American anti-Communism if America had become Communist

[lerk]

Assuming a communist revolution overthrows the United States, how would American anti-Communism, both underground in the country and in the diaspora, look like?

 

[Ricardolindo]

Assuming a communist revolution overthrows the United States, how would American anti-Communism, both underground in the country and in the diaspora, look like?

No offense, but, first, I think you should explain how the United States of America becomes communist considering how implausible that is.

 

[lerk]

No offense, but, first, I think you should explain how the United States of America becomes communist considering how implausible that is.

We're just going with the standard approach of the Great Depression going wrong, which is how most "America becomes Communist" scenarios on here go.

 

[Ricardolindo]

We're just going with the standard approach of the Great Depression going wrong, which is how most "America becomes Communist" scenarios on here go.

I don't wish to ruin the scenario, but I just don't see the Great Depression resulting in a communist America. It didn't happen anywhere else in the world, even in countries far more favorable to communism.

 

[Mumby]

No offense, but, first, I think you should explain how the United States of America becomes communist considering how implausible that is.

I actually don't think it's all that implausible, but you do have to reach back for a POD that would make the resultant 'communist' America fairly unrecognisable from what we think of OTL Communism.

 

[Ricardolindo]

I actually don't think it's all that implausible, but you do have to reach back for a POD that would make the resultant 'communist' America fairly unrecognisable from what we think of OTL Communism.

Could you, please, elaborate?

 

[Nyvis]

To go back to the original topic, I think you'll have a few brands.

First, there's economic exiles. People rich enough to leave as revolutionary activity picks up and make a living abroad with what remains of their fortunes, forever salty about losing their ability to exploit people through property at home. The first generation is likely to be very angry and revanchist but that'll fade as their economic interests integrate with their host countries'.

Then there's the white/christian reactionaries. They have a strong basis in the US and it's very unlikely they'd be discredited entirely before a revolution. From looking at past revolutionary conditions, it's more likely to eat away at the center so they'll be the face of resistance on the ground once the regulars crumble or defect. They're likely to form the bulk of both the anti communist partisan networks and the less wealthy diaspora. Depending on how successful the communists are at home, their staying power could be quite variable.

There's potentially also military remnants, and parts of the US that can be split away rather than follow the revolution.

 

[Makemakean]

There'd presumably be a fair number of liberal intellectuals who would not feel at home in the kind of severely-repressive-at-best-outright-totalitarian-at-worst that these sort of societies have inevitably ended up becoming. People who kind of like democracy and a free press and all that jazz. Your Andrei Sakharovs, your Václav Havels, your Liu Xiaobos.

Then there'd presumably be a fair number of people who in a free and open society likely would have been prominent labour leaders who will not look particularly fondly on the idea that the state should have complete control over the trade unions from the top down. Your Lech Wałęsas, your Han Dongfangs.

It is also fair that there would be a number of Christians who, while not fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists, would deeply despise the control that the state would wish to excert over religious bodies, as has been the case hitherto in all Communist societies. Your Gleb Yakunins, your John Paul IIs, your Chinese House Christians.

For the most part, the anti-Communism wouldn't take the shape of a coherent philosophical idea or system or worldview. In a system as the one imposed under Communism, sufficient liberty of conscience would not be permissible to allow such thoughts to foster in the mind of but a few stubborn. But there would be this widespread sense of silent contempt and hatred for the system, as was the case throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

 

[Nyvis]

There'd presumably be a fair number of liberal intellectuals who would not feel at home in the kind of severely-repressive-at-best-outright-totalitarian-at-worst that these sort of societies have inevitably ended up becoming. People who kind of like democracy and a free press and all that jazz. Your Andrei Sakharovs, your Václav Havels, your Liu Xiaobos.

Then there'd presumably be a fair number of people who in a free and open society likely would have been prominent labour leaders who will not look particularly fondly on the idea that the state should have complete control over the trade unions from the top down. Your Lech Wałęsas, your Han Dongfangs.

It is also fair that there would be a number of Christians who, while not fire-and-brimstone fundamentalists, would deeply despise the control that the state would wish to excert over religious bodies, as has been the case hitherto in all Communist societies. Your Gleb Yakunins, your John Paul IIs, your Chinese House Christians.

