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The following is based on what I learned reading a few books written by people who lived through an actual (or attempted) national communist transition.

Two of the books are first-hand accounts and one is a set of interviews and reflections from those with first-hand experiences. Otherwise, the books are very different:

• I Believed, by Douglas Hyde. The author tracks his own conversion to communism and rise within the British Communist Party, from the 1920s to late 1940s. After years wrestling with communist tactics and philosophy he leaves the party and coverts to Catholicism.
• Man is Wolf to Man, by Janusz Bardach. The author was already a Communist Party youth leader as a teenager in Poland when Germany and the Soviet Union invaded. He was then drafted into the Red Army and served 10 years in the gulag. This book added to my knowledge of communist processes and general destruction, but it included so many horrific scenes that I am troubled by having read it.
• Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism, by Robert Lifton. A series of reflections on interviews with Westerners and local Chinese in China who were imprisoned and put through years of psychological and physical torture.

The books are wide-ranging enough that I’m going to share many examples and quotes as a way to get to the commonalities.

Seeking Social Upheaval

Pre-communist transition, regardless of social class, early supporters see themselves as fighting for social justice. They are members of a new, righteous, and secret, society. They work harder than others can imagine, often bringing organization to places no one expects and attaining desired outcomes, sometimes through democratic means, but by secret collusion. There’s a willingness to see communism as a process, a destination, with social upheaval and class punishment as part of that process. There’s also a Machiavellian approach to winning at all costs. 

The communist “has a vested interest in disaster. Economic crisis, social upheaval, defeat in war or a victory which leaves a nation bled white even though victorious – these are the pre-conditions of communism. It would be less than human and, indeed, idiotic for the communist not, in his heart of hearts, to long for them.” (I Believed, p30)

This was a repeated theme across the books. Disaster brings opportunities. But there’s a difference in working through a disaster because it is the only thing to do and working and hoping for the disaster because it opens up political benefits. In Hyde’s case, British communists initially secretly worked to weaken Britain’s WWII war efforts, then once the USSR allied with Britain worked to help the war efforts, only to switch again to work at weakening post-war reconstruction efforts. 

Hyde left a potential career as a Methodist minister and joined the party because of his revulsion to social injustice within Britain in the aftermath of WWI. The description of his thoughts shows another repeated theme across those attracted to communism – that of generational justice. This is the concept that people living today should pay for the sins of their ancestors. “Under communist rule there will admittedly, during the transitional dictatorship of the proletariat, be injustices so far as the individual former rulers are concerned. But, because of their past, this will in fact be no more than a grim, rough justice. They will be paying for the injustices perpetrated by their class over the centuries. And in balance, how much better that injustice should now be confined to the tiny minority.” (I Believed, p32)

The New Morality

It was surprising for me to see the degree to which free love was common for communists in Britain in the 1930s. And the degree to which this was a selling point for new members.

But that same interest can turn to revulsion. Hyde and his wife became disgusted with communism in part because they knew that their attractive young daughter would likely be “passed around” the communist leadership.

It was much more surprising for me to see that same attitude in China in the early 1950s. “If a boy was interested in someone, he would check with the Party to see if it was all right to be in love… The girl is supposed to be honored if a progressive person asks for her love…. If she spurns a progressive man, the Party will come and talk to her…. Many girls have babies. At first a pregnancy was news, but later it was not. They would say, ‘Sooner or later, they will be married, so what does it matter?’ They made love a kind of business.” (Thought Reform, p344)

Morality then didn’t come from personal beliefs, religion, tradition, or culture, but of the higher group. Defining what is good and bad and controlling guilt are essential in building the new society.

“As the prisoner accepts this ‘higher’ group morality, its most hard judgments make common cause with the most tyrannical parts of his own conscience; through this joining of forces, he is changed from a man who merely feels guilty into one who feel guilty about exactly those actions which the environment considers criminal.” (Thought Reform, p76)

Yet, when members of the moral group commit crimes, they are just “blowing off steam.” The many examples of the above from Man is Wolf to Man – which I will not quote – are all around the commonality of rape by Soviet soldiers entering Poland during WWII and in the gulag system in Russia. 

Enforcing the Illusion

As in the new morality, people under the communist illusion are sometimes there because the truth is hidden from them. 

For the young in Russia in the mid-1940s and 1950s, they lacked direct experience of pre-revolution times, access to pre-revolution books, and accurate news of the West.

