I found myself having a small but heated debate with someone at the pub the other night. Turned out he was a Communist (we still have a few over here). It also turned out that he saw it as his goal in life to convert me to Communism too. Apparently, according to him, we should all be voting at the next election for a great Stalinist Utopia.

So I thought I’d help him out.

Me: I’ve got an idea. Why bother going to all the trouble of electing a Communist Dictatorship when you can start creating a little Communist Utopia all of your own first thing tomorrow. That way you can get to live in your Glorious Workers’ Paradise without foisting it on the rest of us.

Him: Stop taking the piss… you know it’s people like you that keep this corrupt system robbing us of what’s rightfully ours blah blah blah…

Me: No, no… I’m serious… look, it’s simple. All you have to do is this…

And this Ladies and Gentlemen (Ladies!? Gentlemen!? What a bourgeois capitalist bastard I am), is the suggestion I offered (slightly edited for style and tone):

Me: First you’ll need to look for a new job. Convince someone to hire you to do a laborious industrial job on outdated machinery which results in you producing an item that is of no use or value to anybody whatsoever. Do this for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week, and at the end of the week ask your employer to pay you in monopoly money.

Spend your ‘weekend’ hunting down ‘western tourists’ and attempt to persuade them to exchange large quantities of your monopoly money for small quantities of their Dollars or Sterling. Fail.

By now of course, you’ll be hungry. Your refrigerator will be empty (for the full-on Communist Utopia experience you should have emptied your fridge of all edible food items on the first day. A few slices of mouldy bread, a rancid orange and a quarter pint of curdled milk are permissible).

Forget going to the supermarket. There are no supermarkets in your Glorious Workers’ Paradise.

Instead, find a poor quality Butcher’s. Stand outside Butcher’s shop for 8 hours. Go home empty-handed.

Go to a poor quality Baker’s. Stand outside Baker’s shop for 8 hours. Go home empty-handed.

Go to a poor quality Greengrocer’s. Stand outside Greengrocer’s shop for 8 hours. Go home empty-handed.

Repeat week after week after week.

Of course, in a real Communist Utopia, you’d make your wife stand, hopelessly, outside all these shops. But in your own personal, private Communist Utopia, you will no longer have a wife.

Eventually you may acquire enough money to indulge yourself. Perhaps you’d like to splash out on a new car. (Yes, I’m employing artistic license here, I know car dealerships won’t take monopoly money.)

Go down to the car dealership that sells the cheapest, dullest and most unenjoyable cars available. When you’ve made your ‘choice’, pay the full amount upfront. (Don’t try to bargain, there is no bartering in your Glorious Workers’ Paradise. Ask for so much as a free mudflap and you’ll be having to incarcerate yourself in a homemade gulag for the next 6 months). Once you’ve paid for your delightful automobile, tell them to have it delivered to you. In five year’s time.

You’ll be really hungry by now. So go home and scour your refrigerator for anything edible. There will be nothing edible in there, but you’ll look anyway. In fact, you’ll spend the whole evening regularly getting up from your chair to check the fridge, knowing that it’s still going to be barren. And you’ll spend the whole evening being disappointed. At this point, you’ll do what everyone does in a Glorious Workers’ Paradise. You’ll start the long and systematic destruction of your liver with the daily consumption of gallons of cheap vodka.

Voilà! You’ve made it. Utopia at last. Utopia at last. Thank God Almighty, Utopia at last.

–

That rant made me thirsty. So I picked up what I thought was my pint and took a healthy swig.

Him: Err… that’s my beer!

Me: Oh, sorry… errr… hang on a second. What happened to ‘all property is theft’?