For the most part, the anti-Communism wouldn't take the shape of a coherent philosophical idea or system or worldview. In a system as the one imposed under Communism, sufficient liberty of conscience would not be permissible to allow such thoughts to foster in the mind of but a few stubborn. But there would be this widespread sense of silent contempt and hatred for the system, as was the case throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

You're doing an awful lot of assuming on the nature of American communism here. This is in fact "if American had become communist", not "if America had become a copy paste of the soviet union or its methods despite an entirely different movement and material conditions". And you may look at the transformation of the US socialist movement into a soviet aligned one to claim it would happen the same way, but I'd argue that was a factor of its defeat if anything.

Labour unions won't end up controlled because the revolution isn't going to happen without them. If anything, they're more likely to end up the ones who do the controlling to the detriment of the rank and file workers.

You're probably right about a lot of the churches though. I expect a lot of that gets tied up in them being party to reactionary forces, though, so it's likely far from one sided either.

As for general contempt for the system, that's likely to be a consequence of failure to deliver (in the case of the soviet union proper) or the imposition of a barely red painted puppet system (in the case of the Warsaw Pact). The US is much better equiped to deliver, and it's likely the only areas it ends up being perceived as a foreign occupying force in would be the reactionary south.

You can do better.

 

[frustrated progressive]

You're doing an awful lot of assuming on the nature of American communism here. This is in fact "if American had become communist", not "if America had become a copy paste of the soviet union or its methods despite an entirely different movement and material conditions". And you may look at the transformation of the US socialist movement into a soviet aligned one to claim it would happen the same way, but I'd argue that was a factor of its defeat if anything.


You can do better.

This is all possible, but I don't think it's unfair to extrapolate from the only communist states that have (despite what Marx predicted) ever established themselves in real life, rather than putting the theoretical cart before the historical horse.

 

[Nyvis]

This is all possible, but I don't think it's unfair to extrapolate from the only communist states that have (despite what Marx predicted) ever established themselves in real life, rather than putting the theoretical cart before the historical horse.

Marx was right though, in that even if Russian communists won their civil war, they couldn't build communism out of Russia (or China).

The basis of communism is the proletariat and they barely had one, most of which died during their civil wars. I don't think I'm unfair in saying that it's a very bad template to apply to what would be the most industrialized country at the time. Their imitators were both ideologically gutted by the soviet control of the comintern and facing a lot of the same lack of proletariat issues either.

Does that leave us with very little to go on about the shape of communism in a developed country? Yes. Is it a good reason to copy paste a poor understanding of the ones we have like material conditions don't matter to a movement's development? No.

We can do better.

 

[Makemakean]

You're doing an awful lot of assuming on the nature of American communism here.

I'm assuming that American communism will be pretty much akin to communism as it has been practiced pretty much wherever it has been practiced. And that has inevitably always been without a free press, without freedom of speech, with significant state monitoring and control of organized religion, without democratic elections, and without independent trade unions.

On the particular point of the trade unions, I would further remind you that despite a significant role played by trade unions in helping both the Russian and Chinese Communist parties obtain power (there's a reason it was called the Soviet Union, after all), they both ended up under very stringent state control, where eventually, the very idea of independent trade unions was officially denounced as being lacking in solidarity, wrecking, and outright bourgeois.

Frankly, I don't have much credence for the notion that Communism, if practiced in the United States would somehow miraculously be either democratic or economically prosperous. Part of the reason is because Communism appears to me to come with inherently anti-democratic tendencies. As I see it, a planned economy will inevitably lead to a centralization of authority as a matter of organizational necessity, where democracy will be continuously be circumscribed from above to the bottom, to prevent deviations from the plan. Further, as a matter of friction always existing in one form or another, the more authority to the top, the more tasks they are entrusted with, and the less democratic control, the more the bureaucracy, which will spawn further bureaucracy.

I furthermore think that the reason why the Soviet Union never caught up with the United States economically has pretty much everything to do with the economic system in question, not that Russia started off as a poorer country and simply didn't have the "hardware" so to speak. A planned economy will inevitably be a Frankensteinian behemoth that is incapable of figuring out what people want and in what quantities they want them. Simply because there is so limited room for experimentation, there will be less innovation.

I additionally assume that for a Communist Party to be successful in achieving power, there would have to be a complete breakdown in the ecconomic and social fabric of society. Whatever relative prosperity you see in the United States today, and which you lean upon to make the case that the US would be more capable to deliver economically would simply have to disappear, making it a moot point.

