From 'Seize the Means' to 'Please, Not the Means': A Comrade's Emotional Collapse in Ten Acts
By Earl 'Red' Hutchins, Actual Life Under Communism
Congratulations, comrade. The revolution was a success. The bourgeoisie have been dispatched, the means of production have been seized, and someone spraypainted 'NO LANDLORDS' on what used to be a Whole Foods. Beautiful. Truly. You should be proud.
Now. The lithium mine opens at five-thirty.
Somewhere between the third reading of The Communist Manifesto and the forty-seventh time you shared that infographic comparing Jeff Bezos's wealth to a grain of sand, a rather significant detail slipped past you: a functioning society — communist, capitalist, or otherwise — requires an absolutely unglamorous quantity of actual physical labor. Pipes. Cables. Ore. Sewage. The revolution, it turns out, has a maintenance schedule.
Here, then, is the emotional itinerary every aspiring comrade travels, documented with the clinical precision of a man who has watched this unfold far too many times.
Stage One: Radiant Certainty
This is the golden hour. Your tote bag says something clever. Your podcast queue is exclusively leftist theory. You have explained surplus value to your parents at Thanksgiving with the patient condescension of someone who has recently discovered something that has existed for 175 years. The future is collective, equitable, and — this part matters — aesthetically pleasing. You have not yet thought about what keeps the lights on, because the lights have always been on.
Stage Two: The Planning Committee Meeting
The revolution is three weeks old and someone has organized a committee to distribute labor assignments according to each citizen's abilities and the collective's needs. You arrive wearing your best vintage corduroy. You have prepared a short presentation on community mural programming. The committee thanks you and assigns you to the potassium mine in what used to be Saskatchewan. You laugh. They do not.
Stage Three: Surely There's Been a Misunderstanding
You explain — very calmly — that your background is in trauma-informed expressive arts facilitation. You have a certificate. The committee nods. The certificate, they explain, has been assessed for its contribution to collective output. The assessment took eleven seconds. Saskatchewan, they repeat, still not laughing.
Stage Four: Negotiation
You counter-propose a role as the mine's emotional support coordinator. You could run group sessions. Process the workers' feelings about extraction. The committee writes something down. You assume it is your job title. It is not your job title. It is a note reminding them to remove 'emotional support coordinator' from the list of roles before the next meeting so this doesn't happen again.
Stage Five: Ideological Gymnastics
Back in your shared dormitory — four comrades to a room, which you support in principle and are finding challenging in practice — you spend several nights constructing an elaborate theoretical framework in which your specific situation represents a bureaucratic deviation from true Marxist thought. The real communism, you write in your journal, would recognize the revolutionary value of somatic healing practices. You share this on what remains of the internet. Six people like it. Two of them are bots.
Stage Six: The First Shift
The boots do not fit correctly. Nobody warned you about the boots. You had imagined, in the vague cinematic way one imagines things, that the revolution would involve a lot of standing on things and pointing at horizons. There are no horizons in a mine. There is rock. There is your quota. There is Dmitri, your shift supervisor, who has heard every variation of 'but I have a philosophy degree' and whose face has achieved a permanent expression of geological patience.
Stage Seven: Bargaining With the Universe
You become briefly and intensely religious. You consider writing a strongly worded letter to the central planning office. You draft it four times. Each draft begins with 'As someone who has dedicated their life to the cause.' Dmitri reads the fourth draft and suggests, not unkindly, that you dedicate the next six hours to the cause of hitting the ore quota. The letter is not sent.
Stage Eight: A New and Terrible Understanding of History
Something shifts around week three. You are eating your collective-issue dinner — adequate, nutritionally — and you find yourself doing the thing you swore you'd never do: reading the Wikipedia page for the Soviet labor system with the dawning recognition that it is less 'Wikipedia page about historical atrocities' and more 'eerily accurate description of your Tuesday.' You close the tab. You open it again. You close it again. Dmitri walks past and says nothing, which somehow makes it worse.
Stage Nine: Selective Revisionism
You begin telling the story differently. In the version you tell yourself, you chose the mine. You are performing an act of radical solidarity. You are embodying the principles rather than merely posting about them. This is, technically, true. It is also the psychological coping mechanism of a person who is operating a pneumatic drill eleven hours a day and needs to believe it means something. Dmitri, who has been here since before the revolution and will be here long after you've mentally collapsed, finds this phase the most entertaining.
Stage Ten: Enlightenment (The Uncomfortable Kind)
It arrives quietly, somewhere around the second month, while you are unclogging a filtration pipe in what the committee's documents refer to as 'collective sanitation infrastructure' and what you are referring to, under your breath, as something unprintable. The thought is simple. Almost embarrassingly simple. Somebody always had to do this. Before the revolution, after the revolution, during every utopia ever sketched on a coffee-shop napkin — the pipe still clogs. The ore still needs extracting. The lithium that powers the phones that hosted your infographics doesn't manifest from ideological purity.
The philosophy degree, you realize, was never going to unblock this pipe. The philosophy degree was always going to be beside this pipe, examining it, contextualizing it within a framework of late-stage capitalist alienation, and then leaving it for someone else.
You are now the someone else.
Dmitri hands you a second wrench and says something in Russian you don't understand. Based on his expression, it is either a proverb about the dignity of labor or instructions about the secondary valve. Either way, you get back to work.
Earl 'Red' Hutchins is the founder of Actual Life Under Communism and has personally toured seventeen mines, four collective farms, and one 'liberated' artisanal cheese cooperative that lasted nine days before collapsing into a bitter dispute over who owned the good cheese knife. He takes no pleasure in this. He takes some pleasure in this.