Is Communism inevitable?

The first civilization arose in Sumer 6,000 years ago. Since then the government has expanded with each expansion of the economy and culture. The next 6,000 years will bring more of the same.

When did the cities begin to win?

Historians tell us that the first civilization was established 6,000 years ago, in Sumer. That was the birth of the era of Big Government, the first human society to demonstrate a complex hierarchy, overseen by a formal superstructure that was able to make rules and enforce them.

Since that time, civilization has followed a bumpy road, with some progress mixed with serious setbacks (such as the Dark Ages in Europe), but the overall trend been towards a larger and larger formal sector, overseen by the state.

For awhile it seemed that wandering, migratory tribes could easily overwhelm civilizations. 3,000 years ago every society in the Mediterranean collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, overwhelmed by marauding tribes. But then the civilizations had a good stretch, lasting almost 1,000 years, during which the migratory tribes faced frequent defeat. The Roman Empire unified the West and the Chin unified all of China in the East. But then the migratory tribes gained the upper hand for awhile, overwhelming both Europe and China. Even the Islamic conquests can be seen as part of the trend. The era from 500 AD to 1,000 AD was rough for all of the major urban areas. And then things switched again, with urban life regenerating itself everywhere.

And then, finally, there was Tamerlane, the last great migratory warrior to build a huge empire as the leader of a wandering tribe. When he died in 1405, it was the end of the era when endlessly moving tribes could defeat the cities. Since then, the urban civilizations have won every battle, eventually conquering the whole world.

How big is the government?

How should we measure the growth of government? One way is to look at the percentage of the GDP that is consumed by the government, or the amount of money that passes through the government. So for instance, in the USA, final consumption by the Federal amounted to about 1% or 2% of GDP in 1900, and grew to maybe 8% by 2022. But the Federal budget is much bigger, often between 20% to 25% of GDP. That money doesn't count towards final consumption because the government gives it to someone else. Some of the money goes to state governments, some of the money goes to Social Security, but the Federal government is not the final consumer in those cases. In terms of final consumption, the Federal government has a big military and all other Federal expenses are minor compared to that (again, Social Security is not part of final consumption).

In the USA, if you add up all local, state, and Federal spending, it is roughly equivalent to 45% of GDP, but again, that is not the same as final consumption. It would not be correct to suggest that government in the USA consumes 45% of the economy. There are many programs that simply pass the money through to private sector actors.

Still, the number, as a percent of the economy, grew dramatically during the 1900s. Does that mean that government was small until 1900? Sort of yes, but it is also true, as we go further back in time, the numbers no longer teach us much. Why? Because the monetary economy was small, and the non-monetary economy was huge.

(According to Braudel) In the year 1500, even in Europe, about 90% of the population never used money, they still lived in the world of barter. The 1500s saw dramatic changes, including the explosive growth of the monetary economy, over which the various governments struggled to get control. But it wasn't until the 1800s that the majority of people were drawn into the monetary economy, and became dependent on it.

How should we measure government?

The monetary economy gives us an easy way to measure the size of the government, but when we go back in time, to a world in which the non-monetary economy contains the vast majority of all economic exchange, then we have to rely on qualitative analysis, rather than quantitative analysis.

How would we measure the growth of government in the non-monetary economy? Mostly by considering what areas of life are overseen by the government.

Marriage, for instance. In many societies, all over the world, marriage remained a private affair, between two families. In some cases marriage was overseen by the major religions. It wasn't until the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s that governments in Europe began taking over marriage. This was an enormous expansion of the government's power. By contrast, in Iran, the imam clerics remained in control of marriage until the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Iran has suffered extremely weak government for most of its history.

What else can we measure?

Control of religion. This was an endless struggle. Everywhere in the world, the government often struggled to get control over religions, and the religions struggled to get free, occasionally winning. In Europe, the struggle between the princes and the Catholic church is well known, with the Church winning for some centuries during the Middle Ages. The Hussite rebellion of the 1400s established something like "national Catholicism" in Bohemia and parts of Poland, with local control of the churches. The Reformation of the 1500s briefly put the religious radicals in conflict with their government, though in the long run most of the major monarchs established themselves as the heads of national churches.

