By Dmitri Volkonsky, Actual Life Under Communism
There exists, somewhere between a Spotify playlist called Red Dawn Chill Vibes and a tote bag bearing the face of a man who would have personally confiscated that tote bag, a very specific vision of communism. You have seen it. Perhaps you have reblogged it. It features a sunlit apartment with exposed brick, a shelf of well-thumbed Ursula K. Le Guin novels, a ceramic mug of something oat-based, and — crucially — absolutely no one doing anything that could be described as agricultural labor.
Photo: Ursula K. Le Guin, via cienciaficcion.com
This is the communism of the aesthetically inclined. And I, Dmitri Volkonsky, son of a man who once queued four hours for cooking fat, am here to offer some light supplementary reading.
The Vision: Soft Socialism for the Chronically Online
Let us be precise about what is being imagined, because precision is important when we are about to disappoint a significant number of people.
The Tumblr-and-leftist-Twitter version of post-revolutionary life looks roughly like this: healthcare arrives automatically, rent ceases to exist as a concept, and everyone spends their newly liberated hours either making art, processing their childhood trauma in a state-funded therapy session, or attending a very horizontal meeting about community garden scheduling. Work, in this vision, is something you choose — expressive, fulfilling, and conducted at a pace that respects your nervous system.
It is, I will admit, a lovely picture. I particularly enjoy the part where nobody has thought about who is growing the food.
What the Central Planning Committee Actually Thought About Your Nervous System
Here is where I must introduce you to a concept that does not appear on any aesthetic mood board I have encountered: surplus labor allocation.
Centrally planned economies, operating on the entirely reasonable assumption that grain does not harvest itself and coal does not mine itself out of collegial solidarity, developed elaborate systems for directing human bodies toward tasks that human bodies would not, left to their own preferences, volunteer for. The Soviet Union had the Trudarmiya — labor armies. Cuba mobilized hundreds of thousands of urban residents for the sugar cane harvest in campaigns that were, depending on your perspective, either stirring expressions of collective purpose or absolutely exhausting and non-negotiable. China's Cultural Revolution sent millions of educated young people to the countryside to perform agricultural re-education, which was exactly as relaxing as it sounds.
The through-line in all of these arrangements is that nobody asked what you were passionate about first.
A Brief Cross-Reference Exercise
I have taken the liberty of reviewing several LinkedIn profiles belonging to individuals whose public social media presence suggests enthusiasm for systemic economic transformation. I will not name them, because I am a gentleman, but I will share some representative skill endorsements that I encountered:
- Proficient in Canva
- Adobe Creative Suite
- Community organizing
- Facilitation
- Trauma-informed communication
- Content strategy
- Somatic awareness (I had to look this one up)
Now. I want you to hold those skills gently in your mind while I tell you that during the 1970 Cuban sugar harvest — the famous zafra that Fidel Castro staked his considerable reputation on — the government mobilized over a million workers, many of them from urban professional backgrounds, to cut cane by hand in brutal heat for weeks at a time. The harvest still fell short of its target by thirty percent.
Proficiency in Canva was not, at any point, a mitigating factor in machete assignment.
The Mismatch Is Structural, Not Personal
I want to be fair here, because I am a fair man who simply grew up understanding the price of eggs in a way that is apparently quite educational.
The people drawn to the cozy-communism aesthetic are not stupid. Many of them have genuine and legitimate grievances: housing costs that consume most of a paycheck, healthcare systems that treat illness as a revenue opportunity, a labor market that demands constant performance of enthusiasm for jobs that are, let us be honest, quite boring. These are real problems that deserve real engagement.
But there is a specific intellectual error happening when someone concludes that the solution involves a political and economic transformation that has, in every historical instance, required the more intensive direction of labor — not less — and then imagines themselves on the comfortable side of that direction. The error is not ideological. It is mathematical. Somebody has to grow the turnips. Under capitalism, that person is incentivized by wages. Under the systems being romantically invoked, that person was often incentivized by a quota and the social pressure of not wanting to be the one who let the collective down. The turnips still needed growing either way. The paperwork just had different letterhead.
What the Reading Nook Forgot to Include
The cozy-communism aesthetic has, I notice, excellent bookshelves. Lots of theory. Graeber, Kropotkin, some dog-eared manifestos. What it tends not to include is first-person memoir literature from people who actually lived through the systems being referenced — Eugenia Ginzburg, say, or Varlam Shalamov, or any number of writers whose accounts of actually-existing collectivism are available and are notably less vibe-forward than the Pinterest board suggests.
This is not an argument that suffering literature should replace all political imagination. It is simply an observation that a reading nook stocked entirely with the theory and none of the testimony has curated itself into a rather comfortable blind spot.
The Honest Conversation Nobody Is Having at the Collective Meeting
If you genuinely want universal healthcare, affordable housing, and a reduction in the more soul-destroying aspects of contemporary work — and again, these are not unreasonable things to want — there are political and policy arguments to be made that do not require you to eventually explain to a labor allocation board why your experience as a podcast editor qualifies you for anything other than the fruit picking rota.
The revolution, historically speaking, did not tend to ask what you'd prefer. It asked what you could do. And then it told you where to do it.
Your landlord, I grant you, is probably terrible. But the turnip quota has no interest in your grievances whatsoever.
Dmitri Volkonsky writes about the gap between political theory and agricultural reality. He has strong opinions about queuing and considers beet soup to be a warning, not a comfort food.