No, I'm afraid that I honestly think that you are the one who can do better.

 

[Makemakean]

Marx was right though, in that even if Russian communists won their civil war, they couldn't build communism out of Russia (or China).

The basis of communism is the proletariat and they barely had one, most of which died during their civil wars. I don't think I'm unfair in saying that it's a very bad template to apply to what would be the most industrialized country at the time. Their imitators were both ideologically gutted by the soviet control of the comintern and facing a lot of the same lack of proletariat issues either.

Does that leave us with very little to go on about the shape of communism in a developed country? Yes. Is it a good reason to copy paste a poor understanding of the ones we have like material conditions don't matter to a movement's development? No.

My honest opinion is that there seems to be a certain odd correlation here, in that all countries who have adopted Communism hitherto have either not had strong democratic and civic institutions historically or have been impoverished and poorly developed, or, almost invariably both. This, while developed, industrialized countries with a high degree of prosperity and stable democratic and civic institutions tend to not elect Communist governments. As in, they haven't. Hence, it seems to me that if a Communist Party were to achieve power in the United States, it would have to be because the place has become the kind of basket case wherein a Communist Party can achieve power.

I furthermore feel that it is always odd when Communists of various kinds try to explain away the failure with the Soviet Union in that, well, it was because Russia didn't have a history of parliamentary government and the idea of democratic institutions, it was because Russia was a poor country to start with. Somehow, socialism is incapable of nurturing democracy and civil liberties, but brutal Victorian-style capitalism is? You need to have a long period of capitalism first, because whereas capitalism can give birth to democracy, socialism is oddly barren? You need to have capitalism to develop the wealth first, so socialism will then have something to redistribute? That doesn't seem to be particularly promising for your favoured ideology.

But then, of course, I remember that this makes sense to the Communists, because they operate on the basis of the historical dialectic in analysing the world. Everything is to be interpreted from the point of view of Marx and Engels misinterpretation of Hegel's already bizarre notions on metaphysics in analyzing social and economic development.

No, no. The simple fact of the matter is that I find Communism to be inherently silly and self-defeating.

And I hope you should, in some sense, have sympathy for that point of view.

After all, if I were to ask you to imagine, say, a world that runs on, Objectivism or Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, I'm quite sure that you would similarly be unable to conceive of a version of it that wouldn't be a complete dystopia. If someone were to say "We can do better" to that, well, I think your honest reaction would be, "No, this is what Objectivism and anarcho-capitalism inevitably leads to, and there's just no getting away from that."

 

[Nyvis]

I'm assuming that American communism will be pretty much akin to communism as it has been practiced pretty much wherever it has been practiced. And that has inevitably always been without a free press, without freedom of speech, with significant state monitoring and control of organized religion, without democratic elections, and without independent trade unions.

On the particular point of the trade unions, I would further remind you that despite a significant role played by trade unions in helping both the Russian and Chinese Communist parties obtain power (there's a reason it was called the Soviet Union, after all), they both ended up under very stringent state control, where eventually, the very idea of independent trade unions was officially denounced as being lacking in solidarity, wrecking, and outright bourgeois.

Frankly, I don't have much credence for the notion that Communism, if practiced in the United States would somehow miraculously be either democratic or economically prosperous. Part of the reason is because Communism appears to me to come with inherently anti-democratic tendencies. As I see it, a planned economy will inevitably lead to a centralization of authority as a matter of organizational necessity, where democracy will be continuously be circumscribed from above to the bottom, to prevent deviations from the plan. Further, as a matter of friction always existing in one form or another, the more authority to the top, the more tasks they are entrusted with, and the less democratic control, the more the bureaucracy, which will spawn further bureaucracy.

I furthermore think that the reason why the Soviet Union never caught up with the United States economically has pretty much everything to do with the economic system in question, not that Russia started off as a poorer country and simply didn't have the "hardware" so to speak. A planned economy will inevitably be a Frankensteinian behemoth that is incapable of figuring out what people want and in what quantities they want them. Simply because there is so limited room for experimentation, there will be less innovation.

I additionally assume that for a Communist Party to be successful in achieving power, there would have to be a complete breakdown in the ecconomic and social fabric of society. Whatever relative prosperity you see in the United States today, and which you lean upon to make the case that the US would be more capable to deliver economically would simply have to disappear, making it a moot point.

No, I'm afraid that I honestly think that you are the one who can do better.

