Communism has deep human appeal

...And this is not a good thing

Despite the terror-famines, the mass murders, the tyrannies, the economic stagnation, the millions of refugees, some version of the communist ideal—“the warmth of collectivism”—retains endless appeal.

Yes, some of this is the wish-fulfilment power of this time will be different. It never is different in ways that are a net positive to human flourishing, but that has remarkably little purchase. People who have never had to confront any of the ghastly historical rhyming of the warmth of collectivism feel an especial pull.

But none of this explains the endless appeal of the communist ideal. People, after all, have to work at rationalisations, at ignoring, at downplaying of so much horror.

Some of it is that happy families do provide genuine communal warmth, which can be a seminal experience. Many loving and effective families do operate on the principle of from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs. Problem is, cancer cells also operate on that principle.

Jon Tyson, Unsplash

It is not the principle here that is sound: rather, it’s a web of intimate biological connections and information that enables families to work as places of communal warmth. Such webs do not scale up: well, not very far.

Webs of intimate connections and information scale up to the foraging band—typically around 150 souls, the famous Dunbar’s Number—that was the basis of Homo sapien subsistence for the overwhelming majority of our existence as a species. That is how we evolved to live, so it makes sense such communality can have a profound, even atavistic, appeal.

Indeed, in the theory of Karl Marx, the march of history is from primitive communism—which suffered from tribal narrowness due to under-developed productive capacity—to global communism. The latter would be achieved when our productive capacity had multiplied so hugely as to enable elimination of all other classes apart from the one that does the productive work (the proletariat) coupled with liberation from the oppression that production constraints had otherwise made inevitable.

It is worth dwelling on what those foraging societies—whose primitive communism Marx cites as revealing our “species being”—were actually like. First of all, they were violent. They were violent internally: horticultural and foraging cultures have the highest rates of homicide of any human societies. Collectivism only works to general benefit if one can eliminate free riders and dominance behaviour. This elimination often involves violence.

Foraging societies were also violent externally: foraging populations genociding each other was a recurrent occurrence. Populations were small, their density was low, it was relatively easy to knock a foraging population down below the size where they could sustain the technological and social cohesion to survive.

Foraging societies were also technologically stagnant. There was remarkably little technological development for over 200,000 years of our existence as a species. Over the last 70-50,000 years, things sped up, but the rate of change was still slow. It is post-foraging societies where change really took off, with the fastest rates of change happening in the societies least like the “primitive communism” of foraging societies.

So, violent, genocidal, a strong tendency towards technological stagnation. Does this sound familiar? Marx was right, modern communism is a scaling up of primitive communism. Problem is, this is not a good thing.

So, yes, communism has an atavistic appeal. It resonates with our deep evolutionary history. A history we want to outdo—not recreate the same horrors at scale as communism does.

References

Lawrence Keeley, War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage, Oxford University Press, 1997.

Robert L. Kelly, The Lifeways of Hunter-Gatherers: The Foraging Spectrum, Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2013.