Elsewhere, the struggle to control religions is less well known. In the late 1500s Tokugawa Ieyasu had to defeat a major Buddhist sect before he could unify Japan.

In Iran, the opposite was true, the religious sects won, and the Shah lived in fear of the major religious leaders. In the 1880s the Shah and his primary wife took a train ride to Moscow to develop a better relationship with the Tsar. Upon arrival, the Shah and his advisors realized that it was considered normal, in Russia, to bring one’s wife to gatherings. The Shah was certain that if he took his wife to a dinner then he would be overthrown by the clerics at home. He was nominally the all-powerful, all-conquering, all-seeing, all-controlling, absolute ruler of all Iran, however he lacked the power to invite his wife to a party. To get out of the awkwardness of locking his wife in her room while he went to formal dinners, he immediately put her on a train and sent her back to Iran. Then he could go to dinners and simply explain that his wife was back home in Iran. (Story from Iran: A Modern History, by Abbas Amanat, a great book that I recommend.)

And this was the pattern that dominated much of the Earth for thousands of years: weak authoritarian governments. It might seem like a paradox, but these monarchs had no formal limits on their power, but in practical terms they were extremely weak.

Along with control of religion, there was the struggle to control the flow of information. That has been a complex situation, as over time there has been more and more information. In some places the government can suppress it, but elsewhere the government merely hopes to manipulate it.

Absolute monarchs were weak

In the 1780s, in France, King Louis XVI had a court of about 500 advisors and secretaries. There were a few hundred other people who received some kind of payment from the government, but all in all, it seems like a toy government by modern standards. It was small compared to the government in Britain which already consisted of several thousand workers.

On the eve of the Revolution, France appeared to be bankrupt. Louis XVI kept inventing new taxes, on candles, paper, ink, coffee, tea, and much more. No matter how many new taxes were invented, France remained broke: the government was barely able to pay its debts, and frequently failed to pay its soldiers.

Then the Revolution happened. Just 5 years later, in 1794, the government of France consisted of almost 5,000 workers. Somehow bankrupt France had found the money to grow the government by an order of magnitude. How was this done?

In 1789 the Catholic Church owned 25% of all the land in France, all of which was tax exempt. And the nobility owned perhaps another 50%, also tax exempt. And all the businesses they owned were tax exempt, and all of their economic activity was tax exempt. The Revolution ended all of these exemptions, and allowed the government to seize vast amounts of land, which was then sold to wealthy merchants.

In short, France before the Revolution may have seemed like it had high taxes, but those taxes were falling on only a small amount of the total property in the country. There were a great many consumption taxes being imposed on the poor and middle classes, who had good reason to complain about the injustice of paying high taxes while the nobility and the church paid none. Crucially, even very high taxes on those who are poor don’t generate much revenue for the government. By contrast, being able to tax the wealthy unleashes transformative energy. Suddenly France was able to go to war with all of Europe and win, for 26 years.

But this was common all over the world: the authoritarian King who was actually very weak, and unable to enforce taxes against the nobility and the churches. Over and over again, the pattern repeated: it took some kind of revolution to end the exemptions for the ruling classes, and once those exemptions were ended, each nation then saw government grow by orders of magnitude. France in 1789, Russia in 1917, China in 1949, over and over again we’ve seen revolutions unleash incredible energy, because such revolutions end the exemptions of the wealthy, at least for awhile. In the USA the crucial revolution was the English Civil War followed by the long struggle for formal civil rights, ending with with the Glorious Revolution of 1688. This put great limits on what the King could do, but it dramatically expanded what the government could do, when the Parliament and King were in agreement. Increasing the legitimacy of the government also increased the power of the government. And this revolution setup the later revolution in the colonies. In particular, the English Bill Of Civil Rights was passed in 1689 and shaped how the colonists thought of themselves. In 1774, when the government of Virginia commissioned Thomas Jefferson to write a letter of complaint to the King, Jefferson specifically cites the previous revolution, stating that those in the colonies thought the Bill Of Rights applied to them (Prime Minister Townsend famously insisted that the English Bill Of Rights only applied to people who were living in England).