These truths were so hidden that Soviet prisoners refused to believe that Bardach’s family in Poland could have lived in a house with extra rooms. That they could have had more than enough food. Or that they could have owned a lake (“No one can own a lake!”). Just 30 years after the Bolshevik Revolution, the youth of Russia had no true knowledge of the capitalist world and elders were hesitant to pass those memories on to them. 

For those who chose to be communist in Britain, they lacked accurate news of life in Russia.

Hyde’s own discovery of this comes from the anti-communist Weekly Review which published reports of what cruelty was happening in Russia. Understandably, these reports were reinterpreted as not “typical of the new type of Soviet citizen” who were “letting off steam and should be understood and sympathized with, particularly in the light of what they had suffered.” (I Believed, p208)

For those put through though reform in China, they endured years of isolation and psychological and physical torture that led to confessions and often temporary changes in belief. 

There were occasional social errors from leadership. A verbal “indiscretion” committed by a visiting Political Bureau member: “It would not be possible, he said, quickly to raise the standard of life of the people in the new democracies since theirs were mainly peasant economies. But there was another way of raising their relative standards and that would be by reducing that of the countries of the West.”

“It is rarely that the Party’s real aims are put clearly into words in that way. Even at top levels they normally talk in the language of the Party’s public propaganda, whilst the real and concealed meaning is understood by all present who share the same knowledge of Marxist-Stalinist theory, jargon and methods of thought.” (I Believed, p246)

Enforcing the illusion also means that people must be punished for breaking the illusion. Hyde has to “try” two Party members alleged to be guilty of “left-wing deviations.” Interestingly, these members had spent years working at the Communist International headquarters in Russia. A woman on “trial” said that “she had lived in Russia and knew from experience that there were still imperfect social conditions there; and that the worship of Stalin had been carried a great deal too far.”

But her own revelation went too far. She broke the illusion. When people like her were tried and found guilty, they were then ostracized from the community and had their job prospects damaged by false reports of bad behavior. 

Throughout the books, discovering the illusion led people to find a personal escape, at least for a time. Secretly entering a church and sitting quietly. Reading non-approved books. Looking out of the unblocked window of the top bunk of a train. Praying secretly, or even openly.

All or Nothing, So Definitely All

Joking was taken very seriously in communist countries. If you joked about something, that meant that you doubted it or didn’t respect it. Joking about communist leadership or policies meant that you doubted them and therefore you weren’t all in. Jokes are memorable — they spread. And jokes might infect others so the jokers had to be isolated or eliminated. 

For example, during WWII as a new tank driver, Bardach accidentally overturned his tank while crossing a river. He was left with a Russian enlisted man to guard the tank. As they waited, Bardach said that he was tempted to just run to Poland (impossibly far away), but when his colleague revealed his joke to their superiors, Bardach was sent to be executed. It was a Polish officer who saved him by commuting the sentence to 10 years hard labor in Siberia. 

Years later, Loskutov, another prisoner Barduch meets, reflected on what landed him in the gulag. “Who’d ever think that a joke, inspired by too much vodka, could screw up a life so badly?” 

In the Soviet experience in the 1940s and 1950s, political prisoners – even those with minor infractions – were considered lost causes. Rather than reform, they were punished with prison and physical separation from the rest of the population in the gulag system. Common criminals were treated better and trusted more than the political criminals. Notably, a political prisoner who had made a joke about Stalin as his only crime was treated worse than actual murderers. 

As Orwell wrote in 1984: “The positions of trust were given only to the common criminals, especially the gangsters and the murderers, who formed a sort of aristocracy. All the dirty jobs were done by the politicals.”

Reform Through Struggle

Upon reflection after release from prison in China, one of the priests Lifton interviewed noted the similarity of communist conversion techniques with religion. “They lie so truly.” (Thought Reform, p141)

Elements of a devout, all-encompassing religion came up again and again in the framing of the thought reform experience.