What makes you think it'd have the same Stalinist planning model as the soviet union, one even the soviet union wasn't guaranteed to land on, and one that largely developed as Stalin's bloody answer to the situation the NEP built. The US doesn't have to deal with an economy that wants to retreat to subsidence farming, it's well past that and its argriculture is already well integrated into its markets.

As for trade unions in the soviet union, they never covered a significant portion of the pre revolution population. Just because they were there to work with the Bolsheviks in their organization in the city doesn't mean they were ready to be the core of the post revolution society, owing to Russia's lack of industrialization.

Follow up revolutions look similar because they were funded by the soviets on the condition of orthodoxy after they hollowed out the international communist movement to become an extension of their foreign policy.

My honest opinion is that there seems to be a certain odd correlation here, in that all countries who have adopted Communism hitherto have either not had strong democratic and civic institutions historically or have been impoverished and poorly developed, or, almost invariably both. This, while developed, industrialized countries with a high degree of prosperity and stable democratic and civic institutions tend to not elect Communist governments. As in, they haven't. Hence, it seems to me that if a Communist Party were to achieve power in the United States, it would have to be because the place has become the kind of basket case wherein a Communist Party can achieve power.

I furthermore feel that it is always odd when Communists of various kinds try to explain away the failure with the Soviet Union in that, well, it was because Russia didn't have a history of parliamentary government and the idea of democratic institutions, it was because Russia was a poor country to start with. Somehow, socialism is incapable of nurturing democracy and civil liberties, but brutal Victorian-style capitalism is? You need to have a long period of capitalism first, because whereas capitalism can give birth to democracy, socialism is oddly barren? You need to have capitalism to develop the wealth first, so socialism will then have something to redistribute? That doesn't seem to be particularly promising for your favoured ideology.

But then, of course, I remember that this makes sense to the Communists, because they operate on the basis of the historical dialectic in analysing the world. Everything is to be interpreted from the point of view of Marx and Engels misinterpretation of Hegel's already bizarre notions on metaphysics in analyzing social and economic development.

No, no. The simple fact of the matter is that I find Communism to be inherently silly and self-defeating.

And I hope you should, in some sense, have sympathy for that point of view.

After all, if I were to ask you to imagine, say, a world that runs on, Objectivism or Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, I'm quite sure that you would similarly be unable to conceive of a version of it that wouldn't be a complete dystopia. If someone were to say "We can do better" to that, well, I think your honest reaction would be, "No, this is what Objectivism and anarcho-capitalism inevitably leads to, and there's just no getting away from that."

I never said it was because Russia didn't have "a history of parliamentary government and the idea of democratic institutions"? It's not about capitalism having to take place to produce democracy either. It's about having a proletariat you can organize to build your communist movement. The basis for the organization of society the ideology envisions isn't there, so you end up having to maintain it at gunpoint.

I don't think it's utterly impossible to manage some kind of synthesis that would guide an undeveloped country through that issue but it'd require a very different organization. The Bolsheviks saw themselves as communists and thus organized the workers, which is why their support base started in the cities. They managed support in the countryside through the twin concerns of peace and land but those were never sufficient to build the organization that would underpin their target model for society. They weren't a party of the peasantry that managed to convince the peasants to organize to leap across capitalist development straight into socialism in spite of their common inclination towards individual lands. They never built the basis for a tailored approach to the problem of Russian material conditions.

America doesn't have to worry about that. It has other problems, but lacking a proletariat isn't one of them. And organizing it is how it'll succeed. Which will form the basis of the new organization of society.

I do agree America would need to be doing significantly worse for revolution to happen, but it's very hard to roll back the clock on industrialization and integration of the countryside into the market. I think the Spanish civil war is a more relevant model for escalation into revolution through reaction against a more moderate coalition victory, so that might be how it happens.

I think I'd be capable of distinguishing between anarcho capitalism applied to a preindustrial society and to an industrial one? I'll expect both to be bad, but I wouldn't claim they'd have the same problems because material conditions underpinning them are different.


Edit: anyway, this is off topic and I'm not going to convince you. It's very hard to answer the thread's question without an understanding of what communist America looks like.

 

[Makemakean]

Edit: anyway, this is off topic and I'm not going to convince you. It's very hard to answer the thread's question without an understanding of what communist America looks like.

Well, thank God for that, because I was kind of dreading having to type up another long reply and get stuck in this cold war with you again over who gets the last word.