Some taxes represented a conceptual leap forward for government

Take, for instance, a real estate tax, which became widespread in Western countries in the late 1800s. Libertarians argue that true ownership of land ended when the real estate tax was introduced: nowadays we are simply renting land from the government — if we don't pay the real estate tax, then the government evicts us, as any landlord would.

In this case, I agree with the libertarians, though I don't see this as a negative thing. It is true, previously, families could own a plot of land for thousands of years with no concerns, but once the real estate tax came along, suddenly the government became, de facto, the owner of all land. In this sense, the introduction of a real estate tax was a large step towards a kind of Communism. The government suddenly felt it had this vast power, to appropriate any land from people who failed to pay.

(In the USA, Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed a wealth tax, a 2 percent tax on fortunes worth more than $50 million, and a 3 percent tax on fortunes worth more than $1 billion. Under the logic the libertarians have used with the real estate tax, the introduction of a wealth tax implies a Communist society in which you are only renting your property from the government, you don’t really own it. Which is true. And once you’ve accepted the validity of a 2% wealth tax, it seems less radical to then consider a 95% wealth tax.)

Barbara Tuckman, the great historian, in her excellent book The Proud Tower, looks at the struggle during the 1890s, in Britain, to impose a real estate tax on the nobility, ending the exemptions they had till then. At the time, it was a huge fight, and many of the nobility suggested it was an entire way of life that was coming to an end, which was true. Many of those noble families had owned their land for several thousand years, and now suddenly they could lose it if they didn’t pay the annual tax. Up to that point many noble families had avoided commercial development of their land, but suddenly they were forced to engage in commercial development, so as to have the money to pay the tax. And this suggests the good and the bad of civilization’s advance: more resources are forced into productive use, increasing wealth and increasing the economy, while also increasing the pressure on the environment, and the pressure on each person to maximize their contribution to the economy. I would not call this progress, I would only call it a global transformation that humanity seems to be going through as we commit to this strange new lifestyle known as civilization.

The oldest fossils that look like modern Homo sapiens were found in a cave in Morocco, and are dated to 300,000 years ago. Apparently, we spent 294,000 years wandering around in small hunter-gatherer tribes before suddenly deciding on this new life that we’ve increasingly lived these last 6,000 years. It’s a big change for us. As with any such change, there is good and bad. (I’ve wondered if this shift towards sedentary and urban living has associated genetic changes. It’s known that the gene that allows milk consumption in adults spread very rapidly through the population once cows were domesticated. It would be surprising if our new urban life wasn’t rewarding certain genetic changes.)

I’m not saying this is good or bad, I’m only saying this seems to be the path that humanity is on. For whatever reasons, our society continues to become more complex and more specialized, the economy expands and so the government expands, and as the government expands, it claims more powers for itself.

The counter-argument is that we’ve reached peak government, and it will fade away now. Government got bigger for 6,000 years, and then hit its peak during our lifetimes, and from now on it will get smaller and smaller. That is certainly possible, but there is no evidence for it. For now, the trend seems to be towards more and more levels of superstructure. Over the last few decades, we not only saw the expansion of government, but even more dramatically we saw the invention and expansion of international organizations, with increasing powers: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc. The Covid-19 pandemic has triggered a move to increase the powers of the World Health Organization.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting that governments will necessarily become authoritarian. A fascinating fact of the last 300 years has been this era during which governments have gained more power has also, often, seen governments become more democratic and more concerned with the rights of individuals. Legitimacy generally follows some popular event, most commonly the vote, and the most legitimate governments have been the ones with the greatest ability to claim new powers for themselves. It's easy to imagine the advanced nations remaining vibrant democracies with more and more civil rights to protect individuals from the power of the state, even as the government continues to grow.

And yet, even in a democratic society with strong protections for the individual, the advance of civilization does mean more and more rules. Civilization sometimes offers humans great new things, but civilization has a cost, in terms of more strictures that people need to be aware of and obey. There is clearly a loss of certain kinds of freedom, as the world becomes more crowded; more and more bound by the need to justify one’s activity to whatever laws which society has defined. When the world was empty, 50,000 years ago, young men and women could simply leave their home and move to some wide open frontier, they could establish a new society whenever they wanted to, therefore they could enjoy a kind of personal sphere of maneuver that no longer exists for anyone, not even the wealthy (though some rich people fantasize of moving to the planet Mars, exactly to regain that personal sphere of maneuver — they long for the distant past, they despise what the world has become and what the future will likely entail — they want the lifestyle of 50,000 years ago, but with spaceships).