“‘Hate your past to win your future’, the reformers urged, and they meant it. But they might well have added, ‘Do not hate it so much that you cannot bring us its sense of filial dedication.’ The reformed intellectual was expected to be, as before, loyal, self-disciplined, and obedient – now a filial son of the Communist regime.” (Thought Reform, p379)

“The prisoner joins in condemning himself less for what he has done than for what he has been: as a Westerner – and there an “imperialist” – he is guilty. For him, this is the real significance of the people’s standpoint, and its use of news, information, and intelligence is merely a method of implementing its prejudgment.” (Thought Reform, p76)

Lifton lays out the process of thought reform as including the following steps, administered over months and years in prison, often with physical torture: 

• The assault upon identity – which would force the prisoner to reject the premise of his imprisonment.
• The establishment of guilt – to accept not only one’s guilt, but, importantly, to feel guilty.
• The self-betrayal – often processed by forced betrayals of one’s friends and family.
• The breaking point: Total conflict and the basic fear – use of sleep deprivation, verbal and physical torture. 
• Leniency and opportunity – A sudden change in official attitude. 
• The compulsion to confess – repeated verbal confessions.
• The channeling of guilt – improving the confessions.
• Re-education: Logical dishonoring – the Marxist practice of weakening the individual’s personal thesis and strengthening his antithesis (what the individual fears becoming). 
• Progress and harmony – accepting the new self. 
• Final confession: The summing up – the writing and rewriting of the confession until perfection is achieved.
• Rebirth – returning to one’s original identity but with communist sympathy. 
• Release: Transition and limbo – freedom from prison, but carrying the psychological change within. 

Some of those engaged in thought reform found one of the steps to be the most difficult – that of denouncing family members. One of Lifton’s interviewees recounted what a cadre told him: “the most important part of the reform of an intellectual was the denunciation of his father – since the intellectual almost invariably comes from a wealthy family which must have been anti-Communist, and if he does not denounce his father he cannot be a faithful citizen of the new regime.” The cadre further extended that “the father is the hero of every small boy”… and here I learned just how psychological social reform is. 

The Use of Torture

Skipping this.

The In and Out Group

This theme came up again and again in the books. For party members in Britain, one’s entire social circle (in and out of work) revolved around communism. Maintaining good standing through study sessions and noted good  behavior (in the communist, not moral, sense) were essential.

In the China examples, “their thought reform program has gone far beyond anything either their dynastic predecessors or their Russian Communist mentors ever attempted. They called for a personal conversion… from every Chinese intellectual….” (Thought Reform, p245)

Was there a reason for this? According to Lifton, by late 1951, “all intellectuals were swept up in a year-long Thought Reform Campaign primarily aimed at them as a group – the first of China’s national outbreaks of soul-searching.” 

As one of Lifton’s interviewees said, a friend had advised him “Your thoughts are still those of the bourgeoisie. You must change for the great period ahead.” (Thought Reform, p254)

Echoes of Today

I initially put together this collection of books out of the interest in how people, in spite of study and experience, could believe in objectively incorrect theories. Even when those theories are so damaging to themselves and others. For this to work, you need a few things.

• A negative starting point. Those most receptive to communism came from a place of loss from which things could only improve. Those without that starting point had to be forced into changing their mindset. 
• True belief in a grand future. When there are obvious setbacks, the answer should always be – let’s do more of the thing that made this not work out.
• Practiced cliche talking points as quick retorts that remove the need for thought. 
• Class and generational sin. The ability to blame others for your problems. Or, forcing others to admit that they are guilty.
• Physical force or peer pressure to admit sin and work for redemption. Offering confessions as part of one’s rehabilitation.

Those tactics of almost a century ago are still with us today. And if we see a similar approach over the years, I figure that’s a sign that it works. The innovation of modern implementations is to make a new morality, illusions, upheaval, reform, and an inability to deal with a joke… into a business and without requiring a legal political transition. 

What are the antidotes?

It starts to feel like something is off, that on a visit to a library — not a glass and concrete one, but one built with brick or stone or leaded glass — one should encounter not books, but a traveling exhibition or a diorama about innovation of pre-Columbian peoples.

Still, I go to these old places or make requests of their grand depositories and leave carrying books with actual library card holders with stamps from 1982, 1954. Books with “from the library of _____” still pasted in (and the glue still holds).

I have not once searched for a book that has been checked out, which says as much about my reading habits as it does about everyone else’s. The only books I can’t find are those which are themselves missing, possibly placed on the wrong shelf to lie undiscovered for a century.

Occasional castoffs, too obscure today to keep — Nietzsche in the original, ecclesiastical histories, Chomsky vs Foucault, a first edition Coming of Age in Samoa — are helpfully placed on “Free!” shelves by the entrance.

Walking through the reading rooms surrounded by beautifully bound editions of Carlyle everyone is on a laptop or a phone. No one has a book.

Walking through the stacks I meet no one, except possibly, during study periods, students at a study carrel.

I remember my emotion, as a freshman, upon seeing the library stacks for the first time. My hometown library was stone and leaded glass, but had few books, and had yet to be converted into a place to do photocopying and borrow videos.

