The Vice of Amateur Communism

Since it’s in the media, everyone feels qualified to write on it

Photo by Flikr user Marco Gomes (CC BY 2.0)

The typical article about how communism might be worth trying usually tries to make the case for it by either criticizing “capitalism” or by putting out a story about workers deserving to get paid more money, ignoring that there are less drastic solutions than that.

This time, Teen Vogue’s Tom Whyman published “So, What Actually is Communism Then?”

In response, I could link to Will Wilkinson’s “Public Policy After Utopia” and call it a day. It’s a great critique and defense of libertarianism, which happens to also touch upon smart people’s tendencies to make really bad decisions when it comes to politics. But we can do better than indirectly arguing why pieces like Whyman’s are bad. We can directly point . So let’s break down the issues with this.

1. Blaming Capitalism For Everything

Capitalism has been responsible for things like the international slave trade and World War I, and created the conditions in which Nazism could emerge. Capitalism has destroyed whole cultures and civilisations; it has spread killer diseases, profited from child labour. Today, capitalism is drowning refugees in the Mediterranean, separating children from their parents at the Mexican-American border. It prevents people from accessing basic services such as healthcare, puts lead in the drinking water, sells guns that are used to shoot up schools.

Like most pieces, the author plays a double-standard. Whyman redefines communism as to disavow everything done in its name, but at the same time blames everything on “capitalism” without actually explaining what it is.

It saves Whyman the trouble of having to admit that his definition of capitalism is “people acting selfishly.” That’s not fair. It would be like a conservative saying that communism’s definition is “giving free stuff to people.”

So it’s hard to criticize Whyman’s argument about capitalism because there’s no real argument. All there is, is a laundry list of bad things being tied to “capitalism.” Which part of capitalism caused Nazism, and how? Was it the capital accumulation? Was it private property? That logic should have been explained already, because that’s how arguments should work.

2. Blaming Capitalism For Climate Change

It could have been that when Whyman was blaming everything on capitalism, it was just a casual joke about conservatives. Many of them, one of them probably being Ben Shapiro, like to blame China and the USSR’s atrocities on “communism” without actually knowing how they caused it.*

But it turns out Whyman doesn’t recognize the irony: He blames climate change on capitalism, without explaining how.

Perhaps most urgently, capitalism is choking the planet, causing the climate to change in ways that could lead to the end of all life on Earth.**

And again, it’s hard to counter that argument, because there’s no actual argument. What part of capitalism causes it? How? What would things have been better if we had communism?