Again, I’m not saying this is good or bad. As with so many things in life, there is a trade-off to be made. The life we had before disappears, and it would be dishonest to suggest that all of the changes we have seen represent some kind of progress. But also, with change, new forms of living become possible.

What is the next big expansion of the state?

I’ll make a prediction about the next big change: The state will increasingly take over the funding of raising children. In the old days, women married men and then the man and woman worked together to raise children. Some of that will happen in the future, but also parents raising children will increasingly rely on money from the government. I don’t mean simply for poor families, I think we will see this spread to everyone. We briefly saw this during the Covid-19 crisis:

Legislators and researchers have fiercely debated the merits of the policy for nearly two years, since the American Rescue Plan temporarily enacted it in March 2021, a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. (Technically an expansion of the child tax credit, it is now back to being available only to families with earnings.)

When the American Rescue Plan passed, proponents argued, based on a 2019 National Academies of Sciences report, that the child allowance would reduce poverty without meaningfully discouraging parental employment. Opponents, including me, argued that the allowance’s short-term effects on poverty would be at least partly reversed in the long run because the allowance would lead some parents to stop working and would discourage marriage. We cited evidence from two divergent approaches: the poverty-reducing welfare reforms of the 1990s, which increased work, and an income-guarantee experiment in the 1970s, which had the opposite effect.

…Based on the evidence we have now, a permanent child allowance would indeed reduce poverty among those who fall temporarily on hard times. (That is the initial effect, after all, of giving people money.) But among those families with the weakest attachment to stable work and family life, it would be likely to consign them to more entrenched multigenerational poverty by further disconnecting them from those institutions.

Let’s start with the short-term data. Federal statistics indicate that in 2021, when child allowance checks were sent out for the last six months of the year, child poverty fell from the previous year’s 9.7 percent to just 5.2 percent — the lowest rate on record. Census Bureau researchers have estimated that more than a third of that reduction was a result of the expanded child tax credit.

Something like this is the future. Part of this is because the culture and the state is making it more difficult to have children, and therefore the state should pay parents to make up for the fact that child raising has been made more difficult. In particular, for thousands of years, large families were possible because the oldest children were asked to help raise the younger children. An oldest daughter at the age of 11 might be put in charge of 4 younger siblings. But since the 1990s, in most Western countries, the state has gotten more strict about legal liability. Parents can no longer leave several children in the charge of the oldest child. In this sense, the culture and the laws have changed in ways that make it more difficult for parents to raise children. And therefore the state must send parents money, to make up for the new state imposed difficulties.

A hundred years from now it will seem normal for the government to pick up most of the bill for young children. I am not saying this is good or bad, I’m only saying it is inevitable.

What happens over the next 6,000 years?

So what happens, as these trends continue? Over the last 6,000 years, we’ve seen the growth of civilization. We will probably see the further growth of civilization over the next 6,000 years. This is why I think, at some point over the next few thousand years, something like Communism becomes inevitable. I doubt anyone will ever say “We live in a Communist society” but I do think, in practical ways, people’s actual experience will have be reconciled to an all-consuming expansion of government activity. And there comes a point where the superstructure that oversees society becomes all-pervasive.

Again, this can be authoritarian or liberal. We previously looked at the question of whether something like Communism could be reconciled to an open, pluralistic, and liberal society. Clearly it’s possible.

If Communism is the idea that the government eventually controls all economic activity, then Communism seems inevitable. Presumably the move to greater taxation and regulation, that we saw during the 20th Century, is just a warm-up act to what we will see over the next 6,000 years. There will likely come a time when the economy is almost wholly defined by the actions of the government. On that day people may not regard their society as Communist, but the label might still apply in every way that actually matters.

(If you enjoyed reading this essay, you might also enjoy reading my book, How To Destroy A Tech Startup In Three Easy Steps.)