Sections Introduction I. The United States as a World Power II. Why Communism Would Fail in the United States III. What Can Be Done to Prevent This IV. The War in Political Parties V. The Fallacy of Oligarchism VI. A Day in the Life: Communist America Appendix A: References

VI. A Day in the Life: Communist America

The following is a work of satirical fiction in the tradition of George Orwell's Animal Farm and Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. It is intended to illuminate, through humor, the everyday human costs of systems that have been lived and documented. Any resemblance to the actual policy platforms of specific American political figures is, of course, purely coincidental — and also sort of the point.

6:00 AM — The People's Alarm

The alarm sounds at 6:00 AM, as it does in every unit of the People's Residential Collective, formerly known as your apartment building. The alarm cannot be adjusted. The Party's Bureau of Temporal Optimization determined, after three years and $40 billion in central planning, that 6:00 AM is the optimal wake time for maximum collective productivity. The study was conducted by the same bureau that previously determined 6:15 AM was optimal. Before that, 6:30. The science, as they say, is settled.

Your smartphone — the People's Communication Device, v3.2 — displays today's schedule. You have been assigned to Production Unit 7, formerly Apple, Inc. Your role: Senior Content Specialist for the Ministry of Information's Social Media Enhancement Division. Your previous job was software engineering. That job no longer exists as a private enterprise. The collective salary is the same for all engineers: 240 People's Credits per month. This is exactly what the guy who updates the Party Secretary's Wikipedia page earns. He updates it hourly. The Party Secretary, it should be noted, has never been wrong about anything.

7:15 AM — The Bread Line

Breakfast is obtained at the People's Nutrition Distribution Center on the ground floor, formerly the Starbucks. The line is not long today — only forty-five minutes. You present your ration card. You receive one bread roll, a small portion of approved vegetable spread (butter is a bourgeois affectation, per Party Circular 441-B), and a cup of the People's Morning Beverage, which tastes like what would happen if coffee learned about Marxism in college and decided principles were more important than flavor.

The Party member at the front of the line — you can identify them by the red lapel pin — receives two bread rolls and something that appears to be an actual croissant. This is not inequality. The Party's Bureau of Nutritional Equity has determined that senior administrators require additional caloric intake to perform their duties of ensuring equitable caloric distribution. George Orwell, who predicted this exact arrangement in 1945, would not be surprised. He would, however, still be on the banned books list. Animal Farm, it turns out, is counterrevolutionary literature. Who knew?

9:00 AM — The Commute

You travel to Production Unit 7 on the People's Transportation Network, formerly the subway, now operating on a schedule determined by the People's Bureau of Locomotive Temporal Optimization (a different bureau from the alarm bureau, but staffed by the same people). Your apartment has been reassigned to a three-family unit since the People's Housing Authority determined that 850 square feet was more than one person requires. Your roommates are a retired schoolteacher and a man who insists he was a wine merchant before the collectivization and has not fully recovered from the transition.

12:00 PM — The People's Cafeteria

Lunch at the collective cafeteria. Today's menu: People's Stew. Tomorrow's menu: also People's Stew. The stew is adequate. You remember, dimly, a restaurant on this block that served something called a burrito bowl. Chipotle was, the Party has explained, a capitalist exploitation scheme that charged $13.50 for a meal that contained 1,400 calories of ideologically unsound ingredients. The People's Stew contains 800 calories of ideologically sound ingredients and is available for zero People's Credits — because it costs zero People's Credits to be adequately fed, which is a very different thing from eating well.

Your coworker whispers that she heard there is an actual restaurant — privately operated, illegally — somewhere in what used to be Brooklyn. The prices are in old dollars, which technically no longer exist, paid in gold, which technically no one is allowed to own. The food is apparently excellent. The wait list is two months. You put your name on it.

3:00 PM — Political Education Hour

Every afternoon from 3:00 to 4:00 PM, work at Production Unit 7 pauses for Mandatory Political Education. Today's topic: the historical necessity of the transition. The presenter, Political Commissar Dmitri — formerly a middle school vice principal, now your supervisor by virtue of having read Das Kapital twice and attended the correct three-day certification course — explains, for the fourteenth consecutive week, why the pre-revolutionary economy was unfair. This is not disputed. The disputed part is whether the solution to unfairness was to make everyone equally unhappy while the people running the fairness program quietly kept the good croissants.

7:00 PM — Evening Entertainment

State television offers four channels. Channel 1 airs a documentary about the Chairman's economic wisdom. Channel 2 airs a documentary about the Chairman's environmental vision. Channel 3 airs a sporting event featuring the People's Athletic Collective defeating a foreign team, 7-0, which seems statistically improbable but is apparently what happened. Channel 4 is the People's Cultural Arts Program, which tonight features an approved musical performance by the People's Ensemble for Ideologically Consistent Popular Music, performing original compositions that are technically songs.

You attempt to use your People's Communication Device to access the internet. The People's Approved Information Network provides access to 2,400 websites, down from the previous internet's 1.9 billion. Wikipedia exists, but the entries for several historical events have been substantially revised. The entry for "Animal Farm" notes that it is "a counterrevolutionary propaganda text falsely presented as a children's story about farm animals" and that it is "not recommended for educational purposes." The entry for Fahrenheit 451 simply reads: "See: Fire Safety Regulations, People's Bureau of Approved Literature."

11:00 PM — The Diary

You write three sentences in a small notebook, then stop. The Neighborhood Transparency Council — elected, technically, by a show of hands at a meeting where only party members attend — has the authority to report Expressions of Counterrevolutionary Sentiment to the Bureau of Ideological Safety. Counterrevolutionary Sentiment includes nostalgia for pre-revolutionary conditions, possession of banned literature, and — this one is new this year — "persistent facial expressions suggesting discontent." The neighbor's twelve-year-old was referred to the People's Youth Re-Orientation Program last week for having mentioned, in school, that the book his grandmother gave him — the one about the pigs and the farm — had a different ending in it than the approved curriculum version. The grandmother's copy of the book has since been collected.

You close the notebook. You did not write anything of consequence in it. This, perhaps, is the truest cost of the system: not the stew, not the alarm, not the croissant differential. It is the notebook that stays blank. It is the thought that stays unwritten. Ray Bradbury understood this perfectly. You did not need to burn the books to silence the people. You only needed to make the people afraid to write them.

This satirical account is not fantasy. Every scenario above — the Nomenklatura food privileges, the mandatory political education, the neighborhood informant committees, the banned books, the reassigned housing, the blank diaries — is drawn directly from documented firsthand accounts of life in the Soviet Union, Communist China, and Cuba. See: Applebaum (2003), Chang & Halliday (2005), Valladares (1986).