Yes, I agree. The question is plainly too open-ended to give an intelligent response to shorter than a longer tome.

 

[Nyvis]

Basically, the right way to answer questions like this is to write a timeline, or at least the skeleton of one. How you get there will give you the context to answer the question of who's opposing it.

 

[Mumby]

Could you, please, elaborate?

Well I think a decent POD would be one somewhere around WW1, combining OTL high rates of unionisation (particularly in the IWW) with worsening state repression of the workers' movement. This is also the era in which segregation and racial laws became even more rigorous and federalised. If the circumstances of the war are ones in which the US is not enjoying a highly favourable exports boom, and instead facing a deepening economic crisis, and worse if they lose the war you have fairly potent conditions for something that looks like an American 1917. I think it would also help if the Russian Revolution happens differently, altering the conditions of the First Red Scare.

I think a revolution based upon a mildly radicalised and enlarged version of OTL's unions in the 1910s coupled with a worsened domestic situation results in a very different outcome from OTL's Soviet Union. Part of the reason for the USSR's authoritarianism was the Bolshevik conception of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries - individuals who tend toward the intellectual rather than proletarian end of the spectrum. I think if its something like the IWW spearheading the revolution, you don't get that vanguardist approach. Instead you get a highly decentralised and variegated patchwork of syndicalist councils. I don't think this is immune to exploitation or authoritarianism, but the scale of it would be much smaller. Individual councils and unions would be subject to authoritarian personalities - I imagine John L. Lewis would be about as close you would get to an American Stalin ITTL.

 

[Mumby]

Well I think a decent POD would be one somewhere around WW1, combining OTL high rates of unionisation (particularly in the IWW) with worsening state repression of the workers' movement. This is also the era in which segregation and racial laws became even more rigorous and federalised. If the circumstances of the war are ones in which the US is not enjoying a highly favourable exports boom, and instead facing a deepening economic crisis, and worse if they lose the war you have fairly potent conditions for something that looks like an American 1917. I think it would also help if the Russian Revolution happens differently, altering the conditions of the First Red Scare.

I think a revolution based upon a mildly radicalised and enlarged version of OTL's unions in the 1910s coupled with a worsened domestic situation results in a very different outcome from OTL's Soviet Union. Part of the reason for the USSR's authoritarianism was the Bolshevik conception of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries - individuals who tend toward the intellectual rather than proletarian end of the spectrum. I think if its something like the IWW spearheading the revolution, you don't get that vanguardist approach. Instead you get a highly decentralised and variegated patchwork of syndicalist councils. I don't think this is immune to exploitation or authoritarianism, but the scale of it would be much smaller. Individual councils and unions would be subject to authoritarian personalities - I imagine John L. Lewis would be about as close you would get to an American Stalin ITTL.

Where I do think analogism is helpful is in what happens to the 'Whites' who lose the revolution. I imagine you'd see Federal and state governments-in-exile, fleeing particularly to Canada and possibly the UK (this depends on the status of the UK post-WW1). I agree to a certain extent with @Makemakean that a certain segment of this exile movement would consist of 'liberal' and 'constitutionalist' objectors to the new revolutionary state of affairs. While I think that a revolution based upon a mass membership trade union movement would preserve a lot of participatory democracy, it would be in the shape of the Founders' Constitution which is revered in American civic culture, particularly in the early 20th century. I think there would even be some anti-revolutionary labour unions opposed to the revolutionary industrial unionism established by an IWW led revolution, preferring instead reformist craft unionism.

However, once the revolution is done and it's clear that the initial conflict is over, you'd see a lot of those kind of objectors die off due to old age, integrate into their new homes, or make a peace with the new America. I think the remaining determinedly anti-revolutionary diehards would agglomerate into roughly two groups. The first are hard right crypto-fascists, analogous to the Solidarist movement, calling for the exaltation of the individual before the collective, class collaboration through corporatism, and a new rebirth of patriotic fervour. I believe there would also be a strong religious element to this - inheriting a tradition of firm Anglo-Saxon Protestant nativism in opposition to the 'foreign' ideology of socialism and the Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish faiths of many in the union movement. The other strand would be the American Mladorossi, those who remain anti-socialist but believe that the post-revolutionary situation is simply an evolution of America which needs to be corrected. Some of these groups may believe the new revolutionary state, through agitation in Canada and Australia is simply extending the frontiers of Manifest Destiny. Some may believe that the syndicalist system of hundreds of local councils and unions may be assisted by a federal President and Cabinet.

