M Chesney-Stroak

Being a communist in 2026 means one of two things. Either you're stupid. Or you've never opened a history book. You cite Lenin and October 1917 as your model. Fine. Let's look at the model. Lenin gave us the Cheka, the Red Terror, war communism, and the 1921 famine that killed around 5 million people. Stalin gave us the Holodomor, millions of Ukrainians starved on purpose. The Great Purge, roughly 700,000 people shot in two years. The Gulag, more than 1.5 million dead. Mao gave us the Great Leap Forward, the deadliest famine in human history, with estimates running from 15 to 45 million dead. Then the Cultural Revolution on top of it. Pol Pot gave us Year Zero. Money abolished, cities emptied at gunpoint, wearing glasses was enough to get you killed for being an intellectual. Close to a quarter of Cambodia's population gone in under four years. The Kims gave us three generations of hereditary communism, a famine in the 90s that killed hundreds of thousands, and camps that are still running today. Mengistu gave Ethiopia its own Red Terror, then a famine his policies made far worse. Castro gave Cuba firing squads, political prisoners, and six decades of people risking their lives on rafts to get out. Ceaușescu, Hoxha, Honecker. A wall in Berlin built not to keep enemies out, but to keep its own people in. And for the "21st-century socialism" crowd: Venezuela, sitting on the largest oil reserves on the planet, watched nearly 8 million of its people flee. Every continent. Every culture. Every decade. Same result. Depending on who's counting, tens of millions dead, close to 100 million according to The Black Book of Communism. So why does it fail every single time? Not bad luck. Not the wrong people in charge. Not "real communism has never been tried." Mises explained it in 1920, before Stalin even took power. If the state owns all the means of production, there is no market for them. No market means no prices. No prices means no way to calculate anything. You can't know whether a factory here is worth more than a railway there. A planned economy isn't just inefficient. It's blind. It's flying a plane with every instrument ripped out. Hayek went further. In "The Use of Knowledge in Society," he showed that the knowledge needed to run an economy doesn't exist in one place. It's scattered across millions of people: the farmer who knows his soil, the shopkeeper who knows his customers, the engineer who knows which part is about to break. Prices are the only system that aggregates all of it in real time. No committee, no Politburo, no five-year plan can replace that. The Great Leap Forward is the textbook case. Local officials, terrified of being purged, reported harvests that didn't exist. Beijing requisitioned grain based on fake numbers. The peasants starved. When you kill the price signal, the only information left is lies told to people with guns. And in "The Road to Serfdom," Hayek explained the rest. When the plan fails, and it always fails, someone has to impose it by force. Central planning requires concentrated power, and concentrated power attracts the people most willing to use it. He titled a whole chapter "Why the Worst Get on Top." That's the mechanism. Destroy prices, you destroy information. Destroy information, the economy collapses. Once it collapses, you need terror to keep it standing. Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot weren't betrayals of communism. They were communism working exactly as designed. So when someone tells you in 2026 that he wants to replicate October 1917, take him at his word. He's not promising you equality. He's promising you the Cheka.