: 'It's giving… it's giving…'
Brianna decides that her Feminist Dance Theory minor is, in fact, deeply relevant to collective production. Culture is labor. Healing IS work. She posts a seven-slide carousel explaining why her lived experience as a certified crystal practitioner constitutes a means of production in itself. Sixty-two people agree. One of them is her mom.
Marx: 'Labour is, first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature.' Brianna highlights 'metabolism' and decides this proves her point about gut health content.
Stage 4: The Orchard Incident
TikTok Audio: 'Wait, this isn't what I signed up for'
A well-meaning comrade shares an article about collective agricultural management. There are photographs. People are picking fruit. Very large quantities of fruit. In the sun. Bent at the waist. Brianna's lumbar support pillow is not visible in any of the images. A cold feeling settles somewhere near her sternum.
Stage 5: Bargaining (The Specialization Gambit)
TikTok Audio: That audio people use when they're trying to explain their way out of something
Surely, Brianna reasons, a properly organized communist society would still need people to facilitate emotional processing. Someone has to tend to the collective psyche. She drafts a position paper titled 'The Revolutionary Case for Mandated Afternoon Therapy Sessions.' It is twelve pages long. It cites Audre Lorde four times. She does not address who harvests the wheat.
Photo: Audre Lorde, via cdn.britannica.com
Marx, unhelpfully: 'The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.' There is no mention of a mill that processes feelings.
Stage 6: Encountering The Sewage Treatment Literature
TikTok Audio: Silence. Just silence.
This is the stage historians will study. Someone — again, almost certainly the tractor person — shares documentation on how collective infrastructure actually operates. Sewage treatment plants are mentioned. They require staffing. Around the clock. By humans. Brianna reads the words 'mandatory rotation of sanitation duties' and has to lie down on her meditation mat.
Stage 7: The Fish Processing Spiral
TikTok Audio: 'I don't feel so good'
One rabbit hole leads to another. Soviet fish processing quotas. The smell, described in memoirs, of industrial fish facilities at 4:45am. The weight of the equipment. The mandatory output numbers. Brianna's aromatherapy diffuser is running full blast. It is not helping. She watches a twelve-minute documentary about a Norwegian salmon facility and does not finish it.
Marx: 'It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.' Brianna's consciousness is currently determined by the memory of fish scales.
Stage 8: The 'Maybe Capitalism Has Some Points' Flirtation
TikTok Audio: That sound from when someone gets caught doing something
This stage lasts approximately forty-five minutes and is never spoken of publicly. Brianna briefly visits the website of a local small business collective. She considers, for the first time, whether her somatic breathwork practice could be monetized through a tiered membership model. She closes the tab. She opens it again. She closes it. She posts 'late stage capitalism is exhausting' to cover her tracks.
Stage 9: Attempting To Locate A Loophole
TikTok Audio: 'Okay but hear me out'
Brianna discovers the concept of 'intellectual labor' and experiences brief, electric hope. Writers were valued in some communist states! Artists received state support! She does not look too closely at what that support looked like in practice, or what happened to the artists who declined to paint portraits of the correct people. Hope, at this stage, is a fragile thing and must be protected from facts.
Stage 10: Quiet, Agricultural Resignation
TikTok Audio: Lo-fi beats. The sad kind.
The carousel posts have slowed. The hammer-and-sickle earrings are still worn, but with less conviction. Brianna has started following accounts about 'regenerative farming' and telling herself this was always what she meant. She uses the word 'land stewardship' now. She has purchased gloves. Not the cute kind.
Marx, one final time: 'The realm of freedom actually begins only where drudgery, forced by necessity and by external purposes, ends.' Brianna reads this and realizes Marx was describing a destination, not her current situation. Her current situation involves a very early alarm.
Stage 11: The Profile Bio Update
TikTok Audio: Whatever sound is playing when someone has simply accepted their fate
The bio no longer reads 'revolutionary healer | dismantling systems | she/her | DMs open.' It now reads 'learning to grow things 🌱.' The Substack has been quiet for six weeks. The tote bag is still in rotation, but it now contains actual produce from an actual farmers market where Brianna spent actual money because, it turns out, someone still has to grow the food.
She is not, to be clear, growing the food. But she's thinking about it. She's really, genuinely thinking about it.
Progress.
Chad Whitmore III is the founder and sole editorial staff of Actual Life Under Communism. He owns several pairs of work boots and has opinions about drainage systems that he will share with you unprompted.