From Plato to Bernie and AOC – A Brief History of Communism Twenty-four centuries, one idea. It always starts the same way and always ends the same way. 1. Plato, 380 BC. The world is badly made, the wise should redesign it, and the rulers may lie to the people for their own good – he called it the noble lie. Property abolished among the guardians, the family abolished with it. Everything since is a version of it, with progressively worse writing and progressively higher body counts. 2. The millenarian sects. Property abolished, the chosen in charge, purification required – a thousand years before capitalism existed. The idea needs no economy to appear. 3. Rousseau, 1762. Man is good, institutions corrupt him, so institutions must be remade. The General Will – the collective desire of the people, which the correct leader can identify and implement regardless of what individual people actually want. The philosophical foundation of every subsequent revolution that murdered people in the name of their own liberation. Whoever refuses to obey shall be forced to be free. Rousseau personally abandoned all five of his children to the orphanage. He wrote extensively about the correct upbringing of children. This is a pattern. 4. Kant and Hegel. Kant splits the world as we see it from the world as it is. Hegel adds that history is going somewhere. Together they supply the phrase that ends every argument: the wrong side of history. 5. 1789, French Revolution. The idea gets a country. Virtue is the goal, and virtue turns out to need enforcement. Four years from liberation to the guillotine and the Terror. 6. Marx, 1848. The same idea in a scientific costume – now you weren’t arguing for it, you were reading the future. Written by a man who had never worked in a factory, funded by a man who owned one. 7. Lenin, 1917. The vanguard party: a small group of professionals who know what the workers need better than the workers do. Delivered to Russia in a sealed train by a German general who wanted Russia out of the war. He got that, and more. 8. Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. What it looks like when it wins. Terror as government, and a lie so complete that people lost the ability to tell what they thought from what they had to say. Tens of millions dead in China, a quarter of the population in Cambodia. Not a deviation. The same premise, applied with enthusiasm. Collectivization, the gulag, the Great Leap, the killing fields – roughly a hundred million dead in one century. Each time preceded by intellectuals explaining why this time would be different. 9. The Frankfurt School. The workers in the West refused to revolt, so the explanation changed: the problem is cultural, and Western civilization itself is the oppressor and has to be deconstructed. Everything to be criticized, nothing to be built. 10. Gramsci, Spinelli, Dutschke and 1968. Don’t storm the parliament – get a job in the editorial office. Power in the West rests on consent, and consent is made in schools and newspapers – so take those instead. The long march through the institutions. The generation that failed in the streets became the professors, editors and judges. It worked, which is why elections now change the government but not the direction. 1989 – the system collapses, the archives opened, and in the Western universities almost nobody changed their mind. A faith, not a theory. 11. Bernie and AOC. Same idea, new clothes, and nobody left who has read the source material. Free everything, paid for by the billionaires. Honeymooned in the Soviet Union in 1988 – three years before it collapsed – and came back impressed. Three houses. Net worth in the millions of dollars. Democratic socialists. The reasoning is Plato’s, the aesthetic is TikTok. From Plato to Bernie and AOC: Even communism isn’t immune to decay… What follows 12. The lie is not a side effect. It is the system. 13. Where truth is handed out instead of found, anyone who insists on finding it is in the way. 14. It survives because it protects positions, not beliefs. Ask who is best for the job and every protected position is at risk. Ask who belongs in the room and the same people stay in it for life. 15. The managerial class is the nomenklatura. Same selection, same script, same immunity to results. Only the letterhead changed. 16. Where everything needs permission, permission becomes the currency – and whoever knows the apparatus rules, whoever wins the election. 17. Silence is not ignorance. It is knowledge plus a calculation: speaking costs everything, silence is free. 18. Underneath, it runs on two fuels: envy and fear. Envy supplies the motive – someone else has what you don’t, and the system promises to take it. Fear supplies the compliance – everyone can see what happens to those who say the wrong thing. Neither has anything to do with justice, and neither ever built anything. 19. The idea never learns, because the error is not in the implementation. It is in the premise: that the "wise" can plan the lives of the many better than the many can plan their own. 20. The answer is not a better plan for society. It is refusing to let anyone hold the pen. Reality is not negotiable. Say so out loud, build things that work, and hand them to your children. Tell the truth. Have courage. And build.