Unlike what popular movies teach us, Alexander didn’t weep because he had no more lands to conquer, but wept after hearing a discourse about an infinite number of worlds — a very different type of weeping. I was comforted, somehow, to know that someone so great felt the same as I, seeing the volume of those volumes, more added each day than could be skimmed in a lifetime.

How do you guide your children to have a successful career? What’s good advice?

In Laura Ingalls Wilder’s book Little House on the Prairie we learn about her experience growing up in a small cabin as her family homesteaded on the American frontier. Wilder also wrote a less known, but to me, even more interesting book, called Farmer Boy, which tells the story of one year of her future husband’s life, living on his parent’s farm  in far upstate New York.

More a memoir of the year 1869 than a history, we learn how nine year-old Almanzo Wilder planted and harvested potatoes in the cold (and how an exploding roast potato hurt his eye), how he almost fell into freezing water when his father was cutting ice, how he had to awake with his family in the middle of the night to save the corn from freezing, and how he helped butcher livestock and made candles from the rendered fat. We hear about the long days working in all sorts of weather, peppered with time off on Sundays and to visit local fairs.

All It Saves Is Time, Son

While Almanzo’s parents are experts at running a farm and profiting from sales of butter, potatoes, and wool, they choose what new tools to adopt, for example, when threshing wheat. From Farmer Boy:

“Almanzo asked Father why he did not hire the machine that did threshing. Three men had brought it into the country last fall, and Father had gone to see it. It would thresh a man’s whole grain crop in a few days.

“‘That’s a lazy man’s way to thresh,’ Father said. ‘Haste makes waste, but a lazy man’d rather get his work done fast than do it himself. That machine chews up the straw till it’s not fit to feed stock, and it scatters grain around and wastes it.

“‘All it saves is time, son. And what good is time, with nothing to do? You want to sit and twiddle your thumbs, all these stormy winter days?’

“‘No!’ said Almanzo. He had enough of that, on Sundays.” Continue reading “Should Almanzo Become a Wheelwright?”

A quote from Peter Drucker’s book Adventures of a Bystander always struck me: 

“I once, as a boy, looked at the suits my grandfather had left behind — he had died in 1899 when my mother was fourteen. There was not one pocket in them except for the waistcoat fob pocket for the watch. ‘Your grandfather was a gentleman,’ my grandmother explained, ‘and gentlemen twenty years ago had a servant walking behind them, carrying; a gentleman did not use his hands.'”

The idea that servants would be so prevalent that some people wouldn’t need pants pockets… It’s just fascinating to me. Just as watch pockets long ago disappeared, because watches moved to the wrist (or phone), why would a tailor add pants pockets if the wearer had servants to carry whatever he needed? Continue reading “How You’re Being Served”

“As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.” Or, in German and with a similar rhyme, “Wenn die Münze im Kästlein klingt, die Seele in den Himmel springt.”

A friar named Johann Tetzel may or may not have said those words in the early 1500s, but the money he raised by selling indulgences helped rebuild St. Peter’s Basilica.

But what is an indulgence?
Continue reading “Secular Indulgences”

In the early 2000s while in Mexico City I ended up on the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico. This is an enormous university, by any of the standards I know. The university had 370,000 students (as of 2023, but I believe a similar number 20 years ago). 

Walking around I met some students and followed them to a meeting of the Spartacist Youth League. 

I had no idea what that was, other than the name seemed interesting and the people were nice. 

Then the meeting started. After a long speech by the organizer (my Spanish was only good enough to understand half), students took turns standing and giving their own speeches. A few of the speeches were in English, which surprised me. The content was surprising too. One of the speeches was to persuade mainland China to abandon capitalist reforms. Another was in support of North Korea. 

As the meeting ended, my new friends asked me what I thought. 

“I’m not sure if I understood, but was there a speech in support of North Korea? In support of the government of North Korea? And the continuation of the revolution there?” Continue reading “The Youth”

Even if we’re not good at dealing with them, we tend to see a lot of systems surprises that arise from expansionism – the situations where something grows faster than expected, dangerous positive feedback loops, or good intentions with bad outcomes that negate the original good intentions.

So I was surprised when I recently learned about the way some forager hunter societies found to create stability in environments with both limited food (meaning successful hunters could accumulate status) but with few ways to store that food (limiting the ways others could accumulate status).

My main source here is a paper titled “Leveling the Hunter,” by Polly Wiessner.

Continue reading “Borrowing an Arrow”