 

[Catalunya]

I think the most important aspect is what the revolution itself is actually like. If it’s a years long violent civil war, it may very well destroy the proletariat, and lead to a USSR like state where there is a big distance between the elites and the people, though with a relatively peaceful revolution democratic standards would probably be better than anything from OTL, though a centralized system is always prone to elites trying to consolidate power in their own hands.

 

[Ricardolindo]

I'm assuming that American communism will be pretty much akin to communism as it has been practiced pretty much wherever it has been practiced. And that has inevitably always been without a free press, without freedom of speech, with significant state monitoring and control of organized religion, without democratic elections, and without independent trade unions.

On the particular point of the trade unions, I would further remind you that despite a significant role played by trade unions in helping both the Russian and Chinese Communist parties obtain power (there's a reason it was called the Soviet Union, after all), they both ended up under very stringent state control, where eventually, the very idea of independent trade unions was officially denounced as being lacking in solidarity, wrecking, and outright bourgeois.

Frankly, I don't have much credence for the notion that Communism, if practiced in the United States would somehow miraculously be either democratic or economically prosperous. Part of the reason is because Communism appears to me to come with inherently anti-democratic tendencies. As I see it, a planned economy will inevitably lead to a centralization of authority as a matter of organizational necessity, where democracy will be continuously be circumscribed from above to the bottom, to prevent deviations from the plan. Further, as a matter of friction always existing in one form or another, the more authority to the top, the more tasks they are entrusted with, and the less democratic control, the more the bureaucracy, which will spawn further bureaucracy.

I furthermore think that the reason why the Soviet Union never caught up with the United States economically has pretty much everything to do with the economic system in question, not that Russia started off as a poorer country and simply didn't have the "hardware" so to speak. A planned economy will inevitably be a Frankensteinian behemoth that is incapable of figuring out what people want and in what quantities they want them. Simply because there is so limited room for experimentation, there will be less innovation.

I additionally assume that for a Communist Party to be successful in achieving power, there would have to be a complete breakdown in the ecconomic and social fabric of society. Whatever relative prosperity you see in the United States today, and which you lean upon to make the case that the US would be more capable to deliver economically would simply have to disappear, making it a moot point.

No, I'm afraid that I honestly think that you are the one who can do better.

My honest opinion is that there seems to be a certain odd correlation here, in that all countries who have adopted Communism hitherto have either not had strong democratic and civic institutions historically or have been impoverished and poorly developed, or, almost invariably both. This, while developed, industrialized countries with a high degree of prosperity and stable democratic and civic institutions tend to not elect Communist governments. As in, they haven't. Hence, it seems to me that if a Communist Party were to achieve power in the United States, it would have to be because the place has become the kind of basket case wherein a Communist Party can achieve power.

I furthermore feel that it is always odd when Communists of various kinds try to explain away the failure with the Soviet Union in that, well, it was because Russia didn't have a history of parliamentary government and the idea of democratic institutions, it was because Russia was a poor country to start with. Somehow, socialism is incapable of nurturing democracy and civil liberties, but brutal Victorian-style capitalism is? You need to have a long period of capitalism first, because whereas capitalism can give birth to democracy, socialism is oddly barren? You need to have capitalism to develop the wealth first, so socialism will then have something to redistribute? That doesn't seem to be particularly promising for your favoured ideology.

But then, of course, I remember that this makes sense to the Communists, because they operate on the basis of the historical dialectic in analysing the world. Everything is to be interpreted from the point of view of Marx and Engels misinterpretation of Hegel's already bizarre notions on metaphysics in analyzing social and economic development.

No, no. The simple fact of the matter is that I find Communism to be inherently silly and self-defeating.

And I hope you should, in some sense, have sympathy for that point of view.

After all, if I were to ask you to imagine, say, a world that runs on, Objectivism or Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, I'm quite sure that you would similarly be unable to conceive of a version of it that wouldn't be a complete dystopia. If someone were to say "We can do better" to that, well, I think your honest reaction would be, "No, this is what Objectivism and anarcho-capitalism inevitably leads to, and there's just no getting away from that."

I agree. Being a moderate social democrat, I am to your left but I share you belief that communism can't work. History has repeatedly shown that.